Relationships are the bread and butter of life. They make our lives meaningful and fill us with experiences and memories that we carry our whole life long. However, we all know that relationships can be stressful, exhausting, and downright toxic at times as well. Not all relationships last the span of our lifetime and friends come and go as if they are exiting and entering through a revolving door.  It is a fact of life that some of the relationships we lose through this journey of life are relationships that we were meant to lose. Relationships that hindered our growth and well being in some way. 

We often eat to be physically healthier, leaner, and trimmer. But do we eat for our mental health as well? According to research, how we eat does effect our overall mental health. As the field of psychiatry is expanding, alternative ways to treat mental health are being explored. The more deeply that we study mental health and the effects of external factors on it, it is becoming obvious that issues such as inflammation, gut stability, and neuroplasticity are all effected by what we eat. Inflammation in the body can affect our mood for the worse. Microbiota that line our gut appear to have a link to our overall mood and mental well being as well. Even how our brain wires up and makes connections can be influenced by our diet.

Workplace trauma is rarely discussed and yet it is a wide-reaching and common occurrence. Harassment at work can occur in several different forms. The harassment can be active or passive, direct or subtle. It can be perpetrated by one person or a group of people. Workplace harassment most commonly occurs to young females, especially if they are new to a job. Although young females are the primary targets for perpetrators at work, harassment can and does happen to every demographic.

Regulating your emotions is often seen as a sign of health and maturity. You may wonder how much the ability to control your emotions is under your conscious control. It turns out that emotion regulation is quite complex. People are born with a certain temperament and their ability to control their emotions is strongly shaped by their environment. Our minds have the ability to implicitly and explicitly process emotions. Research shows that the development of the brain differs depending on the type of emotional environment that one is raised within. Supportive parents and a household in which emotional expression is encouraged can help to wire the brain for easier emotional regulation as one grows into adulthood.

There is a well known technique that is being used now with therapists across the world. It has been found to be just as effective as trauma-focused CBT in may studies. It is called EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. This technique has been around since the 1980s and has been growing in popularity and use.

 Mental health symptoms are very common in today's society. Despite numerous efforts to treat mental  health with medication alone, studies show that sustained improvements in mental health are not effective over the long-term with this approach. Typically an approach targeting multiple areas of your life is more effective for the long haul. So if you are looking for an alternative way to improve your mental health then exercise just might be your answer. You can also use exercise in combination with medication and therapy.