Mental Health Resources During Uncertain Times
With resources from Rare Beauty friends National Alliance on Mental Illness and Rare Impact Fund Grantees Transformative Educational Leadership, JED Foundation, and Friends of Semel Institute .
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GUIDE: Protecting Your Mental Health From Violent Content Online
Once content of tragic events start to spread and everyone is talking about them, it’s easy to feel like you need to watch them to show you care about what’s happening. That is not true. You do not have to watch violent events to care about them, know they are wrong, and take action or share information. Follow these six steps to protect your mental health from violent videos and images.
GUIDE: Better Sleep to Maintain Mental Health
Sleep is tied to improving mental health and well-being, so it’s best to take efforts to improve or maintain good sleep. Here are some tips for getting better sleep.
PRACTICE: How to Relieve Stress: Breathing Exercises You Can Do Anywhere
Slowing your breathing can help you calm down in any kind of stressful moment. It sends a message to your body that you are safe and that your body can come off of high alert. Shallow breathing, which is what we tend to do when we feel stress, does the opposite, keeping your body in a moment or cycle of stress.
COPING
GUIDE: How to Cope With Traumatic Events
How you feel about and respond to traumatic events may differ, but it’s important to know that it can have a very real impact on your mental health and well-being. And there are things you can do to cope and move through it. You deserve that support, and it will help.
PRACTICE: Loving Kindness for Oneself
This guided loving kindness practice focuses on sending loving kindness to oneself. Through this short practice you are invited to hold yourself with loving awareness and compassion as you cultivate mindful, heart-centered breathing.
PRACTICE: Coping with Trauma: Tips on Moving Forward
If you've gone through a traumatic event there is no one right way to cope. It's important to know that trauma looks different for everybody. One of the best ways you can get support is by first acknowledging that something scary happened to you.
GRIEF
GUIDE: How to Deal with Grief and Loss
Grief is the anguish we feel when we experience the death of a loved one, or another kind of significant loss. Though while we are grieving we may experience difficult emotions and even physical symptoms, it’s important to understand that the grieving process is natural. There are many ways to deal with grief and loss, both individually and as part of a community, that help us grieve in a healthy way and ultimately accept our loss.
DIRECTORY: Losing a Loved One: Grief Support
Many grief support services are offered through organizations at the community level. A good place to start is to contact your local NAMI Affiliate.
PRACTICE: Unlocking the Secret Powers of Tenderness
Tenderness is connected with empathy, compassion, and vulnerability. Empathy is feeling for and with others. Compassion is feeling for and with others coupled with the motivation to relieve suffering. Vulnerability is the courage to open up to others, it’s the birthplace of true connection. But tenderness can be a key ingredient that activates and deepens all of these other powerful emotions – for others and ourselves.
RESILIENCE
GUIDE: How to Build Resilience
Resilience doesn’t mean being stress-free or having no mental health challenges. Resilience is not a thing you either have or don’t have, since you can be resilient in some situations and not in others and you can build your resilience over time. There’s no way to avoid stress and challenges in big transitions like this, but resilience helps you adjust, learn, and ask for help when you need it.
GUIDE: How to Stop Feeling Hopeless
We all experience loss, difficult times, or mental health challenges during our lives, and hope is what helps us get through those moments. We need hope, because it helps us tap into the positive belief that even when things are out of our control they can get better. It’s an essential part of our well-being.
GUIDE: Gentle Reminders for Times of Stress
This fact sheet includes information on welcoming the body's stress response, completing the stress cycle, connection & relationship, emotion skills & practices, and mindfulness & attention.
GUIDE: Resiliency Skills & Tools
Resiliency reduces the harmful effects of stress and trauma, acting as a buffer to help you maintain your well-being. Strengthening and adding protective factors, like social support, access to resources and caring for your physical health all serve to help you effectively counteract cumulative stress.
PRACTICE: Cultivating Rootedness and Open Heartedness
This short, guided meditation is offered to cultivate rootedness and open heartedness during challenging times. During the meditation we are invited to draw strength from those who have come before us. This meditation was featured on Mindful.org.