Living Your Best Life: Practical Strategies for Emotional Wellness

Week of June 29, 2024

Learn effective, practical strategies for coping with challenging thoughts and feelings so you can live your best and healthiest life!

Living Your Best Life: Practical Strategies for Emotional Wellness
It is normal to struggle with sadness, anxiety, procrastination, and stress from time to time. Unfortunately, many people get “stuck” in these experiences and find their quality of life significantly diminished as a result. In recent decades, clinical psychologists have developed and tested effective strategies for attaining and maintaining emotional wellness. This presentation provides an overview of practical strategies designed to help people maintain a positive outlook, overcome procrastination and avoidance, face their fears, and focus their energy on the things that are truly important to them. Follow-up workshops will delve deeper into specific strategies.

Harnessing Happiness
One of my mentors once said, “Our minds are like Teflon for the good stuff and Velcro for the bad stuff.” This analogy reflects a hard truth – the human brain is hard-wired to focus on the negative. Our brain does this to look out for threat and keep us safe, but the result is that many of us find it challenging to focus on the good things in life. Thankfully, effective strategies have been developed to help us train our minds to focus on the positive and their use often results in improved mood and more fulfilling lives.

Maintaining Motivation
We all put off things we need to do, things we should do, and, sometimes, even things we want to do. In fact, many people name procrastination as one of their biggest barriers to a happier and more fulfilling life. Nearly a century of research on motivation and reinforcement have led to the development of effective strategies to help us overcome procrastination so that we can get things done and move forward in life, even when we just don’t feel like and our minds are telling us it’s just too hard.

Facing Your Fears
Nearly 1/3 of Americans report significantly distressing and impairing anxiety at some point in their life. Many millions more have significant fears and phobias (some rational, some irrational) that hold them back. What if instead of avoiding the things we are afraid of, we leaned into them instead? Western research on how the human brain learns and Eastern traditions rooted in mindfulness have been integrated in recent years to develop effective strategies for facing your fears. Learn how to overcome fear and anxiety once and for all so that you can live your best life.

 

Dr. Richard LeBeau is a licensed clinical psychologist whose career has been dedicated to improving mental health treatment. After graduating from Colgate University, he completed over 10 years of training in clinical psychology at University of California, Los Angeles, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Harvard Medical School. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, primarily focused on treating depression and anxiety, and maintains a private practice in Beverly Hills. He currently works at Lyra Health, where he helps the company further its mission to expand access to high-quality mental health care across the globe.