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Get Healthy De Soto

…having a long-lasting positive impact on the health and safety of the De Soto community by encouraging healthy lifestyle choices, through programs promoting physical activity, healthy nutrition, community involvement, and disease and injury prevention.

Heading into the holidays with something different this year

I’m looking forward to Christmas this year with something between a sense of dread and a desire to just skip the holiday. I doubt that I am alone either.

Even in families that are healthy, the holiday is creating stress that wasn’t there last year. The separation that happened last year has created an unrealistic expectation that we find the perfect recipe, give the perfect gift, and wear the perfect outfit. For families like mine, we’re dealing with the first holidays where family members long-deemed “essential” are missing; mourning the loss of those who have passed away.

This season should bring about some level of peace, but we really stack the deck against ourselves sometimes. Here are things you should consider doing to bring some peace to your holiday regardless of how perfect or imperfect your family might be.

  1. There is not going to be a perfect holiday this year or any other year. Give up on the idea of “perfect”. Consider this: you are not going to change the life of your sister-in-law by giving her a great gift wrapped up in beautiful paper with just the right amount of curl in the ribbon. Take the pressure off, and give yourself permission to focus on the people you’ll see instead of the things you’ll do, wear, or give.
  2. Make due with less, not out of some sort of austerity measure, but to direct your focus on quality time with the people you care about. Spend less money by worrying less about the gift and focusing on the person.
  3. Shop differently. Buy local and handmade. And when you do purchase gifts online, see if the online retailer you use has information about companies that refuse child labor or use environmentally sustainable practices. Be educated about what your purchase supports.
  4. Give a gift that makes a difference. Give food to the food pantry, toys to the Jefferson County Foster Children’s Fund, gift cards to A Safe Place. One of my favorites is to give bees and goats in honor of my nieces and nephews through Heifer International. And if you can’t afford a monetary gift, give your time. The pantry frequently needs help sorting items, and organizations often have “honey-do” lists of things that need to be done but don’t have the people to do it.
  5. Visit with a lonely person. I would provide suggestions for where to find lonely people, but the reality is that you don’t need my suggestions. We all know lonely people.
  6. The pandemic has taught us things, right? Hasn’t it taught us that life can be so short? Give the gift of forgiveness. Offer some mercy to someone that you thought you couldn’t. You can even forgive someone who is no longer part of your life. Stop dwelling on things and move forward during this season.

Above all, enjoy the small things that are offered this season. One of the greatest joys I have is being able to drink a cup of coffee with my husband without herding children off to school. If we can enjoy just a few quiet minutes at the table before the horde awakens with all their daily demands, it’s a beautiful thing! It doesn’t happen every week, but it is wonderful when it does. Take joy in those small things; taking a walk, waving to a neighbor, reading a book, petting your dog. When you focus on the holiday season as an all-consuming thing to either plan for perfection or dread with sadness, you can lose sight of all of the other gifts that life offers every day. Do your best to focus on these and turn your attention to simple joy as much as possible.

Before Stage 4

When we think about cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, we don’t wait years to treat them. We start way before Stage 4. We begin with prevention. And when people are in the first stage of those diseases, and have a persistent cough, high blood pressure, or high blood sugar, we try immediately to reverse these symptoms.

This is what we should be doing when people have serious mental illnesses, too. When they first begin to experience symptoms such as loss of sleep, feeling tired for no reason, feeling low, feeling anxious, or hearing voices, we should act.

These early symptoms might not ever become serious. Like a cough, they often go away on their own, and are nothing to fear. But when they do not go away, it typically takes ten years from the time they first appear until someone gets a correct diagnosis and proper treatment.

This means that by ignoring them, we lose ten years in which we could intervene in order to change people’s lives for the better. During most of these years most people still have supports that allow them to succeed – home, family, friends, school, and work. So people can often recover quickly, and live full and productive lives.

Even when we don’t intervene right away, and serious mental illnesses get worse and disrupt people’s lives, we can act effectively. We can offer people choices and supports to help them recover. These include clinical services, drugs, peer supports, counseling, family supports, and other therapies that also help them manage their thoughts and emotions. These all help keep people connected to their families and their community. Intervening as early as possible preserves education, employment, social supports, housing – and brain power! It also costs less than the all-too-common revolving door of incarceration, hospitalization, and homelessness.

#BeforeStage4

Mental Health Challenges

Almost 20% of adults in America experience a mental health challenge. We’re a terribly stressed society. One way to improve your mental health is to accept reality as it is though. Sometimes in life we end up in situations that we just can’t change. Acceptance is all about fully accepting your reality in situations that are beyond your control. This doesn’t mean you approve of the situation, are giving up, or that it isn’t painful. You are still allowed to (and should!) feel however you feel, but by accepting that it is what it is, you give the problem less power over you, and you can begin to move forward. And practicing this acceptance has been shown to reduce feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety.

One way to cope is through the use of coping statements. These are sentences that remind you that different, healthier ways of thinking are possible. Repeating them (think mantra) can help you get through difficult moments – you can focus on just one or make a long list of your own. Some examples are:

  • It is what it is.
  • I can’t change what has already happened.
  • I can accept things the way they are.
  • I can only control my own actions and reactions.

If it helps, write your coping statements on Post-It notes and put them in places where you will see them multiple times a day, or set an alarm on your phone with a coping statement to pop up with a reminder every now and again.

When you’re fighting against reality, the first step in accepting reality is gaining awareness that you’re resisting it. It may seem like this would be easy to spot, but there are actually a lot of subtle ways that people push against reality. If you’re feeling bitter or resentful, wishing things were different, or thinking about how life isn’t fair, you might be fighting reality.

Learning to spot that, and to practice your coping strategies, takes…well, practice. It’s a great way to deal with difficult situations that we just can’t control. It takes time though, and don’t be hard on yourself if you fail. Start small with simple situations, and build from there. For example, curse the moon when traffic is at a standstill. Then, take a deep breath, relax your shoulders, and say, “this isn’t something I can control.” It might be awkward at first, but don’t let that stop you.

If you have a grandmother or mother of a certain age, she might have taught you this very skill when you were small and you didn’t even realize it. For example, sirens can be stressful for people. My grandmother always had us say a prayer for whoever was driving and might be riding in the emergency vehicle when we heard sirens. It was a way for a little kid to process that anxiety and help us realize that we couldn’t do anything about it other than pray. Pretty simple, right? If you look back over the course of your years, you might find similar instances of this sort of acceptance of reality. Reinstitute those! It make make you healthier.

Mental Health Tools

We can all joke about the pandemic making us crazy, and a bit like Kevin Bacon, the closer in degrees you are to me, the more likely you are to fit that description. I seem to attract crazy people (and I’m okay with that)!

It’s been a hard year, and for some of us, a clinical diagnosis of a mental illness has really happened. For others, trying to determine if professional help is needed is difficult. There is an incredible stigma that goes with mental health, and one way to combat that stigma is to start having discussions about your mental health. No, not just discussions with the people who share space in your head! Actual discussions with friends and family about stress, struggles, sleep (or lack of it), and coping skills.

I have a friend who prepares me for her own unburdening. Before going into a big rant about something and asking my opinion, she first asks if I have mental space to deal with her issue. I love her consideration, and even more, it makes me think about whether I’m at a place to listen or not. Her approach is as unique as she is. However, like most of us, if you were woefully unprepared for all the stress of this pandemic, it’s time to assess where you are and where you can make improvements.

A simple way to start is through a mental health assessment. Mental Health America offers some screening tools that you might find beneficial. Word of warning though: there are a lot of them, so if you get stressed by having too many options and not being able to make a decision, prepare yourself mentally before clicking the link!

These easy, online assessments can help you evaluate if professional help is needed and help you locate appropriate health care providers. It’s just a small step to improving your mental health.

Online Assessment Tools

Move More

Anxiety and stress generally come with holidays. This is especially true this year as we all deal with a pandemic too. Families are making decisions about whether to gather, which isn’t an easy decision to make. When stress runs high, it is important to keep moving. Physical activity is important for your overall health, but can help with your mental health situation during these difficult times.

If you’re looking for something new, you might give mindful meditation or yoga a try. Yoga is usually slow-moving, focuses on breathing, improves balance, and can improve flexibility. This short video from MU Extension might help get you started. It was created for beginners.

And if you need a bit of sunshine, you might check out this video from a few years ago. It features Glennon Doyle Melton, an alcoholic with an eating disorder who spent time as a teenager in a mental hospital. This presentation at a TEDx event in Michigan lays it all on the table and identifies her “brutiful” life. It has some aspects which you can probably identify, and she’s a little funny in the telling. It is a reminder that we all have vulnerable times and need to learn to ask for help.

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