Counselors are one of those professions that know exactly how to deal with mental stress. Every business including schools can benefit from a counselor to help various people with the daily stress of life.
Mental stress is not easy to deal with, especially when you don’t have the correct tools at your disposal. By using a counselor to discuss your issues you can turn even the darkest period of your life around. Here are the 10 best ways that counselors can help you deal with mental stress, and even depression.
Table of Contents
Altered Behavior
Learning to deal with mental stress can be difficult, especially when our daily lives are filled with work, finance, and personal issues that we try to deal with all at the same time. By changing your behavior, you can change the way that you react to situations. Counselors are experts at telling you where your behavior and actions may be negatively affecting your health and wellbeing. A lot of stress can come from not knowing how to deal with something, or avoiding an issue that is too hard to deal with.
Starting simple is the best method. A counselor will find one action or characteristic that you feel is causing you stress and teach how you can change your attitude towards it. It could be that you need to wake up earlier in the morning to get more things done in the day and avoid feeling overwhelmed.
Cognitive Therapy To Think Differently
Through cognitive therapy, counselors help you to identify your fears to better understand why you act in certain ways, by looking at your thought process. This is to try to alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression by changing the way you see the world. Cognitive therapy also works for phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorders, by showing an individual how to emotionally react to those fears by changing thought patterns.
A counselor might suggest that you face your phobia or fear head-on, and in turn, you may realize that you were worried for nothing, or that you can handle the situation better than you thought.
Help To Rationalize Your Emotions
A person’s emotions and the way that they deal with the hardships of life is largely dependent on how they grew up. Our culture and heritage teach us from a young age how to act and behave in life, but sometimes this isn’t the right way to do things. If you were brought up in a strictly religious home, your emotional responses towards other people will be based on your belief system. You may find that you are more rigid and generally see the worst possible outcome in every situation.
These thought processes are so natural to a person that it can be very hard to change your way of thinking. Counselors assist by showing you different methods of dealing with various circumstances that don’t change your belief system. Rather, counselors show you better ways to rationalize the world that won’t let your emotions dictate your actions.
Get To The Root Problem
Most of a person’s mental stress can be traced back to some event in their life, whether it be a physical accident or something that happened to them as a child. Stress is a natural part of life, but some people put unnecessary stress on themselves because of their personalities. Stress not only makes a person mentally tired, but it can have physical effects on your body, such as increased cortisol levels. This is the body’s response to stress, and with too much cortisol you can suffer from heart palpitations and physical injuries.
The role of the counselor is to understand how your thought process works, and how those thoughts negatively increase your stress levels. This involves talking about your problems openly and honestly so that the counselor can point you in the right direction. Keep in mind that these professionals will use these same techniques to combat counselor stress. They are human after all but have just learned the correct way to deal with their problems.
Improved Self-Image
Sometimes lacking self-confidence is all you need to feel stressed in every aspect of your life. You may believe that you are incompetent in your job, and thus you start to make simple errors because you don’t believe in your ability. A teenager at school might feel less intelligent compared to their other classmates and subsequently stops putting in the proper effort to improve their grades. These are all examples of how a person’s negativity affects their life with mental stress, and it can be a very difficult self-image to get away from.
By showing you a better way of understanding yourself, counselors assist to change your self-image to work on your strengths. People can learn valuable ways to find their confidence and improve the way they see themselves.
They Teach Relaxation Techniques
Whether it be a meditation session or taking an hour each day for yourself, learning to relax can do wonders to reduce mental stress. Oftentimes we are so busy with work and personal life that we forget to take a breather and enjoy the little things. A counselor will be able to tell you when you are putting too much strain on yourself, and they will devise a plan that works for you.
When a person is relaxed, they are more focused on long-term goals, and it gives them time to re-evaluate what is important. Having two jobs to supplement your income may work for your financial goals, but the effects on the rest of your life may outweigh the benefits of making more money.
They Use Positive Affirmations
Almost everyone has heard of the famous book, The Secret, where the author tells you how you can achieve all your goals with positive reinforcement. It sounds like science fiction, however, there is evidence that your mind is the strongest organ in your body, and it can affect the rest of your life. It’s the same concept as a placebo effect, whereby your mind plays a trick on you. You believe the pill has the necessary ingredients and that it will work, therefore it does.
Many people have attributed positive affirmations to turning their life around, by constantly working towards a specific and positive goal. By looking in the mirror each morning and telling yourself that you are a confident and successful person, your actions will soon reflect just that.
Reality Testing
This is a psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud whereby a person’s view on reality is compared to the way it is. Psychologists have figured out that our viewpoint on life has a big impact on our egos and how we treat others. Take, for example, someone who is always pessimistic even when nothing in their life has gone wrong. This confused view of reality can make a person see every situation with a negative attitude. In the same breath, those individuals naturally attract bad conditions because they gloomily approach everything.
Reality testing is one’s ability to see the world for what it is and not based on individual fears and opinions about life. Understanding that the external world can be different from the internal workings of the mind is just the first step to rectify this way of viewing reality.
Hypnosis When Nothing Else Works
Many people don’t believe in hypnosis and often think it’s just a stage technique to get a person to act crazy. Hypnosis is very much a psychological technique, and similar to the placebo effect, if a person is easily suggestable a counselor can use hypnosis to alter the way a person handles stress. This method includes a lot of initial behavioral and cognitive therapy, but it can be the magic bullet that helps someone when no other therapies seem to work. This is referred to as multimodal therapy because it incorporates different aspects of the mind to work on a broader scale.
They Teach You To Appreciate Things
Treating yourself right should be second nature, but too many people have a bad opinion of themselves. A counselor may suggest that you start journaling all the things that you are grateful for in life. Even the tiniest factors in life can make the world of difference. If you think you have a great smile, write it down. Before you can treat others properly, you have to learn to love yourself and understand that you come first. You cannot take care of your family until you know how to take care of your mental stress.
Every person in the world has something they offer that no one else can. A unique personality that is completely different from anyone, and each with individual strengths and weaknesses. Take a moment to think of all your achievements in life no matter how small they seem.
Counselors are effective by showing us how to break our lives down into manageable components and to change the way we think and act. Life won’t seem so stressful if you can take each day one at a time, rather than worrying about the final result.
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