You’ve read the blogs, tips, and posts with catchy ideas that make you think about how to break the toxic patterns holding you back. You’re taking the steps and making progress, but you crave more. You want answers about why these habits have formed in your life and how you can take steps to ensure they don’t take hold again.
Before you can begin to make changes that mean something in your life, you’ve got to figure out what needs to change. When you start unraveling the threads of your life, you may feel overwhelmed, frustrated, or frozen in fear of making the wrong next move.
Your mental health is not a house of cards. If you make one move that doesn’t work for you, all your progress will not come tumbling down. You have the strength within you and a foundation beneath you to support the space you need to heal. There is room for trial and triumph as you shed the toxic habits hindering your wellness.
Pause here and take a few moments. Set a timer on your phone or listen to a song as you ask yourself one question:
What in your life is asking for your attention?
When the answer comes, let it. It doesn’t need to have your approval or acceptance. Simply let your awareness meet you in this space with your body, mind, and these words as your guide. This area of your life is where you’ll turn your attention as you begin to re-write your habits to create the life you’re craving. We’ll go together with purpose toward your next steps.
Recommendation: Meditation, Meet Yourself Where You Are
Now that you’ve got a grasp of where your attention is most needed, it’s time to get started. Setting yourself up for success before you begin making changes is the best way to ensure that you have the tools to make sure your new habits stick!
1. Acknowledge the habits you need to change
Great news! You’re on the first step, and you’ve already done it. By taking part in the mindfulness step we just did together, you’re already aware of what needs to change and why it matters to you. You can check this one off with a sense of accomplishment already. Well done 🙂
2. Share your goals and aspirations with someone you trust
Going on a journey of growth with someone else helps you remain accountable to yourself and can ensure that you acknowledge and celebrate the growth that is too small for you to see at the moment.
3. Accept consequences before they happen
No one starts something new with the intention of it going wrong, but preparing for the potential consequences of success is often something we don’t consider. Think about the ways your life may change and get ready for it before you encounter them.
4. Do one thing daily
Some days you may be able to bring a myriad of new healthy habit tools into your life, but other days you may struggle to want to embrace them at all. Commit to doing one thing, no matter how small, each day that helps you feel inspired and excited about your growth.
5. Consider it an experiment
Observe new changes and potential growth with curiosity and excitement as if you were cultivating a new experiment in a lab. Treating your life like a science project may feel foreign and a bit uncomfortable at first, but there is no failure in experiments – only unexpected variables. Let your curiosity lead, and you may discover thoughtful ways to thrive that you never imagined.
Take these tips and revisit them often. Annotate them, transcribe them or rewrite them to fit what you learn along the way. This is your launch pad and your safe space. Return here whenever you need to remember all you’re capable of, or to remind you of how much you’ve grown. These tips are a tool you’ll customize along your journey, and we hope you’ll share the ways you use or alter them with us as you go.
Recommendation: Book, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
Did you know that it’s easier to break a bad habit by replacing it with a new one than it is just to stop doing something you’re already accustomed to? Our brains are wired to prefer routine over unruliness, so instead, Dr. Elliot Berkman suggests replacing your toxic habits with healthier and more sustainable ones!
It can be hard to know where to begin when you’re making changes to your daily routine to improve your mood. To help you get started, we’ve made a list of daily activity swaps that take less than five minutes and require nothing more than your conscious choice to make them.
“Depending on what they are, our habits will either make us
or break us. We become what we repeatedly do.”
Sean Covey
Whether you’re looking to elevate your mood or increase productivity, small steps can mean huge progress. None of these habits require special tools or skills- but they all require effort and attention paid to how you treat yourself. Making simple changes is far from easy, but thoughtful living will bring plentiful rewards to make the effort meaningful every single day!
Recommendation: Book, How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease by Michael Greger M.D. FACLM
Book, 10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Colle
Your mindset is the foundation your life will flourish upon. How you move through your days and where your energy can carry you all begins with the mindset you have. You can cultivate a more holistic, plentiful mindset in your own life. You do not need expensive tools or expert self-help novels to guide you through these changes. You can change your mindset by setting aside a few minutes each day to develop a healthy outlook on life. There are many ways to do this!
Recommendation: Book, Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic, and Worry by Catherine Pittman
These words of empowerment are phrases, mantras, or short poems you can recite to yourself at any time to feel a bit more connected to the healthy, hopeful habits you’re building. While some affirmations come from within us, others are phrases or ideas you’ll gather from people you admire or even meaningful books, songs, or movies. An affirmation might be a simple repetition of something you need to be reminded of or something more tailored to what you’re tackling each day.
• I believe in myself
• I am worthy of good things
• I am capable of anything I try
• I love myself as I am
• Hope is stronger than fear
• I am successful
• Confidence is key
• All I need is within me
• Others are inspired by my hard work • My past does not define me • My life has meaning
• I choose happiness today
• I am enough
• Self-care isn’t selfish
One of the most powerful things about affirmations is that you can have as many as you need. When your life, mood or needs change, your affirmations can too. You may pick them up from favorite songs or things you needed to hear in the past but never did. Anything that empowers you to act with your best self in mind is an affirmation worth inviting into your life.
Write, sing, share or repeat your affirmations in any way you need, as often as you like. These words can be the glue that holds your pieces together as you sort and assemble them into the version of yourself you feel most inspired to be.
Gratitude is the process of being thankful and making that state of being a practice you intentionally incorporate into your life. There is no one way to express your gratitude and, much like affirmations, there’s no wrong way to grow a gratitude practice.
Some of the ways you may choose to practice gratitude are through a gratitude journal, through mindfulness meditations, with the use of affirmations, or by using ritual practices to remind yourself to be grateful. You may choose all of these, some of them, or alternate the way you practice inviting gratitude into your daily life.
One of the most important parts of living a grateful life is to share that gratitude with those around you in genuine ways.
• Keep a gratitude jar for the ways you’ve been shown gratitude and draw from it when you’re feeling inspired to show someone else you’re thankful for them.
• Observe the things you’re thankful for out loud, even if no one is listening.
• Write a letter to a loved one you see daily and mail it to them so they • receive an unexpected token of your appreciation.
• Let an act of kindness speak for you when you’re feeling grateful.
• Openly let your people know what they mean to you, and don’t shy away from the vulnerability that comes along with it.
• Tell someone thank you, even for small or seemingly insignificant kindnesses like holding the door or letting you go first in traffic.
You do not have to make a show out of being grateful, or force gratitude in moments that feel difficult. Every practice of appreciation has room for balance. You are not failing to be grateful by acknowledging frustration, accepting disappointment, or expressing grief. Even in dark places, there is something to be grateful for simply by witnessing your truth. Gratitude can be more than an appreciation of the good- after all, even flowers need rain to bloom.
Meditation is more than silently floating within your awareness. If silent meditation has not been beneficial for you, we’re sharing two other kinds of meditation here that we can’t wait for you to try.
In this meditation, you share kindness and love with yourself and others. With roots in Buddhist traditions, metta meditation combines the power of affirmations and gratitude (a triple threat of thoughtful growth!) with peacefully reconnecting with your sense of self. You’ll use a simple phrase to help you experience decreased anxiety, increased joy, and a better sense of connection.
Auditory healing is an under-tapped superpower in the meditative world. You can choose to use your own blend of binaural beats, ASMR or ambient noises to let sound wash away the cluttered soundtrack of daily life. If you need a more direct experience, Vibrational Sound Therapy is a group or individual experience that can tap into unique frequencies of sound to induce a calm or meditative state.
Recommendation: Book, Sound Medicine: How to Use the Ancient Science of Sound to Heal the Body and Mind by Kulreet Chaudry, M.D.
For many people, meditation feels like a challenge they cannot meet or a frustrating experience they’ve tried and never returned to. If you’ve previously tried meditation or felt hesitant to do so because you prefer to take an active role in your own improvement, consider revisiting this mindfulness tool with us.
In relationships, love stands alongside trust, intimacy, vulnerability, and courage. Relationships are a puzzle of human experience; when you’re in one, you’re tasked with fitting past and present with a future with multiple perspectives and possibilities.
If you are looking for thoughtful ways to improve your relationships, you’ve come to the right place. From breaking down the structure of breaking up to improving your relationship with the idea of relationships, we’ve got you covered.
Recommendation: Book, Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward by Dr. Henry Cloud
Finding fulfilment in your romantic and intimate relationships begins when you turn inward. Think about what makes you feel valued, safe, and loved. Do you recognize many ways of being shown that you matter by your loved ones? When you consider these things, you may begin to notice a pattern that reflects all the way back into the roots of your memory. You learn how love feels to you and how to recognize it when you are young.
• How you connect and share your emotions with people you care about?
• Your needs and preferences in personal and professional spaces?
• Conflict and distress tolerance?
• The way you form expectations for yourself and others?
• Your communication style?
The early relationships in your life with caregivers, siblings, friends and even with yourself are the anchor of how you’ll develop bonds and attachments through the course of your life. Your attachment style is firmly established in childhood, a time in our lives when we learn how love and connection feel. Your attachment style continues to influence the way you experience emotions and interactions with others throughout your lifetime.
Recommendation: Book, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World by D. W. Winnicott
The idea of primary attachment styles was developed in the 1950s by researcher Dr. John Bowlby. Though they have been added to over time, four styles have been identified as the accepted standard. Each identified attachment style has unique characteristics that can help determine how you best feel connected in your relationships. If you are struggling within your relationships, identifying your attachment style can help you to make progress in redeveloping the way you connect with yourself and others.
Relationships for people with an anxious attachment style may feel stressful or fraught with intense emotions. Fear and anxiety are likely to play a strong role in connecting with those around you when you have an anxious attachment style.
• Low sense of self-worth
• Fear of abandonment
• Difficulty establishing trust
• Craving intimacy without restriction
• Too dependent on your partner
• Constant need for reassurance
• Unpredictable emotions and mood
swings
• Incredibly sensitive to others’ moods
Those who develop an avoidant-dismissive attachment style did not get their needs met by the caregivers when they needed it. As a result, their adult selves do not anticipate others to be willing or able to meet their needs.
• Strong sense of self
• Distance and separation feel safer than connection
• Sense of isolation and loneliness even in relationships
• Struggle to have needs met or meet the needs of others
• Lack of trust in others to support you
• Low or no conflict tolerance
• Disconnected from emotions
When small children experience trauma, they must respond to that trauma in whatever ways are available to them. Disorganized and fearful attachment can result from trauma or abuse at a young age when children are too ill-equipped to navigate conflict that’s rife in their worlds. As a result, relationships for adults with disorganized/ fearful attachment styles can be confusing and complex.
• Difficulty being emotionally open
• Low self-esteem
• Lack of healthy coping mechanisms
• Struggle with retelling stories due to fragmented memory
• Emotional regulation struggles in relationships
• Inability to communicate needs (even when you want to)
• Attention-seeking behaviors
• Deeply task-oriented
Thought to be the most balanced attachment style, secure attachment is what many people are striving for. Secure attachment is the gold standard of attachment styles, upon which most relationship ideals are based, as it makes up the attachment style of just over half of American adults.
• Easily trusting of others
• Comfortable with solitude and intimacy
• Capable of self-reflection in relationships
• Seeks and supports healthy connection
• Effective internal regulation of emotions
• Empathetic and responsive
• Can be vulnerable in action and conversation
Your attachment style has meaning beyond relationships as well. Knowing your attachment style and creating thoughtful progress in managing its impact on your life can help you at work, at home, and in your friendships. Professional development blossoms when you understand how you best receive praise and constructive feedback, and healing trauma and making meaningful connections as an adult is easier when you feel empowered to make authentic and rewarding choices for who you are now.
Recommendation: Book, Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship by Stan Tatkin
While you cannot change the experiences that established your attachment style, you can make thoughtful choices about how you develop relationships. If you are in a relationship with someone who is working on their attachment style, you can support them in making positive changes in their connections and attachment security.
Recommendation: Book, It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn
Noticing what’s happening in your inner and outer world as you engage with your relationships is a profound skill. Your awareness dictates the change you can make and the impact it will have. Practice being aware of your own impact on your relationships by noticing your state of mind.
Recommendation: Podcast, “How to Become More Self-Aware” from Being Well with Dr Hanson
Take a moment to reflect on what you feel before you share or express it. Whether happy or sad, adding a pause between your emotions and your response to the rest of the world is foundational in being mindful of what kind of power you give others over your valuable inner world. Tools like meditation, self-awareness, and talk therapy are powerful in so many ways. They can help you understand yourself and those around you. Learning to use mindfulness as a standard practice in your daily life will create space for you to exercise these tools to reflect on how you connect with others.
Recommendation: Book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
Ask yourself, “What can I notice right now?”. As you tune into the present moment, use breath counts of 5:
5 seconds to notice within yourself
5 seconds to exhale that awareness
5 seconds to notice around yourself
5 seconds to exhale that awareness
Whether you’re working on thoughtfully rewriting your relationship with yourself, others, or a bit of everything, how you share your thoughts and feelings is a critical part of your success. Take a moment here to reflect on the way you communicate.
Effective communication is about clarity, sincerity, and trust. We’ve created our 3 H’s of communication to help you navigate your communication health. Any time you’re doubting the way you’re talking to yourself or someone else, use the 3 H’s to evaluate the way you’re communicating and align your words with the moment you need right now.
Heart- you believe in the message you’re delivering as well as the method you’re using to do so.
Honesty- what you’re saying (and why you’re saying it) are true and aligned with your intentions.
Holistic – there is nothing buried or unexpressed that is vital to understanding what ou’re trying to share in this moment.
Recommendation: Book, Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts by Brene Brown
Book: Stop Avoiding Stuff: 25 Microskills to Face Your Fears and Do It Anyway by Matthew S. Boone, LCSW
Book: The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety: A Guide to Breaking Free from Anxiety, Phobias & Worry Using Acceptance & Commitment Therapy by John P. Forsyth, PhD & George H. Eifert, PhD
Gleyce Almeida-Farrell is a psychotherapist and the founder of Holistic Wellness Practice in Alpharetta, GA. She specializes in helping adults manage stress and overcome symptoms of anxiety utilizing a holistic and integrative approach to mental wellness.
We offer in-person and virtual services – contact us today to learn more!
It’s good to see you here. You’ve read the blogs, tips, and posts with catchy ideas that make you think about how to break the toxic patterns holding you back. You’re
Gleyce Almeida-Farrell is a psychotherapist and the founder of Holistic Wellness Practice in Alpharetta, GA. She specializes in helping adults manage stress and overcome symptoms of anxiety utilizing a holistic and integrative approach to mental wellness.
We offer in-person and virtual services – contact us today to learn more!
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We offer in-person and virtual services – contact us today to learn more!