Mental Health: Hope and Recovery · Mind Body Spirit.fm

How Valerie and Helen (Mostly) Outsmart Negativity

·50 min·2 clips

The gratitude list that changed everything: a woman goes from 'wasted year' to 'I had a good year.'

Hosts Helen Sneed and Valerie Milburn, both with lived experience of severe mental illness, explore practical strategies to combat negativity and achieve personal goals. They frame this episode around the common struggle of maintaining New Year's resolutions and the more effective alternative of structured goal-setting. Helen and Valerie distinguish a resolution as a firm decision from a goal, which is an actionable aim requiring effort and planning. Helen shares her current physical health goals: reducing sugar by skipping a daily muffin and limiting dessert to once weekly, and adding a hilly walk twice a week to her Pilates routine. Valerie discusses her mental health goal of maintaining wellness through sleep, diet, exercise, prayer, and community connection, noting a recent strategy of speaking her "truth" to trusted support people. The hosts examine goal-setting for work, finances, and relationships, with Valerie revealing a calculated $700 annual savings from forgoing her bakery muffin. Helen describes making an unprecedented gratitude list of over 15 positive accomplishments from the past year, which dramatically shifted her perspective. A key insight is the SMART goal framework, where a goal must be Specific, Measurable, and Time-bound, exemplified by the sentence "I will walk two times this week." They discuss using Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills, like clarifying personal values, to combat procrastination, self-doubt, and setbacks. Helen reveals that accepting the possibility she might never finish her novel paradoxically freed her to pursue it without negativity. Valerie emphasizes that accepting her bipolar disorder and occasional challenges is a counterintuitive but crucial part of outsmarting negativity. The tone is conversational, educational, and deeply personal, blending structured advice with vulnerable anecdotes from the hosts' own recovery journeys. Listeners seeking practical, non-clinical self-improvement strategies from peer experts will find immense value, while those preferring clinical or purely scientific approaches might find it less applicable.

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