If you or a loved one is in crisis, please seek help. One of the resources below may be able to assist. If there is a medical emergency, please immediately dial 911 instead.
Feeling stressed? Here are a few easy activities to help you relax.
Yoga, meditation, and practicing mindfulness can have a big impact on your mental wellbeing and resilience. If you're new to these practices, these resources will help you get started:
When you're stressed, taking time out of your schedule to exercise can feel like the last thing you want to do. However, physical activity can have a very positive impact on your mental health.
Although it can be tempting to cram in some late-night study sessions during finals, sometimes the best thing you can do for your mental health and your academic performance is simply to get enough sleep.
Sometimes when we're stressed, it's tempting to reach for unhealthy snacks – and of course, it's okay to let yourself have a treat sometimes! But don't forget to eat your fruits and veggies too. Eating nutritious meals will give your brain the resources it needs to get through stressful times.
This one might not sound like much fun, but making a study plan can help lower your stress by making you feel more in control.
Whether it's seeking help from a mental health professional or simply talking with friends or family, it can help to share what you're going through.
The Mindful Twenty-Something: Life Skills to Handle Stress… and Everything Else by
In The Mindful Twenty-Something, the cofounder of the extremely popular Koru Mindfulness program developed at Duke University presents a unique, evidence-based approach to help you make important life decisions with clarity and confidence. As a twenty-something, you may feel like you are being pulled in dozen different directions. With the daily tumult, busyness, and major life changes you experience as a young adult, you may also be particularly vulnerable to stress and its negative effects. Emerging adulthood, which occurs between the ages of 18 and 29, is a developmental stage of life when you're faced with important decisions about school, relationships, sex, your career, and more. With so much going on, you need a guide to help you navigate with less stress and more ease. The Koru Mindfulness program, developed at Duke University and already in use on numerous college campuses--including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth, and several others--and in treatment centers across the country, is the only evidence-based mindfulness training program for young adults that has been empirically proven to have significant benefits for sleep, perceived stress, and self-compassion. Now, with The Mindful Twenty-Something, this popular program is accessible to all young adults struggling with stress. With Koru Mindfulness and the practical tools you'll learn from this acceptance-based, proven-effective approach, you'll be able to cultivate the compassion and mindfulness skills you need to manage life's challenges from a calm, balanced center, regardless of what comes your way.
Activating Happiness: A Jump-Start Guide to Overcoming Low Motivation, Depression, or Just Feeling Stuck by
It's not just big choices that can radically change our lives--sometimes it's the small ones. Activating Happiness offers powerful, evidence-based strategies to help you conquer low motivation, nix negative moods, and defeat depression by actively making positive choices in small, everyday moments. If you have depression or just suffer from low mood and lack of motivation, you know that your life isn't going to change with one grand, sweeping gesture. But you can make important decisions every day--whether it's getting off the couch and going for a walk, signing up for a course in pottery or screenwriting, or just setting aside some time to meet and chat with a good friend over coffee. These little things won't change your life all at once. But over time, they will shape the way you live and see the world and keep you on a path to wellness. In Activating Happiness, you'll find solid strategies based in behavioral activation and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help you break the cycle of avoidance, guilt, shame, and hopelessness that can take hold when you're feeling your lowest. Using this guide, you'll find little, doable ways to "show up" to your life, get the ball rolling, and start really feeling better, instead of just reassuring others. You'll learn to set healthy goals for your body like eating and sleeping well, as well as healthy goals for your mind. Most importantly, you'll discover how to view your life through the lens of your own deepest values, which will spark a commitment to real, lasting change. The best thing about change is that you can start anywhere. By building a life--moment by moment--of rewarding behaviors that correspond to your values, you have the recipe for getting and staying well at your fingertips. This book will guide your way.
Mindfulness for Students: Embracing Now, Looking to the Future by
This book will introduce you to the many benefits and applications of mindfulness - from mindful breathing, eating, exercising, sleeping, studying and communicating.
Improving Mental Health by
In Improving Mental Health: Four Secrets in Plain Sight, Dr. Lloyd Sederer draws upon four decades of diverse clinical practice, mental health research and public health experience to create a memorable volume that is as elegant as it is instructive. The book aims to help clinicians improve the lives of their patients--and patients to improve their own lives--by identifying these secrets and taking action in ways that can work immediately, closing the science-to-practice gap. In addition to mental health and primary care clinicians, patients and their families will find the book's many stories, clinical examples and cultural references fascinating and illuminating. The book's four foundational truths, all hiding in plain sight and all eminently actionable, are * Behavior serves a purpose. The search for meaning and the identification and communication value of a behavior are too often overlooked aspects of mental health care and a lost opportunity with and for patients and their families. * The power of attachment. The force of attachment as a human need and drive must be harnessed if we are to change painful and problem behaviors. Relationships are the royal road to remedying human suffering -- both individual and collective. * As a rule, less is more. Mental health treatments, both medical and psychosocial, have often been aggressive, from high doses of drugs to intensive sessions and psychic confrontation in individual and group psychotherapy. Unfortunately, these high risk efforts infrequently provide help and often have unwanted and problematic effects. Primum non nocere -- first, do no harm -- is the first law of medicine. * Chronic stress is the enemy. From adverse childhood experiences to posttraumatic stress, chronic stress can be an underlying factor in the development of many mental and physical disorders. However, chronic stress can be understood and contained, thereby reducing its damage. Dr. Sederer synthesizes the knowledge gained through his considerable experience as a psychiatrist with insights gleaned from history, research and literature to address the four truths in a systematic, yet lively, manner. The result is a book of rare grace. Improving Mental Health: Four Secrets in Plain Sight will be a touchstone for the clinician and general reader alike.
Please note: The tips and resources provided in this guide are not intended to substitute for professional mental health advice. If you think you may be experiencing symptoms of mental illness, please consider reaching out to a doctor or mental health professional for support.
Los Angeles Mission College. All rights reserved. - 13356 Eldridge Avenue, Sylmar, CA 91342. 818-364-7600 | LACCD.edu | ADA Compliance
Questions or comments about this web site? Please leave Feedback