Taking the big step towards mental well-being can come with lots of questions and indecisiveness, especially when you are unsure and yet convinced about why you should seek help and see a therapist.
People seek help for different reasons, which could be either major mental health diagnoses, traumatic events, or day-to-day stress such as work pressure, relationship issues, or financial worries.
Seeking help from a therapist is a powerful step towards taking control of your mental health. Nonetheless, before walking into a therapist’s office, you must be properly informed about the main purpose of therapy so that you can use it best.
Let’s get right into it!
Signs you need to see a therapist
1. You constantly feel overburdened
Stress can be excruciating at times and can weigh you down.
A major sign that you need to see a therapist is when you’re having recurring overwhelming feelings. You feel tired and heavy on most days. You’re gradually losing your smile and seem to have lost your ability to push through stress and the hubbub of life. Even the seemingly weightless tasks overwhelm you. Then, it’s time to see a qualified therapist.
Therapy equips you with the right tools to manage persistent anxiety, headaches, lack of concentration, or forgetfulness, making you feel better prepared to face life’s challenges.
2. You don’t function at your best anymore.
Optimum functionality is one of the significant ways to know whether you’re healthy. These signs could mean you’re unable to do your job well, missing deadlines, or falling short of your responsibilities at home or work.
You’ve been receiving complaints from your boss, and you are mostly not in the right frame to fully immerse yourself in your work. You don’t do impressive work, and you are absent-minded.
Seeing a therapist will help you better process your feelings and regain the energy to function at your optimum best!
3. You can’t regulate your emotions.
Emotional regulation is a skill that must be learned. If you’ve been acting aggressively lately or have anger outbursts, it’s time to get help!
Sometimes, emotions come in handy, but the ability to control your feelings, whether anxiety or anger, determines how well you’ve mastered them. Intense thoughts, chronic stress, irritability, yelling, rage, frequent emotional breakdowns, and situations stirring you to react are signs that you need to see a therapist. A therapist would help you adopt coping mechanisms to reduce anxiety so it doesn’t get the best of you.
4. You’re experiencing difficulties managing relationships.
Relationship issues sometimes have an underlying cause. If you notice that you are experiencing too many conflicts in your relationships or feel resentment toward your friends or close ones, you’ve got to see a therapist.
Likewise, feelings of resentment, dissatisfaction, or the inability to master interpersonal relationships could be due to violating boundaries from one or both ends. Lack of healthy boundaries can cause relationships to fail and friends to fall out. If you feel stuck in your relationships, the best way out is to seek help.
5. You’ve experienced trauma.
Whether it’s trauma experienced a long time ago or a recent occurrence, you must see a therapist. Traumatic events could be in the form of divorce, war, loss of a loved one, sexual assault, family dysfunction, or a life-threatening accident.
Constant flashbacks, anxiety, tremors, PTSD, or avoidance are signs that the trauma you went through is still somewhere lurking in your body or your mind.
It’s safe to know that trauma isn’t in the magnitude of the incident. Instead, it depends mainly on how we respond to stressful events. Meanwhile, trauma affects us when our fight/flight system tries to answer in stressful circumstances but fails.
You might have been traumatized by a toxic workplace culture, financial hardship, lack of mutual efforts in your relationships, or a verbally abusive partner.
If you notice that the trauma you’ve experienced keeps affecting how you think, your emotions, your behaviour, or even your relationships, you need to book a session with a therapist immediately.
However, you must be matched with a qualified therapist to meet your needs.
6. You experience anxiety a lot more than usual.
Panic attacks, nervousness, tremors, and consistent irritability are signs that you are struggling with anxiety, which is an abnormal state of one’s mind. Persistent feeling of anxiety shows that something is wrong, and yours is to pay keen attention in finding a solution- Therapists provide solutions!
Seeing a therapist would make you understand major stressors and help you navigate your emotions even when it gets disturbing. A therapist can provide you with coping strategies, help you identify triggers, and guide you in managing your emotions effectively.
7. You’re grieving, or you lost a loved one.
Navigating grief can feel like a cold, lonely, and distressing journey. You could be grieving the death of your loved one, loss of your job, friendship loss/ breakup, or a life you wish you could have.
Grief is the natural way your nervous system responds to loss, and depending on how you respond, it could take a toll on your mental health. You might be unable to concentrate, function optimally at work, or have an extended time getting over the shock of the event.
The rollercoaster of emotion surmounted during grief isn’t a weight you should handle alone. At this phase, you need much hope in your soul and strength to pull through the highs and lows.
Seeking therapy or grief counselling would help you learn how to walk through this dark phase. While therapy can address a wide range of mental health issues, grief counselling is specifically designed to help individuals cope with the loss of a loved one or other significant losses.
8. You are going through a life transition.
Journeying through life automatically pulls specific transitions our way. Getting married, changing cities, switching jobs, getting used to a new environment, changing apartments, taking up the role of a new mom, interacting with a new boss, or the unforeseen re-directions on our paths are phases that come with big emotions.
These transitions come with responsibilities and challenges that demand that we adapt and build strength to maneuver. While all of these go on, your mental health is doing a lot of work. While physically stressed, you’re also feeling a lot, and your mind is doing a massive amount of work figuring things out. Resilience is vital, yeah? But you still need to be equipped for the new level of stretching.
The stress level you are exposed to during a transition phase requires you to talk it out. If getting through a season like this starts getting complicated and overwhelming, you must see a qualified therapist.
9. Your sleeping and eating habits have changed.
When your sleeping and eating pattern gradually gets disrupted, it’s a significant sign that you’re not fine mentally. You could be oversleeping by spending more hours in bed or finding it difficult to close your eyes and rest at bedtime. Sleeping more than usual is a profound sign of depression, while insomnia is a sign of stress and anxiety disorder.
Research shows that the gut and brain have an intimate relationship. Microbes in the gut release chemical neurotransmitters, which the gut and brain relay messages through.
Therefore, changes in eating patterns can be traced to your brain and emotional health. Most times, over-eating becomes a way we adapt to cope with uncomfortable emotions that are irritable, especially when it becomes unbearable.
If you have found any of these signs, it’s time to seek help.
10. You withdraw and avoid social gatherings.
You suddenly lose interest in eating dinner with your family at night, prefer drinking coffee alone rather than with your colleagues, or stay home on occasions like family trips.
Signs of withdrawal could also include avoiding social interactions or staying numb in conversations that would naturally interest you.
If you intentionally spend most of your time alone, it could mean that you are experiencing depression and anxiety. Some people naturally like to be by themselves. However, when it becomes an extreme case of isolation, such a state is a red flag and an indicator that you are mentally stressed.
Seeing a therapist would help you know the cause of your withdrawal mechanisms and manage situations better.
11. You use substances to cope.
Managing pain can be exhausting. However, using hard substances to cope is more debilitating. Most times, we turn to drugs, alcohol, and hard substances to get rid of the feelings of pain, distract ourselves, and feel better in the short term.
12. You can’t get over negative thoughts.
Do you struggle with negative thoughts about yourself, the people around you, or even the future?
You can’t help it; they slip through your mind, and it feels like you’re going crazy.
Negative thoughts spread like wildfire, and they spiral into negative feelings. This recurring cycle of negative thinking can lead to a mental breakdown, with negative and scary thoughts turning to your default thought pattern. These intrusive thoughts can come as having a negative perception of yourself, self-sabotage, low self-esteem, self-loathing, feelings of hopelessness, or suicidal thoughts.
Developing the systemic approach to overcome these thoughts can be learned, and you need a therapist to help you know how to control your thoughts.
13. You don’t enjoy the things you used to love anymore.
The activities that sparked a fire in your heart no longer matter to you. You suddenly lose interest in taking strolls in the cool evening after you return from work. You’d rather spend time scrolling through Instagram than sit on the porch meditating like you did before. None of your hobbies get to you anymore.
Your sudden change in appetite toward the things that gave you joy in the past is a sign that you are not fine. Something has changed, and you must see a therapist.
14. You are being secretive and feel ashamed to disclose to people.
Keeping secrets, hiding information from close ones, and staying in the dark is a wild path. If you keep these secrets because you feel ashamed of yourself and cannot stand telling to a friend, a trusted family member, or your partner because of the gravity of the matter, then turning to a therapist is the right way to go.
You can be assured that your therapist will listen to you without judgment or criticism. They will make you feel safe and calm so you can let out all your secrets. Therapists are trained to keep patients’ information confidential so your secrets are safe.
15. You need someone to talk to
Take your time if you feel the urge to talk it all out! Research shows that openness and vulnerability are key ways to ensure mental well-being.
Talking it out will ease the burden and weight of your issues. You don’t have to bottle up your feelings, toughen up, and act like you’re fine. Expressing yourself with friends, family, or support groups is essential. It is equally important that you see a therapist who will give you clinical insight and counsel on managing your emotions better and navigating life.
Benefits of Seeing a Therapist
1. Learning new and better coping mechanisms
Withdrawing, people-pleasing, self-sabotage, overworking, spending excessive time scrolling through social media, passive aggression, overeating, and other unhealthy coping mechanisms are all toxic and a contributing factor to your mental health struggles.
Your therapist will assist you in learning how to deconstruct unhealthy coping mechanisms and adopt healthy ones for you to avail yourself through your mental health challenges.
Learning new coping mechanisms is a step closer to healing. The more you enact these healthy coping mechanisms daily, the more you can stay afloat through life’s challenges.
2. You enjoy unadulterated listening.
Therapists are trained to listen. As much as you are going into therapy to get help and counsel, it’s also the therapist’s job to listen to you with empathy and intense attention. Some people have never felt heard or seen all through their lives. A therapist is there to practice active listening the moment you step in to receive help.
Therapy gives you the space to express yourself, release irritating emotions, and divulge your fears, secrets, and struggles. You won’t be judged or criticized for how you feel or think. Therapy is a place to come as you are.
3. Improved skills for emotional regulation
Emotional regulation is your power over your emotions and how you react in trigger or challenging situations. Handling the rush of emotions in an overwhelming situation, such as at home, with your colleagues, or even at the grocery shop, can be a hassle.
Knowing how to “feel” yet be “cool” can be difficult. Your therapist will help you be self-aware. You will also learn not to be hard on yourself for your feelings and consciously practice shifting your thinking in that moment. You need to know that learning emotional regulation will require gradual and proper integration of your learnings into your daily life.
4. Improved communication skills
The therapy room grooms you for improved communication skills outside the four walls of the therapy room. You’ll get to articulate your thoughts better the next time you speak. Suppose you have been experiencing misunderstandings and conflicts in your relationships because of a lack of communication skills. In that case, a qualified therapist can help you develop assertive communication skills that will help you communicate your needs better, express yourself fluently, and say the right things at the right time. How you communicate applies to how it’s done with your partner, family, friends, and even colleagues at work.
Therapy lets you set proper boundaries and communicate them clearly, never looking back.
5. Healing from trauma
One of trauma’s difficulties is that it cuts deep into the soul and gets woven into the fabric of our behaviour and personality. No matter how hard it can be, you can work with a therapist who’ll work you through your journey into wholeness. A trauma therapist will help you manage your experience with PTSD and how trauma impacts you emotionally and psychologically.
Therapy will help you feel less triggered, alleviate symptoms, and practice reconstructing your thinking. There are a variety of trauma therapies, such as Cognitive-Based Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT).
Take the Next Step to Therapy
When you can’t handle it all alone, help yourself by booking a session with a trusted and qualified therapist that matches you. Each session with your therapist will ease your nervous system and change your life.
If your gut tells you to go, don’t resist. If you come from a culture that stigmatizes therapy and mental health, you’ve got to prioritize your well-being above any form of bias.
Seeing a therapist relieves you of the burden; don’t take two steps backward; go for it!
