Category: Practice

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 ...

Do you think it’s possible to walk away from an event, situation, relationship, or opportunity and not ask the question why? I’m not sure what the “right” answer is, but I think it’s incredibly difficult for us humans not to ask the question why. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. When we talk about meaning in psychology, we are often referring to an explanation of why something has happened or why something is important. 

As we consider this question of why and create meaning from our experiences, what would you consider to be most meaningful to you? Is it people, events, experiences, hardships, or all of the above? Take a moment and take a look at the pictures in your phone. What is in the pictures, why makes them meaningful? How do I feel about them? What do they make me think of? This may seem like a trivial exercise or question to ponder but if we sit with it long enough, we may be surprised at how we create meaning from our experienc ...

Recent decades have seen an increasing interest in the healing and therapeutic potential of nature and the perspective of various nature-based interventions for the benefit of mental health. The field of nature-based therapies is expanding in line with this interest. During the formative years of modern psychotherapy, several psychotherapists had a close, loving relationship with nature and who had contributed in some ways to the formation of nature therapy. One of them was Carl Jung, a renowned Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was one of the first people in the field of mental health to voice concerns about the separation of men and nature. C. Jung believed that a modern man was in danger of losing all contact with the world of instinct, increased by his living an urban existence and separation from nature. Jung wrote in his diaries that the loss of instinct is largely responsible for the pathological condition of contem ...