Sometimes we don’t need a whole course, appointment, or major life overhaul. Sometimes we just need a small, credible mental health resource that helps us understand what is happening, feel less alone, or take one next step.
In a previous post, which I revisit regularly and update, I talk about how, in Australia, we have an excellent range of self-guided online therapy options.
Sites like MindSpot and This Way Up provide a wide range of evidence-based therapeutic courses on mental illness and wellbeing. Many are free or very low cost. Some include therapist assistance.
These courses can be stand-alone investments in your mental health or completed as an adjunct to therapy or counselling.
For access to the courses, you typically do some kind of online assessment (e.g. the one at MindSpot), which seeks to clarify the mental health challenges you’ve been experiencing, and then register for the best-fitting course.
But some of these sites also provide mental health tools and guides that you can access separately from enrolling in a full course.
Courses are great when you are ready for a more structured commitment. You get more from them, but you also have to put in more time.
Resource hubs are useful when you want something lighter: a quick explainer, a coping tool, a translated handout, or a simple practice to try.
Sometimes we don’t need (or aren’t ready for) a whole course, appointment, or major life overhaul. Sometimes it is enough to get a small, credible mental health resource that helps us understand what is happening, feel less alone, or take one next step.
For example, I’ve been getting practitioner emails from This Way Up for the last few months, which has alerted me to their growing Resource Hub.
Their recent article, “5 Simple Mindfulness Practices for Your Everyday”, captures nicely that mindfulness practices aren’t limited to formal meditations. Mindfulness can also be woven into ordinary moments: noticing your breath, tuning into your senses, paying attention while doing everyday tasks, or creating a brief pause before reacting.
And it isn’t just this resource. There are other cool resources Resources: tips for living well, coping tools, symptom explainers, and a bunch of translated resources.
The question then arises:
What should I do with these resources?
This varies depending on your situation and your readiness to make some changes in your life.
Sometimes, you don’t really need to do anything immediately. It might be as simple as reading an explainer, like one on anxiety and worry, and feeling a bit validated that what you’ve been experiencing is known about and that there are treatment options. That can be valuable in itself. A good explainer can give language to something that has felt messy or confusing. It can help you realise that other people experience similar things. It can make a problem feel a little less mysterious and a little more workable.
Sometimes, one of the resources might convince you to make a change in your life, like exploring new ways to speak to someone about how you are feeling or giving you a small practice to try. A breathing practice. A reflection question. A way of noticing thoughts. Ways of calming your emotions. A suggestion for how to approach sleep, worry, stress, study, motivation, or relationships.
Other times, the resource might finally convince you to sign up for a course, seek advice from a professional, or start the help-seeking or treatment process.
To get more from these kinds of resources, ask yourself, after reading:
- Does this help me understand something?
- Does this validate something I’ve been experiencing?
- Does it suggest one small thing I could try?
- Does it make me think I should seek extra support?
- Does it point me toward a fuller course or program that might be useful?
Just asking yourself, “How can I use this new knowledge?” might be sufficient in working out what, if any, value the resource has for you, in your life.
And because these therapeutic tools and guides are typically quite short, the whole process of reading and considering can happen quite quickly. There’s is nothing much to lose from checking them out, but potentially a lot to gain.
All of this to say: if you’ve been struggling in terms of mental health or wellbeing recently, check out a few articles or resources on This Way Up’s Resource Hub and see if they help you open up some new possibilities. I’ll point out some similar resource hubs in future posts.
Take care everyone.