Mental Moment-Structuring Life Differently
I’ve always worked mainly on mental states and emotions but also include structure and tactics. Currently I am finding that more clients need the latter. I have worked with them on mental states and emotions but they need support to make it happen. As an example, I’ve worked with a client for several months on the mental states and emotions around eating healthy, working out and losing weight but he’s not been able to do it. We’ve talked about exactly what to eat and when to eat. It wasn’t working so I realized I needed to take a slightly different approach to the situation. We sat down with one weeks worth of calendar pages, Monday – Friday. We talked about when he should eat breakfast and what he should eat. He listed out breakfast foods. We did the same thing for lunch. We did the same thing for snacks. We revisited our conversation about why snacks are important and how often he needs to eat a snack and why. Even though we’d had that conversation before having in the context of scheduling out his day brought a new awareness to him around why a snack at 2 and another snack at 5 were important if he was eating lunch at 12/12:30 and dinner at 8. We talked about when he was going to write the grocery list (the grocery list contained only items we talked about or recipes given to him from the nutritionist) and when he was going to go to the grocery store. My client rarely went to the grocery store. When he did go to the grocery store he’d never written a grocery list and he’d run into the grocery store when he had time which generally ended up being 15 minutes before he had to go to work. We starting talking about accountability; how I could support him. We weren’t able to finish that conversation but I started sending him text to remind him to get groceries or to see how his eating schedule was going. He emailed and text back saying that things were going good. I also had him talk to his nutritionist and get a weeks worth of dinners, full meals…not a recipe for one thing and only meals that require a few ingredients…and portion sizes; both things that’s been a challenge for my client.
This structure was a good starting place. It’s been two weeks but this week my client and I plan to talk about what worked and what didn’t work and add a couple more things to the structure. For example, what accountability does he need around food, meals and exercise. We will add dinner to the structure. We will add a realistic amount of exercise into the plan and also include times when he can take the stairs (versus the elevator) or take a walk around the office.
We will keep developing this plan a step or two at a time and refine the plan until it works! This will help increase motivation and build confidence.
It is as difficult to make these kind of changes as it is to make mental state and emotional changes. Why? We don’t know what we don’t know!
Happy midweek!
Dr. Michelle
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