Practicing Mindfulness, Meditation, and Self-Care to Combat Stress for Military Families

By: Jason Jowers

Stress and stressful situations are issues that everyone must deal with and affects individuals and families in a multitude of different ways. This is even more true for military service members and their families. On top of daily, normal stressors, military families must deal with the stress of deployments, transitions, frequent moving, and the possibility of injury or death for the military service member in military combat. Military families need outlets and ways to cope with stressful situations.

There are tons of great resources available to military families to help mitigate stress and practice self-care. Below are several that we found interesting and would come in handy when working with military families in your practice.

• This first resource article comes from HPRC Online and emphasizes the importance of breathing properly, especially practicing breathing exercises to manage stress and anxiety. This includes ways to slow down you’re breathing in stressful times and teaches how to implement morning and nighttime breathing practices for every day.
• The National Center for PTSD at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs includes several apps for iOS and Android like PTSD Coach, and Mindfulness Coach, which are great resources to utilize to practice self-care and help deal with stress.
• The PTSD Coach includes information about PTSD and highlights treatments that work. The app also includes tools for screening and tracking symptoms, as well as ways to handle stress and direct links for support from medical and mental health professionals. The PTSD Coach is also great for managing troubling symptoms related to sleep, trauma reminders, and anger.
• The Mindfulness Coach includes info for people who may be experiencing emotional distress and for those wanting to maintain healthy coping practices. This app provides strategies to help overcome challenges as well as lets you log exercises to track your progress.
• This article from Mindful.org instructs on ways to get started practicing mindfulness and learning the basics of mindful meditation. This article also includes various mindful exercises to practice each day.
• Finally, here is one of our Resource Discovery blog posts that gives you the lowdown on an awesome mindfulness app called Chill Drills. Chill Drills is a collection of relaxation and mindfulness exercises for those within the military community. Read more in this blog for all things that are awesome with the amazing mindfulness app.

Hopefully, some of these resources will provide new tools to your stress management toolbox to use for yourselves and the military families you work with.

Blog Image: Photo from Pixabay [Yoga Lake by leninscape, April 13, 2017, CC0]