I made a small graphic thinking about what helps me focus when things get to be too much.

I began to think about where I begin my mental health awareness. How do I become self-aware and how do I keep on track and moving forward?

These four squares came to me in simple ways. They are both simple and entrenched in my way of being. They are my touchstones. They are not necessarily yours. You will find your own touchstones and ways to cope with whatever comes up daily.

In a similar vein, I’d like to share an exercise that I did on a recent retreat with the Dominican Sisters. The main topic was time and how time affects our priorities and ways we can use to change them and shift where we spend our time. While this retreat wasn’t geared towards mental health and awareness of mental health, time plays an important role in how we perceive our mental health challenges and push and pull until we’re being intentional with our time and our mental health, emphasis on health.

Below I explain the exercise, and hope to come back to it in a couple of weeks. I plan to think my own choices and perhaps begin again.

How the exercise works is to lay out a checkerboard of nine squares, so more like a tic-tac-toe board. From top left to right, one to nine, put how you currently spend your time.

Here are some suggestions for things to put in your boxes:

1. Computer/Social Media
2. Exercise
3. Family
4. Friends
5. Leisure
6. Prayer/Meditation
7. Sleep
8. Work/Volunteering
9. Writing

Make a second nine square checkerboard and put how you’d like to spend your time.

How can you get from Board A to Board B?

And importantly, it doesn’t and won’t happen overnight. This retreat was five  months ago, and this is the first time I’m thinking about it and using it as part of my mental health awareness month.

I’d remind readers, and myself that tools are not meant to beat you over the head; they are to assist, and if something doesn’t assist, put it aside. For me, I’m going to pick one item from the bottom of my checkerboard and see if I can move it up higher for a week.

I hope this might be a possibility when we’re together on the next Mental Health Monday.

Until then…

Peace and health, and peaceful mental health.