Using psychology to improve your mental health
Yesterday I looked at motivation as a way of understanding how and why people make decisions about their health-related behaviours, and how changes in motivation can affect how they pass through the various stages of change. Hopefully there were some useful pointers there to help with your decision-making processes.
Continue reading “Day 28 – cravings and relapse prevention”
I am aware that as we come into the last few days of Dry January I have not really provided anything helpful in terms of how you can make changes and stick to them, be it in relation to drinking, smoking, dieting or exercising. I will try to redress the balance over the next couple of posts or so. Some of the material can then be replicated in the main body of this website as static pages that people can more easily access. It is after all a self-help website, although I do have problems with that terminology. It does carry (unintentionally) undertones of “pull yourself together” and “I did it and therefore so can you“. What works for one person may not work for another, and everyone has a different starting point.
Continue reading “Day 27 – are your cogs dissonating?”
Yesterday was all about fun and games and a bit of thrill seeking. We spoke of clowns. There is a darker side to clowns and many people have a morbid fear of them. Think of Pennywise in the film “It”. Today I want to consider the other side of the coin – the negative aspects of drinking. After looking at the reward side of learning theory yesterday, what you might call the carrot side, today I want to look at the punishment side, or the stick side. I like a bit of learning theory, me.
Continue reading “Day 19 – a question of balance”
As part of my drive towards improving my health and well-being, I took advantage of the sunshine this morning to dust down my homemade bo stick and did some gentle drills after not doing any drills for the past three months. I remembered some moves from my martial arts training (Tang Soo Do) and found a lot of other stuff on-line. When I say homemade, I mean I stripped the bark from a stick and sanded it down. That level of DIY is pretty good for me.
And talking of sticks, I thought today I would write something about sticking. By this I mean how difficult it can be to stick to those important changes we want to make. Here we are looking at a key stage of the change cycle – maintenance. No, not cycle maintenance – this is a reference to the Stages of Change model proposed by Prochaska and DiClemente that is widely used in the area of behavioural change (e.g., eating habits, drinking, gambling, smoking, and other health related behaviours).
Continue reading “Day 6 – for sticks and sticking”
Understand Yourself Better 