Shaded Bough Counseling

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  • Four Self-Care Tips for Students

    Four Self-Care Tips for Students

    If you’re in high school, you’ve probably heard stories about how difficult it can be to adjust to college life. If you’re in college or graduate school, you already know! Standard advice like “get eight hours of sleep every night” and “eat healthy” may be easier said than done when you’re moving to a new town or living in a dorm. So, set yourself up for success with some self-care tips for students, based on what’s helped my clients the most in their college years.

    1. Limit your work load.

    Don’t take more classes than you feel ready for. And don’t take harder classes than you have to. This goes double for your first semester, when you’re still figuring out how much you can handle.

    You should also take into account jobs, social obligations, and time commitments from Greek houses if you’re a member. Depending on finances, you may have to work or take a certain number of classes. Ask your program advisor for suggestions about which courses are easier or harder, and how to balance them with your situation.

    If you have ADHD or other mental health conditions, I highly recommend ADDitude’s College Success Strategies for ADHD Teens. They also mention self-care tips for students of their own!

    2. Look for friends who share your values.

    Whether you’re aiming for a 4.0 or are just here for a good time, it helps to have buddies get what’s important to you. Explore the student clubs around campus, look at fliers for upcoming events, and try attending even if you feel nervous the first few times. It’s okay to feel awkward. If you don’t click with one group of people, there will always be others.

    Some prime places to meet people might be:

    • Classrooms and libraries are a great place to meet other people who share your academic interests, or to get a study group together.
    • Dorms and other student housing often have welcome parties and group hang-outs.
    • Churches, synagogues and other spiritual centers often have groups for students. These can be good places to start if your beliefs are important to you or you want to get involved in charity work.
    • Greek houses vary in how much membership costs, how much of a time commitment they require, and how much they focus on academics, social life, and community service. Ask existing members what their daily life is like and how happy they are with the group.

    3. Break down school work into chunks.

    The most common challenge my clients encounter in college is figuring out how to tackle big tests and projects. You might have to study most of a textbook, or put a massive presentation together. But the good news is that these tasks can always be shrunk into something more manageable.

    This is my go-to strategy:

    • Figure out what the assignment is asking for. Or the material you need to review, if you’re preparing for a test.
    • Ask the teacher questions for anything where you’re not completely sure about what they want. Write the answers down.
    • Spend a half-hour just listing the tasks you have to complete to get the whole thing done. It’s like making a to-do list just for this project.
    • Break down each to-do item into smaller chunks. Be as specific as possible. So instead of “Research for a presentation,” the smaller chunks might be, “Find an article about the topic. Read an article. Find a line in it you can cite. Write out the citation for it.”
    • If you’re feeling stuck, or aren’t sure what to do next, try explaining the problem to another person. This will often get it un-stuck.

    If you’re neurodivergent, or just need better study habits, ADDitude has an excellent article on developing your organization and study skills.

    4. Check out your campus’ support resources.

    Self-care tips for students may not be enough on their own. But all colleges in the USA have a disability office you can ask about accommodations, and most have counseling centers. You may be able to score free therapy, career advice, and study skills coaching! Plus access to the gym, recreation center, and other student amenities. Go to the school’s website or student resource center and try to find everything they’re offering. Grab everything your tuition entitles you to!

    The main limitation of college counseling centers is that they often have long waitlists, and you don’t get to choose your counselor. So some students choose to get counseling independently anyway. If you’re in Texas, I’m one such therapist who often works with students, and helps other students find the right therapist for them. Drop me a line if you are interested or want more articles about mental health in college!

  • How to Help Someone with Low Self-esteem

    How to Help Someone with Low Self-esteem

    You probably know people with low self-esteem. It can be frustrating and sad to see someone you care about struggle in how they see themselves, and you might wish you could fix their self-esteem for them. But you can be a voice of support that helps them keep going. So, here are five ways you can help someone with low self-esteem!

    1. Treat them like they matter.

    As children, we learn that we are important, and that our feelings are important, based on how adults react to us. If our feelings or needs are ignored, we may start to think they don’t matter, that we don’t matter. Even as adults we still need that validation from others sometimes.

    So, one way you can help someone with low self-esteem is by acting like they’re important to you. Make time for them. Show interest in their life. Celebrate what makes them happy and listen if they need to vent. It sounds simple, but it can have a profound effect.

    2. Point out their strengths.

    People with low self-esteem tend to have brains that are very good at noticing their flaws, but not so good at noticing their strengths. Over time, this adds up to a lot of negative information that becomes a poor self-image. You can help counter this by reminding them of things they have done right, things they are good at, and other traits that you appreciate about them.

    3. Don’t encourage self-deprecation.

    Many people with low self-esteem make disparaging comments about themselves. Sometimes it’s presented as a joke: “Ha ha, I’m such an idiot.” Not all self-deprecation is bad, but if you think your friend has low self-esteem and they make a lot of these comments, self-deprecation might make their negative feelings worse.

    So, you can help someone with low self-esteem by disagreeing: “No, you’re not an idiot. Anyone could make that mistake.” Or you could tell them those comments make you concerned: “Hey, when you say stuff like that, do you really mean it? Because it seems like a mean thing to say about yourself.”

    Thank them for taking care of themselves.

    When a person with low self-esteem does treat themselves well, ask for what they want, or set a boundary, praise them for it. Taking care of yourself helps you believe you’re a person who’s worth taking care of, and positive feedback encourages that. This can feel odd at first, so here are some examples:

    “Thanks for telling me you weren’t comfortable doing that activity. I’m glad I didn’t put you in a bad situation.”

    “It’s awesome you finally took a day off. You deserve some chill time.”

    “Nice job speaking up back there – it’s good to hear what you wanted, too.”

    And the final way to help someone with low self-esteem is…trust in them.

    One of the trickiest, but most important things you can do is to stop helping, and trust that they can handle challenges themselves. More precisely, stop doing things for them that the person could do for themselves. This goes double if they’re an adult who should be able to express what they want and solve problems on their own.

    This can be hard! You may want to step in and take their problems away, and they may struggle for a while. But people build confidence through the experience of doing things for themselves. They learn that they can get through the struggle without getting crushed by it.

    Think of it like ordering food at a restaurant. Instead of ordering for the person, you tell them, “You can do it!” and high-five them when they order for themselves. You aren’t abandoning them, you’re building them up so they can do it on their own.

    Helping someone with low self-esteem can take a long time, and they may need more help than you can give them on your own. If you think your loved one would benefit from professional support, encourage them to reach out to a therapist. Psychology Today and Good Therapy are great places to start, and I see clients virtually as well.

  • 5 Easy Self-Care Habits You Can Start Today

    5 Easy Self-Care Habits You Can Start Today

    One of the best ways you can improve your mental health is by improving your self-care habits. In the same way that “maintenance” keeps your car running, self-care keeps your brain and body in good shape. Here are five simple, practical self-care habits to get you started.

    1. Prepare with snacks

    Food can affect your mood, energy, and stress level. When you feel irritable, stressed or nervous, check if you’re also feeling hungry. If so, taking a snack break will usually help you feel better. You can also use snacks as a back-up plan for when you’re too busy or tired to cook, which helps prevent you from getting exhausted.

    I recommend keeping “neutral” snacks on hand. A neutral food is good enough to eat, but you don’t have strong feelings about it, positive or negative. If you worry about the calories, don’t like the taste, or get cravings for it, it’s probably not a neutral food. Bonus points if it’s portable.

    2. Take breaks to stretch

    Stretching is another self-care habit that helps physically and mentally. Many people carry tension in their body. This can lead to headaches, muscle cramps, digestion problems and more. Our brains then interpret the body’s tension as a sign that we need to feel stressed or anxious. Stretching helps our bodies relax, and this tells our brains to relax, too.

    If you sit or stand for long periods, do stretches at least once every thirty minutes. You can stretch however you feel like, or you may follow examples like this stretching guide from Very Well Fit. Pay attention to what feels good for your body and do more of it.

    3. Connect with someone

    One of the best ways to feel better is to spend time with someone you care about. Friends can cheer you up, listen when you need to vent, and give you things to look forward to. Think of someone you usually feel better with after talking to them, and send them a call, message or hang out together.

    If you’re not sure how to start, try asking them how their day was, or what they’ve been up to. Or show them a funny picture, or talk about something you’re interested in or looking forward to. If you have had a rough day and aren’t sure whether you should talk about that, ask them whether they’re up for hearing some venting, and they will let you know.

    4. Give yourself credit

    Some of our habits are purely mental. One of these habits is how often we see positive or negative traits in ourselves. If you don’t like yourself very much, your brain has probably had lots of practice at looking for negative traits.

    So, do the opposite! Once a day, think of something good you can say about yourself. It might feel weird, but that just means you’re strengthening a new neural pathway in your brain. It will get easier over time.

    Here are some prompts to get you started:

    • Did you manage to get something done? (Even small things count.)
    • Maybe you did something good for someone else, or made them smile?
    • What are you good at doing? Again, even “unimportant” things count!
    • Do you like something about your appearance, clothes or sense of style?
    • Sometimes just getting out of bed when you’re feeling awful is an accomplishment!

    5. Wind down at bedtime

    Falling asleep on time is one of the most common challenges I see in therapy. Many people stay up later than they want to, or lie awake in bed feeling frustrated. If this is you, you need a way to switch your brain into “bedtime mode.”

    Pick a relaxing activity that gets you out of your own head, but isn’t too absorbing, like coloring, drinking non-caffeinated tea, or rereading a book. Start doing this 20-40 minutes before you intend to sleep. If you feel sleepy earlier than the scheduled time, go to bed right then. This will help your brain associate the activity with sleep time.

    Try to do the same activity, in the same location, at the same time every night. The more familiar it feels, the better your brain will get at going to sleep afterward.

    Self-care habits take time

    It’s okay if you can’t start doing all of these at once, or if you start off strong but miss doing them later. Any new habit will take practice before it becomes automatic, even simple ones. If you need more motivation for developing your self-care habits, consider partnering with a friend to hold each other accountable, or reach out for therapy to get expert support.