Many of us are constantly in need of …

This guest article from YourTango was written by Kim Olver. 

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. We will go to the doctor for a physical checkup, but how many of us engage in a mental health checkup? The goals of my process, InsideOut Empowerment, provide us with ten things we can do to improve our well-being and increase our happiness.

1. Assess the strength of your needs while learning to obtain the proper amounts for happiness. We all have five basic human needs — connection, freedom, significance, survival and enjoyment. While we share that in common, the strength of our needs vary. So for example, one person may be high in connection and enjoyment, while another person might be high in significance and freedom. The key to happiness is to engage in behavior that brings you the precise amount of each need you want. Having too little leaves you feeling deprived and having too much can leave you feeling over-saturated.

Creativity can bring a lot of joy into our lives — if we let it. As we get older, unfortunately, many of us leave our favorite activities behind, forget to play and instead go through the motions. Wake up. Go to work. Run errands. Come home. Have dinner. Watch T.V. Go to bed. Rinse. Repeat.

In The Book of Doing: Everyday Activities to Unlock Your Creativity and Joy, Allison Arden, publisher of Advertising Age, shares a slew of fun and playful ideas to reignite our creativity. More than that, her book shows us how to create and find joy in our everyday lives.

So what is “doing”? According to Arden, it’s anything and everything from creating, making, helping, experimenting, drawing, reading, playing, acting, cooking, tasting, celebrating and loving.

Here are 10 of my favorite ideas from her book. I hope you’ll try them!

Life is hard for everyone. That’s why it helps to have an assortment of tools to navigate life’s inevitable lows.

And that’s exactly what you’ll find in Russ Harris’s book The Reality Slap: Finding Peace and Fulfillment When Life Hurts. Harris is a psychotherapist and renowned expert in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The book is based on ACT’s principles.

The reality slap is a term that Harris uses to refer to life’s various lows, which include everything from losing a loved one to experiencing failure or envy.

According to Harris, after a reality slap strikes, we face another problem: “the reality gap.” The reality gap consists of two sides. One side is the reality we have; the other side is the reality we want.

The bigger the gap between these realities, the more painful our emotions.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Tom King. 

Relationships are rarely smooth sailing. Like life itself, relationships provide us with a lot of shelter during the storm, but sometimes they are the storm.

My wife and I recently celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary. As I reflected on this, I decided to share my list of the top ten things I have learned in 36 years, in no particular order.

Click through to read these tips, and hopefully you’ll find some wisdom you can apply to your own relationship.

While researching the history of psychology, I come across a lot of interesting information. Every month I share five pieces, podcasts or videos that you might find fascinating, too.

Last month we talked about Alan Turing, Carl Jung and the famous Robbers Cave Experiment.

This month we’ve got quite the array of topics and in various mediums, including a podcast and a few videos. You’ll learn about the first sport psychologist, the infamous Wolf Man, the history of treating depression, mental asylums and a recent film featuring psychology’s masterminds.

Courage is plentiful. In fact, it’s all around us, writes Robert Biswas-Diener, Ph.D, a positive psychology researcher and founder of Positive Acorn, in his latest book The Courage Quotient: How Science Can Make You Braver.

And it doesn’t just happen on the battlefield: It also happens in the boardroom, on a bike ride and at the grocery store, he says. Courage lives in the everyday and helps us lead more fulfilling lives.

According to Biswas-Diener, courage “allows you to pursue the life you want, to overcome obstacles that hold you back from living a full life, and to put your core values into action, and it also helps and elevates others along the way.” It also helps you have better relationships and do better at work, he says.

In his book Biswas-Diener defines courage as “the willingness to act toward a moral or worthwhile goal despite the presence of risk, uncertainty and fear.”

Every month, I run across a newspaper or online article about how such-and-such mental disorder is an “epidemic.” I can rattle off the disorders that have been paired with this word so far this year — bipolar disorder in children, ADHD, depression and anxiety, a lesser form of schizophrenia… and the list goes on.

In fact, it makes me wonder whether there’s really any journalism done any more, or if it’s just, “Let’s pair one expert’s opinion with the word ‘epidemic,’ and there’s our story!”

The problem with a word like “epidemic” is that, sans a legitimate base comparison, you can always throw this claim around with little regard for actual scientific data. Because if you actually look at the scientific data, you’d be hard pressed to use the word “epidemic” for virtually any mental disorder.

When I completed Elaine Aron’s Highly Sensitive Person Self-Test, I checked 24 statements. Out of 27.

I checked everything from being bothered by bright lights and loud noises to getting startled easily to trying to avoid mistakes to not watching violent movies or TV shows.

Maybe you can relate.

While there are many differences among highly sensitive people (HSPs), we have one thing in common: HSPs have a sensitive nervous system that makes it harder to filter out stimuli and easier to get overwhelmed by our environment.

For instance, the sound of sirens and other loud noises might reverberate like nails on a chalkboard through your head. (They do in mine.)  Crowds might make you especially uncomfortable, while strong smells make you feel sick.

When clinical psychologist Deborah Serani, PsyD, was diagnosed with depression, she was relieved. But soon after the comfort and relief dissipated, she felt shame and guilt and even started reconsidering her profession.

Serani writes poignantly about this so-called self-stigma in her beautiful, information-packed book, Living with Depression:

…I felt inadequate and embarrassed by my diagnosis. I knew that society feared anything that strayed from the norm, and the idea of being seen as different, disabled, or dysfunctional really frightened me. I didn’t tell anyone about my depression, kept my medication hidden in a bedside dresser, and kept secret my feelings of failure. I even went so far as to believe that I should hang up my shingle as a practicing psychologist because, clearly, I was incapable of taking care of myself as a person. How could I take care of others as a professional? Despite the fact that I was a psychologist educated in the mind, brain and body, the misconceptions about mental illness shoehorned themselves into my life.

Fortunately, as Serani started feeling better, these negative thoughts and feelings went away.

In her book Serani outlines other types of stigma, and provides tips for dealing with them.

I was a successful actor. Then I had more and more success. I won an Emmy for my role on The Sopranos and I thought: That’s it? The Emmy was supposed to make me feel better. I left it on the floor of my car. It didn’t give me the feelings a life you dream about is supposed to give you. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Success didn’t cure my clinical depression. I started to self-destruct.

It was two days before shooting began on Canvas in 2005 and I was about to hit bottom. Ironically, I was working on a film about mental health. I got a call from my old friend, actor Charlie Rocket.

Charlie was a brilliant actor and comedian and a self-ordained minister. He married Nancy and me, our ceremony like a sketch on Saturday Night Live. He surprised us and our 300 guests by presiding over our nuptials in his magenta tuxedo and John Lennon rose-colored glasses. He spoke of those rose-colored glasses as a metaphor for married life in his wonderful, deep voice, sounding like the voice of God Himself. He was so funny that director Andy Davis cast Charlie on the spot for his next movie, Steal Big Steal Little. Charlie was my go-to man for many of my problems.

So when Charlie called out of nowhere, I was glad to hear that voice. In our fifteen minute conversation, we shared a couple of laughs, and made plans to get together with friends over the Thanksgiving weekend, some eight weeks away.

On my second day of shooting, Nancy called to tell me Charlie was dead. He had slit his throat with two kitchen knives, one in each hand. He didn’t leave a note.

How could this be? I just talked to the guy. There was no evidence that he was troubled in any way. How angry must he have been?

Even in today’s advanced world, there’s still much misunderstanding and stigma surrounding mental illness. Many of us are quick to dismiss people with mental illness as inferior or less than or wonder why they can’t just snap out of it.

Many of us also rarely believe that mental illness merits the same understanding and compassion as medical illnesses such as diabetes, cancer or heart disease.

Such stigma has devastating effects. It “prevents some people from accessing support and professional help and breeds shame and secrecy, which can significantly worsen a person’s condition as well as their prognosis — even to a point of being life-threatening, in the case of suicidal ideation,” according to Joyce Marter, LCPC, a psychotherapist and owner of Urban Balance, a multi-site counseling practice in the greater Chicago area.

That’s why it’s so important to talk about the facts. Below, experts share accurate information about mental illness.