4 Easy Steps to Start Journaling and Understanding Yourself

St. Thomas Aquinas once said that the “hand is the conjoined instrument of the mind.” A great deal of research has gone into studying brain processing and its connection to handwriting, and the evidence clearly favors it over other forms of note taking (ie typing). It would seem St. Thomas Aquinas was correct in connecting the process. It’s a good starting point for recognizing the value of journaling.

To start the habit of journaling, here is a simple process you can do every morning:

1. Write down one experience that stood out to you from the previous day. Try to name any emotions you felt and draw out patterns.

2. Pick a goal a write a list words that are relevant to improvement. For example: If my goal is to be less angry, I might include words around patience or self-control.

3. Look back on your previous day’s experience and see if you can find where opportunities for your goal may have come up. From our previous example, these would be opportunities for practicing patience.

4. Ask God for the grace to recognize those opportunities next time.

Over time, go back and revisit some of your journals. You’ll be astounded at the way you used to think and how much you’ve have changed over the years. You’ll be grateful for cultivating a personal development mindset which helps us realize our sense of agency in becoming who we are.

Two Steps to Know if You Need Professional Help With Your Anxiety:

First, let’s not think we need to get rid of all anxiety. No other emotion has the same energy behind it. It is meant to keep as alert when we realize something is important and help us focus. Honestly, without anxiety you would find yourself in lots of trouble during life.

What we need to clear up is normal anxiety and “clinical anxiety”. The difference is that clinical anxiety is putting us into a state of continued disruption or getting stuck. Basically, you want your fight or flight response to be working (good), you just don’t want it activated 100% of the time (bad).

First, try and recognize when these symptoms start presenting themselves:

• Do my hands feel clammy?

• Does my heart seem to be racing?

• Am I experiencing shortness of breath?

Then ask yourself:

1. Are these feelings snowballing in a way that kicks my body into a state of panic?

or

2. Am I able to channel all my anxiety to my chest and get on with the task?

If you fit the second category you are probably managing your anxiety well.

However, if you fit the first category, you may want to look into extra support.

Whether we try seeking professional help or not, the best thing we can do when examining our experience of anxiety is to start practicing acceptance.

We cannot get rid of anxiety, it's natural, and it's meant to be there. We should never be ashamed of that. Instead, we want to move into a place where we can regulate it.

Three Steps to Talk About Therapy with Your Teenager

Therapy can be a hard thing to bring up with anyone, and it is especially daunting with your children. Luckily, there is a process that can help when you feel like you should say something.

When talking about therapy, make sure you follow these three steps:

1. Be specific. Don’t say “you have anxiety”… instead try, “I noticed you get anxious when you have a big homework assignment.”

2. Tell them there are professionals trained to help with this specific problem, which is different than reading about it online. Having a person who is an expert with this specific issue will be much more helpful than trying to solve it on their own.

3. Let them know this isn’t a lifelong commitment. If they truly want to feel better and do the work needed, they can have relief relatively quickly. An approach like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be as little as 12 weeks. There is even a lot of research stating that up to 80% of individuals can benefit from just a single session of therapy.

In sum, be specific, tell them there are experts around these specific issues, and remind them it doesn’t need to be a long commitment.

3 Foods to Improve Your Mental Health

Research shows there is no question that what goes on in the gut impacts our mental health. This can be for good or bad.

One example we can all relate to, is that sleepy state we feel after eating a bunch of turkey at Thanksgiving. This effect comes from eating an excessive amount of Tryptophan. Tryptophan helps the brain build hormones in the brain suchs as Melatonin (good for sleep) and Seratonin (good for your mood).

While we don’t want to consume to excess; basically, eating foods with Tryptophan gives the brain materials to help you have good sleep and a good mood.

We can contrast this with the experience of the sugar blues, which we often experience the day after eating too much sugar. This is because sugar creates a hormone imbalance and our body and our mind has to work hard to adapt to it.

While these are small examples of how our mental health is impacted by our diet, these effects can add up to big (both good and bad) effects.

Here are three amazing foods to help stabilize your mental health:

Walnuts (good source of omega fats too!) 💪

Eggs 💪

Beans 💪

Also, to better understand how you are impacted by food, I recommend you start a food journal. Make a daily list of things you eat, what time you eat, and how you feel 15 mins after the meal. Finally, record how your mood was overall at the end of the day.

You may be surprised at how much insight you gain by doing this simple process. You will be well on your way to improving mental health through this process of learning how your gut is impacting your brain.

3 things you can start doing until you can afford therapy

There are many things we can do to improve our situation until we can start going to therapy.

1. As Catholics, we know the most important thing we can focus on is the state of our own soul. So strive to remain in a state of grace and go to confession a couple times a month.

2. Reading is a great way to start personal work. One I highly recommend is “Self Knowledge and Self-Discipline” by Fr. Basil Maturin.

3. Never underestimate the mental health benefits provided by friendship and service. In fact, one of the leading causes of illness is loneliness. Spending time with friends and serving others will make a big difference.

There are other resources that can also be helpful. Betterhelp.com, can be an affordable introduction to therapeutic process. There are also resources through the Catholic Psych Institute and Souls and Hearts IFS.

The most important thing you can do is commit to personal development, growth, and change. The willingness and mindset to do so, is the most powerful factor no matter what level of care you engage at.

All that being said, therapy may be more affordable than you realize. Make sure to check if your insurance covers some level of therapy. If they don’t offer their own in-house version of counseling, they may have a network of providers, or even cover a percentage of out-of-network providers (often the case when wanting to see Catholic therapist).

I feel lost as a parent, are there any books you recommend?

A book that has been helpful in framing our parental role is Hold Onto Your Kids by Drs. Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. They speak about how to strengthen your family through the lense of attachment theory.

Attachment theory is basically how things bonds us to others and help children orient themselves.

The basic idea is that your child can be parent oriented, or peer oriented… and that you want to disproportionately grow the parent orientation.

Parent orientation means a parent talks with their child, makes good eye contact, and conveys affection and affirmation through various sensory interactions. This allows a child to grow up secure in the connection with a parent’s care, attention, and critical thinking abilities.

The child is able to make sense of the world and have their own brain developed by the more mature, developed person.

Overall, the book covers some very important topics and provides useful tools to be able to reorient children towards their parents and adult relationships for guidance.

One of my favorites is the idea of establishing “rituals of connection” after parent and child have been separated for a time.

A classic example is when dad comes home from work he gets on the floor and wrestles with the kids. The tools are not only helpful for parenting but can also help us examine our bond in marriage too.

Pick up a copy of the book and add it to your parenting library. It is well worth it and will dramatically improve your relationship with your children!

“I’ve heard a lot about 12-step programs… what are they? Do they work?”

“I’ve heard a lot about 12-step programs… what are they? Do they work?”

They do work and can change lives!

Desperate for a way to find addiction treatment in modern society, it was founded by two alcoholics. The two men found God and each other and were able to begin battling their addiction effectively which laid the roots for the 12 steps. They described it as a spiritual awakening, that without God they couldn't be free of the addiction, but without their cooperation, God wouldn't free them of it. They also acknowledged their need to serve and help others who were struggling with the disease.

Many people describe 12 Step Programs as a self-help group, but is much more than that. Self-help makes it sound like it’s all on the addict to heal themselves. Instead, it requires a person rely on a sponsor, fellowship with the group, and God.

Working the full “12 Steps” is the program’s essential tasks to gaining sobriety and recovery.

They are:

1. I admit that I am powerless over alcohol (food, money, sex, drugs) — that my lives had become unmanageable.

2. I come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understood Him.

4. I made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself.

5. I admitted to God, to myself, and to another human being the exact nature of my wrongs.

6. I was entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. I humbly asked Him to remove my shortcomings.

8. I made a list of all persons I had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. I made direct amends to those people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. I continued to take personal inventory and when I was wrong, I promptly admitted it.

11. I sought through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God as I understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for me and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, I tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all my affairs.

As Catholics we have a leg up on this journey by seeing these concepts in the life of the church and her different orders. Much like the spiritual traditions of the Dominicans, Franciscans etc., these steps construct a rule of life that bring discipline and freedom.

The 12-steps (when followed properly) combined, with the a growing relationship with the Lord through the church, can be an incredibly healing experience for someone struggling with an addiction.

“I sometimes joke about being OCD... but what really is OCD?”

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder can be understood as thoughts based on the emotion of fear leading to worry and anxiety. These thoughts lead to irrational actions around doing something to prevent a feared outcome.

For example, a woman might finds herself having to bring a toaster and coffee maker to work because she feels like it is the only way to prevent her house from catching fire.

While she is somewhat aware of how irrational it is, she cannot stop herself.

She will also feel very embarrassed having to carry them in her purse to her work cubicle, only increasing her anxiety.

Despite this, each day when she leaves the house, her worries come back and so she finds herself doing the same action again and again.

Some other examples could be rituals around hand washing, driving, light switches, door locking religious scruples—not to be confused with perfectionism (OCD can be differentiated by the distress involved).

In the book Brainlocked by Jeffery Scwartz, he recommends a really simple tool to help fights the feelings of anxiety you may have with OCD:

1. Reattribute (symptoms not reality)

2. Relabel (these are symptoms of OCD)

3. Refocus (spend attention elsewhere, following through on the thoughts only reinforce them)

4. Revalue (these thoughts and feelings aren’t going to matter if I don’t let them).

As Catholics we get to apply the tools of psychology and of faith.

So while we use the above tools we can also keep in mind that God made great saints of those who may have struggled with OCD.

It is said that St. Alphonsus de Liguori struggled with scrupulosity, and yet he is one of the Church’s greatest moral teachers.

Experiencing OCD doesn’t have to be an obstacle to sanctity, but rather a part of the path.