6 Signs It’s Time To Seek Professional Mental Health Counseling

Since mental health is vital to the overall development of a human, they have to ensure that they have a healthy mind to help them function properly. However, most individuals might go through life-changing challenges, like discrimination, long-term stress, trauma, and negative social experiences that affect their mental functions. Without immediate treatment, these issues might result in poor quality of life, family conflicts, isolation, and substance abuse. 

Here are six common signs that it’s time to seek professional mental health counseling:

1. Unable To Regulate Emotions

Emotional regulation is a person’s ability to handle effectively and adequately respond to a negative experience by being aware of the impact of their behavior. This skill allows them to calm down during a period of high emotion while controlling their urges as they deal with emotional distress. However, most people who undergo long periods of stress might experience emotional dysregulation, which leads to self-damaging behaviors and interferes with their productivity and relationships.

Since this skill can prevent a person from making bad decisions, they must learn how to regulate their emotions to save themselves from having regrets later in life. As you seek professional assistance from Craig Counseling or any other similar facility, you’ll go through therapeutic activities to help you deal with your negative experiences by understanding your emotions. In turn, you can avoid indulging in destructive behaviors with underlying consequences, improving your wellbeing and nurturing personal connections.

2. Engaging With Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms

Emotions are a natural factor of everyday life because people often face challenging situations, like feeling frustrated while they’re stuck in traffic. Unfortunately, some individuals who try to control their reactions during these events might engage in unhealthy coping mechanisms that might affect their overall wellbeing. These activities may include excessive substance use, oversleeping, impulsive purchasing, food addiction, and avoiding personal issues.

You must learn how to manage your emotions if you’re trying to regulate your moods by frequently engaging in self-destructive coping mechanisms. With that, you must practice identifying your triggers and finding ways to reduce them by exploring why you carry this weight rather than avoiding it. Since this process requires self-discipline and awareness to achieve desired outcomes, you must consult a professional mental health counselor to receive expert guidance.

3. Feeling Overwhelmed

As an adult with expenses to pay and career goals to fulfill, you need to have healthy mental wellbeing to perform effectively in the workplace. Unfortunately, you might face several work-related stressors, like tight deadlines, long work hours, job insecurity, heavy workload, or significant changes within the company. In addition to these mentally draining factors, you still have to deal with monthly expenses, like savings, debt payments, transportation fees, housing loans, electricity bills, and child care.

As you try to deal with these factors, you might often get overwhelmed, affecting your daily function at home and work performance. Without dealing with these issues, you might go through sleep disturbances, have difficulty concentrating, develop a short temper, and weaken your immune system. Luckily, you have the option to receive guided therapy with a mental health counseling agency that’ll help you understand your triggers to process your emotions as you organize your responsibilities.

4. Experienced A Traumatic Event

Most individuals go through a series of traumatic events that might result in mental health problems. These issues might include excessive substance use, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sleep disorders, fear of recurrence, depression, and anxiety focused on flashbacks. In turn, the affected person might develop psychological concerns, such as anger, panic attacks, obsessions, shock, detachment, shame, and irritability that might affect their relationships with others.

After going through a traumatic event and you can’t seem to move forward from it, you should seek therapy from a professional mental health practitioner. Commonly, your PTSD will fall under cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which can ideally shift the obsessive thought patterns that are negatively impacting your life. As you communicate with this expert, they’ll guide you in identifying your trauma and triggers so you can figure out where your fears are coming out and stay unstuck from your memories.

5. Dealing With Intrusive Thoughts

Intrusive thoughts are mentally-draining ideas that pop into the heads of individuals, and which may happen at any time, sometimes leading to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). They may include triggered reminders of distressing events related to previous negative experiences, or doubts about both big or small facets of their lives. As a result, an affected person might engage in maladaptive behaviors or may be at risk of self-harm to escape the feelings they generate as they deal with these thoughts.

If you’re dealing with intrusive thoughts and considering harming yourself or others, you must seek assistance from an expert. Once you find and start communicating with your therapist, they’ll guide you in addressing these recurring thoughts by exposing you to acceptance techniques and response prevention therapy. These activities will help you handle your intrusive thoughts and lessen the impact of OCD so it won’t rule your day-to-day living.

6. Suffering From Mental Fatigue

Mental fatigue happens when a person feels excessive exhaustion after dealing with stressful activities beyond their mental capacity. The most common symptoms of this physical state include muscle soreness, chronic tiredness, sleepiness, impaired judgment, and irritability. When this individual continues to suffer from such, work tasks may seem overwhelming, and they might lash out at their colleagues or family members.

After recognizing the common signs of mental fatigue, you must get professional support from a therapist to help you figure out the causes of this state. They might be able to address issues about your lifestyle that contribute to this condition, like substance abuse, burnout, and eating disorders. After that, they might help you learn practical methods for managing stress by recommending an addiction recovery program or creating an attainable self-care routine.

Key Takeaway

You might get overwhelmed by challenges and, in turn, resort to unhealthy coping mechanisms in order to regulate your thoughts and emotions. However, these self-medicating activities aren’t beneficial for your overall wellbeing because you might develop life-threatening physical and mental illnesses. Therefore, you should consider seeking professional mental health counseling if you’re experiencing most of these six signs to improve your mind and how you deal with your emotions.