In his 2024 Wellness Academy lecture, Ravi Prasad, PhD, explored strategies for overcoming common barriers to personal change and wellness.
In this insightful Q&A, Dr. Prasad responds to audience questions on managing wellness when facing work and family demands, overcoming emotional barriers to change, improving sleep quality, and practicing self-care as a caregiver. His practical advice encourages individuals to embrace wellness as an integral part of daily life, rather than a separate task on an already packed schedule.
About the expert: Ravi Prasad, PhD
Ravi Prasad, PhD, is a psychologist by training and currently Clinical Professor and Director of Behavioral Health in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. His clinical work focuses primarily on evaluation and treatment of individuals suffering from acute and chronic pain conditions.
Q&A with Ravi Prasad, PhD
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Q: How can someone prioritize wellness when they have multiple competing demands like work, family, and social commitments?
Dr. Prasad: So how to prioritize wellness, especially when we have so many competing factors, is the reason we need to have that wellness. And I wouldn’t say that wellness is something in addition to, or an additional task. Wellness is something that is embedded among all of those things. Right? In all of those different domains we want to make sure that we are taking care of ourselves. So wellness, really, should be something that permeates in all of those different domains.
How would you prioritize it? I would say it should be a priority, but it’s not necessarily let me do my wellness first and then I will worry about work stuff, and then family stuff. Instead of separating wellness from other commitments, incorporate it within them. For instance, make self-care part of your work and family routines. Rather than setting wellness aside as something to tackle only after other responsibilities, let it permeate through all your activities, ensuring you’re taking care of yourself in each area of life.
Q: For someone new to wellness practices, should they start with physical or mental exercise?
I would say whichever one is easiest for you, because if you start with something that feels insurmountable, like say for example, if exercise has never been a part of your life and you tell yourself you are going to jog for an hour everyday. That can seem like a dramatic sift that places a significant burden on you.
But with diet, for example, if it’s something where you say you’re just going to cut back and only have one soda per day, that might be easier. With any big task, break it down into smaller pieces.
For example, start taking the stairs at work instead of taking the elevator. So with any of the areas you that you start with, there’s no sequence in what you should do, it’s just whatever is easiest for you, and try to find spaces that make sense and where you can maximize your success.
And when you’re not successful, don’t be hard on yourself. Any time that we make changes in our lives, it can be stressful. And our brains and our bodies like to stick with what’s familiar, even if that’s not the healthiest thing for us. And so it’s an effortful process to try to do some of these different things.
We take two steps forward, three steps back, two steps forward, one step back; that’s how growth occurs. Be kind to yourself as you make changes.
Q: What emotional barriers often prevent people from making changes?
At the most extreme level, from a clinical perspective, if people do have significant depression or anxiety at a clinical stage, that can certainly be a barrier. A lot of times it can also be a circumstance where you known you’re feeling something, but can’t quite understand what it is. So not necessarily clinical depression or anxiety, but just some tendencies toward depression, tendencies towards anxiety, where you know there is some pattern that’s occurring in your life that is maladaptive. And in those moments, where you are getting outcomes that aren’t satisfactory to you, you end up feeling stuck.
I think that is one of the biggest barriers, and that people usually have those two things, either on the more extreme where there is a true clinical issue or just kind of that feeling of not knowing how to move forward. They know something needs to change, they want something to change, but they just don’t know how. Recognizing these feelings and seeking support can be key to moving forward.
Q: Insomnia undermines my wellness practices. Can any of these wellness tips help me sleep?
Absolutely. Sleep is something that is often unaddressed in our overall healthcare. If you don’t get a good nights rest, everything is going to be off-kilter the next day. Your physical functioning, emotional functioning, etc.
There are a wide range of factors that can influence our sleep. It’s rarely just 1 or 2 things that contribute to sleep issues. So with that, I would try to look at some of the low hanging fruit. What are some small changes you can make to address your sleep?
In terms of the things that I discussed in my session, there are some strategies that you can use to help improve your sleep. A lot of time people have a very overactive mind that interferes with the ability to fall asleep at night. So doing some breathing exercises can be helpful. If there is a lot of self-critical thinking that happens at night or a lot of worrisome thoughts, you can try to do some cognitive restructuring work before you go to bed, and then some breathing exercises to help yourself get into a calmer state so that sleep can come from that.
So simple answer, yes, you can use some of these strategies, but it will likely take a lot of repetition and a lot of time to see the benefits from them, so be patient with the process.
Q: I’m a 78-year-old caregiver for a 92-year-old homebound elder. How can I stay focused and avoid absorbing the surrounding stress?
That is a great question, taking care of others can be an exceptionally challenging thing. So one of the most important things to do is make sure you’re taking care of yourself as you’re taking care of that other person. And there is nothing selfish about self-care. A lot of times people feel like if they take a few moments for themselves that there is something greedy about that, which is absolutely not the case. Because the reality is, if you don’t take the time to take care of yourself, there won’t e enough of you there to take care of that 92 year old person.
So make sure that you are taking some time out for yourself, and you might achieve this by looking at your day and carving out little times that you can have for yourself. It might look like taking an hour or even a few minutes during lunch to yourself. Or adding in a couple of minutes here and there just to make sure you’re focusing on yourself and then building up from that.
It’s critically important to make sure you’re maintaining your own well-being, and it’s easier said than done.
Watch Dr. Prasad’s full 2024 Wellness Academy session.
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