How Harm Reduction Can Support Stress & Mental Well-Being

There is an overwhelming amount of information online that tells you what you should be doing to optimize your mental health. The truth is that supporting mental health and stress is not that simple.

Mental health disorders and stress disorders are spectrum disorders - this means that they are exacerbations of normal emotional states in our lives. For example, stress is something that is normal and can actually help us succeed in our daily life. However, when the amount of stress becomes chronic or overwhelming it can lead to full blown and highly intrusive anxiety.

When we look at supporting our mental health and stress levels, sometimes it’s more about understanding ourselves better, understanding what soothes us, and not necessarily ridding ourselves of those feelings (or negative behaviours) entirely. This might not always look like the healthiest option, but it certainly will help us navigate where these feelings are originating from and set us on a trajectory for better mental health and stress resiliency. This is called harm reduction.

What Is Harm Reduction?

Harm reduction is a very important tool in treating mental health and in helping us cope with stress. ‘Harm reduction refers to interventions aimed at reducing the negative effects of health behaviours without necessarily extinguishing the problematic health behaviours completely’. Harm reduction is the idea that we are trying to avoid the worst outcome from happening by doing something that is less harmful, but still might be harmful, to minimize the overall detrimental impacts on our health.

Here are a couple examples to help you really understand:

In the treatment of addiction, harm reduction involves replacing the drug of choice or behaviour that is causing harm with something less harmful. This could be replacing drug use with nicotine use. The effects of nicotine are less immediately harmful and less likely to result in death. Even though it is not the “best” behaviour for one’s health, relatively speaking it is much safer than excessive drug use. In this way, smoking is possibly the best and healthiest behaviour for that person. It also gives the person space and time to treat their addiction from other avenues.
The same idea can be applied in eating disorders. For someone with restrictive food tendencies, eating pizza and fried food is actually a “healthy” behaviour because it decreases the nervous system overwhelm and prevents the eating disorder from taking over. For this person, being open to eating all kinds of foods is the definition of health.

How We Use Harm Reduction Every Day

The reality is that most of us are using some form of harm reduction, without even knowing it!

Practitioners are starting to use harm reduction more and more in mental health treatment. The primary goal is to decrease the level of overwhelm that people are experiencing so that they can function. In essence, medication can be seen as a form of harm reduction. The goal is to decrease the intensity of one’s symptoms so that they are able to function and start to work on why this disorder exists in the first place. In mental health harm reduction is anything that can give someone’s nervous system a break from the overwhelm and pain that they are experiencing.

From another perspective anxiety can even be thought of as a form of harm reduction. In essence anxiety is the idea that if we worry about something, we can then do something that is going to prevent a negative outcome from happening. It is causing us to be on edge in order to make that moment better for us and stop something worse from happening. While we know that worrying about something can’t stop something bad from happening, the ideas behind anxiety are well intentioned in theory.

Harm reduction is something that each of us engage in everyday. It is a way to try and minimize the overwhelm of our daily lives whether it is family, work, etc. that is causing our nervous system to go into overwhelm. Harm reduction is meant to decrease the impact of stress on our body and our nervous system so that we can function even when we can’t control the stressor.

How Harm Reduction Can Support Stressful Times

As we go into times of stress - whether it is work, relationships, food, or the upcoming holidays – remember that it is not always about the BEST solution, it is about the solution that is going to decrease the impacts on our nervous system.

Judging ourselves for how we manage our stress in the moment can actually put MORE stress on our nervous system and in fact have the opposite impact that we want. In our modern lives stress is something that we cannot avoid - what we need to do is manage the impact that it has on our mental and physical well being.

Harm reduction can be anything that resonates for you - it can be allowing yourself to eat in a way that makes you feel good either mentally or physically (whether that’s eating a piece of cake or a plate of vegetables), it can be going for a walk, it can be bingeing a TV show, it can be going out to see friends, it can be taking some time off from socializing, it can be doing arts and crafts, it can be going to the gym, it can calling a friend, it can be playing a game.

Most of all it is NOT a laundry list of things to optimize mental health - it is the small things that you do day to day that give your nervous system a break.

A Final Word

If you’re looking for mental health or stress support, and think harm reduction might be a good avenue for you, there is so much we can do to support you on this front! If you would like to learn more about how naturopathic medicine can help support your mental health, you can book a complimentary consult with me here.