Faith + Mental Health BLOG

MENTAL HEALTH: 10 Signs That You Are Struggling With Perfectionism 

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by Alexis Rosendo

Are you a perfectionist? Or are you just a higher achiever? Or simply someone who likes things done well? How can you know?

The word perfectionist has taken on a bad connotation: describing someone who chooses to be ‘over-the-top’ in tedious criticism towards situations or people, annoyingly refusing to admit their own faults or mistakes, and someone who turns everything into a competition that they have to win. Or someone who needs to learn how to loosen up and not take life (and themselves) so seriously, or else they’ll end up alone because no one wants to be around them. This negative reputation, not to mention the social outcomes, results in many people choosing to deny that they struggle with this very real phenomenon, even though admitting the struggle is the first step to getting the necessary help. Furthermore, the misconception that individuals choose to be perfectionists, which is not the case, leave the perfectionists shouldering a ton of guilt, shame, and poor self image. All-in-all, this can be a touchy topic and one that many are hesitant to come forward about.

Fortunately for us, there is a difference between being high achieving and being a perfectionist, and this distinction is very important. Having perfectionistic treats qualify as mental health symptomology, which is not something a person chooses or has to feel responsible for causing. Like most mental health symptomology, it is very difficult to overcome perfectionistic traits on your own without professional help, and so struggling for years without improvement is understandable and nothing to be embarrassed about. Living with these traits leads to a decreased quality of life unless it is properly resolved therapeutically, because the traits are cyclical, reinforcing themselves in an endless pattern that haunts someone throughout their entire life. Not fun.

Can you relate? Answer these questions for yourself to see if you may struggle with perfectionism symptoms. 

ask yourself:

  1. Do you find it hard to celebrate your success?
  2. Do you feel like nothing you do is ever good enough for you or others?
  3. Do you feel like you have no control over how much you think about achievement and success, and that you can’t turn it off?
  4. Does it bother you if you are not always the best, the most, first, or the favorite? Do you compare yourself obsessively to other people?
  5. Do you find yourself fixating on tiny faults in yourself and having a hard time letting them go?
  6. Do you only attempt something if you know pretty certainly that you will excel in it?
  7. Are you overly competitive to where you have a hard time enjoying things unless you are winning at them or performing better than others? Or to where it has affected your relationships?
  8. Do you feel like you are always under a lot of pressure to perform, but that you aren’t sure where that pressure is coming from?
  9. Are you excessively anxious about your performance outcomes, your work, not being good enough, losing at a competition, letting others or yourself down, or your hard work, not perfectly paying off?
  10. Do these symptoms suck the joy out of life, relationships, and/or activities for you? Do they create a bondage or restriction that you can’t seem to escape?

If one or more of these questions resonate with your daily lived experiences, be encouraged that you are not alone. Hope abounds for you! There is the potential to overcome these traits to where they don’t significantly impact your daily life. You deserve help to be freed from the restricting symptoms of perfectionism, and there are therapeutic interventions that can absolutely create change in your life. You can do this, and it is not your fault. When you are ready, reach out to your local mental health organizations to find a counselor that meets your needs and can provide the support and accountability you require.

Onward and upward!

FAITH + LIFE + MENTAL HEALTH: Praying With Your Kids Before School

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By Alexis Rosendo

As parents, and Christian parents, we can create a routine around harnessing the power of prayer to maintain mental wellness. Prayer is such a powerful tool, (if you are interested in hearing more about prayer, see the post “What Is Prayer?”) and one that has to be taught and practiced in order to truly bring about the full richness of its benefits. We Christian parents are always looking for ways to model faith before our kids and to lovingly invite them into, one day, choosing Jesus Christ as their savior. What are the small ways that we can begin to plant seeds of prayer and mental wellness in the lives of our children? 

Why don’t you try praying with and over your children before school? As school prepares to begin for the new year, we have the unique opportunity to start new habits that cultivate spiritual and mental wellness and can be maintained all year long. Prayer is a great place to begin!

Here are the benefits of praying before school: 

  1. It is something that you do with your kids = bonding, connection, investment of time
  2. Prayer sets the mental, emotional and spiritual framework for the day = increases chances of successful outcomes and positive attitudes 
  3. Prayer can release and calm your child’s anxieties about their school day
  4. Prayer can release and calm your anxiety about your child’s school day
  5. Prayer reinforces that we go to God regularly with adoration, thanksgiving, and for comfort
  6. Prayer opens the door for your children to explore their own personal faith and establishes that you are a safe person to go to with questions about faith

All great stuff, don’t you agree? Reading through the benefits of prayer before school helps to build our motivation for creating this amazing habit. Once you’re ready to start praying with and over your child(ren) before each school day, check out the following tips.

tips for praying with your kids before school:

  1. Keep it low pressure! Our goal is to introduce prayer as something that is enjoyable and beneficial, not stressful, or an obligation. We get to pray, as a privilege! The more positive memories your child associate with prayer, the more likely it is that they will choose a lifestyle of prayer as they get older. 
  2. Model a lifestyle of prayer before your kids. Children will do as you do, not as you say! Praying with them and over them is a great way to model your own prayer life before then! However, if you only pray before their school day, they will only pray before their school day. Even though praying before school is the habit that we are trying to create, make sure your children also see you modeling Prayer throughout the day, having regular and healthy conversations with God. Great opportunities for this are before/during meals (“I thank God that we always have enough to eat, I feel very grateful”), during car rides (“What do you guys see out your window that you want to give God thanks for? I’m glad they are finally fixing our street so we can drive on it without all the stress”), and during difficult parenting moments (“Wow, this has been such a frustrating day for us! God, please give me the patience I need right now. I really need help to keep my temper in check. Amen.”).
  3. Keep it short! Again, we want children to find prayer enjoyable and to be able to associate the benefits of prayer with the prayer itself. We don’t want to overwhelm them with a long prayer, nor do we want to confuse them! Either create a three or four line prayer that you will say every single day as something to memorize, or only pray for about 30 seconds to a minute at a time so it is brief and direct. 
  4. Keep it consistent! The key to creating and sustaining any habit is consistency. The aim is to make prayer just another part of your kids’ school day, their routine, their life. Let prayer become who they are, not just what they do. The only way to achieve this is to be consistent.

Whew! So, it may sound harder than it is. However, as someone who grew up praying with my family before every single day of school, I am attest to the fact that it truly has the potential to accomplish the outcomes we hope for!

Here is the prayer I’ve been using daily since my oldest began preschool a year ago: 

Dear God, 

As I take my baby to school, I pray for (child’s name), I pray for the teachers, I pray for the students. 

May you help him/her to listen and learn,

May you allow him/her to grow and thrive,

May he/she always know that he/she is safe and loved. 

In Jesus’ name, amen! 

Saying this prayer in the car before getting out to drop off my sweet child became a moment of pause, calm, and reassurance. It helped me to manage my own separation anxiety around my child beginning school, and it became something that he memorized and said with me. I often paused at the end for him to say on his own that that he is “SAFE and LOVED”! It became our affirmation, our collective declaration. Feel free to use our prayer or to follow the template and adapt for the specific blessings you want to speak over your child. I am praying for a great school year for my child and yours! 

Onward and upward!

MENTAL HEALTH: How to Change Behavior

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by Alexis Rosendo

If you’re like me, you have at some point found yourself in a position where you are really frustrated with a behavior that it seems you just can’t change. Maybe you’re someone who sleeps with a stuffed animal and absolutely, positively, cannot sleep a wink without it. Or maybe you were tired of biting your nails, but nothing you had tried has helped you to stop. Or maybe you find yourself telling a bunch of ‘white lies’ in order to impress people and it makes you feel awful afterwards. Whatever the behavior is, it is one that is no longer helpful or appropriate (or maybe it never was?) and it feels impossible to change this behavior and keep it changed, long-term. Haven’t we all been there? It’s amazing that we want to change our unhelpful, habitual behaviors; however, in order to do so, it is important that we understand the role that behavior plays in our lives.

ALL ABOUT BEHAVIOR

On a very basic level, behavior is functional. That means that everything that we do serves a purpose or a function, and that behaviors meet needs. Now, when we say needs, this includes both big and small, superficial and deep-rooted, conscious and subconscious needs. So, for example, in one moment you may need to feel beautiful, and in the next you may need to eat something, and later you may have a need for companionship. From these needs you would engage in behaviors that would make you feel beautiful, get you something to eat, or place yourself around current or potential friends.

Whether we realize it or not, no one ever does anything for no reason. There is always a reason. It is not always easy to figure out that reason, but figuring it out is actually an early step to changing whatever behavior that you want to change: you have to figure out why the behavior exists. What need is this behavior meeting in your life?

What need is this behavior meeting in your life?

The behavior that you want to change is currently feeding something in you. It is meeting a need for you, and whether that need is a good need or a bad need is not relevant to changing the behavior. What we have to understand is that if a behavior is meeting a need, and all behavior is meeting a need, then this behavior will never be able to be changed long-term unless we find another way for that need to be met.

To give you a practical example: Imagine you are someone who suffers with emotional eating. You overeat. Try as you might, you’ve never been able to reign in the habit of indulging in food past the point of being full and almost to the point of being sick. Afterwards, you feel horrible and wish you had never done it, but still the next day you are back at it. Eating and eating and overeating. You would want to explore what need this behavior is meeting in your life. Why do you overeat? Maybe the eating makes you feel better when you are sad and depressed. Maybe the eating alleviates anxiety when you are having spiraling, intrusive thoughts. Maybe the eating helps you get closer to your desired weight, which helps you get closer to feeling good about how you look. Whatever the reason is, it is important to identify it because that need will continue to exist regardless of what behavior is meeting it. That need still needs to be addressed. So if you are overeating because it helps you with your sadness and depression, you will need to find a replacement behavior that is just as effective in meeting that need (making you feel better about your sadness and depression) in order to resolve the maladaptive behavior of overeating. The same would go for alleviating anxious thoughts or helping you to feel better about your body. In order to change that behavior long-term, we can’t just try not to overeat. We engage in the replacement behavior that meets the need, and once the need is being met in another way, the unhealthy or maladaptive behavior would actually resolve on its own since it is no longer needed. Cool, huh?

Here’s a step-by-step process to guide behavior modification. 

  1. What behavior do I want to change? 
  2. Why do I want to change this behavior? Why now?
  3. When do I do this behavior? Where do I do this behavior? What feelings are attached to doing this behavior, as in what do I feel before I do the behavior? What do I feel after I do the behavior?
  4. How is this behavior helping me? What need is it meeting in my life? What would I lose if I didn’t have this behavior?
  5. What is a replacement behavior that I could try to meet that same need?
  6. How effective is the replacement behavior at meeting the need for me? Do I need to try a different replacement behavior? How will I know if the replacement behavior meets my need?

All-in-all, behavior meets needs and your needs need to be met. If a bad behavior meets a need, the bad behavior will fade away once you put a good behavior in its place to meet that need. This isn’t an overnight fix, it takes time, effort, honesty, and intentionality… but it is possible and you can do it! You are already on your way just from desiring to change your unhelpful habits.

Of course, if you find yourself stuck on one of the 5 steps above, you can always reach out to mental health professionals in your area to receive support and accountability in exploring behavior, needs, and long-term change. Getting help is always a smart idea, and counseling is a great place to start.

Onward and upward!