Build a resilient workplace by prioritizing mental health through supportive environments, open communication, work-life balance, Employee Assistance Programs, stress management, and ongoing training.
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.
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, accessing support has become easier with online services. A Telehealth psychologist offers the same professional, evidence-based care you would receive in person, but with the convenience of connecting from home, work, or anywhere with internet access.
Not sure if Telehealth psychology is right for you? Here are five signs you might benefit from working with a psychologist online.
For many Australians, local psychology services may be limited. A Telehealth psychologist in Australia makes it possible to access professional support without travelling long distances. This ensures you can receive consistent care, no matter where you live.
Balancing work, study, or family life can make it difficult to attend in-person sessions. Telehealth appointments save time by cutting out travel, making it easier to fit therapy into your week.
Some people find it easier to open up in a familiar environment. Meeting with a psychologist via Telehealth can provide a greater sense of comfort and reduce the anxiety that may come with attending a clinic.
Telehealth can be combined with face-to-face sessions, giving you choice and flexibility. This means you can still see a psychologist in person if you prefer, but switch to online sessions when needed — such as during busy times, illness, or travel.
Whether you are seeking an ADHD assessment online or counselling for trauma, anxiety, or relationships, Telehealth gives you access to psychologists who may not be based in your local area. This expands your options and helps you find the right professional fit.
A Telehealth psychologist provides the same standard of professional care as in-person sessions, with the added convenience of flexibility and accessibility. If you are considering support for your mental health, Telehealth might be a helpful option.
At Your Mind Matters Psychology Services, our Melbourne-based team also offers Telehealth psychology across Australia, including assessments and therapy.
📞 Get in touch today to book a Telehealth psychologist appointment.
Our Blog Author
This post was written by the team at Your Mind Matters. Telehealth sessions with our psychologists are available across Australia. Meet our team.
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.
“I just feel like my brain never switches off.”
If you’ve ever said this—or felt it—chances are, you’re carrying a mental load. And no, it’s not just about having a lot on your plate. It’s about being the plate.
The term mental load has gained traction in recent years, especially in conversations about working parents, relationships, and burnout. But what does it actually mean—and why does it affect so many people, particularly women?
Let’s unpack it together.
The mental load refers to the invisible, ongoing effort it takes to manage household responsibilities, emotional needs, planning, and organisation. It’s the internal checklist that never ends.
Think of it like this:
It’s not just physical tasks—it’s the thinking, remembering, planning, and anticipating behind them.
And that’s what makes it so exhausting.
Busyness is visible. People can see you running from meeting to meeting or folding laundry while answering emails. But the mental load is silent and often unacknowledged—even by the person carrying it.
You might look like you’re coping just fine on the outside, but internally, your brain feels like a browser with 47 tabs open. The weight is cumulative and relentless.
Many people report that the mental load causes:
And the hardest part? It’s easy to dismiss. “Everyone’s busy” becomes a way to invalidate or minimise the impact—until your body or mind forces you to stop.
Anyone can carry a mental load, but research and lived experience show that it disproportionately affects women—especially mothers, as they are typically the primary carers of children. Often referred to as the “default parent,” many women find themselves responsible not just for doing tasks, but thinking about and managing them, even when others help.
But it’s not just parents. Young adults caring for ageing parents, neurodivergent individuals masking or managing executive function challenges, and professionals navigating high-pressure roles often carry intense mental loads too.
Over time, the mental load can chip away at self-worth, relationships, and wellbeing. You might find yourself:
This can lead to chronic stress, anxiety, or even depression if left unaddressed.
At Your Mind Matters Psychology Services, we work with many clients who arrive saying, “I don’t know why I’m so exhausted.” When we explore what their day-to-day mental load looks like, it becomes clear: they’re doing the job of five people, internally.
Psychological support can help in several ways:
Therapy provides a space to pause, reflect, and realign your energy with your values, not just your responsibilities.
You don’t need to be in crisis to seek support. In fact, recognising the weight of your mental load before things spiral is a powerful act of self-care.
Here are a few reflective prompts to help you check in:
The mental load isn’t a personal failing—it’s a systemic reality for many. But it’s not inevitable, and you don’t have to carry it alone.
At Your Mind Matters, we help clients unpack the invisible pressures that weigh them down and rediscover what it feels like to breathe, rest, and be enough. If you’re feeling the weight of “doing it all,” we invite you to reach out.
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.
Life can be extremely difficult. The possibility of human experience is endless. Regardless of how privileged or disadvantaged we are; human beings all connect in our capacity for psychological suffering.
We all can move to listening to a harsh internal critic. Do you have an inner critic? If so, what is the purpose of this critic? Is this critic chastising you, searching for your flaws, punishing you, and comparing you? Is it maybe even preventing you from doing things you love, or from living by your values and being your authentic self?
Let’s consider a few examples:
Imagine you have broken your leg and fractured your ribs from a bicycle accident and that you have the choice of getting help with daily tasks from companion A or companion B.
Companion A says to you: “Suck it up, it’s not that bad, you’re pathetic! Plenty of people are worse off than you, quit with the baby tears”
Companion B says to you: “This absolutely sucks. You must be in some really awful pain and feel like you’ve lost some independence that I know is so important to you. I’m here for you, let’s just take it slow together”
Strangely we are often the Companion B to our friends but often not to ourselves!
Imagine a close friend of yours just went through a romantic relationship break-up. They tell you their heartfelt story, and you listen intently from start to finish. Your friend isn’t perfect, but they deserve to be happy. You reassure them that they’ll get through this, they’re a wonderful human being, and that it can be painful, but they will be okay.
You don’t judge your friend. You don’t tell them they are not worthy, they are unlovable, will never find anybody, are ugly, stupid or that they need to change. You show your friend compassion. Strangely we often don’t do the same for ourselves!
Imagine you are at work and your boss calls you in for a meeting to have your annual review. She discusses your strengths and lets you know she is so happy to have you on the team. She then gives you some constructive advice related to organisation/planning skills. Coming from a place of critical judgement, you only hear the negative, and tell yourself, “I’m an incompetent idiot. I’m a shambolic mess and I can’t do anything right”. You head home and feel stressed out, go over all your flaws from memory and can’t sleep.
Coming from a place of fairness and acceptance, you see and hear the whole message, and tell yourself, “I’m doing a really solid job & working well with the team. I’m going to take on her helpful advice and learn from this”. This is a more compassionate response.
There are many different definitions of self-compassion in the literature. I kind of like Neff (2003) that suggests there are 3 components that collaboratively interact to develop a self-compassionate frame of mind:
What we know from the research is that when you’re critical and judgemental of yourself, you’re more likely to experience feelings of anger, anxiety, sadness, loneliness and insecurity. When you treat yourself fairly you are in a position to manage these uncomfortable feelings with acceptance.
Self-compassionate individuals often take pride in their human characteristics and believe they are good natured, well-meaning, and competent, and happily understand their unique weaknesses or areas they can work on. They know they are a work in progress and embrace it.
It’s kind of hard to break old habits and practise self-compassion.
I encourage you to treat yourself fairly and with kindness, and see what happens.
Barnard, L. K., & Curry, J. F. (2011). Self-compassion: Conceptualizations, correlates, & interventions. Review of General Psychology, 15(4), 289-303.
Neff, K. D. (2003). The development and validation of a scale to measure self-compassion. Self and Identity, 2(3), 223-250.
Our Blog Author
This post was written by the team at Your Mind Matters. Self-compassion is a skill anyone can learn, and we are here to help. Meet our team.
Have you felt exhausted, overwhelmed, feeling like you hate what you’re doing, not enjoying your family time and like you’ve got nothing left to give?
You could be suffering symptoms of burnout.
Burnout is not a new concept and was explored by American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in the 1970s. He determined burnout to be essentially a byproduct of our desire for high achievement and the extreme stress levels we put ourselves through to meet this goal. Even prior to the global pandemic, World Health Organization (WHO) recognised burnout as a major occupational hazard with a growing number of worker reports of energy depletion, negativity about their work and a reduction in professional efficacy. The changes to the workplace, family demands (remote learning), reduction in social outlets and work life balance impacts during the pandemic, further compounded this, with significant increases in workplace burnout being reported.
Whilst most people are generally equipped to handle stressors that they encounter in life and at work, burnout can start to take hold when these stressors become chronic in nature and are not addressed. Burnout is not a badge of honour, however often tends to be perceived as such, especially in high achieving environments. It is worn daily as we rush to meetings, skip meal breaks to complete an extra task, work long hours, forget to take our vacation time as well as accumulating many years’ worth of personal leave, pushing through exhaustion and illness to attend work due to a misguided belief that we’re irreplaceable. It is also worn by parents who undertake too much and chase the perfect image of parenting to please others, rather than slowing down, asking for help and acknowledging struggles.
When in the throes of full-fledged burnout, one is no longer able to function effectively on a personal or professional level. Since burnout doesn’t happen suddenly, but gradually creeps up, the wellbeing decline is often overlooked until it’s too late. Medically, there has been debate about whether burnout is simply a form of depression, due to similarities and overlap between them. The general consensus is, that the difference is in burnout being specific to workplace/family situations, whereas depression can develop in any given circumstances, even in the absence of triggers and stressors.
Burnout is both emotional and physical exhaustion caused by prolonged periods of stress. WHO describes it as “a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic stress that has not been successfully managed”.
In the workplace, common contributors to burnout include:
The effects of burnout are not limited to the workplace, however. It often spills over to affect relationships with family and friends. Research shows that when supervisors are critical of employees who are also mothers, these women tend to be harsher toward their children as well as more withdrawn. Burnout also tends to increase rates of alcohol and substance abuse. Certain professions, such as health care, are particularly prone to burnout.
The vision of a struggling exhausted parent often paints the clearest picture of what burnout looks and feels like in the family context.
For mothers in a 2018 study, burnout resulted in:
Furthermore, burned out mothers:
As burnout and stress have become more common, the long-term effects can lead to significant problems, which are still continuing to emerge. Our bodies react to heightened stress levels by increasing adrenaline and cortisol, raising your blood pressure, and switching your nervous system into heightened awareness. While this response means to protect you in a dangerous situation, prolonged exposure to this response wreaks havoc on your body.
Physically burnout is linked to heightened blood pressure, hair loss, and chronic pain. Other symptoms can include physical exhaustion, headaches, gastrointestinal symptoms, appetite changes, increased susceptibility to common infections, and sleep disruption. Mentally, burnout is experienced as a feeling of mental exhaustion, cynicism, detachment and ineffectiveness, a lack of accomplishment as well as anxiety and depression.
We cannot simply apply intervention strategies to focus on a single context or only address individual symptoms. We cannot “rest” our way out of burnout, but rather need a combined approach to address all the causes of burnout, both visible and underlying.
You don’t wake up one morning and all of the sudden “have burnout.” Its nature is much more insidious, creeping up on us over time like a slow leak, which makes it much harder to recognise. Still, our bodies and minds do give us warnings, and if you know what to look for, you can recognise it before it’s too late.
The list of these warning signs is not exhaustive and they do exist on a continuum rather than being clearly defined. So, there is generally no clear transition between general stress and burnout and as such regular self-checking as well as listening to feedback from others is necessary.
Signs of physical and emotional exhaustion:
In the industry, burnout is responsible for billions of dollars in losses both through productivity and compensation claims and countless hours in absenteeism and loss of talent.
Dealing with burnout can seem like an impossible task, especially when you’re already feeling so drained and exhausted. You can manage stress and burnout! There are many things you can do both by yourself but also with a bit of help. Your first step is to ACKNOWLEDGE it exists. Sometimes we get very stuck in our routines and we don’t see the effects these have on us. It sets a standard for our normality, and hence becomes less noticeable and more entrenched. So, it’s vital to become aware of its existence.
Here’s a few ideas to help yourself start to feel on track again:
If you would like some support with better managing work stresses, why not give us a call today? Our team of highly skilled and well-experienced practitioners are here to help.
Fuller, T. The Physical Effects of Stress and Burnout & What To Do About It. February 23, 2021. The Physical Effects of Stress and Burnout
Ginger. 2019 workforce attitudes toward behavioral health. Ginger Annual Report. 2020. Accessed July 30, 2021. 2019 Workforce Attitudes Toward Behavioral Health
Hubert S, Aujoulat I. Parental burnout: when exhausted mothers open up. Front Psychol. 2018;9:1021
Psychology Today. The Tell Tale Signs of Burnout … Do You Have Them?. November 26, 2013. The Tell Tale Signs of Burnout
Queen D, Harding K. Societal pandemic burnout: a COVID legacy. Int Wound J. 2020;17(4):873-874.
Threlkeld K. Employee burnout report: COVID-19’s impact and 3 strategies to curb it. Indeed. March 11, 2021. Accessed July 30, 2021. Employee burnout report
World Health Organization. Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases. May 28, 2019. Accessed July 30, 2021. Burn-out an occupational phenomenon
Our Blog Author
This post was written by Lana Lubomirska, Senior Psychologist at Your Mind Matters. Lana works with children, adolescents and adults, using evidence-based therapies to address anxiety, depression, relationship issues and educational stress. 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.
