It's Not As Simple as it Seems

For those of you who are MountainWings recipients, today the posting was about their server problems, and the fact changing out the server and getting the daily postings out was not as simple as it seems, as is true for many things in life.

Yet, in my line of work, as a social worker in a psychiatric prison, one of the things I repeatedly tell people is that what we teach them about self care is deceptively simple, too amazingly simple to sound good enough to be helpful...


And, yet it is helpful, and effective. One of the first things we teach patients when they come into the unit is about self care skills: We start with the basics: nutrition, hygiene, sleep, exercise, medication and treatment compliance. It is amazingly, deceptively simple, but it really lays a good foundation for more involved coping skills, including other behavior and thinking changes, such as relaxation skills, stress management and anger management techniques....


And, because the self care skills are so simple, many of our patients disregard their potential for being beneficial or disregard their importance. Yet, over and over again, when I can convince someone to start taking better care of themselves, they notice an improvement right away. Not a cure, just a better sense of well being...


So, this is one instance that life is truly simpler than it seems. It is not a panacea, but a basic foundation for more changes and improvements that are not as simple as they seem, and, as I am frequently told by patients, changes that are "easier said than done." But changes that can be less stressful when someone has a basically positive self care routine.....