Life Psychologists are trained to promote positive wellbeing and healthy behaviours to reduce risk factors for health problems.
Many people don’t realise how much their mind affects their physical health, and vice versa, until they’re in the throes of a recent diagnosis or major life event.
To help you work through the mental and physical changes to your body that often come together, Life Psychogists provide health psychology services.
Impact of health problems
We know that harmful health behaviours such as smoking, binge eating, or inactivity can contribute to conditions like heart disease and diabetes.
As life psychologists, we are trained to promote positive behaviours to reduce risk factors for poor health.
We are dedicated to understanding and helping to modify attitudes, beliefs and behaviours that contribute to poor health outcomes.
Life psychologists can also help people recover from, or self-manage, trauma, chronic pain, or a disability. We also help clients to manage contributory issues such as anxiety or emotional reactions like anger and grief.
Health psychology
Health psychology is a relatively new discipline in psychology that focuses on the connections between your physical health and your mental health.
Health psychology can help you:
- Reduce stress and its effects
- Reduce risky behaviors
- Improve your nutrition
- Exercise more often
- Stop smoking
- Manage your weight
- Prevent illness
- Learn to cope with illness
- Learn to cope with grief or your own hospice care
Managing pain
Health psychology attempts to find treatments to reduce or eliminate pain, as well as understand pain anomalies such as episodic analgesia, neuralgia, and phantom limb pain.
Although the task of measuring and describing pain has been problematic, the development of the McGill Pain Questionnaire has helped make progress in this area.
Health psychology treatments for pain involve pacing strategies, mindfulness and cognitive behavior therapy.
References
- Johnston, M. (1994). Current trends in Health Psychology. The Psychologist, 7, 114-118.
- Ogden, J. (2012). Health Psychology: A Textbook (5th ed.). Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.
- Rogers, R. W. (1983). Preventive health psychology: An interface of social and clinical psychology. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 1(2), 120-127. doi:10.1521/jscp.1983.1.2.120
- “David F. Marks, Michael Murray & Emee Vida Estacio (2018) Health Psychology. Theory-Research-Practice (5th Ed.) Sage”. 2018-11-16.
- Everly, G. S., Jr. (1986). An introduction to occupational health psychology. In P. A. Keller & L. G. Ritt (Eds.), Innovations in clinical practice: A source book, Vol. 5 (pp. 331-338). Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Exchange.
- Raymond, J. S., Wood, D. W., & Patrick, W. K. (1990). Psychology doctoral training in work and health. American Psychologist, 45, 1159–1161. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.45.10.1159
- Quick, J.C. (1999). Occupational health psychology: Historical roots and future directions, Health Psychology, 18, 82-88. doi:10.1037//0278-6133.18.1.82
- Schonfeld, I. S. (2018), Occupational health psychology. In D. D. Dunn (Ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Seeking Help
If you feel your health problems are impacting on your ability to enjoy life, a Life Psychologist may be able to help.
- Life Psychologists are highly trained and qualified professionals, skilled in providing effective interventions for a range of mental health concerns, including health-related problems such as smoking, addictions, IBS, binge eating, chronic pain, weight gain, disability and inactivity.
- A Life Psychologist can help you to identify and address factors that might be contributing to your health problems and the most effective ways to address them by using techniques based on best available research.
- Life Psychologists usually see clients individually, but can also include family members to support treatment where appropriate.
A medical check-up with a GP might also be helpful to see if there is an underlying health issue.