Mental Health Coaching

The brain offers several options for responding to stress.

Our brains are amazing organs that help us survive. The brain manages survival using primitive responses such as flight, fight, freeze, or fawn.

Some display the fight response in stressful situations, sometimes resulting in increased anger and conflict. Alternatively, the flight response may result in overthinking. They may think, “Why do I keep doing this to myself? I am so stupid, or I am a failure.” These thoughts create worry, feelings of guilt, or shame and can result in body fatigue and muscle tension.

A freezing response represents numbing out behaviors like binge-watching television, scrolling through Facebook, or playing Candy Crush. People who display the fawn response focus on pleasing by doing things like denying their needs to meet the needs of others. If you fall into a fawn response, you may end up feeling resentful.

Although these responses provided by the brain are helpful for self-preservation, they can sometimes result in unhelpful behavior that occurs in many cases with the person being unaware.

Mindfulness helps create self-awareness.

Mindfulness, a method used in mental health counseling, can help train our brains toward empowering strategies. Mindfulness keeps us grounded in the present moment, empowering us to create sustaining change.

Through our coaching work together, we will identify the stressors that trigger your survival response. We will also discover empowering strategies to reduce stressors, such as creating compassionate self-talk scripts to empower your mind, integrating somatic tools for regulating emotions, and reducing body tension related to unhealthy thinking patterns.

Together, we can discover the right tools for empowering your mind and training your brain to function out of abundance instead of in survival mode. Think of how exercise helps your muscles perform better. Like your muscles, your brain needs training to get stronger.

The hard work is worth it.

Doing the work to become more self-aware takes courage and perseverance as you learn to push through the discomfort of your autopilot responses of flight, fight, freeze, or fawn.

Don’t live another day in old mindsets that sabotage your mental health. Contact me today.