Your mental health dictates how you feel, think, and act. As a result, it greatly impacts your life. Tony Hoffman knows from first-hand experience how much mental health challenges often create chaos and confusion in your life. He also knows that finding peace is very important in managing your mental health. Incorporating peace into your life is difficult. However, once you do, you are more likely to find joy and satisfaction. Tony Hoffman can help you understand the gradual process of introducing peace into your life and how it plays a role in turning your life around for the better.

When Tony Hoffman was a teenager, he was known as the kid who was bound to be successful. He was recognized in the BMX community and set up to be successful as a BMX athlete. However, under the surface, Tony was struggling with crippling anxiety and depression. His mental health challenges drove him to drug use, which led him down the path of addiction, homelessness, and incarceration. After being incarcerated, Tony knew he had to change. He took steps every day to turn his life around, knowing that if he did not, he would be stuck in chaos and addiction long-term.

Mental Health Challenges: The Impact

As an individual, your mental health challenges are unique to you. Regardless of the type of mental health issues that you face, they impact your life. When you struggle with mental health, you can look fine on the outside but still struggle to get through each day. This is how it was for Tony Hoffman. While he looked like he was set up for success, he was struggling immensely to find peace and meet his goals.

There is a variety of mental health disorders, each of which can affect you due to different severity, your unique genetics, and your environment. However, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are all well-known to affect peace and quality of life. In addition, each of these mental health disorders commonly plays a role in substance use and addiction. As such, depression, anxiety, and PTSD are well known to co-occur with addiction.

The impact that mental health disorders have on your life is far-reaching. In reality, you may not fully understand how it is impacting your life until you address it. Over the course of treatment and far into recovery, you will begin to see how your mental health has shaped your daily life, your relationships, and your outlook for the future.

Depression

Major depressive disorder, more commonly known as depression, is a serious mood disorder. The symptoms of depression vary in both types of symptoms and severity. However, depression impacts how you feel, think, act, and handle daily stressors. Common depression symptoms include a low mood, irritability, and high fatigue. However, depression can also cause challenges with your eating patterns, sleeping patterns, and focus.

The symptoms of depression make it difficult for you to get through each day. Depending on how depression manifests for you, it can make it hard for you to feel motivated to do what you have previously enjoyed. In addition, the changes in mood, sleep, and self-care create a challenge in dealing with stress. This means that stressful events are often difficult to resolve and disrupt your emotional and mental health.

Depression is often thought of as a persistent low mood. This is one of many symptoms associated with depression. However, a low mood does not mean a peaceful mood. When you struggle with depression, your thoughts, feelings, and actions are disrupted, which means that while you may not feel like doing anything, you often feel bad about not wanting to do anything. This combination is very painful and makes it very difficult for you to find peace in your life.

Anxiety

Experiencing occasional anxiety is a normal part of life. Anxiety disorders, on the other hand, are not. If you struggle with an anxiety disorder, your daily life is disrupted by symptoms that range from fatigue and lack of concentration to restlessness and panic attacks. The specific symptoms are highly individual. They vary due to the types of anxiety disorder you struggle with and the severity of your anxiety.

Having anxiety at any severity level is a challenge. It affects how you feel, think, and act. This, in turn, affects every aspect of your life. In addition, anxiety makes it more challenging to deal with stress. As stress is a normal part of life, anxiety causes distress when you encounter challenges.

Anxiety causes particular difficulty in finding peace in your life. The mental cycle of anxiety causes repetitive thoughts, panic, and physical discomfort. As a result, in moments where you would ideally feel tranquil and satisfied, you may find yourself met with the reality of anxiety. Once incarcerated and on the road to recovery, Tony Hoffman was met with this harsh reality. He was confronted with his anxious feelings and, as he was separated from distractions and substances, had to learn to face his mental health head-on.

PTSD

While initially thought of as a disorder developed by veterans, PTSD is a mental health disorder that anyone can develop at any age. It is a reaction to experiencing or witnessing trauma and results in a variety of mental health symptoms. The symptoms are separated into categories, including:

• Re-experiencing symptoms such as flashbacks or distressing thoughts

• Avoidance symptoms

• Reactivity symptoms such as irritability

• Mood symptoms

If you are struggling with PTSD, your symptoms can vary in severity. However, the diagnosis for PSTD includes one re-experiencing and avoiding symptoms and two reactivity and mood symptoms.

The symptoms associated with PTSD greatly impact daily life. When you struggle with re-experiencing symptoms, your sleep and physical rest are severely affected, while avoidance symptoms make it difficult to engage in your life. Both reactivity and mood symptoms also impact your daily life. Ultimately, the combination of these symptoms disrupts your internal life. They create constant discomfort and disturbance, decreasing your quality of life.

Difficulty of Finding Peace: The Mental Health Cycle

When you have peace in your life, it does not mean that you are not challenged. Instead, it means that you can meet the challenges that you face without total disruption. This feels like playing a well-matched game. You are engaged in a challenge without being overloaded by it. Therefore, while you may experience stress, you are still able to feel positive about the experience that you are having.

When you have a mental health disorder, finding peace is very difficult. This is because mental health challenges decrease your ability to cope with daily challenges. For example, if you struggle with anxiety, a presentation at work can cause you to feel completely depleted and overloaded. This means that you are not able to meet the challenge with vigor or joy; instead, you may get through it but will likely feel highly disrupted by the experience.

In addition to this disruption, mental health challenges commonly cause shame. While feelings of shame and embarrassment are common, they play a role in a cycle that disrupts your quality of life. When you meet a challenge in your life and struggle with it due to your mental health, shame makes you feel that it is all your fault. This, in turn, makes it harder to face the fact that your mental health is impacting your quality of life. As a result, you turn internal instead of reaching out for help. The more shame you feel, the less you address your mental health, and the more you get stuck in a cycle of disruption, moving farther away from finding peace.

Finding Peace: Tony Hoffman’s Story

When Tony Hoffman was incarcerated, he faced many hard realities. First, he had to face up to what his life had become. This included owning up to his challenges with addiction, mental health issues, and crime. The reality was difficult to see and accept. However, once he had accepted it, it opened up many doors.

By accepting where he was at, Tony Hoffman had the chance to make a decision. He could choose to stay on the path he was on, setting himself up for living on the street, going in and out of prison, or he could change. Making changes meant taking steps to be different. As he was in prison, he had control of very few things. One of the things he could change was his internal life. Tony Hoffman took steps and put in daily effort to transform himself internally, finding peace so that he could meet his goals and create a life he was happy with.

Slowly Incorporating Peace

Finding peace is not a one-step process. When Tony was first incarcerated, he went through a process that was far from peaceful. This internal process included owning up to the fact that he had made choices that led him down this road. While this can seem counter to the goal of finding peace, sometimes you have to get over the speed bump to get to where you want to be.

Once Tony had decided he could and would change, he began to slowly incorporate peace into his life. This process was slow. The first step was to find ways that helped him to rest. For Tony, this was difficult. His body and mind were healing from addiction, and there was often little peace in the process. However, through exercise and routine, Tony began to experience moments of peace.

Over time, Tony found ways to feel less chaos internally. The more he did it, the more he was able to find peace. This step-by-step process often felt grueling, and Tony had to focus on it daily. However, over time, peace became a habitual part of his life in prison, and he was able to carry that skill with him when he was released.

Finding Peace Through Simplicity

When you are seeing peace in your life, it often feels very complicated. It is like something that you can’t quite grasp. This is a very frustrating experience that Tony Hoffman can empathize with. When he was first seeking to make changes he found himself frustrated daily. He wanted to feel different but would find himself disrupted repeatedly.

However, finding peace comes from the consistent practice of simple things. Tony began by making changes that he could do daily. This included simple tasks like making his bed, exercising, and breathing. While these things were easy, he found that he often didn’t want to do them. However, when he pushed himself to complete these tasks, he found that he felt different. He was taking the reins of his life one small step at a time.

The simple actions of his daily life ultimately led Tony to find peace. Due to these actions, he identified his goals, which included going to the Olympics, racing BMX bikes again, and starting a non-profit. Tony Hoffman did not know how he was going to meet these goals. He took the steps that he could every day, and the more he practiced, the more he found peace internally and focused on where he wanted to be in the future.

The Path to Finding Peace

As a unique individual, your path to finding peace will need to suit your specific needs and wants. However, looking at Tony Hoffman’s story of how he found peace and nurtured it in his life can help. Tony Hoffman found peace by building community, rebuilding habits, and caring for his needs. You too can make these changes and help yourself to transform your life for the better.

Community

As a human, you are a social being. The actions of others with whom you spend time greatly impact how you think, feel, and spend your time. When you are engaged in unhealthy behaviors, including addiction and crime, you are surrounded by others who are also partaking in these activities. As you transition your life away from these activities, it is therefore important that you build a community that supports these changes.

There are many ways that you can find a community that helps you to sustain peace in your life. Peer support groups, family and friends, and joining new healthy activities are all great options. When you build your community, it can help to think about how others are impacting your internal and external environment. Ideally, you want to engage with others who help you feel capable of meeting your goals and help decrease the disruptions that you experience.

Rebuilding Habits

The way that you spend your time greatly dictates how you feel. Tony Hoffman recognized this when he was first incarcerated and worked to change how he spent his days. While he was incarcerated, you do not need to be in prison to rebuild your habits. You can take steps in your daily life to change, finding peace through self-care and daily habits. Habits are actions that you take regularly, often without really thinking about them. For example, you habitually drive the same route to the grocery store or buy the same brand of milk. As a result, habits can cause an issue because they become such a normal part of your life.

Fortunately, you can take steps to change your habits. The first step is recognizing how your habits are impacting you. When you see that they are stopping you from meeting your goals, finding peace, and your quality of life, you are more likely to feel motivated to change them. As you begin to change your habits, it is helpful to take it slow. The goal is to consistently change your behavior. This means that it needs to be attainable to be successful in your new habits regularly.

Over time, rebuilding your habits becomes a bit easier. The more you practice a new habit, the less energy and effort it takes to do it. Making the new and healthier habit a part of your daily life. This helps you in finding peace not just once, but in a manner where peace is built into your life.

When an individual struggles with mental health challenges, they often struggle to find peace. Tony Hoffman had the same experience. However, Tony learned that finding peace helps you to stay sober and manage your mental health needs. He knows that you, too, can make changes that will transform your life for the better. Tony Hoffman is a motivational speaker who helps his audience understand the need to find peace, how they can find peace or help loved ones to do so, and find the drive to make these changes. If you are interested in learning more about Tony Hoffman and his availability for motivational speaking, call us today at (559) 392-8897.