7 Reasons Your Current Mental Health Strategies Might Not Be Working

um today we're going to be jumping in on seven reasons why many mental health strategies do not work so you can figure out if what you are using right now for your mental health is going to be effective or not or if you feel like you've been trying a particular method and it's not been working well for you and you're unsure why I want to help you kind of diagnose what the problem is so that we can figure out how to get you a better set of strategies so let me start by prefacing that the strategies that I prefer to help people with obviously are ones that I found to be very helpful because my whole MO is trying to make sure that people can get the mental health they deserve as quickly as possible and that they can sustain it and we also focus on natural strategies but the strategies that I prefer and recommend may or may not be the right ones for you so this is not about me saying you know you need to use my particular strategies per se it's more about making sure that you are able to effectively figure out what set of strategies is going to work for you and your nervous system and also for your particular mental health goals and so that's what I'm here to make sure that we help people do more than anything so if you are feeling like you've tried a particular method and it's not working or you are unsure whether to try a new approach or a new method then I hope that these seven little tips and guidelines will help you accelerate your mental health recovery and reach your mental health goals more quickly so the number one reason that I have found in my career that a mental health strategy may not be working well for somebody is that it may be a coping mechanism as opposed to a conditioning mechanism so A coping mechanism is when you're implementing a strategy that is meant to respond to a negative emotional pattern and simply mitigate the effects of that negative emotional pattern a conditioning strategy is when you are trying to either uproot or change or modify that existing negative pattern so a simple example of this would be breathing exercises so a breathing exercise is a very common coping strategy and what people will do is if they find themselves in a panic attack or an anxiety attack they will use breathing exercises to try to calm themselves down and it usually will help them at least you know reduce their anxiety in the moment the only challenge is that then you are left to Simply use that set of coping strategies the next time an anxiety attack or a panic attack occurs whereas a conditioning strategy and there are several different conditioning strategies that you can use for anxiety and panic attacks but some of the ones that we rely on work quite well and when you use a conditioning strategy what you can actually do is you can create a situation where after usually within a couple weeks or sometimes a couple months it'll usually be somewhere between 4 and 12 weeks but we can get somebody to in an environment where they're now not having anxiety or panic attacks at all and so that's really the the key difference so on the one hand A coping strategy is meant to endorse the idea that anxiety depression stress are sort of going to be there indefinitely and there's not much you can do about that but you can learn to make do you can learn to live your life around the negativity the negative feelings the negative intrusive thoughts conditioning based strategies are about how do we either dramatically reduce and or eliminate intrusive thoughts and thinking so we get after the source of the issue so that's one big reason I see a lot of people get stressed and upset because a lot I hear from people a lot of times like hey I've been in therapy for you know years and years and I'm still dealing with the same issue like what's going on and I tell them like well your therapist is just doing what they're trained to do there's nothing wrong with your therapist per se it's just that your therapist is doing what traditional therapy is meant to do which is give you coping strategies so there's very often a big mismatch between what the patient or the client is expecting from the strategy and what the strategy is actually designed to do so if you're trying to you know really dramatically reduce anxiety and depression or live without it but yet you're using coping strategies you're going to be frustrated and you're going to feel like the strategy is just simply not working because there is a mismatch between the goal that you're after and the strategy itself so it just fundamentally is going to be frustrating for you so that's why I'm a big proponent of making sure that you are very clear on number one what is the mental health goal that you really want right so some people are looking simply just to develop coping strategies and ways to cope better and if that's your attitude and you're totally content and happy with if you can just get like a 10 to 25 reduction in your Stress and Anxiety levels and that's what your goal is then that's fantastic because if you know that that's what you're after there are several different coping strategies you can use to do that and there are ways to to get that done but if your goal is much larger than that if you believe that there is a way to get your mental health to a naturally fantastic place and you want to learn what that is coping strategies are usually not going to get that done for you okay so that's the first big reason okay the second reason you might be having trouble with one of your mental health strategies is you might be underestimating how much time it's going to take so let's talk a little bit about timelines and how things tend to go now yes it is true that in a big sense everybody is a little bit different however in my case after working with hundreds and of people over the years and helping them create recoveries I've learned that there are some general rules of thumb that you can abide by so if you for example are trying traditional therapy CBT DBT something of that nature what I have found tends to happen is people will tend to have a fairly positive experience within the first 90 days or so the first month tends to be kind of information gathering they may provide a diagnosis some therapists are kind of quick to jump to providing a medication recommendation or a diagnosis others will simply want to take a little more time to unpack your background and they want to learn about your whole history and things of that nature and what tends to happen is people have this initial sort of honeymoon period where they feel good because they're finally letting things out they've been building up things for a long time and they're now getting things off their chest and so things will start to feel very good and then what happens for a large portion of people is they kind of hit a bit of a plateau or they start to experience diminishing returns with traditional therapy where after about six months or so uh the majority of people I've consulted with probably at least two-thirds of people will find that they're just hitting a little bit of a plateau like they're not getting as far as they'd like to as quickly as they want and uh however some people do kind of Hit The Sweet Spot between three and six months so what I have found is that typically if therapy is going to be very effective for people usually within three to six months that's when you start to really see a little bit of a positive uptick and that's if you feel like you are on a steady incline during that period that's a good sign that it's going to continue to add a lot of value for you if you have however been going with traditional therapy for six months or more again this is just my opinion it's based off my experience you're welcome to disagree there are going to be some of you who are listening to this who have an experience that does not fit with this but what I have found is probably three times out of four if you haven't gotten a good Improvement after six months it's probably a good indication that therapy is not Gonna Get You super super far there are some exceptions to that but that's just the general rule particularly with your typical general anxiety or depression type situations um now let's talk about some other things like meditation for example meditation is one of the ones where people very much underestimate how much time it's going to take to start to see benefits and a lot of people get very frustrated because they try meditation and they feel like they're not able to focus uh right away and they get very frustrated that their mind wants to wander within their first couple of sessions well that's what your mind is meant to do in your first couple of sessions the whole point of meditation is it's a training process to get your mind to stay focused and more centered right now by the way I'm not a big meditator I have done meditation in my life it is a it is a strategy that I use with my clients if it is something they respond well to but I have found that there are other strategies that are more effective than meditation personally so it just depends on you but if for example you've said okay I'm gonna try meditation I would recommend that you give it at a min minimum two weeks do it once a day for two weeks and see how you're doing at the end of the two weeks there are also ways you can make meditation more effective by the way but that's a subject for a different video so those are a couple common ones there are some other main methods and strategies out there for example my method the SSS method we tend to see that people will get somewhere between a 10 and a 20 percent reduction of anxiety or depressive feelings within their first two weeks in their first month we'll usually get them to about the 25 percent threshold and then after that it usually takes the second month first to get them to about a 50 percent level Improvement and then the third month is where we get them to a 75 percent plus Improvement level and so one of the key things I always tell our clients right up front is like hey you know don't compare yourself to somebody else like the as long as you're making steady progress then you will end up in a much better situation by the end of this than you were in the beginning and progress is the key so it is sometimes the case where I have a client who wants to just like jump right to the Finish Line right away and those people do not do well because when you convince yourself that you either your strategy has to be miraculously effective right away then you're gonna feel like you're losing all the time because your definition of winning is that it all is all perfectly happening the way you want it to be so there is something to be said for the nature of patience and managing your expectations a little bit so that you can make sure that you don't add another layer of getting down on yourself that's going to derail your progress so make sure that you have an accurate understanding of how long of a timeline it is going to take for the strategy you have chosen in order to reap the benefits and the results that you were after that's the main piece of advice I'm trying to provide now there are some strategies that I find generally are not helpful for the majority of people again the majority of people there are going to be some of you who disagree but for instance journaling is one of those ones where I tend to find that people who even implement it for a long period of time they see an initial bump and then it kind of plateaus right from there it's not like people get a huge amazing incremental return on journaling in most cases unless it's a structured journaling prompt that is meant to train and condition your mind to think positively but those are a couple key things okay so anyway don't underestimate how much time it will take have an accurate understanding of how long your particular method is going to take and this may be a helpful way for you to decide what method you want to choose right if you're not comfortable waiting six months you know to get to see whether or not therapy is even something that's going to work for you and you need something more urgent then you need to pick something more urgent if you're comfortable waiting then go ahead and do that if your priority is to take control of your mental health on your own and you think that you can do that and you're going to try that with like meditation journaling something like that you at least need to be prepared to give it a shot for a couple weeks okay and with any type of strategy when I work with my clients and I give them a conditioning strategy to test out and see if their nervous system responds to it the bare minimum I recommend is one week usually between one and two weeks is when you can determine if something is going to work with you but you need to do it consistently every day for at least one week to determine if you're seeing a result that's positive okay so that would be number two you might be underestimating how much time okay the number third reason why the strategies you've been choosing may not be effective is you may be comparing yourself to an ideal and so you instantly feel like you are losing and then you give up the most common ones is you compare yourself to Perfection like oh I should have figured this out by now or I should be meditating for 30 minutes perfectly by now or my friend met and the other common ways we compare ourselves to other people so oh well my friend is able to meditate and they do just fine and I'm not able to do that or my other friend did good with therapy but I'm not doing good with therapy or whatever it is okay so comparison is the thief of your happiness right there is never ever a time when comparison is really helpful unless you are asking yourself you know what what can I learn from that other person who is succeeding right but if you're just comparing yourself to beat yourself up that's not going to help you make you feel worse so don't do that because you can end up I've had this happen with clients before who are going through my program where they're doing a whole lot better than they actually even realize eyes because they're spending way more energy comparing themselves to an ideal of how they think they should be improving instead of just focusing on making incremental progress the people who focus on progress will start to feel like they're getting momentum that's why the Mantra I always teach my clients is progress over Perfection and so you'll start to get your self-esteem and your mental health moving in the right direction the more you measure by your daily gains as opposed to comparing it to an ideal okay the number four reason why very often mental health strategies can be ineffective is you might be waiting to implement that strategy until you feel a hundred percent certain that you that it's going to work for you and I see this happen for people all the time like I will do a consultation with people and I'll say how long you've been dealing with panic attacks they'll say six years and I'll say huh what have you tried to get this handled they'll say not much and I'll say Okay interesting and why is that and they'll be like well I just wasn't sure what would work so I didn't want to do it unless I was sure it would work and so what's happening particularly if you're dealing with an anxiety issue is you have started to over value certainty in your mind and you're wanting to wait to take action until you feel totally certain but that is what creates anxiety anxiety occurs when you value certainties so highly and you want to be totally certain so what happens is your mind goes into all these branching what-if scenarios and the emotional byproduct of all of that overthinking is anxiety the feeling of anxiety so part of the way that you get out of the Trap of anxiety is you have to start to train yourself to take action even when you feel uncertain yes ironically you have to become comfortable being uncomfortable as in you have to be comfortable making actions and decisions when you feel uncertain and realize that you're not going to be totally certain because that person that I asked and there's a specific person coming to mind who told me they were dealing with panic attacks for six years I said okay well would you rather have a hundred percent certainty that you're going to have panic attacks again for another 12 months or would you like to have a decent probability that you are going to feel better and reduce or remove your anxiety attacks and they said yeah okay well when you put it like that I certainly want to go for the chance to improve and so we were able to get them over that threshold but what happened is they had to remove the belief that they had to be a hundred percent certain before they would take action so you need to be comfortable lowering your threshold of certainty in order to move forward otherwise you're just going to stay paralyzed and anxious forever you're gonna wait for this magical moment that you think you're going to feel totally certain and totally comfortable and totally confident and then you're going to take action but that is totally the cart before the horse the whole reason you need to implement a mental health strategy in the first place is because you don't feel confident and because you don't feel certain and you're gonna not feel certain regardless of whether you're taking action to improve your life or whether you're just sitting at home not doing anything so you might as well be doing something to improve right it's like it'd be like someone saying well I really want to lose weight but I don't know what diet to choose I'm not sure which one is going to absolutely work for me so I'm going to do none of them doesn't that isn't that ridiculous right it's like there if you just did one of them and tried it for a month or two you're going to probably get some level of results or at a minimum you will now know for sure whether it works for you or not and then you can move on to the next method right so don't sit in paralysis trying to wait for This Magic Moment when you're gonna feel certain if you do that you're going to waste your whole life right and you're going to just burden yourself with unnecessary anxiety okay so you got to start taking action okay the fifth one that people will sometimes do that causes their mental health strategies to not work is they rag on themselves only for what they're doing wrong as opposed to the progress they're making that one's pretty self-explanatory right so you want to start to develop the habit of pointing out and noticing what you're doing right this is why when I have my clients go through my process I'm always making sure that the very first question we answer whenever we get on the call is what progress did you make this last week even if it was super super small right even if it was I went from 90 anxious to 89 anxious because sometimes in the first month it takes a little while to get them up and going but if we focus on the gains you get your mind Associated to looking for the gains when you focus on the gains you feel good about yourself when you feel good about yourself you feel more motivated to keep going and that's a key part of success and Recovery if you only focus on what you feel is going wrong or what is not perfect yet you're going to constantly bring your energy down and you're going to find it very difficult to stay following through on any particular mental health method or strategy right number six way you can slow yourself down is you're unwilling to embrace a little bit of trial and error I have found that this is a huge part of me helping people reach recovery this is why our success rate is so astronomically high and why they're really the only people we ever have who are not successful with our program and I tell people right up front is either a if you're not coachable and willing to try everything I teach you then I can't help you because if you make up your mind in advance of what you're willing to try and what you are not then great it's not going to work and be like going to the gym saying you want to lose weight and saying yeah but I'm not going to get on the treadmill all right well then maybe you're not going to lose weight right the second thing is you gotta dedicate a period of time you know a couple hours a week to it and then third is you got to make it a must right some people are just not committed enough and that's just the honest truth uh some people want their mental health improved but they're willing to tolerate having less mental health than they deserve so long as they can not take a risk or not take action it's just the truth we've all done that we've all been lazy before and that is that applies to some people so anyway the trial and error part though is a key part of how we are able to make sure that any one of our clients who abides by those three commitments is able to be successful because what I've found over the years is that there's only so many ways that the nervous system will create anxiety there's only so many ways it will create depression and so by having there's about 96 strategies that we pull from to create customized plans for people and we're able to find winning combination pretty much every time because as long as somebody is willing to give something a shot for a week or two see how it works and then we can refine it then we can always make stacking improvements and find whatever combination makes the most sense for them it's kind of like customizing a workout plan for somebody's fitness goals so if you're not comfortable with a little trial and error you're going to again fall into that trap of wanting to be 100 certain it's absolutely going to work before you even do anything and then you're just not going to do anything and then your mental health will stay the same so got to be comfortable with a little trial and error okay and then number seven the seventh reason I see that mental health strategies can be problematic for people or they can make it unsuccessful is they don't stick with what worked after they got initial results so for some of you you were sticking with say like an exercise in a meditation routine and you are feeling great and then you got off your exercise and meditation routine and then you started feeling really anxious and upset and then you go well I just don't know what happened it's like well you stopped doing what worked in the past and that's why you're not getting the same results Also let's talk about medication for example the majority of people find medication to be more like a Band-Aid type thing but for some of you medication is something that has worked really really well and a big mistake a lot of people make is they get on medication and then they start feeling great so what do they do they stop taking medication it's like come on guys you know like if you are fine taking medication and you want to maintain good mental health and medication cause good mental health then stick with the medication if you have a goal to get your mental health great without medication then you need a different method than just using medication you shouldn't just stop taking your medication and hope that great everything's going to be good now right so you got to make sure you have the clear goal in mind like do you want to just cope with this do you want to really like solve this from the core are you trying to really like are you willing to put in the work to be depression and anxiety 80 free or are you okay with just like a 20 reduction in it there's no wrong answer but you got to be crystal clear on what you want that's the number one tip I can give you number two you need to understand that not every route out there is going to match up with your particular outcome if you are looking to cope with the issue then you need to go with coping strategies go with therapy go with counseling go with medications go with breathing exercises go with journaling try those things out you can maybe handle it on your own if that's what your goal is if your goal however is a full like turnaround right or as good of a turnaround as you can get those are probably not going to work great for you you need something more in depth you need something that's more practical more strategy based okay that leads me to my next tip which is figure out how you want the journey to go so let's say you're trying to go from New York to California right well there's some several different ways you could do that you could do it by plane which would be about four and a half hours you could do it by car which would probably be like three or four days by car you could do it by train which would probably be maybe a day or two I would imagine right and those are different experiences do you want to drive yourself do you want to be on a train do you want to be on a plane those are different like one of them is going to be really fast and really direct and boom you're there so one of them is going to be more Scenic and more you know you can take your time and you can be patient and you can relax into it a little bit right so for example my process that I use with people I always tell people this like I am not a good fit for what I call toe Dippers right like people who just want to like dip their toe into a method and just give it a little shot and yeah let's see right that's not usually how my process works that's why I guarantee in writing for my clients we are going to help them reduce their anxiety or depression by 75 percent or more in 90 days or I continue to work with them one-on-one for free until we reach that point so as you can tell I'm more of a Band-Aid Ripper right like I'm really my full process is really the best fit for people that are sick and tired of being sick and tired and want to get the damn thing over with and just go live their life but that is not I'm not everybody's cup of tea and that's totally cool too right that's why I make these videos I want to help everybody and so uh you need to be you need to be aware of that are you the type of person that if you just like vent and get things off your chest and then you feel great and like your mental health feels very stable and natural and fine if that is the case then therapy is probably exactly where you need to be and coaching is not what you need right but you've got to be clear on what you want number one number two how do you want to get there and then you need to have an accurate understanding of what you can expect with each of these different routes because I the biggest thing I see is people don't know what they want firstly or there's just a huge mismatch between what they're really after and the method that they're trying if they're like I want to get rid of my panic attacks as quickly as possible and I want this to be done and over with right now well guess what therapy is not really meant to do that therapy is meant to like do it's the long slow haul and it's going to take you a long time right so people get themselves really frustrated that way and then the third piece of advice I'll give you is just go do it like take action Don't Wait For This Magic Moment when you're going to be totally certain because if you do that you're never going to make any progress so here's my call to action to you today firstly have you already taken action to improve your mental health have you committed to at least one method to try to reach your mental health goals if the answer is no then what you need to do is you need to just go do something and you need to do that today so whether it's joining a program or whether it's linking up with a therapist or whether it's uh getting a course or whether it's trying meditation or whatever do something if you've done nothing do something okay number two if you've told yourself I've done everything what that typically means is you've done like the same two or three things again and again and again and again and you've expected a different result it's usually what people mean when they say they tried everything so if you feel like you've tried everything I can sympathize with you because I appreciate the level of frustration that can come when you told yourself well I was dealing with anxiety five years ago and I tried to do the right thing and I got on medication and therapy and I've been in therapy and medication for five years and I'm still dealing with anxiety so I've tried everything no it's not that you tried everything you've tried everything that you currently knew of in order to meet your mental health goals but it's a big wide world out there okay there's lots of different routes you can go to make this happen so if you haven't done anything do something if you feel like you've tried everything you need to just be honest with what are the results that you've gotten and have you slipped into any of these flaws I mentioned did you expect results too early or did you stick with the method way too long and you kept thinking okay well maybe on this fifth year of therapy now I'm gonna feel great even though I've been feeling the same for the past five years if you're that type of person it's clearly a signal therapy may not be for you right so be honest with the results you're getting a leader does three things number one they see the situation as it is but not worse than it is so just be honest where is your mental health right now are you really really dissatisfied if so it's time to make a change if you're content with where you're at cool you don't really need to make a change the second thing is you got to see it better than it is don't slip into the mentality of like oh well it's just going to be like this forever no BS any human being on the planet can live with exceptional mental health not perfect mental health but exceptional mental health I believe that one thousand percent because I've seen so many people through so many challenging backgrounds genetic childhood trauma all sorts of stuff and I've seen people be able to live with great mental health sustainably but they have to be willing to find the right method for them right and that's what's really important maybe you got like a 20 or 30 Improvement through therapy or medication but you plateaued and you want to go farther than that well in that if that's the case then you need to add something new to your repertoire you've got to get back into a little trial and error you got to be willing to try something okay and then I think I said this already but really just take action right just go ahead and do it right and if you don't know where to look ask for help right I me and my team of course we do coaching services for people for people it's a good fit for but for people it's not a good fit for it we still want to help you utilize our free resources ask us if you need help getting connected with a traditional therapist we're happy to help you with that but do something right you just got to do something okay so what I'd love to hear in the comments is what have you tried and uh what has worked or hasn't worked and have any of these seven you know been problems for you like did you did you slip into any of these mistakes I would love to hear any thoughts in the comments would be fantastic and as always if you need additional help at any point go ahead and reach out to us at mentalhealthcoaching.com we'll be happy to help you if you don't know who I am my name is Ty Hicks I am a mental health coach founder of mental healthcoaching.com I was suicidal but therapy and medications didn't work great for me but I found that I could learn how to retrain my brain and that's what we help people do and we help people improve their mental health dramatically in 90 days and it's really exciting so anyway we put these free resources out there because we want you to have the mental health you deserve and you can you just got to learn the right strategies to do that but I'll be excited to see you in our next lesson on our next training in the meantime take some action today to improve your mental health talk to you guys soon bye

Channel: Ty Hicks – Mental Health Coach

Views: 56

Keywords: Ty hicks, Ty hicks mental health, how to beat depression without therapy, How to beat depression and anxiety, How to beat depression and make it last, How to beat depression without medication, How to handle depression, How to deal with depression, how to beat depression and anxiety without medication and make it last, what is the cause of depression, how to overcome anxiety, how to overcome depression, overcome depression and anxiety, mental health

Id: tS-NlhcAx3s

Length: 31min 10sec (1870 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023