How Trails Carolina is Raising Awareness About Mental Health

In the last decade, mental health has gone from something people are very hesitant to ever talk about to a genuine problem many people deal with to various degrees. No person should ever feel alone, which is why Trails Carolina has raised so much awareness for mental health since its inception.

As a wilderness therapy program in North Carolina, Trails Carolina, believes that what they do can change a person’s mindset in a relatively short time. Every person responds differently but having a holistic approach to therapy helps.

What are the main benefits of raising awareness about mental health? Students should see some (if not all) of these changes in their lives as time progresses.

Self-Care

Improving mental health is impossible without focusing on self-care to some degree. Too many people of all ages gloss over what they need to do to take care of themselves, and that all starts to pile up.

Developing healthy habits with self-care at Trails Carolina Wilderness Therapy is one of the tops focuses of the staff. It instantly starts a person off in the right mental state.

Confidence

A confident teenager tends to find success in life much more than someone struggling in this part of their life. Mental health plays a massive role in building confidence and keeping it. Confidence also instills the ability for people to pursue things outside their comfort zone that they might not otherwise do.

Wilderness therapy is excellent at giving teenagers that environment to succeed and then building up confidence. Once a teenager can accomplish certain things while out on their own in the mountains of an unknown area, they can start to see confidence in other parts of their life.

Nutrition

What a growing teenager puts in their body can significantly impact their overall well-being. Believe it or not, nutritional health can impact mental health quite a bit.

It’s a part of the wilderness therapy program for teenagers to have the opportunity to develop great eating habits when they are at Trails Carolina. They have options that allow them to make excellent eating choices that can improve their mental health and well being. Doing this can help them with essential healthy eating habits that they can bring with them back home.

A great diet’s impact on a person can be noticeable within a few days. Teenagers have more energy, sleep better, are more alert during class, and feel better about themselves. Ignoring nutrition puts every single person at a significant disadvantage.

Proper Medication

We should embrace the correct type of medication for students to live a healthy lifestyle. Many are taught that all medications are harmful, but teenagers must have suitable options available to improve their mental health. If that means a valid prescription for medication to take daily, students should stick with it.

Teenagers get in trouble if they start to self-medicate or fall into drugs and alcohol. That can have a severely negative impact on mental health, which turns into much more significant issues as well.

Stress Management

Every student at Trails Carolina is required to participate in the mindfulness curriculum for various reasons. Being able to manage stress healthily is high on the list as many students at Trails Carolina struggle with mental health. Everyone deals with stress to some degree; regulating stress is important.

The goal of the curriculum is for students to learn how to properly observe their emotions instead of always having strong reactions to everything. Taking time to regulate stress makes many activities so much easier.

Yoga

Yoga is the one activity that can prove beneficial both physically and mentally for students at the Trails Carolina Wilderness Therapy Program. For many students, this can be a time where they can learn to relax and control their stress by not taking everything in all at once.

There’s plenty of evidence that shows that spending just a little bit of time on yoga can make a huge difference. There’s also the opportunity for students to stay active in other ways, but yoga is just as valuable physically as it is mentally.

Why Mental Health Matters So Much To Trails Carolina

It’s a core part of living a better life. The curriculum focuses on mental health for this reason. The team hopes that by raising awareness for mental health, it loses its stigma as something people don’t feel comfortable talking about.

This approach isn’t made out of thin air. Trails Carolina has decades of experience and proven results to show that focusing on mental health works. Students come to Trails Carolina needing their changes unique to themselves. One improvement can benefit everyone.