21 Day Journey To Strive For A Healthier You


Non-Fiction - Self Help
88 Pages
Reviewed on 03/08/2022
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Author Biography

A native of Demopolis, Alabama, Crystal Mullen-Johnson is the founder and CEO of Strive Counseling Services located in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. She is an award winning therapist, a licensed clinical social worker, a private independent practitioner, and a registered play therapist. She has more than 16 years of experience providing mental health counseling to individuals and families. She earned her BA and MA in social work at Alabama A&M University. Crystal has also been featured as an expert contributor and a mental health contributing writer in The Birmingham Times and AL.com. She has been featured as an expert on local radio stations, podcast and the news outlets in both Birmingham, AL and in Charlotte, SC. Impassioned about providing useful resources to the community about the importance of mental health awareness and wellness, she launched the Community Mental Health Awareness Initiative in 2019. The initiative's goals are educate attendees about mental health conditions, provide free community resources, reduce mental health stigmas and debunk false information about mental health. Crystal is the founder of Nurture LLC, a non-profit that strive to expand the availability of mental health resources, specifically to individuals from historically marginalized backgrounds. She is the founder of a book club that aims to empower women to read, gain knowledge, and connect socially to discuss relevant topics. In her leisure, Crystal enjoys reading, exercising, traveling, and spending time with family and friends. She has a son, Ethan Johnson and a Labradoodle, Prince Johnson.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Keith Mbuya for Readers' Favorite

Being human means you will at some point feel lonely, experience a breakup, grieve a loved one, and go through experiences that will heavily influence you emotionally. In other words, you will experience different kinds of emotions at different stages of your life. Everyone experiences these stages of life differently. Although these stages are necessary and almost natural, most people do not have any idea about how to deal with them or go through them. While it is okay to allow yourself to fully experience the wave of emotions that comes with them, it is totally wrong to let the emotions you experience destroy you. Get yourself Crystal Mullen-Johnson’s 21 Day Journey to Strive for a Healthier You to learn how you can deal with experiences that negatively affect your emotions.

Crystal Mullen-Johnson’s 21 Day Journey to Strive for a Healthier You is a perfect guide to going through painful emotional experiences and the healing process. Crystal’s style of writing is great. She uses short and simple sentences to convey her thoughts and ideas. Her use of vocabulary and her orderly way of aligning her ideas and thoughts makes the book very comprehensive. The questions were very thought-provoking. It gets even better with the spaces that she provides to write down answers. There is also great advice about how to look after your mental health. What I loved most is how Crystal acknowledged the diversity and complexity of people’s emotions. I also loved how she insisted that I should face and embrace reality, (if it's clear you can't handle your emotional experience, seek professional assistance). All these make her ideas very practical and therefore effective. Simple, precise, educative advice. The 21 Day Journey to Strive for a Healthier You is a must-read for people dealing with painful emotional experiences.

Asher Syed

Crystal Mullen-Johnson's 21 Day Journey To Strive For A Healthier You is a non-fiction devotional style journal for those who want to harness the well-documented benefits of daily journaling as a transformative way to promote positive mental health. As the title suggests, this is a three-week program but one that I would suspect readers will return to as needed. The majority of the book is blank-lined pages for readers to complete the daily theme, but each of the 21 days has an independent theme that includes topics such as Focus on day four, Grief on day fourteen, and Forgiveness on day eighteen. Mullen-Johnson imparts a brief paragraph or two on the topic, a question prompt to facilitate reflection and journaling, a quote, and a breathing challenge. The full journey is capped off with an assessment and breathing techniques as part of the backmatter.

As I perused through the first run of 21 Day Journey To Strive For A Healthier You, the voice of my grandmother rang in the back of my mind with one of her little nuggets of wisdom: “Why use nine words when it only takes two?” Crystal Mullen-Johnson gives us a streamlined and extremely straightforward route to jumpstart our forward movement to living in a healthier mental state. What I appreciated most is that she doesn't muck about with fillers just to pad the journal out, which allowed me to really focus on the material. I hate to admit that I sometimes have the attention span of a ferret, and so the most immediately helpful day for me was day eight; Get It Right. Mullen-Johnson writes, “Avoid procrastination, schedule alerts as reminders, and give yourself grace,” and I have been working to address this particular hurdle. Overall, this is a great little book that may be small in size but has the potential for a big impact.

Marie-Hélène Fasquel

Crystal Mullen-Johnson's 21 Day Journey To Strive For A Healthier You is a self-help guide and a challenge to be taken up by anyone who wants to lead a healthier life in 21 days. It is comprehensive, includes breathing exercises, tips, advice, 21 chapters to reflect on and adopt a better lifestyle one baby step at a time. The aim is to feel better, not to be stressed out or anxious. Therefore, the author always strives to help us in a challenging but easy-going way. She is particularly open, empathetic, kind-hearted and that is appealing.

Crystal Mullen-Johnson's 21 Day Journey To Strive For A Healthier You is an amazing and beautifully-designed self-help guide/challenge for busy (or not) people who need a small push toward a better, thriving, healthier life. I loved everything about this book. It is short and to the point. It is also interactive. The author stresses the importance of being engaged in the process and allows the reader space to reflect, connect, and of course change. You can jot down notes when you have read and completed the actions/reflections of each of the twenty-one chapters. You also have a pre-challenge and a post-challenge assessment to fill in, and an inspirational “letter from the author”, references, and a blank spot for introspection. Everything in this opus allows you to grow as a person and to feel better on your journey of self-awareness and self-discovery. My favorite chapters are those about forgiveness, emotional regulation, habits, self-resilience, and self-care, which is hard to focus on when you are a mum and a teacher. Thank you so much for a delightful and useful challenge!