Life changes causing anxiety? Mindfulness can help

This article originally appeared in the fall 2018 edition of Women's Health Source.

For moms, "back to school" is often a welcome relief from the noise and activity of kids at home all summer. This can hold true until the kids graduate and go off to college or move out on their own. Then the empty rooms and overall silence can be troubling.

When kids leave home, many moms experience "empty nest syndrome"—feelings of sadness and loneliness. Like other big changes in women's lives, empty nest syndrome is an example of an event that can sometimes turn into anxiety and deep depression.

Main Line Health's behavioral and mental health services provide outpatient treatment services to help women through tough times. Its supportive mental health therapy programs for people ages 18 and older sprinkles mindfulness throughout.

Therapeutic mindfulness is learning to tend to your needs in the present moment—what you're thinking, feeling and needing now—instead of worrying about the past or the future. For many people, anxiety is a spiral in the future. Their brains follow one worrisome thought to another, then another to another. Mindfulness teaches them to catch themselves before they get carried away.

Mindfulness helps women deal with all sorts of anxiety—from postpartum blues to empty nest syndrome, from a serious illness to the loss of a loved one. These coping skills help with what they're facing now and also equip them for a healthier, happier future.

Those who participate in these programs often say, "My anxiety is gone." But usually, they've instead learned to deal with anxiety in a different way. Women go through so many transitions. Mindfulness helps with coping with anxiety when it arises to able to get through the day and move on with life.

Main Line Health serves patients at hospitals and health centers throughout the western suburbs of Philadelphia, including our behavioral and mental health services which offers a host of inpatient and outpatient psychotherapy groups that address coping with anxiety.

To schedule an appointment with a behavioral health specialist at Main Line Health, 1.888.CARE.898 (227.3898).

Learn more about behavioral and mental health services at Main Line Health.