Trust Your Intuition: 100 Ways to Transform Anxiety and Depression for Stronger Mental Health 
In this episode of A Healthy Bite, we are discussing how to help our kids have healthier minds.

Meet Jill Sylvester, a licensed mental health counselor and author of two books that can help parents and children strengthen their mental health.

* A Young Adult novel "The Land of Blue" which deals with the themes of depression, anxiety, and addiction and is essentially a self-help book for all ages under the guise of YA fantasy fiction. It's a reliable tool for parents to help their children navigate OCD.
* A self-help book, "Trust Your intuition: 100 ways to transform anxiety and depression for stronger mental health." 

While there are hundreds of steps to choose from, in her book, here are a few simple actions that, if you stick with them, will bring about results and help you transform anxiety.
List 3 things you're grateful for every morning
Use a journal or make a mental note. By stating what you feel thankful for, you rise above the negative chatter in your mind.
Take an afternoon break
Breaks allow you to hit the pause button, helping you manage your emotions, so they don't get the better of you. Every afternoon, go out for a coffee. Or stretch, walk, or do whatever else helps you refresh. 
Schedule regular mental health days
Days off nourish you like breaks. To make sure they happen, schedule monthly mental health days—a day to look forward to, to rest and refuel. 
Trust your intuition
Recall that feeling of this is a definite yes, do that, go on that retreat, make that call, risk looking foolish. Don't doubt these feelings: they are signs pointing you in the right direction.
Building an intuition you can trust
Jill says that flexing your intuition muscle is a learning process, some of the steps she guides her clients through include:  
Start small
Focus on day-to-day decisions such as food choice or minor requests you've received. Check-in with yourself about what you really feel is best.
Switch out of autopilot
When you're operating on autopilot, it's easy to be swayed by other people's choices. Don't let the voice of the inner gremlins steering you in the wrong direction take over. 
Check-in with yourself
Do you feel expanded, open, and relaxed at the prospect of doing something, or tight, agitated, and restricted? The latter points to saying "no…"
Practice
Practice all of the above. The more you do it, the better you will get at it.

Over time you will see that in trusting your intuition, you will be able to act and choose from a place of confidence, self-assuredness, and self-possession.
Useful Tool for Anxiety
Trust Your Intuition contains five sections that focus on how to: Hold On through some of the most grueling feelings of anxiety and depression; Take Good Self-Care; Believe; Trust Your Intuition, and Feel Better. 

The book is a great reference tool; flip through when you need to find just the right tool for a particular challenge. For example: 

* Is anxiety creeping up on you? Play the "And Then What?" game, running the anxiety all the way through to a place where you emerge unscathed—or laughing!
* Are you feeling overwhelmed or on the verge of panic? Take a moment to distance yourself from the source.
* Is your child feeling anxious? Show him how to use the 'tighten and release' technique to help tension leave his body.