Ask a Therapist - Building Healthy Habits

When I'm working with habit building with people in therapy, we'll often start at, like, a comically small place. We're just introducing that I have the time and the opportunity to practice this habit. When you make time for the small things, what that reflects back to us is that, "I have time for the small things. I have time to take care of myself." So when that's reflected back to us, even when those anxious moments come, we're gonna see ourselves having a little bit more of that capacity for resilience. Hi, I'm Ryan. I'm a therapist with Headspace and welcome back to "Ask a Therapist." Our next question comes in from Jerome and Jerome asks, "What are some small realistic habits I can develop to improve myself and mental health? I would love to prioritize self-care, create a work-life balance and manage my stress and anxiety better. But I'm not sure where to start." When I work with people on goals in therapy, we'll talk about SMART goals and if you don't know the acronym SMART as it relates to SMART goals, it's specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-based. Specific is, for example, "I'm going to work out five days a week." Measurable, again, how many times. It's not, "I'm gonna work out more in the new year." It's, "I'm gonna work out this frequently." And it's actionable, because it's something you have control over. So you wouldn't necessarily say, "I'm gonna buy a house by January 15th," 'cause there are a lot of factors that might get in the way that aren't fully actionable under your control. And we have relevant. Is it actually important to you or is it just something that you feel like you should be doing? "Oh, my dentist says I should floss more, so I guess I should try to floss." Well, if that's not an important goal to you, maybe there are other things you can try to practice, good dental health, for example, but if it's not relevant to your values and the things that are important to you, it's gonna be much harder for you to follow through on. And finally, time-based. So we would try to set a goal for a specific period of time. It's not, "I wanna do this for the rest of the year." It's, might be, "I wanna do this for the next week," because by limiting ourselves to a more specific period of time, we shrink the goal and we make it more easily accomplished and then we can build on that over time. We also have some great content on the Headspace app. We have some great guided meditations for the new year and setting resolutions, and they can even give you some specific suggestions in there on easy ways to start some new goals for yourself. But I hope these guidelines are helpful for you to break down some initial steps for you to take to build some habits for the...