Mental Self-Care (Recalling and Revisioning) - Page 2 of 3

When you are overly stressed your ability to function mentally declines. This can create a "Catch 22" type of situation: the challenges present in stressful situations may require your very best thinking, recalling, reasoning, organizing and planning skills, while the stress of the situation compromises your ability to think, recall, reason, organize and/or plan clearly. One thing which remains constant in times of distress or in more pleasant times is the powerful effect which self-generated thoughts can have over our well-being.

This is sometimes referred to in lay language as being the power of "self-fulfilling prophecy." We become what we believe we will become. Researchers have documented the power of self-generated thought and have concluded that while positive self-thoughts may not alleviate all stressors, negative self-generated thoughts almost always lead to deeper states of distress.

Remaining positive is not easy when we are beginning to feel overwhelmed by our circumstances. When stress builds to the point of distress, our natural response is to generate negative self-thoughts, such as "what's the use," "I can't go on," or any of the plethora of other self-defeating scripts we may attribute toward ourselves. Yet we can choose to "revision" problems through supplanting self-defeating thoughts with self-affirming thoughts such as "this is a great challenge," "I can deal with this," or "I'll do the best I can." This is essential to mental resilience. Remembering past successes, lessons we've learned, and focusing on our competencies rather than our weaknesses can help us in generating positive self-thoughts.

As we recognized when we were attending to our physical self-care, each of us arrive at this point of our journey with individual needs for mental self-care. Again, to help you begin your progress toward mental self-care, we have compiled a list of activities on the next page which we hope will be of value to you. Judge for yourself which activities may be helpful in your life and then take time to put them into place. Many of the suggestions below include links to other resources on the World Wide Web. Feel free to leave your path for a moment, engage in the activity, and then return when you are finished.