Minding It Daily
Radical Self Care with the Daily Mind
Do you know that your daily habits affect not only how you feel and your stress level, but they also affect your mental health, your motivation, and your feelings of focus and contentment?
Radical Self Care can bring you to a place where your stress level is diminished and your can reclaim some peace and happiness. Radical Self Care is a roadmap back to joy.
What is the Daily Mind? And what do we mean by radical self care?
The Daily Mind is a simple, free, accessible program designed to help recover, protect, and promote mental health. It is a program designed to help us make the connection between our daily habits and our quality of life.
The habits you will learn to put into place for your “Daily Mind” are radical self care. By radical self care we mean a series of habits that help us take care of ourselves in a deep and positive way, a way that nurtures our mental health as well as our physical health. This program protects and promotes mental health while it teaches you to improve your overall quality of life.
Do you know how to take care of yourself in a way that allows you to feel happy, content, centered, focused, and positive about the future? How do you find your way back to a place of contentment when you are stressed? How do you get to a place where the future looks brighter and you feel able to manage your responsibilities and work towards your goals?
We all know how to take care of other aspects of our health. We know to brush our teeth two times a day and get to the dentist. We know we are supposed to eat healthy food and exercise. We know certain things are healthy and certain things are not. But do you know about the habits that take care of your most precious resource, your mind? This book will help you learn to take care of yourself in a way that empowers you.
In order to improve, and also to protect, mental health, you must first improve self care. There is no pill, or medication, that, alone, is going to help you be able to live your best life. But this is good news. Because the power to make yourself feel better is yours. It’s been with you all along. Through a series of habits that are simple, free, and accessible to anyone, you can gain control of how you feel. When you are not feeling your best, we have found, the first question to ask is, where are the gaps in self care? What needs to be better minded? This book contains those specific instructions that can lead you back to a place where life seems full of joy again.
When people think of self care, often they think of dieting, joining a gym, getting a mani/pedi, a massage, or getting hair cut and colored. A night out with friends. Maybe indulging in some shopping therapy and getting a good meal at restaurant. Some of us, when we think of self care, consider it a luxury. It’s something we can’t afford or don’t have time to do, so we give up on it.
Luxuries, while enjoyable, are not really self care. When we talk about developing habits in order to take better care of yourself, we mean a deep and radical self care. A self care that meets your basic needs and helps you create your own path to joy. We want to show you how to make this program part of your daily routine, so that quality self care becomes an automatic part of your day.
When we talk about basic needs, we are referring to the basic needs all humans must fulfill in order to live happy, healthy lives. Those needs are: 1. Basic physical needs (healthy food, clean water, warmth, and safety), 2. Movement and Exercise, 3. Social Connection and Intimacy, 4. Purpose and Challenge, 5. Spiritual Connection, and 6. Structure to the day and some control over one’s environment. When these needs are not met, we can become deeply stressed.
All of us, at one point or another, have become stressed. Some of us have had early experiences when our basic needs were not met, and thus we became very deeply stressed. Some of us have had stress ebb and flow throughout our lives. We all have different circumstances, but as some point, most of us have to cope with a stressful situation.
Stress causes some major reactions in the body. Chronic stress, or stress that is deep enough to threaten our basic needs, can wreak havoc. Most mental health symptoms are caused or worsened by stress in our lives and in our pasts.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the most important thing to do when stress rises and you find yourself less able to cope with life is to focus on self care. Eating healthy food, getting enough sleep, staying active and exercising, connecting socially, avoiding alcohol and drugs, keeping a normal routine, taking a break and reducing stress, and finding support are all recommendations from the CDC around coping with symptoms that can arise when stress levels have been too high for too long. We think this is great advice. The only problem is, how?
Throughout our work in the fields of mental health and education, we came to notice that what the CDC recommends is true. And we noticed that those who had better self care habits in place were more resilient in the face of life’s stressors. However, as the years marched on we also seemed to be watching more and more people suffer from the symptoms of chronic stress. We started to ask ourselves why. And then we also started thinking about the difference between people who seemed to recover more quickly from severe stress, and those who didn’t. We started noticing some patterns.
As we thought about people who had been deeply stressed in the past, and also those who were currently experiencing this stress, we began thinking that maybe we didn’t have the whole picture. We were wondering if we were noticing all of the factors that not only help people recover when they have been too stressed for too long, but also protect them from stress’s harmful effects in the first place. So, we decided to take a look at current research to see if anyone else had noticed and studied what we were seeing.
What we found astonished us. Virtually every research article we could find that had been written over the past decade or more seemed to support the fact that certain habits not only helped people recover from symptoms associated with the effects of too much stress more quickly, they also seemed to have a protective component. People with certain habits already in place seemed less likely to suffer from symptoms of mental health problems even when battling stressors that have felled others.
Who are we and why should you listen to us? We know there a many people out there who have an opinion on what you should be doing. However, we have a lot of experience working with people, and this is not the same old advice. We not only took observations from our collective 50 years of work and matched it up with the most up to date research that we could find, we also tried the program ourselves And, once we started the program, we never stopped.
We are two mental health professionals who have worked with people in schools, health care settings, and community agencies. We’ve worked in small private practices, and also with large companies. And, believe us, we have pretty much seen it all. We have noticed that far more people are struggling to handle stress and so many more these days are succumbing to varying levels of mental health issues. However, we have witnessed that people with certain habits in place are better able to cope. Those with the right self care habits seem to recover more quickly from setbacks and seem more resilient.
We made a list of the habits that seemed to us, after our observations and our research, most important in helping people protect themselves against the dangerous and health eroding effects of chronic stress. We took a look at that list and saw they were all things we knew we should be doing. But, yet, somehow we didn’t. Why?
Why would we, two experienced mental health and education professionals, not be able to do the very things we knew were important for not only our own mental health, but also our physical health? If we didn’t do those things, who would?
We sat down and tried to think about how to answer these questions. We knew, for example, that walking is one of the most beneficial things that one can do for health of both the mind and body. We knew this to be true unequivocally. And yet, which one of us had gone for a walk in the past week? Neither one of us.
Why? Well, the conclusion that we came to was that it was not a habit. We simply did not have time each day, in the course of work, kids, houses, chores, errands, and dinner, to figure out when to go for a walk. The day just went by and before we knew it, it was over.
It became clearer to us that the environment we live in does not support the idea that our daily habits have an impact on our mental health. We also realized that we needed to become very clear in our own minds that certain habits were vitally important to how we feel and our ability to cope with stress on a daily basis. Our goal became to find a way to make these habits automatic: something we did each day without wasting time and energy having to decide to do it. Like brushing our teeth or taking a shower.
We decided to work out a plan so that these habits became just as automatic as personal hygiene habits. We needed a program. So, we created one. We took all of the components that we found to be important to maintaining and recovering mental health, and we made a list. We then organized that list into four different categories: Being Kind to oneself and to others. Being Quiet: meditating, reducing stress. Getting moving: exercise, getting outside in nature, working towards goals, connecting socially. And, Taking Care of Business: creating structure to the day, improving sleep, taking care of basic needs.
We took a look at the habits that addressed each of these four areas, and got them organised. We then cut each category down to its smallest possible component. We thought, “what if we started here, and made these four small, simple things regular habits, could we then add on? Would the very basics of these steps be helpful?” We took our program and experimented on ourselves.
We started small. Making small changes to our daily routine for one week, and then adding on the next week. We wanted to see how difficult it would be to maintain a daily habit once we started it, and what the effects would be on our mental health.
We were startled by our results. While we fully realized this was not research done in the strictest of scientific fashion, we knew full well that the results we were getting were real and measurable.
So, we gathered up some volunteers and had them try the program, too. Soon, we were all shocked and thrilled at how effective the program could be. Our volunteers wanted more. They quickly got to the point where they knew they felt much better on the days that they followed the program, and began finding ways to make sure they got their radical self care habits done. They became devoted to their “Daily Mind.”
We wrote this book because we want to bring this program to you. The beautiful part of this program, we think, is that it can be made accessible to anyone, regardless of your means, your environment, or your abilities. You may need to do a little problem solving to get everything to fit into your particular situation, but we offer ways to help you along. Our radical self care program puts the power to feel better and protect your mental health into your hands.
Simple and straightforward at first, as you develop these habits, you will notice ripple effects throughout your life. You will be developing daily habits that support happiness and mental health. Those daily habits are called your Daily Mind.
Now, we are not going to tell you that it is easy. But we have tried this program, and so have others, and we have found that it works. We’d like you to try it, too. Some days, you are going to want to throw this book across the room and crawl back into bed. Some days, you are going to get to the point where you feel like you just can’t do it and want to just collapse into the couch with a bag of potato chips and the TV remote. We know. We feel that way sometimes, too. We all have days when our self care falls apart or we just forget or convince ourselves we can’t do what we are supposed to do. That is okay.
What you are to do then is to get up the next day, and start again. Go back to the beginning if you have to do that. Figure out what is causing your stress to rise, and adapt the program. There is no way to mess this program up. You just keep going with what you can do until it becomes automatic. You may soon enough find that on the days that you do the program, you feel so much better that, more and more, you’ll avoid having days when you don’t. That is what we found. That is what all of our volunteers found. Your Daily Mind will become a powerful set of tools to use against problems arising from stress.
