Therapy Is One Hour a Week. Here’s How to Use the Other 167.
Here are a few title options first:
Reframe-forward:
- Therapy Is One Hour a Week. Here’s How to Use the Other 167.
- What You Do Between Sessions Matters as Much as the Session Itself.
- Making the Most of Therapy Starts Outside the Therapy Room.
My top pick: “Therapy Is One Hour a Week. Here’s How to Use the Other 167.” — specific, immediately reframes the scope of mental health work, and creates genuine curiosity.
Therapy Is One Hour a Week. Here’s How to Use the Other 167.
A weekly therapy session gives you one hour to do meaningful work on your mental health. That leaves 167 hours in the week where you are on your own.
What you do with those hours matters. The skills you learn in session, the patterns you start to recognize, the coping tools you are building, all of it requires practice outside the therapy room to actually take root. Here are five things that can help.
1. Journal after your session
Therapy can cover a lot of ground in a short time, and it is not always easy to retain everything afterward. Jotting down what you talked about, what came up, and what you want to remember gives you something to return to between sessions. Some people find it helpful to take brief notes during the session itself and expand on them later when they have more space to reflect.
2. Notice how you talk to yourself
Most of us are significantly harder on ourselves than we realize. Therapy can help you identify your inner critic, but noticing it in the moment, between sessions, is where the real work happens. Start paying attention to the quality of your self-talk throughout the day. You may be surprised by what you find. Awareness is always the first step toward change.
3. Take care of your body
Therapy is emotionally demanding work. Be gentle with yourself in the hours after a session. Drink water. Eat. Rest. Do something that feels good. The physical basics have a direct impact on your capacity to process and integrate what you are working on in therapy, and they are easy to overlook when life gets busy.
4. Keep a running list of what you want to discuss
Important realizations have a way of surfacing between sessions at inconvenient times. Keep a note on your phone or in a journal where you can capture topics, questions, or moments you want to bring to your next appointment. It keeps the work continuous rather than starting from scratch every week.
5. Practice mindfulness
A lot of what therapy addresses, anxiety, rumination, emotional reactivity, is rooted in being pulled out of the present moment. Mindfulness practice between sessions helps you build the capacity to stay present, which makes the work you do in therapy more accessible in daily life. Even five minutes a day of intentional presence makes a difference over time.
Showing up to therapy takes courage. What you do between sessions is where that courage compounds into real change. Give yourself credit for both.
If you are ready to start therapy or want to learn more about what working with a Holistic Consultation clinician looks like, we are here.
Want to learn more or schedule? Book a free 10-minute call with our Intake Coordinator or reach out through our contact page.