A Therapist’s Top 10 Tips For Supporting Your Mental Health.

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

RELATIONAL TRAUMA

A Therapist's Top 10 Tips For Supporting Your Mental Health.

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • April 2, 2017

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

As a therapist, I’m often asked for the top tips I have in supporting mental health.

First of all, I love this question , it means that, for whoever asks it, mental health is actually considered a priority which I absolutely believe it should be!

Next, while I believe that we each have our own unique needs, wants, and preferences when it comes to cultivating and maintaining strong mental health, I do have 10 tips that I think almost anyone could benefit from.

So keep reading to see if you could implement any of these 10 tips to support your own mental health.

A Therapist’s Top 10 Tips For Supporting Your Mental Health.

1. First, recognize and realize that mental health is every single bit as important as physical health.

In assigning mental health the importance it deserves, it can make it far easier and more motivating to seek out and build supports to manage your own mental health.

2. Put together your mental health care team.

You have medical supports, right? A doctor and an OBGYN? A legal and financial team like a lawyer and CPA?

Then I suggest you model your mental health care in the same proactive way and gather around you the supports you need even before you need them: a therapist, a psychiatrist, a clergy counselor, whatever this means for you, curate and gather your mental healthcare team.

Many of us need someone who is not our significant other/friend/parent to talk to about life’s toughest stuff. Get your team in place so you can count on them for that.

3. If you believe medication may be of support to you, seek it out.

Please don’t be dissuaded by any stigma or shame about potentially needing short or long-term pharmacological supports if that’s what your particular brain chemistry needs. Talk to your doctor or psychiatrist if you feel this may be an option you would like/need.

4. Take very good care of your physical health.

Always rule out any underlying physical conditions that may be contributing to your mental health and, of course, visit your doctor regularly to make sure your body is functioning well.

Make sure you’ve got a solid, nutritional plan established that works well for your own body’s unique chemistry (consult with a nutritionist if need be for this!). Move your body daily in moderate, invigorating ways that feel good and enlivening for you.

GET ENOUGH SLEEP! I can’t stress this enough: everything in life , including our mental health , becomes more challenged when we don’t get enough sleep. Avoid mood-altering substances as much as possible and in ways that you specifically need depending on your own brain chemistry.

5. Build nourishing relationships in your life.

Seek out and spend time with those who you feel seen, accepted, and celebrated by. Whether this is friends, a loving partner, a women’s group, your therapist, your spiritual community, or your family, make a point of intentional, regular contact with those nourishing relationships in your life.

And, also note that this tip may sometimes may mean withdrawing from or decreasing contact with those relationships in your life that feel painful, challenging, and unsupportive.

6. Plan play and joy and adventure!

Between the often grueling demands of work and adulting, days can fly, weeks can bleed into one another, and the months pass.

Play, joy, and adventure are fundamental needs most of us have, so intentionally building time and resources into your life to support the pursuit of this is, I believe, wonderful for your overall mental health.

Of course, the way that play, joy, and adventure manifests for each of us will be unique, so find out what sparks your joy, what breaks up your daily routines, and discover what feeds your soul and lights up your life and then do more of it regularly.

7. Create, teach, or serve.

I read somewhere once that ultimately what fulfills the majority of us could be lumped into the categories of creating, teaching, or serving.

So I would encourage you to consider how you can weave one or more of these roles into your life regularly, and/or if you already have this as a part of your life, reconnect back to the part of it that lights you up and inspires you.

8. Spend time in nature.

If there’s a panacea for more ills, I’m not sure what it might be.

Connecting to nature in whatever way feels good to you. Be it gardening or sitting in your backyard sunshine, long coastal bike rides, or hikes through your local park. Can support mental health in profound ways. Nature is therapeutic so I encourage you to get outside often.

9. Limit time spent on social media. Or be curious about how you can better use it.

I know, I know, no one really likes to hear this and yet we all know it: social media can often have a negative impact on our self-esteem and therefore our mental health.

So be mindful and curious about what impact social media has on you, and if it doesn’t feel supportive, consider limiting time on it, and/or be curious about using it in ways that feel more supportive.

10. Connect to something bigger than yourself.

Whether this is God and Church, AA, Spirit, The Universe, the Women’s Spirituality Movement, or another institution or practice that feeds you, guides you, and inspires you, spending time connecting to something bigger than ourselves and cultivating faith and purpose can often support our mental health significantly.

Whatever your personal preferences or practices, I encourage you to cultivate the role of this in your life as a support for your mental health.

Your mental health is worth the same investment you give everything else.

Now I’d love to hear from you:

Leave a comment below so our community of blog readers can benefit from your wisdom.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• World Health Organization (2013). Mental health action plan 2013, 2020. World Health Organization.
• Keyes, C. L. M. (2002). The mental health continuum: From languishing to flourishing in life. Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.
• Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.
• Bratman, G. N., Anderson, C. B., Berman, M. G., Cochran, B., de Vries, S., Flanders, J., … & Daily, G. C. (2019). Nature and mental health: An world service perspective. Science Advances.
• Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2018). Associations between screen time and lower psychological well-being among children and adolescents: Evidence from a population-based study. Preventive Medicine Reports.
• Norcross, J. C., & Lambert, M. J. (2018). Psychotherapy relationships that work III. Psychotherapy.
• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. Guilford Press.
• American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.

How Mental Health Struggles Show Up in driven women

In my practice, driven women rarely describe their mental health challenges the way the clinical literature describes them. They don’t say “I’m dysregulated.” They say: “I can’t turn my brain off.” They don’t say “I’m in a depressive episode.” They say: “I don’t know why I can’t make myself care about anything.” The translation matters. Both for treatment and for self-compassion.

Aarti is a 43-year-old surgeon who came to me after her third consecutive sleepless week. “I’ve always been like this,” she told me. “I thought it was just the job.” What I helped her see was that her relationship to her nervous system. Always on, always scanning, always anticipating. Wasn’t just “the job.” It was a pattern that predated medicine by decades, shaped by a childhood in which being alert and anticipatory was necessary for safety. Her mental health wasn’t failing. It was doing exactly what it had been trained to do. The question we began with wasn’t “how do I fix this?” but “what was this originally for?”

This is an important reframe for driven women: your mental health patterns are not arbitrary. They make sense in context. The anxiety that runs underneath your productivity was probably adaptive at some point. The difficulty settling was probably a survival strategy before it became a liability. Treating your mental health effectively begins with understanding not just what’s happening, but what it’s been doing for you. Individual therapy provides exactly this kind of contextual understanding, and it’s where sustainable change becomes possible.

Sleep, Relationships, and the Mental Health Factors We Underestimate

Among the most consistently undervalued factors in mental health. Particularly among driven women. Are sleep and relational support. Both are often sacrificed at the altar of productivity, and both exact a steeper cost than most people realize.

Matthew Walker, PhD, professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and author of Why We Sleep, summarizes the research starkly: there is no biological process in the body that is not improved by sleep or diminished by its absence. For mental health specifically, the implications are profound. Sleep deprivation increases emotional reactivity, impairs executive function, disrupts the memory consolidation that allows therapy to work, and dysregulates the hormonal systems that govern mood. For driven women who have normalized sleeping five or six hours as a mark of commitment, this research is a kind of reckoning.

Relational support. The experience of being genuinely known and cared for by at least one other person. Is equally foundational. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD, psychologist and professor at Brigham Young University, has demonstrated in large-scale meta-analyses that social isolation is as significant a mortality risk as smoking fifteen cigarettes per day. For mental health day-to-day, relational connection regulates the nervous system, buffers against stress, and provides the holding environment in which change becomes possible. If your relational life feels thin right now. If you’re surrounded by people but not genuinely known by anyone. That’s worth addressing as directly as any other mental health concern. Connecting with Annie is one place to start.

Both/And: Vulnerability and Strength Are Not Opposites

There’s a particular form of isolation that driven women experience in recovery: the belief that needing help means they’ve failed. They’ve built entire identities around competence, self-sufficiency, and not being a burden. Asking for support. Let alone admitting they’re struggling. Feels like a betrayal of everything they’ve worked to become. In my practice, this is one of the first beliefs we examine, because it’s almost always a relic of childhood.

Aarti is an entrepreneur who runs a multimillion-dollar company and texts her team at 5 a.m. She canceled her first three therapy appointments before she finally showed up. “I handle things,” she told me in our first session, as though that were a personality trait rather than a survival strategy. What Aarti didn’t yet see is that her capacity to handle things and her need for support aren’t in competition. They coexist. And her refusal to let them has been costing her for decades.

Both/And means Aarti can be the person her team relies on and the person who weeps in my office on Thursdays. She can run a company and still need someone to hold space for her. She can be the strongest person in most rooms and still benefit from being in a room where she doesn’t have to be strong. These aren’t contradictions. They’re completeness. And recognizing that is, for many of my clients, the beginning of something genuinely new.

Tasha is a 36-year-old nonprofit director who came to me not in crisis, but in what she called “a slow erosion.” Nothing was catastrophically wrong. Everything was fine. And she had been fine for so long that she had stopped asking herself whether fine was enough. The mental health tips she’d been implementing. The meditation, the journaling, the therapy. Were working, in the sense that she wasn’t getting worse. But they weren’t helping her get to something she actually recognized as flourishing. That distinction. Between not getting worse and genuinely getting better. Is one worth holding. Both/and: the practices were helping AND there was more healing available. Executive coaching offered Tasha a complementary modality that opened new territory.

The Systemic Lens: Why the Healing Industry Often Fails Driven Women

The wellness and self-improvement industries generate billions of dollars annually by selling driven women solutions to problems those industries have no interest in solving. Heal your trauma. But not so thoroughly that you stop buying products. Practice self-care. Within the narrow window your 60-hour work week allows. Find balance. In a system designed to extract maximum output from every waking hour.

For driven women pursuing genuine healing, the systemic barriers are real. Therapy is expensive, and many of the most effective trauma treatments require multiple sessions per week. A financial and logistical impossibility for many. Insurance covers a fraction of what’s needed, and the most skilled trauma therapists rarely accept insurance at all. Workplace cultures punish vulnerability, making it difficult to prioritize mental health without career risk. Even the language of healing has been co-opted: “boundaries” becomes a buzzword stripped of its clinical meaning, and “doing the work” becomes a social media aesthetic rather than the slow, unglamorous process it actually is.

In my practice, I name these systemic barriers because pretending they don’t exist places an unfair burden on the woman doing the healing. Your recovery isn’t happening in a supportive cultural container. It’s happening despite a culture that simultaneously tells you to heal and makes it structurally difficult to do so. Acknowledging that isn’t defeatism. It’s realism, and it’s the starting point for building a recovery plan that accounts for the actual conditions of your life.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

One of the most important things I tell clients in early sessions is this: the patterns we’re going to look at together aren’t character flaws. They’re the residue of strategies that once kept you safe. The over-functioning, the difficulty resting, the way you find yourself absorbing other people’s moods before you’ve registered your own. Every one of these adaptations made sense in the original environment that shaped them. The work isn’t to shame the strategy. It’s to update the system that keeps generating it.

The Path Forward: Putting These Tips to Work in Your Real Life

In my work with clients, I’ve found that lists of mental health tips can feel simultaneously obvious and impossible. You know sleep matters. You know connection helps. You know you should probably move your body more. Knowing is rarely the problem. The problem is implementation. Figuring out how to translate general wisdom into a specific, sustainable practice inside a specific, demanding life. That translation is actually where the clinical work lives.

What I want to offer here isn’t more information, but a way of approaching the information you already have. The ten tips in this post aren’t meant to become ten more items on your to-do list. They’re meant to be read slowly, and then interrogated: which one, if I actually did it consistently, would make the most difference in my life right now? Start there. Just one. Do it for three weeks before adding another. This isn’t about covering all the bases. It’s about building genuine traction.

From a clinical standpoint, sustainable mental health isn’t primarily about behavior change. It’s about nervous system regulation. Which is a more foundational layer. Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy both work directly with the body’s stress response systems, helping you build the capacity for genuine self-regulation rather than white-knuckling your way through difficult moments. When the nervous system is more regulated, healthy behaviors feel less like effort and more like what you actually want to do. The order matters: we’re not building habits to feel better; we’re building safety so that healthier choices become natural.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is another approach that can shift the foundation of your mental health practice. If you find yourself consistently sabotaging the things you know would help. Staying up too late, isolating when you need connection, numbing out when you’d planned to reflect. IFS can help you understand which part of you is driving that behavior and what it’s protecting. That understanding transforms self-sabotage from a character flaw into a conversation that can actually lead somewhere useful.

Connection deserves its own emphasis here, because it’s both the most researched predictor of mental health and the most chronically under-resourced one in the lives of driven women I work with. Genuine connection. The kind where you’re known, not just liked. Requires time and vulnerability that driven women often defer indefinitely. I’d encourage you to treat relationship maintenance with the same seriousness you give professional development. It isn’t secondary to your functioning. It’s foundational to it.

If therapy is something you’re considering but haven’t yet started, I want to normalize that it takes a little time to find the right fit. And that the fit matters enormously. A good therapeutic relationship is itself a mental health intervention, not just a vehicle for techniques. It’s worth investing the effort to find a therapist whose approach aligns with yours and whose presence feels genuinely helpful to you.

If you’re ready to go deeper than tips and move into real, sustained support, I’d love to be part of that. You can explore therapy with Annie for a sense of what working together looks like, or connect directly through the connect page. Mental health isn’t a destination you arrive at. It’s a practice you return to, again and again, ideally with good company along the way.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written extensively about how relational trauma changes the way the brain processes threat, attention, and self-perception. The amygdala becomes hypervigilant. The medial prefrontal cortex. The part of the brain that helps you contextualize what you’re feeling. Goes quiet. The default mode network, where the felt sense of self lives, becomes muted. None of this is metaphor. It’s measurable, and it’s reversible. The therapies that actually move the needle for driven women. Somatic work, EMDR, IFS, attachment-based relational therapy. Are all therapies that engage the body and the implicit memory systems where this material is stored.

What I see consistently in my work with driven women is that the body holds the truth long before the mind catches up. By the time a client lands in my office describing what isn’t working, her nervous system has been signaling for months. Sometimes years. The tightness in her jaw at 3 a.m., the way her shoulders climb toward her ears during certain conversations, the unexplained fatigue that no amount of sleep seems to touch. These aren’t separate problems. They’re a single integrated story the body is telling about an emotional terrain the conscious mind hasn’t been able to face yet.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.

Medical Disclaimer