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Integrative Psychiatry

6 Things You Can Do For Free Right Now to Improve Your Mental Health

By April 15, 2024No Comments

In the field of integrative psychiatry, it is easy to put a lot of emphasis on fancy treatments and expensive gadgets. We often stress the importance of lifestyle changes that involve a hefty amount of psychological effort, physical stress, or financial means. Nourishing our wellbeing does not need to be so complicated, and to remind us of this, here are six simple ideas to try right now.

  1. Invest in close relationships: Affiliative behaviors evolved as part of sociability mechanisms for group cooperation and species survival. If it feels good for you to do, affiliative behaviors such as touching or hugging someone you trust can immediately stimulate feel-good social emotions. Something as simple as eye contact or orienting body language to appear and feel open toward others. Likewise, it can be just as powerful to connect with an animal, hug a pillow, or provide cues of affiliative behavior, through soothing, caring touch, to you yourself.
  2. Connect with nature: Spending time in green spaces is hugely beneficial to promote relaxation and improve mood. Engaging with nature is accessible in a number of ways–sit on a park bench, go for a walk, listen for birds. If going outside is a challenge right now, observe an indoor plant, or simply become aware of the feeling of sunshine on your skin.
  3. Mindfully move your body: We spend a lot of time in routine, often staying constantly busy. It may be supportive to welcome a few minutes of rest, but in a new physical orientation. For example, if you have been sitting, perhaps you move to stand or lie down instead. If your mind has been active, it may be interesting to just let your thoughts wander, no need to focus or “try” meditating, just let it go, paying special attention to sensations or feelings that emerge and dissipate. If instead movement feels accessible to you, you might try a walking meditation, taking a deep breath in as you lift your foot, and a deep breath out as you lower that foot, intentionally slowing your steps down and noticing connection with the ground as it makes contact with each part of your foot.

  4. Invite gratitude: Gratitude is well known to have a number of mental health benefits, yet it is often overlooked or forgotten. Take a moment right now for three deep breaths and settle into your body, your seat or standing position, your location and context. See if there is space to invite three things you are grateful for in your life right now; notice any pleasure that arises as you breathe.

  5. Express yourself through creativity: Engaging in creative activities, self-expression through movement, writing, or visual art, can support psychological flexibility, taking new perspectives, and problem solving. By seeing what emerges, creativity can act like our inner “voice,” fostering insight and a more intimate relationship with self. Working out the brain’s creative muscle may also help increase a sense of agency by inspiring new cognitive, behavioral, and emotional strategies during life’s challenges. Try writing down your present moment feeling through a metaphor, and if you can, let go of judgements or filtering what comes up for you. For more visual folks, maybe sketch something abstract, or create a mosaic out of small, random objects lying around the room.

  6. Activate laughter: Laughing is like hydration and fiber: underappreciated yet essential ingredients in complete recipe for wellness. Living in the modern age can be very stressful! A good belly laugh every single day can help reset the regulation of the nervous system. Take a couple of minutes to listen to or watch a comedy; you might also inspire laughter by calling a friend, getting in touch with your inner child, considering something amusing that you recently experienced, or stimulating conscious laughing (laughter yoga).

Sara Reed, MS, LMFT

Sara Reed is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and CEO of Mind’s iHealth Solutions, a digital health company that provides evidence based and culturally responsible mental health services for underserved groups. As a mental health futurist and clinical researcher, Sara examines the ways culture informs the way we diagnose and treat mental illness. Sara’s prior research work includes participation as a study therapist in psychedelic therapy research at Yale University and the University of Connecticut’s Health Center. Sara was the first Black therapist to provide MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in a clinical trial and continues to engage in ongoing advocacy work around health equity in psychedelic medicine.

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Jeffrey Guss, MD is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and researcher with specializations in psychoanalytic therapy and the treatment of substance use disorders. He was Co-Principal Investigator and Director of Psychedelic Therapy Training for the NYU School of Medicine’s study on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of cancer-related existential distress, which was published in Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2016. He currently is a study therapist in the NYU study on Psychedelic-Assisted therapy in the treatment of Alcoholism, a collaborator with Yale University’s study on psychedelic-assisted therapy for Major Depressive Disorder and a study therapist with the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) study on treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy. 

Dr. Guss is interested in the integration of psychedelic therapies with contemporary psychoanalytic theory and has published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He has published (with Elizabeth Nielson, PhD) a paper on “the influence of therapists’ first had experience with psychedelics on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy research and therapist training” in The Journal of Psychedelic Studies, August, 2018. He is an Instructor and Mentor with the California Institute of Integral Studies’ Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Supervisor in NYU’s Fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry. 

Dr. Guss maintains a private practice in New York City.

Will Van Derveer, MD

Will Van Derveer, MD is Co-Founder of Integrative Psychiatry Institute and Integrative Psychiatry Centers. Dr. Van Derveer was co-investigator on a phase 2 MAPS study of Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for treatment-resistant PTSD, and co-authored the publication of this study in 2018. He has also provided Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in two MAPS training studies. An active provider of KAP at his clinic in Boulder, CO, he has been teaching others KAP therapy for several years. Dr. Van Derveer contributed a chapter on mescaline in the 2021 "Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens" (edited by Charles Grob and Jim Grigsby). He is co-host of the Higher Practice Podcast.

Dr. Van Derveer regards unresolved emotional trauma as the most significant under-recognized root cause of psychiatric symptoms in integrative psychiatry practice, along with gut issues, hormone imbalances, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other functional medicine challenges. He is trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and other psychotherapy techniques. His current clinical passion is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which he mentors interested doctors in providing. An avid meditator, he has been a meditation instructor since 2004.

For the past several years Dr. Van Derveer has taught psychiatrists and other psychiatric providers integrative psychiatry in a number of settings, including course directing the CU psychiatry residents’ course as well as with Scott Shannon and Janet Settle at the Psychiatry MasterClass.


Scott has been a student of consciousness since his honors thesis on that topic at the University of Arizona in the 1970s under the tutelage of Dr. Andrew Weil. Following medical school, Scott studied Jungian therapy and acupuncture while working as a primary care physician in a rural area for four years. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy became a facet of his practice before this medicine was scheduled in 1985. He then completed a psychiatry residency at Columbia program in New York. Scott studied cross-cultural psychiatry and completed a child/adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of New Mexico.

In 2010 he founded Wholeness Center in Fort Collins. This innovative clinic provides cross-disciplinary evaluation and care for all mental health concerns. Scott serves as a site Principal Investigator and therapist for the Phase III trial of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD sponsored by (MAPS). He has also published numerous articles about his research on (CBD) in mental health. Currently, Scott works extensively with psychedelic-assisted-psychotherapy. He lectures all over the world to professional groups interested in a deeper look at mental health issues, safer tools, and a paradigm-shifting perspective about transformative care.

Will Van Derveer, MD is co-founder of Integrative Psychiatry Institute (IPI), along with friend and colleague Keith Kurlander, MA. He co-created IPI as an expression of what he stands for. First, that anyone can heal, and second that we medical providers must embrace our own healing journeys in order to fully command our potency as healers.

Dr. Van Derveer spent the last 20 years innovating and testing a comprehensive approach to addressing psychiatric challenges which transcends the conventional model he learned in medical school at Vanderbilt University and residency at University of Colorado, while deeply engaging his own healing path.

He founded the Integrative Psychiatric Healing Center in in 2001 in Boulder, CO, where he currently practices. Dr. Van Derveer regards unresolved emotional trauma as the most significant root cause of psychiatric symptoms in integrative psychiatry practice, along with gut issues, hormone imbalances, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and other functional medicine challenges. He is trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and other psychotherapy techniques. His current clinical passion is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which he mentors interested doctors in providing. An avid meditator, he has been a meditation instructor since 2004.

For the past several years Dr. Van Derveer has taught psychiatrists and other psychiatric providers integrative psychiatry in a number of settings, including course directing the CU psychiatry residents’ course as well as with Scott Shannon and Janet Settle at the Psychiatry MasterClass. In addition to his clinical work and teaching, he was co-investigator in 2016 a Phase II randomized clinical trial, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He continues to support this protocol, now in a Phase III clinical trial under break-through designation by FDA.

Dr. Van Derveer is a diplomate of the American Board of Integrative and Holistic Medicine (ABoIHM) since 2013, and he was board certified in the first wave of diplomates of the new American Board of Integrative Medicine (ABIM) in 2016.