Psychotherapy Guidelines: Why Are They So Important?

I will give you a phrase for life: mental health can also be trained. There are many patients who come to consultation with the goal of being well and with the desire to face and resolve the situations that arise in life. The problem? Many times, the suitcase of tools to deal with them has been left empty.

Psychologists can help people improve their lives and that is why we share psychotherapy tasks and guidelines that allow them to acquire new skills to get closer to the life they want to build and solve the problems they want to solve.

What are psychotherapy tasks and guidelines and what are they for?

Psychotherapy tasks and guidelines are exercises that serve to help people internalize other ways of solving situations and problems. There is a very important key to them: the greater the repetition, the greater and better the effect.

In these cases, the mental health professional is in charge of providing these instructions, which will be related to the personal process that the patient is experiencing at a given moment. These exercises can be presented in the form of assignments such as experiments, repetition exercises that allow them to observe patterns or train new skills and in other ways, as required by each person.

By keeping in mind that mental health is also trained, it becomes much easier to understand why psychotherapy tasks and guidelines are so important. Let’s take an example: when we decide to learn a skill, like playing tennis, we assume that there is a process that will lead us to improve with practice. There are several ways to achieve this knowledge: sign up for classes or be self-taught. The same could happen with the therapeutic process.

Imagine now that you have the willingness to take charge of your mental health. You have several options: go with a professional to have a personalized process or search for (reliable) information on the Internet about the specific issue you want to resolve. Although both might work at some point, but which one do you think will be faster and more accurate?

Thus, learning tennis without the teacher tends to take longer and usually generates worse results, The path to improving your mental health without professional and personalized guidance could overwhelm you, frustrate you, and lead to unwanted results (or slower).

The psychologist, especially within cognitive-behavioral therapy, proposes strategies and tasks to his client to manage conflicts, better express their needs, deal with uncomfortable sensations and deal with impatience and excessive self-demand. In the end, we are the people themselves who decide what to do and how, but there are many ways to do it.

Some examples of psychotherapy tasks and guidelines

Next, I will tell you some hypothetical situations followed by some tasks and guidelines that I could propose in each case:

Situation 1:

Suppose a person who is anxious. He feels pressure in his chest, he rests poorly, he has constant thoughts about the problems he had the day before at work with some colleagues. He reflects on the misinterpretation that may have been made of his words and looks for ways to explain his reasons for saying what he said. He tries to do things well with bosses and colleagues and strives so that no one can blame him for doing his job poorly.

If the goal is to moderate the importance of the opinions of others, it would be advisable to propose the following guidelines in psychotherapy:

For the next two weeks you will not preempt someone’s need once a day. Write down which one it was. This way you will show yourself that it is not so important to get others to value you positively all the time.

It is necessary that you live these two weeks understanding that it will probably be uncomfortable for you not to anticipate someone’s need, but it will not be as uncomfortable as you had believed. On the other hand, it is not necessary to avoid at all costs anticipating those needs at all times, the important thing is that when you say you are not going to do it, you live with your feelings.

Situation 2:

Suppose a person sleeps 3 hours less on Fridays and Saturdays and sleeps well. He is a bus driver on an interurban line. The anticipation of not being able to rest and the fear of falling asleep while behind the wheel produces great alertness and difficulty maintaining sleep throughout the night. If your goal is to improve your rest and manage your worry, we can suggest the following psychotherapy regimen:

Each night it is important that you only go to bed when you are sleepy. Don’t force yourself to sleep. Let’s start by assuming what is happening now. You are not sleeping and you spend the night thinking about how tired you are tomorrow. Since forcing yourself to sleep does not help you sleep, you have to reduce the obligation.

You cannot have any alarm clock in sight. It is important that you do not do the calculation every so often on the number of hours you have left of sleep. If you haven’t reconciled for more than 30 minutes, get out of bed and go to another room to read a novel.

Situation 3:

Let’s think about a person who suffers constant anxiety attacks. He fears that he could have a heart attack if his heart rate rises excessively. For this reason, he tries not to exert himself and always keep his heart at moderate acceleration levels.

If your goal is learn to regulate your nervous system and distinguish between truly threatening situations the following guideline could help you a lot in your situation:

Let’s do an experiment: I want us to climb a flight of ten stairs at a moderate pace and when we get to the top we stay still for about five minutes, letting our heart beat at its own pace. I want you to also focus on what you are feeling right now and not on what you fear will happen to you later.

I need you to live with the normal sensations of your body in a non-threatening environment like this, so that you can reduce your level of alertness to them. This is just a task to start, since we will evaluate others.

Do psychotherapy tasks and guidelines work?

There is a saying that “no one learns in someone else’s head” that is very present in these cases. People learn, mainly, from our experiences, not from what they tell us. The ability to think and analyze things is very important to understand and internalize, but learning is usually less intense and less lasting if we do not experience it.

In this sense, psychotherapy tasks and guidelines are key to integrate that knowledge from your own experiences, from your own body opening spaces to become aware of our actions every day.

The guidance of a professional who is aware of the patient’s reality and who knows the procedure adequately is vital to propose guidelines that generate results that would not otherwise be achieved. Psychotherapy tasks and guidelines do work, and they are very useful, especially when they are sequenced and adjusted to the learning that each person is doing. It is important to remember that a single experience is not enough to manage fears, blockages or discomfort, which is why consistency is so important.