Mental Health News

May is not only the month of flowers, it’s Mental Health Month! With the onset of CoronaVirus and the changes it’s forced upon us, many of our students and families are overwhelmed by what used to be tolerable annoyances. If you can relate, read on and discover what experts in the field suggest. In the newsletter Tools 2 Thrive, “Mental Health America” lists and elaborates on six things we can do to attain and maintain a healthy state of mind:

Connect With Others (virtually, of course)
Create Healthy Routines
Find the Positive After the Loss
Eliminate Toxic Influences
Support Others
Own Your Feelings

Today, let’s focus on owning our feelings. Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine has helped a lot of people to own their feelings with a phrase he coined, “Name it to Tame it.” Simply stated, in order to take control of our feelings, we first need to recognize what we’re feeling. Interestingly, although the English language has over 3,000 words for emotions, when most of us ask someone how they’re feeling, we’ll get a vague response such as good, bad, OK, or tired for example. Clearly, one place we can begin to do some work in Owning Our Feelings is to simply increase our Emotional Vocabulary. How can we do this? Well, here’s one idea:

As a family, brainstorm all the feeling words you can come up with and write them down on a large sheet of paper. Work together, research more words online and add them to the list. Post the list of words and add to it over time. Encourage each other to use words which are more descriptive when telling each other how you feel.