Now that the winter season is ending, there is much we can learn from it about factors that impact our emotional health. In the winter, the temperatures are (generally) low, there’s less sunlight and often people are required to stay inside for longer periods of time. As a result, we can sometimes find our emotions [...]
Welcome to September, kids are back in school, summer vacations are over, quarterly work stresses start building, and then your car breaks down. You find you just want to scream or cry because you are feeling so stressed and overwhelmed. Welcome to life in America where we honor achievement and success even when it is [...]
Anxiety disorders are the most common form of mental illness in America, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. The condition affects 40 million adults in the United States. That’s 18 percent of the U.S. population. Despite this, people with anxiety disorders still live with a stigma often associated with invisible conditions. Many people [...]
The Power of Being Broken I’ve recently come across an article written by Julie Peters that introduced me to a very interesting figure that I wanted to pass on. Meet Akhilandeshvari, (pronounced ah-kee-LAN-desh-va-ree) we’ll call her Akhilanda for short. She is the Hindu goddess of Never-Not-Broken. She derives her power from always being broken; in [...]
In the last couple of years, we have seen a significant increase in media coverage of sexual assault and abuse. From institutionalized sexual abuse in places of worship, membership organizations, schools, and universities, it seems impossible not to come across another story of another victimization. Despite such increased awareness, there is still much to be [...]
George Carlin once joked that the evolution of the term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) removed the impact of the condition, essentially meaning the more syllables and words we add, the more detached from the issue we become. To a certain degree, he was right, however what we have now understood as PTSD has come a [...]
Anxiety and stress can affect how we perceive reality. We all react to our “imagined reality” of a situation, not the “reality” of it. Imagined reality is our perception of something. If you think that people are thinking negatively about you, you react as if they are in fact thinking negatively about you. This is [...]
Being shy and bashful seems to have some inherited basis. According to the Monitor on Psychology (November 2014), children can show evidence of shyness as young as 4 months old. While most shy children learn to overcome social reticence, about 30-40% are likely to develop social anxiety, a more intense and debilitating condition. Shyness impacts development [...]
Avoidance and Procrastination is something a lot of people experience. Have you ever struggled to start something you’ve been avoiding for a long time? Often anxiety is at the root of our procrastination. The act of avoidance initially provides relief to our feelings of anxiety but soon makes the task we are avoiding seem that [...]
