Private Practice Development - 2 Quick Self-Care Strategies To Enhance Your Health & Business
About the Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Clinician Self-Care Strategies
Working in the field of mental health and sport psychology can be incredibly rewarding. There is no greater feeling than when you can successfully help someone improve their quality of life and reduce adverse mental health concerns. But doing this type of work can take a toll on clinicians, and while our industry preaches about self-care, many clinicians are not always as good as they should be about putting this into practice.
Being in private practice is more of a marathon than it is a sprint. Mental health clinicians need to treat their minds and bodies in the same way athletes should. For this Private Practice Review, I want to discuss two quick strategies that clinicians can look to use in order to improve their physical and mental performance. Let’s take a look at the first strategy: polar plunge.
Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, nor am I prescribing the polar plunge as a medical intervention, consult with your physician before trying.
Mental Health & Self-Care
There has been a recent rise in interest with using cryotherapy to speed up recovery. Some research seems to suggest that a certain amount of consistent cryotherapy use can decrease inflammation in the body. There are many different potential causes of inflammation, but one catalyst is psychological stress. When we think about the amount of psychological stress that mental health clinicians and sport psychologists encounter, it is reasonable to assume that the percentage risk for increase in inflammation within this population is a very strong likelihood. Frequently engaging in things like cryo-therapy or polar plunges (e.g. ice baths) are one possible way clinicians can manage this issue.
Private Practice & Goal Setting
When you are operating your own private practice, it can sometimes feel like you are living on an island. If enough time goes by, you might forget how you ended up on that island to begin with. In order to both combat the feelings associated with this experience and make sure that your motivation levels do not decrease, it’s important for clinicians to always re-evaluate their outcome, performance and process goals. Making sure that you are still moving towards goals that bring about authentic motivation is a great way to make sure that you are staying focused and never forgetting your purpose!
Note To Reader:
If you are an athlete reading this segment of the TRAINING REPORT, hopefully this content was helpful! I put the Training Report together because I felt like many of the discussions on issues such as the Yips/mental blocks, strength training & other subject matter on athlete performance concepts were really missing the mark on these ideas (e.g. how trauma is the direct cause of the Yips). If you are interested in learning more, make sure to subscribe below for when I put out new content on issues related to sport psychology & athlete performance! Also, if you are looking to work with a mental performance specialist, you are in the right place! USE THIS LINK to reach out to me to see if my services are the right fit for your goals!
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