"Trust Your Intuition: 100 Ways to Transform Anxiety and Depression for Stronger Mental Health"
Do you ever wish that when feelings of anxiety or depression start creeping in, a caring, supportive therapist was right there, helping you break past the dark thoughts and emotions?
Enter licensed mental health counselor and wellness coach, Jill Sylvester. Her new book Trust Your Intuition: 100 Ways to Transform Anxiety and Depression for Stronger Mental Health will make it seem like she is there beside you, coaching you through the techniques she uses with the adults, adolescents, children and parents she counsels in her private practice.
Sylvester’s first book, Land of the Blue, won a Mom’s Choice Award in 2018.
Couched in personal anecdotes about this author’s struggle with anxiety and depression and her path to overcoming them, Trust Your Intuition provides that reassuring voice we all crave when feeling uncertain, dark or down.
“This book is an easy read and has allowed me to think things through before always acting on my anxiety,” said Robin Dorner, The Gayly editor in chief. “I knew when I read, ‘Anxiety is how the body sends us messages that capture our attention, alerting us to the trigger thought or situation that preceded the anxious feeling’ that I was reading a book I needed to read.
“Among many other great tips, this author reminds us of how our mental health is affected by how we care for our bodies with exercise and diet, going outside every day, enjoying pets and just loving ourselves.”
Its five sections focus on how to: Hold on through some of the most grueling feelings of anxiety and depression, take good self-care, believe, trust your intuition and feel better. Written in a warm, conversational tone accessible to all, the book is easy to read, re-read, or flip through when you need to find just the right tool for a challenge.
- Is anxiety creeping up on you? Play the “And then what?” game, running the anxiety all the way through to a place where you emerge unscathed—or laughing!
- Feeling overwhelmed or on the verge of panic? Take a moment to distance yourself from the source.
- Want to set yourself up for a peaceful, anxiety-free day? List three to five things you are grateful for when you first wake up. Check-in with yourself through exercise or meditation before checking your phone.
- Are your children feeling anxious? Show them how to use the ‘tighten and release’ technique to help tension leave their body. Bonus: you can do this too!
- Are you unnerved by your inner gremlins’ negative voices? Learn to outsmart them by talking back.
- Worried that your next bad day is right around the corner? Don’t wait for it to happen. Prevent it by scheduling regular mental health days off.
Above all, Trust Your Intuition delivers this powerful reminder: your intuition never lies. Through practice, you can learn to tune into its voice and follow it like an inner navigation system. You can strengthen intuition too, like a muscle, and come to trust your inner voice.
Doing so—and following the tips in Trust Your Intuition—will reinforce your power to raise the bar for your life and overcome the feelings weighing you down. It’s simply a matter of deciding you truly want something different, Sylvester says not just in theory, but in action.
Trust Your Intuition: 100 Ways to Transform Anxiety and Depression for Stronger Mental Health is 218 pages ($14.95) and available in paperback through Amazon & Noble and more.
The author, Jill Sylvester, is a licensed mental health counselor who has worked with adults and children in private practice for nearly ten years. She has been quoted in Oprah Magazine, and She Knows. Her first book, the novel The Land of Blue, is the recipient of a Mom’s Choice Award.
The Gayly. 9/19/2019 @ 7:02 a.m. CST