Do you have a mental well-being toolbox? 🧰

Do you have the tools to succeed? 🧰

👉 What is a mental well-being toolbox? 🧰 Your toolbox includes a variety of essential practices and strategies that help maintain and improve your wellness in multiple domains. In your toolbox, you have strategies you can implement "in the moment" to prevent you from becoming overwhelmed further. You also have health-promoting behaviours that are directed towards your optimal well-being, personal fulfillment, and productive living 🙌.

👉 Why do you need a mental health toolbox?🧐 There are a plethora of reasons people utilise a mental health toolbox. Some common reasons clients have informed me of include... 🔶 To take control and improve general mental well-being. 🔶 To help reduce the likelihood of a relapse of a mental health condition. 🔶 To use when they feel like they could spiral (e.g., using a strategy when they notice they feel worried to prevent it from developing into an anxiety attack) 🔶 To help feel more control in situations where they previously felt as if they were losing control. 🔶 To stop lying awake at night troubled with worries about the next day, financial concerns, and general life stressors. 🔶 To reduce their experience of panic attacks. 🔶 Becoming increasingly overwhelmed. 🔶 To prevent them from turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms (e.g., alcohol and illicit substance misuse)

👉 The practices and strategies in your toolbox can help alleviate adverse symptoms you are experiencing. Let’s use stress as an example. Some levels of stress can be unavoidable due to the multiple demands you face. By engaging with your toolbox practices you can help yourself to build resilience to stress in the long term and, you can use your toolbox strategies to help you manage and reduce your feelings of stress "in the moment" to prevent the level of stress you're experiencing from becoming heightened. Your toolbox can help you adaptively handle the stress you feel✅.

👉 The Stress Bucket 🚰💧(Brabban and Turkington 2002) The Stress Bucket is a model used when thinking about everyday stress. Imagine you have a bucket that you take everywhere with you. The size of everyone’s bucket is different and can change based on various factors. Any form of stress such as financial concerns, arguing with a partner, or a deadline at work, etc,. causes water to go into the bucket. If the bucket becomes full, you will start experiencing symptoms of stress. When you are experiencing decreased mental health, your bucket will be smaller and so less able to hold as much water/stress. You can prevent the bucket from becoming full by using coping strategies that let the stress/water out at the bottom of the bucket.

If you have a toolbox with pre-established practices that you can use as coping strategies then you are better prepared to release the stress from your bucket. Preventing yourself from becoming overwhelmed or even experiencing long-term stress which can lead to health problems.

✍️ How to benefit the most from your toolbox? Using the strategies from your toolbox is not a luxury to be reserved for “self-care Sundays”. The practices and strategies in your toolbox are integral to your positive mental well-being journey.

Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura 1997). The theory of self-efficacy states individuals' beliefs about their own personal capabilities predict behaviour performance. There are two types of expectancies that can influence behaviour. Efficacy expectation is also referred to as perceived self-efficacy. This is the individual's perceived ability to perform a behaviour. Efficacy expectations influence an individual’s decision to do a behaviour, the effort they put into the behaviour, and their persistence in acting out that behaviour. The second type is outcome expectations. This involves an individual's belief that engaging in the behaviour will lead to a particular outcome (e.g., success or failure).

✍️ Activity: Increasing toolbox efficacy
Social Cognitive Theory can be applied to help maximise the benefits of your toolbox in the following ways… ✍️ Think about your efficacy expectation concerning practising the strategies and exercises in your toolbox. Do you believe you have the ability to do it? If you don’t, think about ways in which you can improve your ability to engage with your strategies. This in turn will help you feel more motivated to use your tools and to put in more effort when using them. ✍️ Think about your outcome expectations. Do you believe using your toolbox will help improve your mental well-being? If you don’t, don’t worry, we can help you with this. Write down all your tools and then write down all the things you would like your mental health toolbox to help you with. For example, meditation (tool) and anxiety (something you want to improve). Then take a look online at what scientific evidence there is that meditation can help anxiety. This will help give you informed, positive outcome expectations which can motivate you to engage with using your toolbox strategies, resulting in improved mental well-being.

👉 It's also important to practice your in-the-moment strategies when you are not experiencing an in-the-moment need for them. By practicing your tools regularly, they will have a higher efficacy at the moment when you need them to work!

👉 Are toolboxes effective?🤔

There is substantial evidence that the beneficial effects of self-care practices can help reduce negative mental health outcomes (Posluns and Gall 2020). Practicing self-care has been reported to be associated with greater well-being ✅ (Colman et al. 2016), quality of life ✅(Goncher et al. 2013), reduced levels of negative affect and stress✅, self-reported academic and clinical performance✅, and higher levels of positive affect ✅(Zahniser et al. 2017), compassion satisfaction✅ (Butler et al. 2017).

A meta-analysis investigating whether engagement in self-care activities could produce positive outcomes for graduate students reported 80% of the students who engaged in self-care practices would show better outcomes than those who did not. Including scores of self-compassion, satisfaction, and decreased psychological distress (e.g., anxiety) (Colman et al. 2016). This meta-analysis provides empirical support that self-care is associated with a number of positive benefits ✅

👉 How do you build a toolbox? Your toolbox is individual and needs to be curated to your own needs. Let’s look at stress, for example, stress is a situation where the demands on an individual exceed their coping resources (Bartram and Gardner 2008). But, the stress caused by a situation varies for different people (Bartram and Gardner 2008) and different people have different coping resources (Gelberg and Gelberg 2005).

✍️ Activity: Building a toolbox.. ✍️ It can help you to identify exactly what you want the tools in your toolbox to target first. Such as, feeling anxious at night. Then you can find a tool that targets this need. So for sleep maybe you will choose evening meditation (for in the moment) and implement a sleep schedule (long-term). Although incidentally, meditation does also have long-term effects. Create a system that suits you and try to keep to it! This could look like going to bed twenty minutes earlier so you have time to listen to one of Happio’s guided meditations.

👉 If you need additional help with creating a mental health toolbox also referred to as a first aid kit, then take a look at the following groups run by Happio all of which can help you to effectively build your toolbox and provide tailored advice on suitable tools … ✅ Manage Stress and Anxiety ✨ ✅ Life Coaching for Women ✨ ✅ Overcome Burnout ✨

👉 "I’m happy, I don’t need a toolbox"… You can appear to have good mental well-being when everything seems to be going well, but then when you experience challenges you may crumble easily if you don’t have resilience (Mguni et al. 2012). Resilient individuals are reported to not only cope but to bounce back after these challenges and come back stronger (Epstein and Krasner 2013). Building your resilience adds an element of future-proofing to your mental health. So, if a hardship or challenge does arise you have already built your resilience and as such will be able to better manage the stressor.

Practicing certain strategies from your toolbox can help to increase your level of resilience. For example, mindfulness training has been demonstrated to build cognitive resilience in high-stress cohorts (Jha et al. 2016)

🤗 Remember, self-care is the ability to refill and refuel oneself in healthy ways (Gentry 2002). Happio is here to help you on your journey 🤗