Mental health is a crucial component of overall health and wellness, impacting everything from blood pressure to sleep quality and weight. A mental health coach is a professional who can help you improve your mental health through goal setting, lifestyle changes, and symptom management.

What is a Mental Health Coach?

Mental health coaching is similar to life coaching. It is a partnership between a coach and a client that supports the clients’ mental health. Like other types of coaches, a mental health coach encourages, educates, and supports their clients to help them meet goals. In this type of coaching, it means setting and achieving goals for improving mental health.

Mental Health Coaching vs. Therapy

A mental health coach is not a therapist or a substitute for a therapist. If you have a mental illness or struggle to control symptoms, you need a trained, professional psychologist, counselor, or therapist. A coach can enhance your therapy or be useful when you don’t need therapy but could benefit from some support.

Perhaps the most important difference to acknowledge between coaches and therapists is treatment. Therapists and similarly licensed professionals administer treatment for mental illness. A coach should be trained and skilled, but they are not necessarily licensed healthcare professionals. Some may be both trained coaches and licensed therapists.

Benefits of Working with a Certified Mental Health Coach

The coaching industry isn’t regulated like mental health care is, but good coaches are trained and certified by professional organizations. When you work with a professional mental health life coach, you could benefit in several ways:

• Set and meet mental health goals. Knowing you want to improve mental health and actually doing it are separate issues. A health coach can take you from plan to action with goal setting and the motivation and techniques to meet them.
• Find your strengths. Coaches are all about action. They’ll help you take concrete steps to meet your goals by uncovering your strengths and building self-confidence.
• Make healthy lifestyle changes. The choices you make daily impact mental health. A coach can help you identify and change lifestyle factors to improve your mental health: getting more quality sleep, drinking less, exercising more, or paying more attention to nutrition.
• Manage mental illness or symptoms. If you have a mental illness or recurring symptoms, a coach can be a great supplement to therapy. They can help you take what you learn from counseling and apply it to your daily life to manage and cope with symptoms like depression, anxiety, and stress.
• Learn time management. Coaches are great at time management. They can help you use your time better and more efficiently, which is a useful way to manage stress and reduce anxiety.

Health coaching is effective for most people. Although mental health coaching is less studied, researchers have found that health coaches successfully help their clients manage chronic conditions.

The importance of mental health is too often overlooked. You don’t have to have a mental illness to work on, improve, and maintain mental health. Anyone can benefit from working with a coach to meet individual goals, like sleeping better, starting a meditation practice, or managing anxiety.