How can Therapy help your Mental Health?

Choosing therapy cannot always be easy if you come with a history of dealing with challenges on your own. As mental health struggles are neither visible, it is easy to deal with them on your own silently. However, the consequences of fighting mental health problems alone can feel super scary and real.

This can result in excessive use of social media, substance abuse, poor physical health, and challenges in the workplace and personal relationships. Your connection with yourself can also get hurt in the process. 

When you give therapy a chance, you give self-healing a chance. You give yourself a chance to understand, explore, and navigate through your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours healthily. You get a chance to reconnect with yourself and what you enjoy again.

Before we discuss some specific ways that talk therapy can help, be assured that it is not the only alternative to approach mental health issues healthily. Read “Talk Therapy Alternatives You May Want to Explore” if you are interested in knowing more.

Here are some benefits of therapy for coping with mental health issues:

1. You’ll be surprised about how much you learn about yourself 

Learning about yourself and building self-awareness can be critical as your emotions, attachment styles, actions, behavioural patterns, and assertiveness permeate all domains of your life. Given the work you will put into the therapy process, it can make you get to know yourself all over again as if getting to know a friend. 

As your therapist designs a bridge to connect with yourself, you realise many things that you wanted to do and respond to differently. You learn to recognise the gap between what you are doing and what you want to do. Therapy can help you respond to this gap from a space of love and support.

Also watch: Accepting Negative Emotions

For example, it can help you work through your dysfunctional behavioural patterns by showing you what is causing them and why choosing differently will help you be more at peace with yourself and others.

2. You get more clarity and coherence in your thoughts

Have you ever wondered why it is so easy to get into the spiral of intrusive thoughts when you are along with your thoughts . . . overthinking your time away? When you have a trained practitioner to talk to, you get to entangle your thoughts and hear them for what they are. Just thoughts. 

You realise that the more you talk about what is troubling you, the lesser power it has on you. Therapy helps give your thoughts shape and a source gently. In the process of literally thinking out loud, you become more aware of what and why is something making you anxious, sad, angry, jealous even. 

Also read: How Therapy Helps Manage Jealousy and Envy in Relationships

When you reach the step of acknowledging your underlying thoughts, you unlock the step to decide how you want to take care of this and which actions you would like to take to be kinder to yourself. Your therapist is with you for support and better understanding throughout. 

Also read: The “Human” Touch in Therapy—Will AI Bots Like ChatGPT Replace Therapists?

3. Your emotions get a space to breathe

Often when you try to address mental health concerns with friends and family, you prefer to leave out the ugly, pent-up emotions to avoid confrontation. You are not alone. Many people prefer to avoid talking about their feelings and what is bothering them. 

Instead of having them pile up and shoot up later, therapy can offer and nurture a non-judgemental space for you to vent out your emotions - the bad and the ugly. It can save you from creating a negative and counterproductive thought and behaviour pattern that can impact your relationship with your partner, kids, coworkers, friends, and yourself.

When you allow space for your emotions and experience to breathe, you allow others space for their feelings and experience to breathe. This can help break the cycle of repressing your emotions and having others around you repress their emotions too. You can feel the irritability free up as you start to address instead of avoiding the underlying emotions causing a negative response. 

Also read: 10 Tips to Navigate a Difficult Conversation With Your Partner

4. You are more likely to have better physical health too

Research indicated that our mental and physical well-being are connected. When mental health problems go untreated, your physical health suffers. Therapy helps you achieve good emotional health which makes you better equipped to deal with physical health issues in the future. 

Therapy also motivates you to exercise and take care of your body better. Exercising regularly not only helps cope with anxiety or depression but also keeps you energised and fit. Further, therapy can also help lower blood pressure and reduce chronic pain.

Besides the points discussed, therapy can also help you communicate better in personal and professional relationships, sleep better, improve self-esteem, express yourself better, and so on. The list is endless.

If you feel ready, talk to our mental health coach to discuss what type of therapy and which therapist can best help you with the challenges that you’re facing right now. Remember to applaud yourself or anyone saying yes to therapy as a step towards healing. 

Sources:

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2014/06/03/11-intriguing-reasons-to-give-talk-therapy-a-try/?sh=38238b284ebb 

2. https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/why-should-i-go-to-therapy-8-signs-its-time-to-see-a-therapist 

3. https://www.carolinawellnesspsychiatry.com/blog/how-psychotherapy-can-enhance-your-physical-health