8 Keys to Practicing Mindfulness: Practical Strategies for Emotional Health and Well-being (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Learning how to pay attention to the present moment. Becoming mindful is about the small, everyday things such as pausing to take a breath before you drive off in a hurry or considering the food that will nourish your body before a meal. Or it can mean checking in with yourself before responding to a challenging email or text. Every moment of our lives can become an opportunity to practice mindfulness. This book will invite you to sharpen your awareness and ask yourself with more frequency, “What do I notice right now?” or “How do I need to respond or be with this situation?” These seemingly tiny moments of noticing yourself can have a major impact on your life as you learn to track habitual patterns and awaken to change. Practicing mindfulness is not about being better by figuring it all out. It is about tolerating the moments when you don’t know or learning to be more curious about the struggle. Here you will learn how to establish a basic practice with guidelines for posture and breathing as well as various options for meditations that involve sitting, walking, gently moving or lying down. You can try these exercises at your lunch break, before you rise or fall asleep. But best of all is for you to sprinkle mindfulness throughout your day. Whether you are new to mindfulness or a seasoned practitioner, you can make the conscious decision to change your approach to life. Moment by moment you have the opportunity to cultivate awareness that will make a difference in how you engage with the world on a daily basis.




8 Keys To Practicing Mindfulness


Book Description

Learning how to pay attention to the present moment. Becoming mindful is about the small, everyday things such as pausing to take a breath before you drive off in a hurry or considering the food that will nourish your body before a meal. Or it can mean checking in with yourself before responding to a challenging email or text. Every moment of our lives can become an opportunity to practice mindfulness. This book will invite you to sharpen your awareness and ask yourself with more frequency, “What do I notice right now?” or “How do I need to respond or be with this situation?” These seemingly tiny moments of noticing yourself can have a major impact on your life as you learn to track habitual patterns and awaken to change. Practicing mindfulness is not about being better by figuring it all out. It is about tolerating the moments when you don’t know or learning to be more curious about the struggle. Here you will learn how to establish a basic practice with guidelines for posture and breathing as well as various options for meditations that involve sitting, walking, gently moving or lying down. You can try these exercises at your lunch break, before you rise or fall asleep. But best of all is for you to sprinkle mindfulness throughout your day. Whether you are new to mindfulness or a seasoned practitioner, you can make the conscious decision to change your approach to life. Moment by moment you have the opportunity to cultivate awareness that will make a difference in how you engage with the world on a daily basis.




8 Keys to Brain-Body Balance (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Take-charge strategies to heal your body and brain from stress and trauma. Understanding how our brains and bodies actually work is a powerful tool in mitigating the anxiety generated by unpleasant physical and emotional symptoms that we all may experience from time to time. Here, Robert Scaer unravels the complexities of the brain-body connection, equipping all those who are in distress with a plausible explanation for how they feel. Making the science accessible, he outlines the core neurobiological concepts underlying the brain-body interface and explains why physical and emotional symptoms of stress and trauma occur. He explains why “feelings” represent physical sensations that inform us about the nature of our brain-body conflicts. He also offers practical, easy-to-implement strategies for strengthening motor skills, learning to listen to our gut to gauge our feelings, attuning to the present, and restoring personal boundaries to relieve symptoms and navigate a path to recovery.




8 Keys to End Emotional Eating (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Bring an end to emotional eating by getting to the root of the problem. Most books about emotional eating tend to focus on how to strengthen self-restraint or how to identify what triggers it. The former can make the problem worse, while the latter may be different each time it occurs. Both approaches fail to help emotional eaters understand why they feel compelled to do something that they don’t want to do in the first place. This understanding is the key to changing this behavior. Howard Farkas, who has more than two decades of professional and teaching experience as a clinical psychologist specializing in emotional eating, explains the underlying motive that drives the behavior: emotional eating is not a passive failure of self-control, but an active impulse to reject the control of dieting. This defiant need “to be bad” usually leaves the person feeling guilty and anxious about their eating, and recommitting to their diet until the cycle repeats, and the compulsive eating recurs. 8 Keys to End Emotional Eating provides a detailed plan for breaking this pattern. By explaining the root cause that drives the desire to binge, Farkas offers practical skills to help you learn to change your mindset about dieting and end the impulse to binge. His road map for the future will help readers maintain healthy eating habits for years to come.




8 Keys to Mental Health Through Exercise (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Inspiring strategies from a wellness expert for keeping fit, relieving stress, and strengthening emotional well-being. We all know that exercise is good for physical health, but recently, a wealth of data has proven that exercise also contributes to overall mental well-being. Routine exercise alleviates stress and anxiety, moderates depression, relieves chronic pain, and improves self-esteem. In this inspiring book, Christina Hibbert, a clinical psychologist and expert on women's mental health, grief, and self-esteem, explains the connections between exercise and mental well-being and offers readers step-by-step strategies for sticking to fitness goals, overcoming motivation challenges and roadblocks to working out, and maintaining a physically and emotionally healthy exercise regimen. This book will help readers to get moving, stay moving, and maintain the inspiration they need to reap the mental health benefits of regular exercise. The 8 keys include improving self-esteem with exercise, exercising as a family, getting motivated, changing how you think about exercise, and the FITT principle for establishing an effective exercise routine.




8 Keys to Parenting Children with ADHD (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Compassionate and effective strategies for raising a child with ADHD. Parenting children with ADHD, whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, can be challenging and complex. But just as a child who struggles with reading can learn to decode words, children with ADHD can learn patience, communication, and solution-seeking skills to become more confident, independent, and capable. This book, rich with optimism, tips, tools, and action plans, offers science-based insights and systems for parents to help cultivate these skills. Combining expert information with practical, sensitive advice, the eight “key” concepts here will help parents reduce chaos, improve cooperation, and nurture the advantages—like creativity and drive—that often accompany all of that energy. Based on author Cindy Goldrich’s seven-session workshop entitled Calm and Connected: Parenting Kids with ADHD©, this book focuses on developing and strengthening effective interpersonal skills in both parents and children as a way to improve conflict resolution. Following the parenting principle to “Parent the child you have,” Goldrich offers advice to help readers tailor their parenting to meet the needs of their unique child. The book also leads parents to recognize the value of being a leader and a guide to children, building parents’ confidence in their decision-making, and giving children a sense of safety, security, and confidence. The principles outlined in 8 Keys to Parenting Children with ADHD are appropriate for parenting kids of all ages—until they have “launched” and are on their own.




8 Keys to Old School Parenting for Modern-Day Families (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Raising secure and confident kids using best parenting practices from the past. Does it ever seem to you like kids these days are in control of their parents? Having a strong sense of yourself as a parent is key to raising a resilient, independent, thoughtful, and solution-focused child. But over the last several generations, parents have been immersed in the well-intentioned idea that parenting should be child-centered rather than adult-centered. Many parents have begun to follow their children’s lead rather than insist that children adapt to parental prerogatives. Parental authority has come to be seen as a bad thing. The 8 keys presented in this book focus on valuing your own authority as a parent; cultivating your child’s character; applying discipline instead of punishment; strategies to motivate compliance; fostering emotional development; problem-solving; conflict management; and effective communication. They will help parents raise self-directed children who are active learners, feel good about themselves, take initiative, and have a strong moral compass.




8 Keys to Raising the Quirky Child: How to Help a Kid Who Doesn't (Quite) Fit In (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Tips and strategies for parents of kids who are “different” than all the rest. A quirky child experiences difficulty fitting in and connecting with others usually due to an interpersonal style or behavior that stands out from the other kids. Maybe they are obsessed with a topic of interest or spend excessive hours a day reading, playing video games, or playing with just one toy. These kids are not so far afield as to fall on the autism spectrum, but they are unique, and their behaviors are not addressed in typical parenting books. This book defines quirky markers and offers strategies for parents to understand their children’s brains and behaviors; to know what is developmentally appropriate, and what isn’t; to understand how to reach their kids; and to help facilitate their social functioning in the world. It will calm the hearts and minds of parents who worry that their child doesn’t fit in and offer hope to parents who need strategies to support their quirky child’s overall development.




8 Keys To Eliminating Passive-aggressiveness


Book Description

Guidance for dealing with this common and frustrating form of behavior. Many people often say “yes” to something when they’d rather say “no.” They offer cooperation through words but follow up with how they really feel—in actions that contradict their words. That’s passive-aggression. At its heart, passive-aggression is about being untrue to oneself, which makes it impossible to have a clean relationship with others. Passive-aggression as a communication method doesn’t make someone “bad.” It is simply a strategy learned in childhood as a coping mechanism, a hard-to-break habit. Changing passive-aggressive behavior requires knowledge, tools, and practice, as outlined here. The book offers effective methods for transforming passive-aggression into healthy assertiveness to communicate in constructive ways through eight keys: Recognize Your Hidden Anger; Reconnect Your Emotions to Your Thoughts; Listen to Your Body; Set Healthy Boundaries; Communicate Assertively; Interact Using Mindfulness; Disable the Enabler; and Problem-Solve for Better Outcomes. Hands-on exercises are featured, enabling readers to better understand themselves.




8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery: Take-Charge Strategies to Empower Your Healing (8 Keys to Mental Health)


Book Description

Safe and effective principles and strategies for recovery from trauma. Trauma recovery is tricky; however, there are several key principles that can help make the process safe and effective. This book gives self help readers, therapy clients, and therapists alike the skills to understand and implement eight keys to successful trauma healing: mindful identification of what is helpful, recognizing survival, having the option to not remember, creating a supportive inner dialogue, forgiving not being able to stop the trauma, understanding and sharing shame, finding your own recovery pace; mobilizing your body, and helping others. This is not another book promoting a new method or type of treatment; rather, it is a necessary adjunct to self-help and professional recovery programs. After reading this book, readers will be able to recognize their own individual needs and evaluate whether those needs are being met. They will have the tools necessary to put themselves in the drivers seat, navigating their own safe road to recovery.