Mental health ideas you can actually use.

Notes On

Staying for the Next Minute

September is National Suicide Prevention Month.

Years ago, I worked overnight shifts at the Samaritans suicide hotline in New York City. Some calls lasted five minutes. Others lasted fifteen. Sometimes a call dropped before there was any real sense of an ending. Some calls frightened me. I often never knew what happened next.

What I remember most is this: in many ways, many callers seemed less interested in dying and more interested in finding a way for their suffering to stop.

That is my personal observation, not a universal truth. Suicidal thoughts can hold many meanings, and every person deserves to be taken seriously.

We sometimes imagine suicide prevention as a dramatic rescue. More often, it may look much quieter. A voice answers. Someone listens without rushing to correct, cheer up, or explain away the pain. For five or fifteen minutes, that person’s suffering no longer happens in complete isolation.

Research on crisis hotlines has found that suicidal callers, on average, can experience less distress, hopelessness, and suicidal urgency during a call. Research cannot tell us what one particular conversation prevented. Still, it supports something I felt during those overnight hours: presence can create a little space inside a moment that feels closed.

This week, practice staying before solving. If someone tells you they cannot go on, ask directly whether they are thinking about suicide. Listen. Help them connect with trained support.

You don’t need the perfect sentence or the perfect answer. You just need enough steadiness to stay for the next minute, knowing that sometimes the bravest part of any call is simply that it was made.

A little deeper: Gould and colleagues’ study of changes in suicidal callers during crisis-hotline calls.

Need support? In the United States, call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org to connect with the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. If there is immediate danger, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.

Notes On...

The Feeling Under “Fine”

Someone asks how you are, and “fine” arrives before you’ve even checked.

Fine can mean fine, of course. It can also mean tired, disappointed, lonely, overstimulated, relieved, or angry in a way that doesn’t feel convenient.

Many of us learned to move quickly from feeling to fixing. We explain it away. We scroll. We make a list. We tell ourselves that somebody else has it worse.

But an emotion doesn’t always need a solution first. Sometimes it needs a name.

Researchers call this affect labeling: putting a feeling into words. In one brain-imaging study, labeling emotional facial expressions was associated with reduced activity in the amygdala and greater activity in a region involved in regulation. That doesn’t mean one word will erase distress. It suggests that language may help create a little room around what we feel.

Try this without turning it into a pop quiz. Pause and say, “Something in me feels…” Then choose the closest honest word. Not the perfect word. The closest one.

If “anxious” feels too broad, maybe it’s exposed. If “sad” doesn’t quite fit, maybe it’s homesick, left out, or tender. You can even hold 2 truths at once: excited and afraid, grateful and grieving.

Naming a feeling isn’t the same as becoming it. “I feel lonely” leaves more space than “I am alone.” One describes weather moving through you. The other can sound like the whole sky.

You don’t need to argue with every inner storm. Sometimes you can simply name the rain.

A little deeper: Lieberman and colleagues’ 2007 study of affect labeling and emotional reactivity.

Just be with that for a moment.

Notes On...

Not Rushing Your Next Season

September has a way of making us feel late. The light changes. Calendars fill. Even the air seems to whisper that it’s time to get serious.

Suddenly, the goals we set aside in June return with clipboards.

But transition isn’t the same thing as transformation. A new season can invite change without demanding that you become a new person by Monday.

Sometimes growth looks less like a dramatic reveal and more like noticing what no longer fits.

Psychological research offers a useful counterweight to all that pressure. Across 79 studies, self-compassion showed a meaningful relationship with well-being. In plain language, people tend to do better when they meet struggle with care instead of turning every hard moment into evidence against themselves.

That doesn’t mean letting yourself off the hook. It means putting down the whip.

Shame may create urgency, but it rarely creates the kind of safety that helps lasting change take root.

So before you decide what this season must become, ask a smaller question: What might I need while I’m becoming?

Maybe the answer is structure. Maybe it’s rest, grief, courage, or one honest conversation.

Let September be a doorway, not a deadline. You’re allowed to cross it at a human pace.

A little deeper: Zessin, Dickhäuser, and Garbade’s 2015 meta-analysis of self-compassion and well-being.

Just be with that for a moment.