Guide helps parents recognize teen stress signs, triggers, and impacts. It highlights benefits of counselling, professional support by Melbourne psychologists, and services by Your Mind Matters, including telehealth.
Evidence-based therapies like CBT, IPT, EMDR, and exposure therapy effectively treat depression and trauma. Melbourne psychologists offer tailored, in-person or telehealth care to support mental wellness.
This guide outlines anxiety signs, daily impact, and practical management techniques like relaxation, cognitive restructuring, and gradual exposure, emphasizing professional support via counseling and workplace programs.
Your Mind Matters builds trust in mental health through compassionate, evidence-based, and personalized care, offering Melbourne psychologists, telehealth, ADHD/autism assessments, and workplace support programs.
In today’s busy world, flexibility in accessing mental health support is more important than ever. Telehealth psychology sessions allow you to connect with a qualified psychologist from the comfort of your home, school, or workplace. At Your Mind Matters (YMM), our clinicians offer secure, evidence-based telehealth services to ensure support is available wherever you are in Victoria and across Australia.
Telehealth refers to psychological consultations delivered via a secure online platform. You’ll speak with your psychologist in real time, just as you would in a clinic, but without the need to travel. Research shows that telehealth can be just as effective as face-to-face sessions for many mental health concerns, including:
Telehealth may be suitable if you prefer the comfort of your own space, live outside Melbourne, or find it difficult to attend in person. For children and young people, telehealth can work best when a parent, carer, or support worker is nearby to assist with technology and engagement.
If you’re unsure, our team can help you decide whether telehealth or in-clinic appointments are the best fit for your needs.
At Your Mind Matters, our psychologists follow strict professional and ethical standards to ensure that online sessions are safe, private, and effective. This includes:
Accessing telehealth psychology at YMM is simple:
Whether you are seeking an ADHD or autism assessment, or ongoing therapy, our telehealth psychologists are here to support you.
Book a telehealth appointment with a psychologist today. Take a look at our clinicians and, once you know who you’d like to work with, call us or book online.
Written by the team at Your Mind Matters
Our blog is written by the registered psychologists at Your Mind Matters Psychology Services in Notting Hill, Melbourne. If something here speaks to your situation, our team is here to help. Meet our team.
There’s no question that feelings can be highly, highly unpleasant. For many people, emotions can become so overpowering that they can compel us to do things we mightn’t be proud of – we can yell, throw things, or binge drink.
Many clients we see at Your Mind Matters struggle with big emotions – some clients report feeling emotionally dysregulated when they’re upset, and struggle to bring themselves back to a baseline, neutral state. It’s a common problem, and can lead to all kinds of difficulties.
This blog is about Distress Tolerance, which is a host of psychological tools that can help us when we’re struggling with truly overwhelming feelings. The goal of Distress Tolerance is not to eliminate an emotion, or even significantly reduce its intensity – instead, it’s about teaching us to tolerate the emotion, and withstand the urges that can come with it. It belongs to a kind of therapy called Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT).
DBT is an evidence-based therapy for multiple forms of mental health challenges, and contains plenty of ideas that can be great for anyone’s emotional wellbeing. DBT breaks itself up into lots of different bits and pieces – one of these is a Skills component, that has Distress Tolerance as a sub-school inside it. You can think of DBT as a big book – Skills is a chapter, and Distress Tolerance takes up a few pages in that chapter.
Distress Tolerance is about asking yourself what behaviours your emotions urge you toward, with a particular focus on the kind of behaviours that lead to greater distress later on – i.e., make the situation worse. For instance, if you were a tennis player whose emotions led to an urge to smash your racquet against the court, your Distress Tolerance goal could be to reduce your racquet-smashing – because this will make you feel embarrassed or guilty later on, and avoid the competitive consequences that come with it. Note the player’s goal wouldn’t be to feel less angry, although this would be nice… instead, Distress Tolerance asks you to ride that emotion more effectively, and not make the feeling worse.
Other behavioural goals can be:
Distress Tolerance asks clients to build a Distress Tolerance Toolkit – i.e., a set of skills that include self-soothing, distraction, connecting with others, and mindfulness. Again, we’d hope these tools reduce the intensity of your feelings; but more importantly, we’d hope they lead to you tolerating your distress without engaging in life-worsening behaviour.
There are lots of methods and strategies DBT uses in their Distress Tolerance framework – many of them are available for free from the Dialectical Behavior Therapy distress tolerance page.
If you need support right now
If this is an emergency, call 000. For 24-hour support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or text 0477 13 11 14. DirectLine, the Victorian alcohol and drug counselling service, is available on 1800 888 236. More options are on our resources page.
Our Blog Author
This post was written by Patrick Carey, Clinical Psychologist at Your Mind Matters. Paddy works with adults presenting with anxiety and mood disorders, trauma, obsessive-compulsive disorders, substance and gambling issues, psychosis spectrum disorders, and grief and loss, and is trained in CBT, ACT, Cognitive Processing Therapy, Metacognitive Training and mindfulness approaches. Meet our team.
Parenthood tends to be talked about in glowingly positive terms. It is described as a beautiful, natural part of life that is all sweetness and light. In this glowing description of parenthood, it is important to remember that having a baby is a big change in life and adapting to this change can be difficult. Having sad or difficult emotions during adapting to a new life does not make you a bad parent! You are not alone. Having a baby is a profoundly powerful experience, and intense experiences tend to create big emotional responses.
Postpartum Depression is not the same as the typical ‘baby blues’ that occur around day 4 post birth. Generally, the baby blues are due to the hormonal changes going on in your body after giving birth, but it does not tend to last more than a few days.
“Baby blues” may make you feel irritable, moody, weepy, restless, or unable to sleep – or all of the above. These feelings often tend to pass as you gain confidence and get into some routines. In postnatal depression, symptoms last longer than 2 weeks, may be more severe and often interfere with your ability to function normally. Unlike ‘baby blues’, postnatal depression doesn’t usually go away on its own. This can be especially tough to cope with when you are recovering from birth and have a new baby to look after.
Postnatal depression, also known as postpartum depression, is a type of mood disorder associated with childbirth. There is no single cause of postnatal depression, but physical and emotional issues may play a role. Physical issues include hormonal changes after childbirth and sleep deprivation; while emotional issues include feeling overwhelmed/anxious and having money, work or relationship problems.
Some common symptoms of postnatal depression include:
More support options are listed on our resources page.
If you are going through difficulties and need to find your inner strength, why not give us a call today? Our team of highly skilled and well-experienced psychologists are here to help.
Our Blog Author
This post was written by Aanchal Sood, Senior Psychologist and Supervisor at Your Mind Matters. Aanchal works with adolescents, adults and couples on anxiety and mood disorders, grief and loss, trauma, adjustment and relationship difficulties, and is fluent in Hindi and Punjabi. Meet our team.
Nowadays, people may use the word depression to colloquially describe several different feelings. These may include sadness, feeling down or upset, lethargy, or even a loss of motivation or care. Unsurprisingly, many people make these complaints, as the literature suggests that 20% of people experience some period of significant low mood at some point in their life, whether that be once in their life, sporadically or regularly.
In a clinical setting, the term depression can refer to several different disorders, some of which may sound more familiar than others – e.g., Major Depressive Disorder (aka. Major Depressive Episode), Persistent Depressive Disorder (aka. Dysthymia) or Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). The common feature of all the disorders within this group include the presence of sad, empty or irritable mood, as well as physiological, somatic and cognitive changes, which have a significant impact on a person’s ability to function day-to-day.
This blog will take a closer look into Major Depressive Disorder and the symptoms that we may not have been aware of that were indicators of disordered mood.
A common misconception about depression is that it is a choice – something that we can just ‘snap out of’ or ‘go for a walk’ to get rid of. However, many factors can increase a person’s vulnerability to experiencing depression, and it is often a combination of these factors that lead to depressive episodes.
Given the name, many people are aware of the mood changes that are associated with depression, however, given the biological and psychological factors at play, individuals suffering from a depressive episode also experience somatic/physiological, cognitive and behavioural changes.
If you or anyone around you has experienced these symptoms, know that you are not alone. There are several services available to support you, including crisis lines, a GP, a school counsellor, or an Employment Assistance Program (EAP) through your workplace. To engage with one of our friendly psychologists at Your Mind Matters Psychology, feel free to reach out to our admin team for further information on (03) 9802 4654.
If you need support right now
If this is an emergency, call 000.
For 24-hour support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or text 0477 13 11 14. The Suicide Call Back Service is available on 1300 659 467, and Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. More options are on our resources page.
Our Blog Author
This post was written by Simone Chaochalakorn, formerly a Psychologist at Your Mind Matters. Support for depression and low mood continues to be part of our services. Meet our team.
Simply put, thoughts are our opinions and beliefs about ourselves, others and the world around us. Thoughts can be experienced in different ways. Some of us think in the form of ‘words’, images/pictures, or even both. We all have that ‘voice’ in our head that helps us process events that are unfolding around us. Sometimes our inner self-talk can be very positive, supportive and encouraging, almost like a cheerleader. However, at times it can be very critical. You may have heard of the term ‘the inner critic’; this is the part of you that scrutinises/judges you. It may, for example, tell you that you ‘should’ do better or that you’re failing in life.
A big part of therapy is to shift our thinking. Now we have all heard the term ‘positive thinking’. We might be going through a tough situation and in an attempt to help, a friend or loved one may tell us “STOP thinking so negatively and think more positively!!”. Easier said than done, right?! We first need to understand our thoughts, before we can start to shift them. Most importantly, we need to understand what has led us to form that interpretation of the situation/event at hand, ourselves, others or the world.
Let’s start at the beginning… First and foremost, you CAN NOT stop yourself from thinking! The more you tell yourself to ‘stop thinking’ the more you think that thought! Have you ever had a song stuck in your head? I bet the answer is YES! And your mind sings it over, and over, and over! It becomes annoying, right? And the more you try to ‘get rid of’ that song, the more your mind keeps replaying it. Eventually, you may decide to stop fighting it and allow your mind to ‘sing’, you allow the song to be there, and go on with your day, focusing on what is important to you. And alas… IT GOES AWAY!!
Above, I mentioned that thoughts are words/pictures/images. I want you to keep this in mind. Thoughts in and of themselves do not have any meaning; they are words/pictures/images formed in our mind about our interpretation of a situation. We are the ones who give our thoughts meaning…we think them and automatically believe them to be true. Just because you think something, it DOES NOT make it true. For example, if you had the thought “I’m not a good friend”, that does not make it a fact.
We can often get caught in ‘thinking traps’. These are also referred to as cognitive distortions. Thinking traps are inaccuracies in thinking which are often very unhelpful and get in the way of us viewing a situation more objectively. Here are some common thinking traps:
Rather than refer to our thoughts as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, I personally prefer to use the terms ‘helpful’ or ‘unhelpful’. Ask yourself, is it useful for me to think this way? Does this help me to live by my values and pursue my goals? In the same way that we stop trying to ‘get rid of’ the songs stuck in our mind, we want to start making choices towards not engaging in our thoughts or getting stuck in the trap of ‘believing them’. Instead, we want to start noticing them more mindfully.
Our thoughts can be quite powerful and influence us in many ways. If you would like some support to shift your thinking to be more helpful and aligned with your values, our team of psychologists are here to help.
Our Blog Author
This post was written by Maria Kampantais, Senior Clinical Psychologist at Your Mind Matters. Maria works with clients using evidence-based therapies including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, mindfulness techniques, Motivational Interviewing, and Solution Focused Therapy. Meet our team.
