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Tools for Stress Reducation & Mindfulness

 

 

How can therapy help me reduce the stress in my life? Many would agree that what passes for a “normal pace” in contemporary North American life, actually requires most individuals –college students, parents, employees, and, increasingly adolescents and children – to keep moving through life with mind-boggling speed. It is no wonder that so many people suffer from the debilitating physical and emotional consequences of the seemingly endless demands of daily living. This pace eventually takes its toll on the very relationships that we are working so hard to maintain.

 

Therapy may help highly stressed individuals by normalizing that this sense of overwhelm is common and by offering the reassurance that there are effective tools and strategies available to bring relief. For example, therapy can help individuals learn simple and portable techniques for reducing stress when it is happening (when you are late and sitting in traffic, when your teenager is ‘acting out’ - again, or when you are having an argument with your partner). It can also help you to learn more general stress reduction maintenance strategies for keeping stress at bay throughout your life – so that you are cooler and calmer well before blood-pressure-raising events even arise.

 

What is “mindfulness”?

 

According to The Greater Good Science Center in at UC Berkeley, Mindfulness “means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.”  Over the past 20 years, and with the advocacy of researchers like Jon Kabat-Zinn MD, and his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, launched at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979, mindfulness has developed from its roots in Buddhism, to become a secular strategy for living that promotes physical and psychological health.

 

I teach clients to apply strategies and tools from the vast literature and research from the field of Mindfulness and Mindfulness Meditation to alleviate or ease the following symptoms:

  • Burn-out

  • Compassion Fatigue

  • Mild to moderate Depression

  • Generalized Anxiety/Social Anxiety/OCD

  • Chronic Pain

  • Anger

  • PTSD

  • Stress

 

To learn more about Mindfulness and its benefits check out The Greater Good’s wonderful website:

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/mindfulness

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