If you’ve never done anything for your mental health before you might be a bit confused when we say ‘techniques’. Like what does that really mean? 

A little, perhaps corny, swimming analogy

One way you can think of it is like learning to swim. If you take someone like me, who can’t swim, then when you’re in the water you may thrash around or be able to move a little. However, you’ll expend a lot of energy and won’t really get anywhere. You can think of that as dealing with some of life’s struggles without having the right ‘techniques’ to know how to process them.

Conversely, imagine someone who does have the right technique. When they’re in the water they can glide through a lot more easily and navigate it to reach the end of the pool. They may be a little tired but they won’t be quite as exhausted as I would be. If we compare this with life you could say it might enable you to glide more easily through life’s challenges (lol) or just to feel a little less burnt out at the end of the day. 

And if we think about someone who knows lots of swimming techniques - they can float, tread water, do breast stroke, front crawl and back stroke. Well you can see how someone like that could deal with any water challenge they face and still get through it. Well again it’s similar in terms of having multiple techniques to deal with life. And in fact, like swimming, we might all have a particular technique or two that suits us best. That’s why it can be helpful to learn a number of techniques to help with different situations.

Techniques to deal with life

"Evidence-based mental health techniques" means methods or strategies to improve mental health that have been tested in scientific studies and shown to be effective. In other words, they are not just random ideas or guesses, but techniques that have real, proven results. 

It can be hard to explain what we mean by these techniques without getting into the depth of them. However, here’s a little summary of the types of things we mean. Just to note, some of these may sound corny or ineffective until you learn more about them and try them out!

• Noticing and challenging thoughts: we don’t tend to pay attention to our thoughts but these can often influence how we feel. By starting to notice and eventually challenge our thoughts this can have a dramatic influence on how we feel.
• Looking at what we do: on the simplest level this can mean making time for things that bring us pleasure and paying attention to what that is. However when we look at this in more depth it can also mean noticing which senses make us feel best or using activities to ‘soothe ourselves’. It can also mean spotting positive and negative cycles and trying to break out of these. 
• Focusing on our outlook: our outlook can be something which influences how we feel because it can relate to how we see ourselves and the world around us. By paying attention to this and practising a few different techniques, this can also have an impact on how we feel.  
• Techniques that use your body: we know some of you may be rolling your eyes already - sure like taking some deep breaths will solve everything? However, although it might sound surprising, there are a few things you can do with your body which can actually make a difference - and they’re not all just to do with breathing!