Helps Anyone to Cope Up from Anxieties & Depression
One of the things that you need to remember when it comes to caring for your husband is that you must know his struggles and problems. It is essential that you motivate him in opening up to you, especially during a time when he experiences a loss in the family. Take note that no matter how strong your partner is, he will always feel a little low when someone in his family dies. Below is a list of the things that you can do to help your partner in this difficult situation:
When the burdens of anxiety and depression reach an uncontrollable level, the body and the mind go through a meltdown. Meltdowns are periods of intense mental distress wherein people fail to function correctly in their daily activities. Unique to each person, stressors, traumatic events, life changes, and chronic medical conditions may trigger these meltdowns. However, it is essential to remember recovery is always possible even after such outburst.
How It Helps In The Recovery Process
The main culprit of a mental breakdown is stress. “Stress can seem omnipresent. Between working, socializing and taking care of the home, it sometimes seems we don’t have a minute to ourselves, let alone enough time to really take care of our bodies and minds.” Sonja Seglin, LCPC elaborates. Anything that triggers or stresses us is capable of shutting our mind and body down. This highly possible event happens when undergoing heavy but regular stressful events. We must learn to tame our mind and pace ourselves to take back our control.
And this is where holistic health comes in. A holistic lifestyle starts with a certain amount of mindfulness as a critical component. It means accurately knowing how you react to situations or merely acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses. Using a holistic approach in this article, we will enumerate steps on how to live a holistic lifestyle after a meltdown.
Recovering From A Meltdown
Practice Mindfulness
Sometimes meltdowns come with raging outbursts or embarrassing bawls in the presence of others. Park that embarrassment for a while and look back to what had triggered that meltdown. Was it related to a person? A particular assignment at work you thought you could not accomplish? Was it an offensive remark someone had said or were you just extremely vulnerable that day? If this is not the first meltdown you have experienced, assess the other times you have had anxiety attacks. You will realize more things about yourself, and this will empower you to become better. Because according to Jennifer Bradley, Psy.D., HSPP, Clinical Psychologist “I believe that human beings have an inherent longing and need for wholeness and balance, which is our natural state of being.”
Allocating time assessing yourself and the situation is considered mindfulness. Identifying your trigger points will be useful for further exercises in the future. Once you have started practicing mindfulness, you can easily apply this in other daily activities like mindful eating and managing emotions.
Other exercises of mindfulness may be meditation, daily examination of conscience, and introspection.
Respect The Limits Of Your Body
Mindfulness also comes with respecting our body’s limits. Avoid activities or situations that are “too much” for you. These activities may cause stress and adversely affect both your mental and emotional health. It is good to disconnect once in a while. Simple meditation or downtime can melt away the angst.
Eat Clean
“It’s important to underscore here the importance of monitoring your mental health and knowing how different medications and lifestyle changes can impact your mental health.” Julia Hogan, LCPC sais. With that, eating clean, green food is only one component of holistic practice. It works hand in hand with other measures that promote mental and emotional health. Eating vegetables, a balanced diet, and healthy food nourishes our bodies and flushes out toxins.
If you are not a fan of vegetables, try a cup of tea a day. It has soothing effects on the body and the mind. A cup of green tea can calm away nerves.
Stay Active
Regular exercise serves as a stress reliever. Whenever you feel overwhelmed, do an activity or exercise to blow off some steam. For others, it serves as a momentary distraction.
If your work entails long sedentary hours, take a break once in a while and walk around the office. Getting your red blood cells moving can help you channel negative energy into something more productive.
Your recovery is possible by leading a holistic lifestyle. Holistic health encompasses the spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional health of a person. Start living a holistic life through the practices we mentioned above.
Coping with depression is not an easy feat, and patients with depression need a lot of support from family and friends. A family’s involvement in a person’s recovery does not stop at support and care.
People need to understand that depression and mental health problems affect not just the individual but also the whole family. When you have a depressed family member, the effects of that condition spread to other family members. For this reason, a family needs to be aware of how depression could affect the entire unit.
Depression Is A Family Matter
Medication is only half the battle when dealing with depression. A patient also needs proper counseling as well as a reliable support system. This support system typically comes in the form of family.
Family makes up the majority of a person’s social environment. In most cases, people with depression are under the care of family members. Even before considering treatment and recovery, a person’s family situation has massive potential in influencing his or her mental and emotional well-being.
When dealing with a person with depression, a family member’s input is vital in coming up with an accurate diagnosis. Sometimes, a patient might not be honest about his feelings. Other times, the patient doesn’t understand or is not even aware of his condition. It is a common manifestation of depression, which is why family input is essential in determining a person’s mental state. Members of the family can observe a person with depression and provide a detailed account to a therapist or psychiatrist.
Impacts Of Depression In A Family (And How To Address Them)
People with depression experience multiple symptoms that can bring down even the best of us. Caring for a depressed person is no match to experiencing depression, but this job still presents a considerable challenge to anyone. Depression has a particular impact that affects not only the patient but also everyone in the family.
The most apparent impact of depression within the family is the disruption of family dynamics. When a person is depressed, this often manifests in loss of will or motivation in many things, most notably in interacting with others. Isolation happens not only in external events like socializing with friends but also in communicating with family members.
An uncommunicative family member creates tension due to avoidance of issues. This situation is most prevalent at the onset of dealing with depression in the family. Most family members might not yet be used to the presence of depression in the family. This uncertainty makes them tiptoe around their depressed family member, unsure of what to say and how to deal with them.
Tension from lack of communication often blows up into conflict. A depressed person’s mood varies from time to time, and a family member’s fuse might shorten in time as well. Lack of communication results in a lack of understanding from both parties.
As a family, communicating through the negative impacts of depression is a must. On the one hand, family members need to stretch their patience when dealing with a depressed patient. On the other hand, depression should not become a person’s excuse to refrain from engaging in healthy discussions in the family.
There are numerous challenges both on the part of the patient and his or her family. It is common for misunderstandings to pop up. Still, everyone in the family must learn to keep communication lines open as much as possible to foster a healthy environment fit for a depressed person’s recovery.