Category: Anxiety

Our ability to manage logistics can often be overlooked when we think of our mental health. But logistics (planning, doing regular, boring life tasks like cleaning, paying the bills, etc) are an important factor for our stress and anxiety levels. For many people, trying to plan or white-knuckle their way out of frustration with managing their day-to-day life doesn't work. 

Maybe this is familiar:

Your kitchen is wildly messy → tired and overwhelmed, you decide not to do it now → you feel a teeeeensy bit better, because you’ve decided not to deal with the thing. → your kitchen is worse now, and because of that, your feeling of overwhelm has also gotten worse. Now, more than ever, you really (really, really) don’t want to clean the kitchen, because it would take a solid 2 hours to clean it properly. At some point, you will likely reach a point where you will end up cleaning things, or someone else you live with may. And t ...

Turning off endless thoughts and rumination can be a difficult task for many people (in fact, 6.8 million people across the US).  So, it should not be shocking that we all may experience similar instances, or even times of day when we find it difficult to turn off the worry.  Some people may experience anxiety in the morning, throughout the day, or all-times revolving around sleep.  Have you ever been abruptly woken up from a deep sleep trying to figure out the world’s problems—many of us have! Or, are you the jealous type who envies your spouse for catching ZZZ’s moments after hitting their pillow—meanwhile, you are left alone with your thoughts for hours on end?! The thoughts can be endless, and thoughts do not necessarily have to be distressing in nature to be, well, distressing. 

Humans have the ability to think and think and think, without ever really finding the end of the thought—we simply ruminat ...

A healthy, regulated nervous system is vital for good mental health. The nervous system is responsible for discerning our general wellbeing and it warns us when we’re no longer safe. For example, we may be experiencing fear or heightened anxiety in the face of a confrontational conversation with someone we love. We may feel that by our hearts racing, having trouble thinking clearly, shortness of breath, or wanting to run away as we’re having that conversation. Other times, we may shut down, disconnect or ghost people in order to avoid a challenging situation. In any of those scenarios, our nervous system is experiencing some sort of dysregulation through overstimulation or shut down. We do not feel safe and our nervous system is working properly by letting us know and moving us into the primal, protective part of our brain. 

Maybe we face that fear and address the challenging conversation a ...