In working with patients as well as communicating through this website, I have long advocated for incorporating change into your lifestyle by resolving to make small ongoing changes in three areas: health and fitness; activities that involve thinking; and the social area – particularly involving helping others. I have described the process of making changes…
Appreciate The Little Things
Probably the most often used exercise in the field of positive psychology is known as the “3 Good Things” exercise. To do the exercise, you select a time – bedtime is the most typical time – identify 3 things that went well during the day, write them down, and reflect upon what caused them to…
The Most Important Image is Your Self-Image
One of the components of Goal-Achieving Psychotherapy, the approach that I use in working with patients, is that the therapist is a role model. I have found that I can be most successful when I am feeling positive, healthy, competent, and clearly able to convey my desire to help. I have stated that it is…
There’s a Long Distance Between Pride and Arrogance
When I work with individuals with low self-esteem, a major focus of the work is on helping them to identify areas where they have experienced successes in the past. Too often such individuals are overly focused on non-successes or failures, but everybody has positive aspects of their histories that can be called upon to help…
Pay Yourself First
If you seek advice from a financial professional in an effort to gain control of your finances, develop a budget, and create a savings plan that hopefully will lead to a comfortable retirement, virtually every expert in the financial field will tell you to Pay Yourself First. That means that you should determine an affordable…
Staying Healthy By Staying Interesting
Sometimes I like to use The Mental Health Gym website for a type of role modeling. Using the regular gym as an analogy, we know that some folks visit the gym at times of crisis; when they’ve become too overweight or out-of-shape or unhealthy in some other way. Others are regular gym visitors for just…
How Are Your Fortune Telling Skills?
You know, I’m actually pretty good at telling the future. Over time, I’ve learned that if I don’t try something I won’t accomplish it. For example, I can’t remember ever being successful at helping a patient or giving a presentation or writing anything – a book or research paper or blog or thank you note…
Be Fair to Yourself; Avoid the Total Putdown
All of us are made up of collections of traits and behaviors. If you try to objectively evaluate yourself on a half dozen attributes – for example, intelligence, compassion, technical skill, reading speed, social comfort, and persistence – you would likely rank yourself differently for each different attribute. And we are only talking about six…
Making Those Around You Better
One of the highest compliments that can be paid to a professional athlete is that, “he makes those around him better”. That means that the player is a role model of commitment, unselfishness, and teamwork. Teams that win usually have at least one player who makes the other players better. But we don’t have to…
It Feels Good to Do Good
A major goal of Positive Psychology and Goal-Achieving Psychotherapy is to feel good about our selves. This type of attitude enables us to use our personal strengths to overcome problems and move into more positive phases of our lives. It may thus seem paradoxical to learn that one of the things that can help us…
Set Goals – And Then Achieve Them
Setting goals is a very important part of The Mental Health Gym philosophy. Rational behavior change enables emotional growth and the maintenance of mental fitness. The opposite of change is staying stuck. The downloadable exercise cards on the products page of this website enables the management of change by providing a format for goal-setting and…