Your stomach feels like it’s in severe pain. You get a headache, and it feels debilitating. You feel a sharp pain in your leg, but despite no clear cut, the pain is extreme and unmanageable. Others may even comment that it seems like you have low pain tolerance, and you worry that you’re missing something more severe.
What if it’s your mental health?
When you’re dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma, or other mental health challenges, pain genuinely hurts more. This isn’t about being weak or dramatic. It’s about how your brain processes pain signals when you’re under psychological distress.
The connection between mental health and physical pain is real, measurable, and backed by neuroscience. Let’s talk about why this happens and what it means for anyone who’s ever felt like their pain response doesn’t match what seems reasonable.
How Your Brain Processes Pain
Pain isn’t just about physical damage. Your brain doesn’t have a simple “pain detector” that objectively measures harm and reports back. Instead, pain is your brain’s interpretation of signals from your body, filtered through emotional state, past experiences, stress levels, and mental health.
When you’re physically hurt, nerve endings send signals to your spinal cord and up to your brain. Your brain then decides how much that should hurt based on context. This is why the same injury can feel different depending on circumstances – a paper cut during a stressful day feels worse than the same cut when you’re relaxed.
Your brain’s pain processing centers overlap heavily with areas that regulate emotion, stress, and mood. The anterior cingulate cortex and the insula — key regions for pain perception — are also involved in processing emotional distress. When these areas are already overactivated by anxiety, depression, or trauma, they amplify pain signals.
This means that when you’re struggling mentally, your pain threshold drops. Your nervous system becomes more sensitive. The volume gets turned up on everything.
Depression and Pain Amplification
Depression doesn’t just affect your mood. It fundamentally changes how your nervous system functions. People with depression have altered pain processing at a neurological level.
Research shows that people with depression have increased activity in brain regions associated with pain and decreased activity in areas that regulate and dampen pain signals. Essentially, the brain’s natural pain control system stops working as effectively.
This can look like:
Chronic Unexplained Pain — You have back pain, headaches, or body aches that don’t have a clear physical cause. Doctors run tests that come back normal. The pain is real, but it’s being generated or amplified by the depressed nervous system.
Lower Pain Threshold — Minor injuries hurt more than they should. A slight bump feels like a major collision. You’re not exaggerating. Your brain is genuinely perceiving more intense pain from the same stimulus.
Prolonged Pain Recovery — When you do get hurt, the pain lasts longer. What should be a few days of soreness turns into weeks. Your nervous system can’t downregulate the pain response effectively.
Increased Sensitivity to Temperature — Cold feels colder, heat feels hotter. You’re more uncomfortable in situations that wouldn’t bother someone without depression.
Depression also causes inflammation throughout the body. Inflammatory markers increase, which sensitizes nerve endings and makes everything hurt more. Chronic pain and depression create a feedback loop — pain worsens depression, depression amplifies pain.
Anxiety Makes Your Body Hypervigilant
Anxiety puts your nervous system on high alert. Your body is constantly scanning for threats, and that includes potential sources of pain or discomfort. When you’re anxious, your pain sensitivity increases because your nervous system interprets pain as a potential danger signal that needs immediate attention.
This is what anxiety-related pain sensitivity looks like:
Muscle Tension Creates Real Pain — Anxiety causes chronic muscle tension. Your shoulders, neck, jaw, and back are constantly tight. This tension creates genuine pain — headaches, back pain, jaw pain from clenching. The pain isn’t “just anxiety.” It’s real physical pain caused by the sustained muscle contraction that anxiety produces.
Hyperawareness of Body Sensations — This is a big one. With anxiety, especially panic attacks, you notice every twinge, every ache, every uncomfortable sensation. Your nervous system is hyper-focused on potential threats, and physical discomfort registers as a threat. When you have panic disorder or health anxiety, your brain not only interprets everything it feels as a threat – it also amplifies it, and then your brain is convinced something terrible is happening because, subjectively, you are experiencing something terrible happening.
Pain Catastrophizing — When you feel pain, your anxious brain immediately jumps to worst-case scenarios. This catastrophizing actually intensifies the pain experience. Your brain interprets the pain as more dangerous, which increases the pain signal.
Heightened Startle Response — When you’re anxious and something causes sudden pain or discomfort, your reaction is more intense. You jump more, tense more, feel more distressed. You physically react faster and more strongly to stimuli.
People with panic disorder often experience chest pain, stomach pain, and other physical symptoms that feel identical to serious medical conditions. The pain is real. It’s caused by the intense physiological response of panic — muscle tension, hyperventilation, increased heart rate. Your body is genuinely in distress, creating genuine pain.
Trauma Changes Your Nervous System
Trauma fundamentally alters how your nervous system responds to the world. When you’ve experienced trauma, your body becomes hypersensitive to potential threats, and that includes pain.
People with PTSD have a sensitized nervous system. The autonomic nervous system — which controls automatic functions like heart rate, breathing, and pain response — gets stuck in a state of hyperarousal. This means:
Your pain threshold drops significantly. Stimuli that wouldn’t hurt someone without trauma genuinely hurt you more.
Your body holds trauma in physical tension. Muscles remain chronically tight in areas associated with the trauma. This creates ongoing pain.
Your nervous system struggles to downregulate pain signals. Once pain starts, it’s harder for your system to calm down and reduce the intensity.
Touch can be painful or uncomfortable even when it’s not meant to be. Your nervous system interprets touch as a potential threat, making even gentle contact uncomfortable.
Somatic therapy works specifically with this body-held trauma. The goal is to help your nervous system recalibrate, to bring down the baseline level of activation so that pain responses become more proportionate again.
Trauma also affects how your brain stores and recalls pain memories. If you were hurt during a traumatic event, your brain can reactivate that pain response when triggered, even without new physical injury. This is why people with trauma histories sometimes experience pain in areas associated with past injuries, even when those areas have healed.
OCD and Sensory Hypersensitivity
OCD doesn’t just create intrusive thoughts. It often comes with sensory hypersensitivity that makes physical discomfort feel intolerable.
People with OCD frequently experience:
“Just Right” Physical Sensations — Clothes feel wrong, textures are unbearable, tags cause intense discomfort. This isn’t about being picky. Your nervous system is genuinely distressed by these sensations.
Hyperawareness of Bodily Functions — You notice your breathing, heartbeat, swallowing, blinking. This awareness can create discomfort where none existed before. The sensation becomes the focus, which intensifies it.
Compulsive Checking of Pain or Discomfort — When you feel pain, you check it constantly, which keeps your attention on it and makes it feel worse. The checking behavior reinforces the pain rather than relieving it.
Contamination OCD and Physical Discomfort — If you have contamination fears, the feeling of “contamination” can create genuine physical discomfort. Your skin crawls, you feel dirty, you experience real physical distress.
The relationship between OCD and pain is bidirectional. OCD increases sensitivity to discomfort, and experiencing pain or discomfort can trigger OCD symptoms as your brain tries to control or fix the sensation.
Eating Disorders and Pain Perception
Eating disorders fundamentally alter how you experience physical sensations, including pain. Malnutrition, over-exercise, and the psychological stress of an eating disorder all change pain processing.
When your body is malnourished, your nervous system becomes hypersensitive. Everything hurts more because your body doesn’t have the resources to regulate pain effectively. People recovering from anorexia often describe this — as they begin eating again, they become more sensitive to temperature, touch, and pain because their nervous system is recalibrating.
Over-exercise, common in eating disorders, creates chronic pain that becomes normalized. You push through pain that should be a warning signal, which trains your brain to ignore some pain signals while becoming hypersensitive to others.
The psychological distress of body image concerns and eating disorder thoughts also amplifies pain. The constant stress keeps your nervous system activated, which increases overall pain sensitivity.
The Stress-Pain Connection
Regardless of which mental health challenge you’re facing, stress is often at the core of increased pain sensitivity. Chronic stress changes your nervous system in measurable ways.
When you’re stressed, your body produces cortisol and other stress hormones. Short-term, these hormones help you respond to threats. Long-term, they increase inflammation, sensitize nerve endings, and impair your body’s natural pain regulation systems.
Chronic stress also causes:
Muscle Tension — Sustained tension creates real pain in your neck, shoulders, back, and jaw.
Digestive Issues — Stress affects your gut, causing genuine stomach pain, cramping, and digestive discomfort.
Headaches and Migraines — Stress is a major trigger for tension headaches and migraines, which are genuine neurological pain conditions.
Sleep Disruption — Poor sleep lowers your pain threshold even further, creating a cycle where pain interferes with sleep and lack of sleep increases pain.
The relationship between stress and pain is so strong that chronic pain is now understood as partly a stress-related condition. When you’re under sustained psychological stress, your body can develop chronic pain even without clear physical injury.
What This Means for You
If you’re struggling with mental health and you feel like pain hits you harder than it should, you’re not being dramatic. You’re not weak. You’re not exaggerating. Your nervous system is genuinely processing pain differently.
This doesn’t mean the pain is “all in your head.” That phrase dismisses real suffering. The pain is real. It’s happening in your body. The fact that it’s influenced by your mental state doesn’t make it less valid.
This connection is important for several reasons:
You Can Stop Blaming Yourself — When you understand that your nervous system is sensitized, you can stop wondering if you’re overreacting. You’re not. Your pain is real.
Treatment Becomes Clearer — Addressing the underlying mental health condition often reduces physical pain. Therapy helps regulate your nervous system, which brings down overall pain sensitivity.
You Can Advocate for Yourself — When doctors dismiss your pain or suggest it’s “just anxiety” or “just depression,” you can explain that mental health conditions create real changes in pain processing. You deserve treatment for both the mental health condition and the pain.
Mind-Body Approaches Make Sense — Recognizing the connection helps you see why treatments like CBT, EMDR, somatic therapy, and DBT can reduce physical pain. They’re working with your nervous system to recalibrate pain processing.
If you’re experiencing increased pain sensitivity alongside mental health challenges, therapy can help with both. At Flourish Psychology, we work with the mind-body connection, understanding that psychological distress manifests physically and that physical pain affects mental health.
We offer individual therapy and specialize in evidence-based treatments that address both the psychological and physical aspects of mental health conditions. Our therapists understand that when you say something hurts, it genuinely hurts. We take that seriously.
Located in Brooklyn, NY, we serve clients throughout New York City and offer online therapy throughout New York State. Whether you’re dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma, eating disorders, OCD, or chronic pain alongside mental health challenges, we’re here to help.
Contact Flourish Psychology at 917-737-9475 or through our contact page to learn more about how therapy can help regulate your nervous system and reduce both psychological distress and physical pain. Your pain is real, and you deserve support for all of it.
Somatic therapy focuses on the connection between mind and body. It’s based on the idea that emotional and psychological struggles don’t just live in your thoughts — they also show up physically in your body.
When you’ve experienced trauma, chronic stress, or overwhelming emotions, your body can hold onto those experiences long after the event has passed. You might notice tension in your shoulders, a tight chest when you’re anxious, shallow breathing when you’re stressed, or physical pain that doesn’t seem to have a clear medical cause.
Somatic therapy helps you tune into these physical sensations and use them as a pathway to healing. Instead of just talking about what happened or how you feel, you’re also paying attention to how your body is responding and learning to release the tension, stress, and trauma that’s been stored there.
But what does this actually look like in practice? How does paying attention to physical sensations translate into real healing?
Working Through Anxiety That Shows Up as Physical Tension
A person might come to therapy struggling with anxiety that feels overwhelming. They wake up with their jaw clenched, their shoulders tight, and a knot in their stomach that won’t go away. They’ve tried traditional talk therapy and found it helpful for understanding their anxiety, but the physical symptoms persist.
Their somatic therapist would introduce body-centered techniques to help them work with the physical manifestations of anxiety. They might start with body awareness — simply noticing where tension shows up in the body and what that tension feels like.
The patient might realize that whenever they start worrying about work, their shoulders creep up toward their ears and their breathing becomes shallow. The therapist would help them notice this pattern in real time during sessions.
Once the patient can recognize the physical signs of their anxiety, the therapist would teach grounding techniques. One exercise might involve pressing their feet firmly into the floor and noticing the sensation of support beneath them. Another could involve gentle shoulder rolls and deep breathing to release the tension they’re holding.
Over time, the patient would learn to catch themselves when the physical symptoms start — before the anxiety spiral takes over. They could feel their shoulders tensing and use that as a signal to pause, breathe, and ground themselves. The physical symptoms become information rather than something to fear.
The combination of talk therapy and somatic work can help in ways that talk therapy alone sometimes doesn’t. The person understands their anxiety intellectually, but now they also have tools to work with it when it shows up in their body.
Processing Trauma That’s Stored in the Body
Someone might come to therapy years after a car accident. Physically, they’ve healed. But they find themselves constantly on edge while driving. Their heart races, their hands sweat, and sometimes they pull over because the panic is so intense.
They know logically that they’re safe. They may have even worked through the memories of the accident in EMDR therapy. But their body still reacts as if they’re in danger every time they get behind the wheel.
A somatic therapist would explain that trauma can get “stuck” in the nervous system. Even after the conscious mind has processed what happened, the body might still be stuck in the fight-or-flight response that was activated during the traumatic event.
The therapist might use somatic experiencing techniques to help the patient’s nervous system complete the survival response that was interrupted during the accident. This would involve carefully and slowly working through the physical sensations associated with the trauma.
The therapist would have the patient recall a moment from the accident and then immediately notice what happens in their body — the tightness in their chest, the tension in their arms, the urge to brace themselves.
Instead of pushing through these sensations or trying to make them go away, the therapist would help them pendulate — gently moving back and forth between the uncomfortable sensations and a sense of safety and calm in the present moment.
They might also use titration, which means working with small pieces of the traumatic memory at a time rather than diving into the full experience all at once. This allows the nervous system to process what happened without becoming overwhelmed.
Over several months, the patient might notice that their body’s panic response while driving begins to diminish. Their hands still tense up sometimes, but they can recognize it, breathe through it, and remind their body that they’re safe.
Managing Chronic Pain Connected to Emotional Stress
A patient might come to therapy dealing with chronic pain in their lower back that’s persisted for years. Medical tests haven’t found anything structurally wrong, but the pain is real and significantly impacts their daily life.
Their doctor suggests that stress might be contributing to the pain and refers them to therapy. The patient might be skeptical — their pain is physical, not psychological.
A somatic therapist would explain that while the pain is absolutely real, chronic stress can cause the body to hold tension in ways that create physical pain. When you’re under constant stress, your muscles stay tense, your breathing becomes shallow, and your nervous system remains in a heightened state of alert.
The therapist would begin with body awareness exercises. The patient might start noticing that their back pain is worse on particularly stressful days, and that it often intensifies when they’re worried or upset even if they’re not consciously aware of the emotional connection.
The therapist would teach breathing exercises that help regulate the nervous system and release some of the muscular tension contributing to the pain. They might practice progressive muscle relaxation, where the patient systematically tenses and then releases different muscle groups.
The patient might also learn to use movement as a way to process stress before it settles into their body as pain. When they notice themselves starting to feel stressed, they could take a short walk, do some gentle stretching, or practice the breathing techniques they learned in therapy.
The pain might not disappear completely, but it could become more manageable. More importantly, the patient would feel like they have some control over it rather than feeling victimized by unpredictable pain that seems to have no cause.
Releasing Emotions Held in the Body After Loss
After experiencing a significant loss, a person might come to therapy feeling numb. They know they should be grieving, but they can’t cry. They can’t really feel much of anything. Their chest feels heavy and tight, but no emotions will come.
A somatic therapist might recognize that the person’s grief is stuck. Sometimes when emotions are too overwhelming, the body shuts them down as a protective mechanism. But the feelings don’t go away — they get trapped.
The therapist would use somatic techniques to help the patient access and release the grief that’s locked in their body. The therapist might have them notice the heaviness in their chest and the tightness they describe. They would sit with those sensations together.
The therapist might ask questions like “If that tightness had a shape, what would it be?” or “If you could give that heaviness a color, what color would it be?” These questions help the patient connect to the physical experience of their grief without needing to find words for it.
Sometimes the therapist would guide them through gentle movement — pressing their hands into their chest where they feel the heaviness, or taking deep breaths and imagining space opening up where everything feels tight.
During a session, as the patient focuses on the sensation in their chest, they might suddenly start crying. Not controlled, polite tears, but deep, body-shaking sobs. The grief that had been trapped finally has a way out.
Working with the body’s physical response to loss can give patients access to emotions that they can’t reach through talking alone.
Building a Felt Sense of Safety After Years of Hypervigilance
Someone might come to therapy having grown up in an environment where they never felt safe. As an adult, they’re objectively safe — they have a stable job, supportive relationships, and no immediate threats in their life. But they can’t shake the constant feeling of being on edge.
Their nervous system is stuck in hypervigilance. They can’t relax. They startle easily. They scan every room for exits. Intellectually they know they’re safe, but their body doesn’t believe it.
A somatic therapist would explain that because the patient’s nervous system learned to stay alert during childhood, it doesn’t know how to shift into a calm, restful state. They need to teach their body what safety actually feels like.
The therapist might start with resourcing — identifying people, places, memories, or sensations that make the patient feel even slightly more at ease. This might be thinking about a pet, remembering a peaceful vacation, or visualizing a place where they felt calm.
The therapist would have them bring these resources to mind and notice what happens in their body. Does their breathing slow down? Do their shoulders drop even slightly? Does the tightness in their jaw ease just a bit?
They might practice orienting exercises, where the patient looks around the room and names things they can see, consciously noticing that they’re in a safe space in the present moment rather than in danger from the past.
Over time, the patient’s nervous system could begin to learn that it can relax sometimes. The hypervigilance might not disappear entirely, but they could start having moments — then minutes, then longer periods — where their body feels at ease.
When Somatic Therapy Makes Sense
Somatic therapy isn’t the only approach to healing, and it’s not always the first choice for everyone. But it can be particularly helpful when you notice that your struggles show up physically in your body, when talk therapy alone hasn’t been enough, when you feel disconnected from your body or your emotions, when you’ve experienced trauma that your body still seems to remember, or when you want a more holistic approach that addresses both mind and body.
At Flourish Psychology, our therapists are trained in somatic approaches and can help you determine whether this type of work would be beneficial for you. Sometimes somatic therapy is used as the primary approach. Other times it’s integrated with other modalities like CBT, DBT, or traditional talk therapy to create a more comprehensive treatment plan.
If you’re struggling with anxiety, trauma, chronic stress, or physical symptoms that seem connected to your emotional wellbeing, somatic therapy might offer a pathway to healing that addresses not just your thoughts and feelings, but also the way your body holds and processes your experiences.
Reach out to Flourish Psychology to learn more about how somatic therapy could help you reconnect with your body and find relief from the struggles you’re facing.
Preventive care is a central part of maintaining physical health. We take steps to stay ahead of illness by getting vaccines, eating vegetables, exercising, and building habits that reduce long-term risk. We see a doctor regularly to check how our body is doing. We are careful about responding to our bodies when we experience pain or discomfort.
We understand that waiting for a crisis is not the ideal way to stay healthy.
The same principle applies to mental health.
Therapy is often viewed as something people seek only when they are experiencing a diagnosable condition or overwhelming emotional distress. But mental health is shaped long before symptoms appear. All of us experience stress, cognitive biases, relational challenges, and periods of uncertainty. Therapy provides a structured space to understand these experiences before they escalate, supporting long-term wellness rather than responding only after something has gone wrong.
Benefits of Therapy for Everyone
Therapy should be considered a form of routine care – an opportunity for reflection, growth, and ongoing maintenance. It supports emotional well-being in the same way that physical check-ups support overall health. Below are several reasons why therapy can benefit anyone, regardless of whether they are currently struggling with a specific concern.
Therapy Offers Unbiased Insight on Your Life – A therapist helps you understand yourself more clearly. With training in human behavior and thought processes, therapists provide feedback that helps you examine patterns, assumptions, and internal narratives from a new and more informed perspective.
Therapists Serve as Objective Third Parties – A therapist cares about your well-being, but is not tied to your life the way family or friends are. This allows for honest, neutral guidance that is not influenced by personal involvement, expectations, or history.
Therapy Provides Dedicated Space for Self-Reflection – Daily responsibilities often make it difficult to set aside time for yourself. A therapy session is a structured environment where the focus is entirely on your experiences, needs, and goals. This type of consistent, uninterrupted attention is a meaningful form of self-care.
Therapy Helps You Learn and Strengthen Coping Strategies – Therapists work with you to understand how you respond to stress and what tools may help regulate your emotions more effectively. Whether it is breathing techniques, journaling practices, mindfulness exercises, or other evidence-based strategies, therapy provides a way to learn these skills and apply them with support and accountability.
Therapy Supports Personal Growth – Even when life is going well, there are areas where you may want to expand, strengthen, or change. Therapy offers a place to explore ideas, clarify goals, and challenge yourself in a productive way. It gives you a consistent source of feedback as you navigate transitions or pursue long-term development.
Therapy should not be limited to moments of crisis. It is a resource for anyone who wants to maintain balance, improve understanding of themselves, or develop healthier patterns over time. Just as routine check-ups support physical health, speaking with a therapist provides ongoing support for emotional and psychological well-being.
If you’re ready to make your mental health a priority, reach out to begin the process.
“Aww, they grow up so fast.” That’s a phase that many have heard before while talking about kids of any age.
It’s also true.
At least, while it can’t be quantified, most parents will say that it feels their “baby” stage went by in the blink of an eye, and that they grow into teenagers a few blinks more than that.
This isn’t just a thing people say because they want their kids to stay young, either. It’s an actual feeling that many people have as they look at their growing children and realize their youth is over/ending.
But why does that happen?
How can a time period “go by” too fast?
Short Time Between Leaps
One reason that it feels like this time period goes quickly is because some parts of it actually do. “Newborn” is only one month, after which they start growing real baby features. Smiling and attention comes a few weeks later. Then there’s laughing, sitting, standing, making sounds like words, then finally crawling, walking, and talking.
For most children, all this growth happens in about 1 year.
That is a lot of growth and change to condense into such a short period of time. This time “goes by so fast” literally. Even after ~1 year old, they go from:
Sounds to full on conversations.
Barely walking to running full sprint.
Wearing diapers to, eventually, using toilets.
Going to school, making friends, learning math, and eventually becoming little adults.
Within a few more years they go from being amazed at the sounds a water bottle makes to going into the fridge and asking if they can have milk.
They start school at about 5 years old and can hit puberty and be almost as tall as their moms by 9 to 10.
They grow up very, very fast, and are changing rapidly during that time.
The Realities of Parenting
Another reason this time period “goes by so fast” is because of the realities of what parenting is really like.
Most of us are not just sitting around, playing with our children all day and creating a host of memories. We are:
Barely sleeping.
Navigating the new stresses of parenting.
Trying to manage a relationship.
On our phones.
Working.
Our children are also napping often, which means that they’re asleep through large chunks of the day. So, not only is it a short period of time, but we’re not present with them during that time, and often we’re also very tired and distracted.
Even the anxiety brought on by parenting can cause issues like memory loss and distraction, often making it feel like time goes by quicker.
The Growth is Gradual and Quick Simultaneously
A baby/child’s face changes dramatically from birth to being a teen. But it does so in small, gradual ways that we only notice by looking back at old pictures or trying to remember what their face looked like.
It’s sort of like boiling a frog. If they immediately jumped from baby face to teen face, you would be rightfully shocked and notice the change in a way that made their baby face more memorable. But instead, their face changes little by little day by day, in ways that are often imperceptible at first glance. That means that every time you’re looking at your child’s face, it looks roughly the same in your mind than it did before.
Yet, suddenly, you’ll think or look back on how your child used to look and realize how much they’ve changed. Because of that it will feel like it all happened in the blink of an eye, despite it really happening over time.
It is not just their appearance that changes either. Their knowledge, their confidence, and more. Children learn to read like this – they know a few letters, then a few sounded out words, and suddenly they’re reading words you did not know they can read. It can feel like it’s happening slowly because it’s happening over time, but suddenly you’ll realize how much has changed in such a short time and how you didn’t get a chance to truly think about and process it in the moment.
How Can Therapy Help?
Therapy may not be able to slow down time or prevent your child from growing up. But it can help with some of the things that make it difficult to truly remember and appreciate this time in a child’s life. For example:
Helping You Cope with the Stresses of Parenting – Some nervousness with kids is normal, but anxiety and stress do not have to be inevitable. We can work together to try to help you cope with the stresses of parenting so that you can focus on the best parts of it.
Couples Therapy – Couples counseling is not limited to couples that are struggling. Sometimes, it’s to help make sure that you’re working together as a team, something that comes up a lot when you have babies. Couples therapy can help reduce conflicts, which in turn makes it easier for you to focus on parenthood.
Mindfulness – Too much of life these days is spent on external things like phone, TV, work politics, etc. Sometimes, we need someone to help us learn to be more present in the moment so that we can really enjoy and take in all the things that our children are bringing to us, and we can be the best parents we can be.
Sleep Support – If you have issues like anxiety that you’re already struggling with, those make it even harder to sleep at a time when sleep is already hard to get. Mental health treatments in a general sense can help make sure you’re getting enough sleep so your memories are sharp and so time doesn’t feel like it’s moving as quickly. Sleep deprivation specifically affects how we experience the passage of time.
Therapists can help if you have postpartum depression. Therapists can help if you have conflicts with your child as they are getting older that is making it harder to bond. Therapists can help you manage your own aging, so that you can enjoy your own life more (which simultaneously helps life slow down for you).
Therapists can also help you with your own traumas and challenges, so that your child does not *have* to grow up too fast from a maturity standpoint, providing you more time with a kid that is able to be a kid.
A Therapist So You Get the Most From Your Child’s Development
Your child is still going to grow up, and it’s still going to be too fast. But how fast it feels and how many memories we make during that time period are affected by your mental health and your relationship.
As the term “AI” takes off, and more and more people choose to use these chatbots and related tools, it is becoming clear that unrestricted use of these tools is a problem.
We’re not just talking about ethics, plagiarism, or the economic impact. Chatbots, specifically, are proving time and time again to be problematic, especially for those struggling with severe mental health challenges. AI runs the risk of introducing problems or exacerbating existing conditions, and the interactions that someone has with it can cause significant harm.
About AI – What it Is
First, for clarity, “AI” does not yet exist. That is a marketing term. Current AI is actually an algorithm that uses a highly advanced predictive text to determine what the most likely word will be given their dataset. It is not capable of thought, reasoning, and certainly not emotions. Any sign of personality from within the program is coding designed to present information in a specific way.
This is important to understand because many people, even those without mental health conditions, feel like and think like they’re talking to computer “person” that is responding to their thoughts. The algorithm is designed to sound like a human being, but it is essentially just a 100x more advanced version of the predictive text on a person’s phone. It is not thinking and has no consciousness of any kind.
How AI Can Trigger Psychological Challenges
With that in mind, modern versions of AI Chatbots:
Sound like people, which makes it feel like you’re talking to a person.
Write with authority, so it makes it appear they “know” what they’re talking about.
Are marketed as if they’re artificial intelligence, rather than just a dataset algorithm.
Has no concept of right or wrong and cannot understand the user’s intent.
Can be intentionally/unintentionally programmed to respond in different ways.
Now, imagine a scenario where someone both doesn’t understand what AI is, and then also struggles with their mental health. It’s easy to see how this computer algorithm on the other end may cause issues that lead to further mental health challenges. For example:
Paranoia/Loss of Reality – Those that are struggling with issues related to paranoia or delusions may equate what chatbots say as either reality or hiding reality. Because these bots can be essentially told to answer questions in mysterious ways based on user prompts, it’s possible for individuals to misinterpret AI interactions as signs of a higher power, AI tracking, government interference, and more.
Depression – Most well known Chatbots are programmed to be careful around depression and suicide related topics, but this programming is tenuous. There are many examples of people sharing information with the chatbot with responses that are not sensitive to the person’s mental health. As these chatbots are unable to think, they are not always capable of determining whether the language output they provide could be interpreted as encouraging self-harm.
Personality Disorder Challenges – Chat algorithms do not always elicit consistent responses. As a result, someone that has abandonment issues (for example, a person with borderline personality disorder) may find that they expect their chat to react a certain way. If it does not, they can interpret that as rejection or abandonment.
It’s also possible for people’s usage of these AI Chatbots to be used to fuel their own mental health challenges further. For example, a person with health anxiety may search these chatbots for diagnoses and get incorrect answers. Or someone with body dysmorphia may seek out validation of their eating habits.
Guardrails to Manage Mental Health and AI
AI’s affect on society runs far deeper than chatbots. It can be used for Deepfakes. It can fuel eating disorders by creating impossible standards of beauty. It can be manipulative. There are also the economic and ethical reasons to be cautious around AI. Plus, the term itself “AI” is misleading enough to warrant concern.
But one other thing we are seeing that we need to monitor even more is the way that “AI” is affecting people that are going through mental health crises. As therapists, we may even have to be aware of clients using programs like ChatGPT in order to make sure that we can be proactive in monitoring for the effects on Chatbots on our patients, and encourage them to be more aware of the way they feel when using these services.
Many of Flourish Psychology’s patients live lives where discretion is critical and time is minimal. CEOs, content creators, doctors, attorneys, and more – these are individuals who are often tasked with work day and night, or find themselves with a busy personal and professional life where it is extraordinarily challenging to manage their mental health.
It is for these individuals that we created our exclusive mental health services. These are mental health services with significantly more availability, using a retainer model similar to the legal field that makes it possible to access mental health services on your schedule, personalized to you.
You can learn about our exclusive mental health services here.
On a surface level, it should already be easy to recognize why having your own individual therapist that is available more often when you need us most is valuable. You have access to a therapist when:
You’re in the middle of some type of crisis.
You have some rare but available free time.
You need someone to trust with your emotions or ideas.
Exclusive services allow you to have a therapist that is essentially on call, and while that doesn’t necessarily mean 100% availability, it does mean that you’re on a few coordinating steps away from someone at all times.
But this level of accessibility and higher level of care also has secondary benefits as well. It means that you have:
The knowledge that you are NEVER alone. With someone you can contact at any time whose role and expertise it is to help you, you will never feel like you’re taking on these challenges and emotional burdens by yourself.
Someone that knows you deeply – deeper than even traditional therapy. Exclusive services often mean that we can meet more often and connect much longer than traditional therapy typically allows.
A therapist unburdened by topic. Often, when you work with a therapist on a more limited basis, we have to keep the focus on the topic of need (for example, anxiety). With our concierge therapy services, this is no longer the case, as there is plenty of opportunity to talk about any emotions of challenges of note to you.
It is also simply a more catering level of care as well. We are professional therapists, and our role is your mental health, but concierge therapy allows for more services, more often, on more topics than traditional weekly or biweekly therapy allows, and that means that you have a therapist that is here to help you at every step.
If this type of therapy is right for your needs, please reach out to us today. We’d love to see if there is a fit or recommend options depending on what your needs may be.
Location: 300 Cadman Plaza West Floor 12 - Brooklyn, NY 11201
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