Use this simple tool to remind yourself of the many ways you can look after your mental health. Or don’t. Either way, you rock!
I’ve been doing some professional development today.
What does that look like?
Well, I watched a lecture by Cassandra Vieten who is a “Clinical Professor at the Centers for Integrative Health in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, where she serves as Director of the Center for Mindfulness.”
She was talking about mental health (my pet topic) and the diversity of practices that we now know positively impact mental health.
No longer is it just the case that we look after our mental health through medications, therapy and hospitalisation (note: those are still important).
There is now a rich body of literature supporting many different practices in supporting people’s mental health, both the alleviation of mental illness symptoms, but also the cultivation of positive states of mental health (e.g. connection, engagement, meaning and purpose).
In her lecture she made mention of a tool she uses with clients to help them think about and brainstorm different activities for positive mental health.
It is included below (just click the image).
It is called the My Well-being Ecosystem and it encourages us to think about 10 different areas when looking to bolster our resilience and achieve positive mental health.
The tool is accompanied by a resource website https://www.johnwbrickfoundation.org/build/, where you can access resources to learn more about each of the 10 areas.
In her lecture, she described that a way to use the tool is to:
First: Brainstorm and write down things you could do for each of the 10 areas. If you are having trouble thinking of some things, I got AI to recommend a few. But ideally, you come up with some of your own examples for each area. Don’t let our robot overlords make all your decisions.
Second: Each day pick one or 2 of those things to action in some way. Over the course of a few weeks/months, you’d probably get around to attending to all parts of the ecosystem in some way.
That’s it!
The goal isn’t that you pack your life with so many things to do that you get overwhelmed.
The goal is that you come to recognise that there are many different ways to nurture your mental health and get used to punctuating the average day with these kinds of activities.
If you’d like to see Cassandra talk, this Ted Talk is a good start: