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In a business meeting last week, a member of my team asked how we were planning on talking to the community about the upcoming holiday. What holiday? We just finished the holidays. Oh, you mean Valentine’s Day!?!! I then realized Valentine’s Day was just a few days away, and I had nothing prepared. That’s because my husband and I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day.
Love as Daily Practice I think the idea of a day of love is fantastic, but, on the other hand, I personally believe in practicing love each and every day. I believe in choosing—and practicing—love every day, not just one day a year. Valentine’s Day is a great day to start from, but I feel love—particularly self-love—should be a daily practice. Love is not always as easy as just loving yourself. We build up a lot of defenses to avoid getting hurt, and sometimes the hurt we experience makes it difficult to accept ourselves for who we are. Love is a feeling we experience. Love is also an action. The more you take action, the more you can experience feelings of love. SO, while feelings come and go, our job is to experience them as we feel them. Valentine’s Day can be a great reminder to feel that love, and a place to start your daily practice. Practicing Love Every Day Identify your top 5 values. These values are the principles that drive you, the reason why you get up and go each day. Write these values down, and place a reminder somewhere you will see it often. When you notice your values list, stop for just a moment, take a deep breath and realign with your values by asking yourself what one step you can take to align yourself with at least one value on your values list today? Love as a daily practice. Prioritize a time each day for you to connect with the values you’ve identified. You’ll start to see when you are living in alignment with your values, you are doing good for others. Practicing love on the daily with the people in your life can also help you learn to practice love for yourself. The more you take time to act on these practices in your daily life, the more you will experience the feeling of love you’ve connected with them. It can be helpful to schedule 30-40 minutes each day to purposely take action with a value in mind. Prioritize love as an intention. When you encounter a stressful situation during the day, remember your intention to love. Like we said, love is an action—a daily practice—and it’s also a feeling. The thing about feelings is they are not always present for us, or even obvious. Self-love is the feeling of knowing you are loved, while not always having all those funny tingly love feelings in your stomach. It is knowing, ultimately, you are not alone. Love is about accepting those feelings of belonging and connection will come and go. Practicing Feeling Love Accept that feelings of love come and go. Just because you do not feel it in the moment doesn’t mean you’re not loved, or incapable of loving. Find evidence of love in your life. Write it down to help you see the truth of that love. Practice the Reverse Golden Rule. Treat yourself the way you treat others. You do a lot for people. You show up in a lot of different ways, offering kindness, respect, care, and compassion to family, friends and even co-workers. If you want to experience feeling loved, try treating yourself the way you treat those you love. Learning to Feel the Love Feeling love is not as easy as loving yourself. You are deserving of love as you are and allowing someone to love you can help you practice love toward yourself. It’s also OK to learn to love yourself, as it will only make your feelings of love stronger overall. As an eating disorder specialist, I teach individuals that loving the body and, ultimately, the self, is a feeling that exists on a spectrum. One extreme of this is love, and the other is hate. Daily love exists somewhere in the middle, and, the more steps you take in that middle space, the more steps you will take toward experiencing love. To move toward love, start with respect. Practicing respect for yourself and the people you are interacting with each day, can foster the feelings love you may feel you are missing. To move toward love, practice appreciation. Notice things you are grateful for, both about yourself and your loved ones, every day. What can you thank yourself for? What can you thank your loved one—or even the people with whom you casually interact—for, every day? To move toward love, practice grace. Practice grace toward others, and grace toward yourself, by giving up the idea that love is perfect. Love means you accept the good and the bad, the quirks and the strengths, and that you recognize mistakes—both yours and others—do not define value or worth. Practice giving yourself a break when you mess up in just the same way you would forgive a loved one for making a similar mistake. The actions of love are imperfect, but the feeling of love is! The more love actions you take each day, toward yourself and others, the more you can consistently experience the joy of love in your life. Be sure to practice love today, Valentine’s Day, and I really want to encourage you to find a way to practice it again tomorrow too! Love as Daily Practice | Psychology Today It is an unfortunate and sometimes downright upsetting phenomenon to see mental health used as a scapegoat to divert attention from other topics. Many will likely be able to report seeing this happen in the wake of mass shootings. In those instances, some people who wish to divert the conversation away from a focus on gun control may say something like “this isn’t about gun control, this is about mental health.” They tend to claim that untreated mental illness is the real culprit behind the tragedy and often propose solutions such as registries of people with mental health diagnoses that can be used in gun purchases.
While mental health can and certainly often is a factor here—and we personally are always in favor of conversations that might shine a light on the often-overlooked problem of untreated mental illness in this country—the motivation behind this attention is likely simply to turn attention away from another urgently important but less politically desirable topic. This kind of diversion tactic unfolded again last spring and summer with calls for schools to reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Then-President Donald Trump, many of his supporters, and others claimed that keeping schools closed was very threatening to mental health and that the mental health-related risks of not reopening posed a greater threat than the COVID-related risks of reopening. It goes without saying that school and socialization are positive drivers of youth mental health. But is it really fair to say that keeping schools closed poses a dire threat to mental health? More dire than the threat of serious outbreaks of a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease? It is here that we must better understand what the evidence we have actually says. In general, and perhaps not surprisingly, school attendance is associated with better mental health and emotional well-being. Being in school can lead to a greater sense of connectedness, social support, and, more practically, better access to services. The benefit is often more pronounced for students with special needs and those who have behavioral or emotional issues and thus for whom extensive use of technology as part of virtual schooling might be difficult. Indeed, any population that is already vulnerable will struggle more with school closure. For all students, schools are central to general development (especially for young children), building social and emotional skills, food security (which has an impact on mental health), and addressing social and racial inequity (which also has an impact on mental health). Given the mental health benefits of being in school, does it necessarily follow that we need to rush our children back into these potentially unsafe conditions in the midst of a pandemic that threatens all of us? Ultimately the question comes down to one of weighing risks. And to be able to weigh risks, we have to have a clear understanding of what has happened to mental health (and what is likely to happen to mental health) as a result of the pandemic and associated school closures and general lockdowns. There is some reason to believe that the pandemic is already taking a toll on mental health, especially among teens. One study out of Italy and Spain found that 85 percent of parents perceived changes in their children’s emotional state during quarantine. High school and college students are clued into the possibility of the pandemic’s negative effects on their mental health, with more than half in a recent survey expressing concern about their own mental health as a result of the COVID pandemic. Professionals in California have also reported an uptick in depression and anxiety in the teen population since COVID began. Despite these reports, it is difficult to know the ultimate impact of COVID-19 and associated quarantine on mental health. It may take years before we understand the relationship and even then, it will be hard to isolate COVID-19 as the cause, especially since mental health issues are already on the rise among teens and young adults. In cases such as these, we would normally advocate carefully and scientifically weighing the risks against one another to reach a decision about when to keep schools open and when to shut them down. But there is simply too much uncertainty here to be able to do that. We don’t fully understand how contagious the virus is specifically among young people, we don’t know what the role of school opening is in the perpetuation of large outbreaks, and we also don’t know how long the pandemic will even last. In our view, it is not acceptable at this stage to keep schools open or reopen schools on account of mental health when COVID cases are extremely high. It is likely that many factors are involved in whether or not opening schools in specific communities is a major driver of increased viral transmission. We simply don’t know enough about the relationship between quarantine and mental health to be able to say that the risks of keeping children out of school outweigh the risks of COVID-19 spreading widely in a community. In the end, we need to do everything we can to protect both the physical and mental health of as many people as possible. Mental Health and School Re-Entry | Psychology Today |
Michelle Stewart-Sandusky
I write articles based on my experience as a therapist or a training or conference attendee. Many of these articles are written by others who are experts in their field and I share their information as resources for others. Categories
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