Each May, Mental Health Awareness Month calls us to pause, reflect, and—most importantly—act. This year’s theme, Turn Awareness into Action, is more than a call to arms. It’s an invitation to treat mental wellness not as a far-off goal, but as a daily relationship. One we tend to in quiet moments, with gentle hands and a steady heart.
Mental fitness isn’t about being fearless or endlessly productive. It’s about creating the internal conditions to meet stress with flexibility, curiosity, and care. The empowering truth? Our brains are designed to grow. Neuroplasticity ensures that what we practice—whether that’s self-compassion or chronic worry—literally reshapes the way our brain functions (Tartakovsky, 2022). When we choose habits that soothe and regulate, we’re not just surviving—we’re building neural scaffolding for long-term resilience.
Integrative Micro-Exercises like CPR for the Amygdala®
A part of the Healing in Your Hands programs, CPR for the Amygdala® is a neuroscience-based self-regulation practice that combines soothing touch with cognitive engagement to calm the brain’s stress response. By gently stroking the arms or hands while performing a simple cognitive task—such as counting backward, naming colors, or reciting song lyrics—you help disrupt the amygdala’s reactive pattern and signal safety to the nervous system. This dual-action technique not only reduces sympathetic arousal but also supports the re-engagement of the prefrontal cortex, creating space for clarity, calm, and empowered choice (Truitt, 2022).
Practice Kindness—Inside and Out
Kindness isn’t a soft skill—it’s a neurobiological strategy for resilience.
Whether it’s directed inward or outward, kindness activates your brain’s social engagement systems and releases oxytocin, the “tend and befriend” neurochemical that supports trust, bonding, and regulation. From a neuroscience perspective, this isn’t just about being nice—it’s about shifting your nervous system out of survival mode and into connection and safety (Truitt, 2023a).
Kindness toward others is deeply regulating, yes—but the harder task, and often the more necessary one, is practicing it with ourselves. That moment you mess up or feel overwhelmed? The way you talk to yourself then matters. Self-criticism lights up the same pain centers in the brain that physical injury does. Self-compassion, on the other hand, invites the prefrontal cortex back online and opens space for reflection, problem-solving, and calm.
Try this simple experiment today:
When something goes sideways, pause and whisper to yourself, “This is hard, and I’m doing my best.”
That sentence alone is enough to create measurable shifts in brain activation, moving you from the limbic system’s reactivity into the brain’s higher-order capacities for regulation and resilience (Garoutte-Moahmmed, 2025).
And if extending kindness to yourself feels out of reach today, offer it to someone else. A smile, a thank-you, a moment of presence in a conversation. The brain doesn’t separate the origin of kindness—it simply registers the state. In other words, even when it feels hard to give yourself grace, the act of offering kindness to others still brings the nervous system home.
Let kindness be your reset button. Not a reward for having it all together, but a way of saying: I deserve care, even in my messiest moments. Especially in my messiest moments.
Watch this video for A Daily Practice for Cultivating Inner Kindness with to help you go even deeper.
Reflect at Day’s End
Before sleep, take a few quiet moments to ask yourself: What felt okay today? Where did I show up, even in a small way? Naming these moments—no matter how ordinary—helps build cognitive pathways for hope and gently counters the brain’s natural tendency to fixate on what went wrong. This tendency, known as the negativity bias (Rozin, & Royzma, 2001), is part of how the brain evolved to keep us safe, but it can leave us feeling stuck or discouraged if we don’t actively work to balance it.
Want to understand why your brain holds onto the hard stuff more tightly than the good?
Watch this short video to explore the science of the negativity bias and learn how simple, daily practices like this one can rewire your brain toward resilience and joy.
Healing happens in the small, repeated choices we make to show up for ourselves. These habits—rooted in science and self-kindness—are how we begin to turn awareness into action. Ready to learn more? Download your free Neuroplasticity Empowerment Toolkit today!
References
Garoutte-Moahmmed, G. (2025, February 5). 9 habits for mental health: Daily practices to boost well-being. BetterUp. https://www.betterup.com/blog/good-habits
National Institutes of Health. (n.d.). Emotional wellness toolkit. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.nih.gov/health-information/emotional-wellness-toolkit
Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(4), 296–320. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0504_2
Truitt, K. (2022). Healing in your hands: Harnessing neuroplasticity to heal the past, create the present, and build your future. PESI Publishing & Media.
