[THREAD] I wanted to share a few more exercises that are very simple and can be helpful to do at home. These exercises are quite efficient when it comes to depression and anxiety. The first one will be facts vs interpretation. All our thoughts can be divided in these categories.

Facts would be thoughts that we know are true because we have evidence for them. For example, if someone tells us they love us, or that they are angry, we can put in the fact column. However, so many of our thoughts are interpretation.

Someone may not answer our texts or is not talkative. Our brain will automatically interpret why because we don’t like incomplete situations. However, a lot of the interpretations we have can be very negative depending on how we feel.

When we are not doing well, interpretations will be negative. When we interpret situations, we may start to believe them as true and they can really impact our moods. It is important to categorize our thoughts, specifically those that trigger anxiety or depression.

Are they facts or interpretations? If they are interpretations, can we make them facts? Maybe we can ask the other people to see why they didn’t answer so that we can change them from interpretations to facts. Even if we don’t gather evidence to make them facts, it is okay.

It is good to recognize that all they are are interpretations and we cannot make conclusions based on them. For those of us who often overthink or have certain thoughts that come back over and over, we can simply put them in the columns facts vs interpretations.

Another exercise is for improving our overall mental health. When we look at our overall mental health, it is made of 5 categories: environment, physical, behavioural, thoughts and moods. When one of these categories is not doing well, it will affect the others.

But one of them starts getting better, it will help the others. Let’s set aside the thoughts and moods because they are much harder to control. In environment, we can improve it by going for walks, having zoom meetings with friends, small changes that can make help.

In physical, walks, exercises, sleeping more can help a lot because our physical and mental health are very linked. Finally in behavioural, we can focus on journaling, reaching out when we are feeling vulnerable, etc...

The important factor to remember is that we are trying to break the spiral somewhere and focus on one or two of these categories to improve our moods and thoughts. There are always things we can add that will improve our quality of life.

Those are small exercises that we can do at home and can have a good impact on our mental health, especially as we do them regularly