Resolve to Have a Healthier Mind and Spirit for 2025

#newyearsresolutions #holistichealth #mentalhealth #spiritualhealth #mindbodyspirit

What are the most common New Year’s resolutions? To lose weight? Get more fit? Drink less? Something else that has to do with our bodies? Most people don’t commit to being healthier mentally and spiritually. Why? Because committing to a healthier mind and spirit is SO BIG that we don’t know where to start. Still, in the spirit of resolutions I thought I’d share some tips that can help you have a healthier mind and spirt throughout 2025:

1) Become More Balanced: During Thanksgiving, my uncle asked me, “What are you doing to make sure you age well?” I muttered something about exercise. He responded, “All that exercise is good, but you need to do yoga or something like it to strengthen your balance.”

He's right in more ways than one. Stretching ourselves and building better physical balance is important, but building better emotional, mental, and spiritual balance is even more important. Living in an out-of-balance culture, how do we do balance our lives? The following are practices that can bring more balance to your life:

• Get the right amount of sleep—this usually means choosing an earlier bedtime, even if you feel tired and want more time to yourself… go to bed anyway. When we’ve slept well, we feel less burned out and better able to deal with life. Apps like the “Rise” app, can help, but the key is getting more and better sleep. It’s amazing how much it helps.

• Eat a better, more balanced diet—this is hard to do in a culture of fast, processed food, but the more balanced and healthier our diet is, the better we feel and can deal with life. A good app for this is the Noom app, which is less a diet and more a cognitive behavioral approach to healthy eating. 

• Get a healthy amount of exercise—getting a healthy amount of exercise doesn’t mean becoming incredibly fit. It means boosting our health through walking at a relatively high pace several days a week and doing some sort of resistance training—bands, chair exercises, or weightlifting. Having healthier bodies help us deal with life better.

• Moderate social media—spending inordinate amounts of time in front of screens is draining. Social media is all designed with algorithms that hook into our addictive centers. They’re powerful much in the way nicotine is: they addict us while leading us to think, “I can quit if I want to… I just don’t want to.” There are other options for boredom—puzzles (I like jigsaws, my wife likes crosswords), reading, chatting with others, and more. Look for substitute activities that are healthier and less addictive.

2) Look for What’s Good: To me, this is foundational to becoming healthier in all facets of life. We live in critical and cynical times about everything: government, church, the Steelers, the Penguins, the police, schools, medicine, science, facts, the world, and pretty much everything else in life. All that cynicism and skepticism, all that looking for what’s wrong, has a deeply unhealthy impact on our lives. It’s like breathing in toxic air all day long that creeps into every capillary of our system.

For a long time, I’ve lived by a more positive mantra: “Look for what’s good, not what’s bad. Look for what’s right, not what’s wrong. Focus on what’s possible not what’s impossible. Embrace what gives life, not what takes it away.” How we look at the world is a choice—a choice that has health impact. You know this already. Think of a time when you were caught in a conversation with someone cynical and couldn’t escape. How did that person impact you? Now think of a conversation you had with someone positive and energetic. How did that person impact you? Looking for what’s good doesn’t mean ignoring reality. It means engaging reality in a way that makes it better.

3) Seek Purpose and Meaning: There’s been a tremendous amount of research on the importance of having a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Purpose is the sense that I am alive for this reason. Meaning is felt when we engage in activities that express that purpose. Seeking purpose and meaning helps us live with intention, especially when engaging in activities and actions that make life better for others.

Looking back on my life and those that I’ve known and worked with, the healthiest ones have always been those who sought purpose and meaning. They’ve pursued a life that’s larger than just them. They look for ways to do good for others. Whatever careers they have—investor, teacher, police officer, retail clerk, janitor, and more—they see their lives as unique service to others and the world. T

4) Deal with Anxiety: Most people are much more anxious than they realize, and both general and specific anxiety can accumulate. Pay more attention to your body and mind and ask if you have anxiety. If you do, resolve to deal with it because anxiety can accumulate and lead to worsening relational and physical problems. There are apps to help, practices that help, organizations that help, and of course our therapists are trained to help people deal with anxiety.

5) Create More Time for Quiet: It’s amazing how healing and healthy quiet can be. Whether that’s the quiet of a walk, turning off music/talk in a car, sitting on a back porch, hiking in woods, or more, quiet restores us. We live in a noisy culture, and most of us are uncomfortable with quiet because of the combination of boredom and running thoughts. Still, finding time for quiet brings balance and health to our lives.

6) Pray: Prayer is more than just psychological centering. It connects us with the transcendent, with the “more than,” with God. Praying brings balance to our lives by connecting us with a spiritual realm that wants what’s best for our lives. So, making time for regular prayer and listening is incredibly healing and balancing.

I hope these ideas can help you resolve to live a better 2025! We’re here to help.

Blessings,

The Rev. N. Graham Standish, PhD, MSW, MDiv, MA

Executive Director, Samaritan Counseling, Guidance, Consulting

Learning as Mental Health

#mentalhealth #learninglife #cbt #narrativetherapy #howtolive

With so much access to self-help books, videos, podcasts, TikToks, posts, and more, why doesn’t it seem like our collective mental health is getting better? With so many resources promising to help us become healthier in mind and spirit, why does it seem as though our struggles have become more pervasive? Is it because we still haven’t learned to learn?

I realized long ago that the key to living a healthier life—whether mentally, physically, relationally, or spiritually—requires cultivating a learning life. We live in an “educated” culture, but not necessarily a “learning life” one. What’s the difference?

Fostering a learning life means embracing growth that leads to a healthier, happier life. Being educated means having mastered ideas and concepts related to particular fields of interest. Just because we’re educated doesn’t mean we know how to live life in the healthiest way. I’m not suggesting that education and fostering a learning life are mutually exclusive because they do overlap. The difference, though, is that fostering a learning life is dedicated to “how I am to live,” while being educated is dedicated more to “how can I engage in this vocation or master this field of study.”

Counseling is dedicated to helping people learn how to live. Good therapists help us learn about our lives. They help us learn about our past and its sometimes-unhealthy influence on our present. They help us learn to identify distorted thinking and the causes of impulsive behaviors, while also learning new insights and skills that improve our lives. They help us learn new ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us that help us adopt healthier perspectives. They help us learn new ways of interacting with others that promotes healthier relationships.

Therapists become expert in this because they themselves have dedicated their lives to learning how to live. Most therapists have embraced a life of learning, often as a reaction to their own personal struggles. They have learned how to live, and now dedicate their lives to helping others learn to live.

At their core all forms of therapy help us learn. For instance, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), a foundational form of therapy all therapists are trained in, helps us learn about the connection between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It helps us identify distorted thinking in response to triggers, and how to nurture different ways of thinking. CBT helps us explore how our distorted thinking can give rise to self-destructive emotions, which lead to dysfunctional behaviors, which then leads to persistently painful consequences. By learning how triggers spark distorted thoughts, how those thoughts provoke troubling emotions, how those emotions lead to problematic behaviors, and how those behaviors give rise to negative consequences, CBT therapists help us learn to change unhealthy patterns into healthier ones.

Another form of therapy, Narrative Therapy, recognizes the positive and negative power of the beliefs and perspectives we have about ourselves and others. It recognizes that we rarely view ourselves and others in an objective way, but instead follow an interpretation, a “narrative” or story, about ourselves and others that trap us in unhealthy loops. For example, if we think everyone is against us, we then interpret most interactions in a negative way. Narrative Therapy helps us to explore our “narratives” about ourselves and others and learn how to develop new narratives that can lead us to healthier living.

Whatever the form of therapy is, it is an attempt to help people learn new perspectives, skills, ways of responding, ways of living, and more. Still, they all require one essential thing: clients who want to learn. Many therapists recognize that overcoming mental health issues requires adopting a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. That means openly embracing growth rather than holding onto a way of thinking that mainly seeks to insulate us from change. In essence, therapists slowly, patiently help us to overcome our resistance to growing by helping us to learn.   

As you’ll see in the rest of this newsletter, learning is the key to healthy living, and we are passionate about helping people learn how to live.

Blessings,

The Rev. N. Graham Standish, PhD, MSW, MDiv, MA

More than Just Therapy

#lifecoaching

Years ago, during my counseling field placement as a drug and alcohol therapist, my supervisor took me aside to give me advice on my future, knowing that I was working on two master’s degrees at the same time—one to become a pastor, the other to become a therapist. She said, adamantly, “Graham, at some point soon you’re going to have to choose either to be a pastor or a therapist. You can’t do both!”

 “Why not?” I asked. She replied, “You just can’t. You have to choose one or the other” The conversation has stayed with me all these years later because I never did choose. I became a pastor. And a therapist. And a spiritual director. And a clergy coach. And a teacher. And a writer. And much more.

I realized something back then that took me a long time to put into words: there isn’t just ONE approach to being mentally and spiritually healthy in life. The healthiest lives are those that integrate insights from many different areas of life. Counseling can be incredible in helping people craft better lives, but mental health requires more than just what counseling offers. Counseling is great at helping people progress from deep difficulties to healthy functioning in life. But there’s a wide gap between merely functioning well in life and flourishing psychologically, emotionally, and relationally.

Counseling will always be Samaritan’s foundation, but over the years we’ve slowly added other services that help people do more than function in life. I began by offering spiritual direction and clergy coaching in 2017. In January of 2022 we added a life coach, Rachel Fagan. In January of 2023 we added a second spiritual director, Amy Armanious. The purpose of bringing them on board was to help people grow through many phases of life by offering them help that fits what they’re seeking.

Here, I want to specifically focus on how our life coaching can enhance your life by sharing what our life coach, Rachel Fagan (pictured below, right) does, and how it enhances life.

Rachel is a trained life coach who embarked on this vocation after having been a schoolteacher for many years. She felt a call to do more to help parents and adults navigate the difficulties of life she saw reflected so much in her conversations with them. So, she became trained as a life coach to help otherwise healthy people navigate the confusing twists and turns of life. That’s what life coaches do. They help us sift through life’s confusion by helping us build skills that allow us to thrive.

Life coaches partner with clients, helping them think through their lives and find ways to reach previously blocked personal and professional potentials. The coaching process often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity, and leadership in ways that lead to greater personal and professional fulfillment. In short, they help us find better ways of living our lives.

More specifically, life coaches help people:

• boost confidence;

• become clearer about their goals, outcomes, or plans;

• find ways to manage time and energy more efficiently;

• improve relationships; feel less overwhelmed and stressed;

• explore options when trying to make decisions;

• overcome barriers to happiness and success;

• navigate major life transitions;

• develop a better work/life harmony;

• figure out how to live out their core selves, values, and beliefs in a world that drives us to live another way;

• overcome life’s obstacles, and

• transform negative thoughts by adopting more positive perspective and behaviors.

So many of the problems we face in life don’t rise to the level of needing deeper therapy, although the therapists we have are among the best in Western Pennsylvania for anyone seeking that. The problems most of us face are life issues that confound or confuse us. We offer coaching and mental fitness to help people find better ways to live.

If you are struggling to some extent on how to craft a better life, I encourage you to consider life coaching. Many people have and they have benefitted greatly.

Blessings,

The Rev. N. Graham Standish, PhD, MSW, MDiv, MA

Executive Director