MENTALLY STRONGER WITH THERAPIST AMY MORINHOSTED BYAMY MORIN
Mental strength is the key to improving your mental health and living your best life. When you grow mentally stronger, you'll be able to overcome self-doubt, manage your emotions, and feel confident in your ability to reach your goals.
Join Webby award-winning host Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and international best-selling author to learn the tools, tips, and strategies that will help you think, feel, and do your best in life.
On Mondays, she interviews experts, authors, entrepreneurs, athletes, musicians, and celebrities about the strategies they use to overcome the biggest battle we all face — the battle within our own minds. She then breaks down their strategies in "The Therapist's Take" section of the episode so you can apply their strategies to your own life. Every Friday, she shares "The Friday Fix," a weekly segment offering quick exercises straight from her therapy office that can help you grow mentally stronger today.
Whether you're struggling with your mental health or you want to take your life to the next level, this show is for you!
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So so thank you for doing that as well. Well, you know, it's funny because people often say to me, you have I have advanced degrees, you know, the kind where, like, it takes 5 years to get certified and stuff. So these are these aren't weekend workshops and master's degrees. So I'm and I've read lots of books, and I wanted more than anything that particular kind of education to be like a a raft or a life preserver around the rest of grief for the rest of my life, although I don't think I was totally conscious of that. But when my mother died, I was like, oh, no. I'm about to learn that that's not how it works. And in fact, all the education that I had, really, what it the core of what it helped me with was understanding that I did not pretty much from the minute I started to have grief symptoms that they were gonna need treatment. They were not the kind that we consider sort of typical disruptive, but with enough support kind of abate on their own, like, from the beginning, I was like, oh, this is this is a clinical case. This needs help and support. So I didn't do what some of my clients do, which is wait a year before they seek out treatment. I was scrambling, you know, within a couple of months understanding that I'm not gonna be able to manage this by myself. That was the advantage of how all my education was, like, having a deep understanding of, oh, I am really screwed. This is not this is not a small thing that I've got myself into. What are those signs for somebody listening who says, gosh. Is this something I can manage on my own if I've lost somebody? Yes. I'm sad and I'm grieving. But how do you know when you need professional treatment, and then how do you know when you need more than just, say, 1 hour of therapy a week? Oh, so good. So, I mean, I don't need to tell you this, but I'll tell it to the audience that trauma in general is not we don't have a core definition for
Dick, your ai powered All Star. Because businesses that grow grow with Shopify, sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/mentallystronger, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/mentallystronger now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com/mentallystronger. Okay. We're back. Let's move on to the number 3 exercise you can do from the couch. Identify 3 things that you feel grateful for. A research shows that gratitude is a superpower. The benefits can include anything from you'll sleep better to you'll be a happier person. In fact, people who regularly practice gratitude, take better care of their health, and they actually live longer. So if you'd like to write, you could get out a journal and just write down 3 things you feel grateful for. Research shows that if you do that right before you go to sleep, you actually get better quality sleep. Who doesn't want that? But if you don't enjoy writing or you're not somebody who's gonna keep a journal, Just thinking about 3 things you're grateful for can be an incredible way to build mental strength. And these don't have to be huge things. He might be grateful that you heard from an old friend last week. He might be grateful that you had a really good lunch today. Or that you have clean water to drink. Just take a minute, though, right now and think about three things that you can be grateful for. And just like that, you've boosted your mental strength. Number 4, write yourself a kind letter. This is simple, but it's really powerful. You know how when you're going through something difficult and a friend or a family member seems to give you some really kind words hit just the right spot and you feel better, well, your own words could be even more powerful.
All over the place, but there's a lot of strategy involved in kind of putting teams together and constantly getting into new areas and really reaping the benefits of that fresh area, energy by doing new. So those are good examples of times when you don't wanna be on autopilot. That's right. You're coming up with ideas that other people haven't come up with or things that maybe nobody thought could be done, or you're taking these products and figuring out, like, what do we do? How do we make this useful? How do we get it out there to people, in a way that's somehow helpful? So great examples of how it helps you professionally. How about personally? How do you use the lit the lit tools, which we'll get into in a few minutes, but how do you use these tools in your personal life? Yeah. Actually, maybe just before going to my personal life, just one thing I wanted to add to the previous answer in my lab just to give you just some examples of of how, you know, really using these tools is so one is, like, by constantly getting into new areas, I think there's this tool that I refer to as do new. It's a way to just usher in fresh energy into our lives. And it's almost like the more you do new in your life, the more capacity you have to do new and the more gravity you have to do new things. And our brains just love it when we engage in new activities. So one of the one of the strategies actually that I use in the lab is I minimize the the overlap of expertise of people who are there. So we have, for example, like, engineers, biologists, chemists, material scientists. We've had a gastrointestinal surgeon, a cardiac surgeon. We've had a dentist in the lab, so it's constantly changing. So by sort of having people in the lab who have very different expertise, it creates this opportunity to always learn something from the people around us. And then we've had people from over 30 countries as well in the lab. And so people are exposed to different education systems. They think differently. So there's just a lot of disruption of autopilot that's happening on
Again, I would worry less about the type of treatment and more about the relationship with the therapist. So, those are some strategies that can help you find the best therapist for you. If you struggle to do so, so far, just know that you're not alone. Again, the system can be confusing and it can be kind of complicated. But I hope that you keep trying. There are tons of good therapists out there. And while they have slightly different approaches to treatment, finding the best one for you could make all the difference in helping you feel your best. Thank you for listening to mentally stronger and for hanging out with me today. If you know somebody who could benefit from hearing this message, share this show with them. Simply sharing a link to this episode could help someone feel better and grow stronger. Make sure to subscribe to us on your favorite platform so that we can deliver mental strength tips to you every single week. And if you want even more strategies for building mental strength, subscribe to mentally stronger premium by clicking on the link in the show notes. And as always, a big thank you to my show's producer, who is the reason I get to say that we have 16 Grammys between the 2 of us, Nick Valentine.
That's my goal in life as a human, as an investor. I just wanna discover the truth. And I would imagine that happens a lot easier when we create a culture of kindness. People dare acknowledge their mistakes. They're not afraid I'm gonna be severely punished because I just messed up. But if I can own up to this mistake I just made and I predict I'm gonna be treated with kindness, I would think it would become easier to then say, how do I recover from the mistake? Or you can all work together on solving a problem that exists rather than pretending it's not there or people being afraid to bring it up. Totally. I mean, like, look. There's also a lot of humor with kindness. We it's and tears, by the way, because there's a lot of that too. But the humor, it's funny. If you think about the most when I look back, the most important thing I did in August of 2013 was show up in this chaos. Right? It was bad enough that I ultimately hired a police officer to protect the employees. It's it was that tense. And you have this guy come in and say, yeah. I know. I'm wearing pleated khakis. I got this Asian face. There's not a fashionable jean in my, I think, my whole body. I'm the least qualified person to run this company. And I laugh. I tend to laugh at myself a lot. Like, it's just there's no pretense. Right? It's like, I know what I'm not. And when I look back, I think that was one of the most important things I did because I gave permission for everyone to just laugh at themselves a little bit. Right? And just to, you know, open the door and say, look. I'm not trying to pretend like I'm somebody that I'm not. And in doing that, it opened the door, and not everyone sort of went into the door. But the people that really went into the door, they tended to be women. They tended to be the black women on the front lines. They received that really well, and they just said, you know, for the first time, we have someone who's pretending to he's not
