Category: Goals

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 ...

You are sitting on a bench at your local playground. It’s sunny (despite Michigan’s temperamental weather). Your gaze begins to wander and settles on children climbing. They are climbing everywhere. It’s amazing, actually, how many things children can climb on. You further notice how they run, walk, slide down slides, play tag, squeal with delight on swings. Toddlers trundle off in a big, new-to-them world. They seem to take up space with ease; it’s their world, we’re just living in it. They are so sure that they belong wherever they go. Do you have this scene? For me, this imagined space invites lots of emotions: joy, wonder, delight, curiosity, and sadness. Yes, sadness. Because I, as an adult, have a harder time feeling so present and excited and happy and confident of belonging. I have more awareness and more to my story as to why these emotions make sense for me.

What is play, and why does it make sense for all humans of ...

For years I often heard people say that you have to go through grief and pain, you can’t go around it, you can’t go above it, you have to go through it. For years I didn’t understand what that meant. We live in an incredibly emotionally avoidant culture which then leads to chronic mental emotional health struggles, high addiction and disconnection from self and others among other symptoms. 

In order to move through grief or pain a person must create a safe space for emotions to build. Like a wave on a beach, emotions need to be able to build and crash safely on the shore before they can recede out and become calm again. Instead of allowing the natural flow, we often dam up the water as high as we can to keep it from crashing, but then when it inevitably breaks the dam, and the lifetime of suppressed emotions can come cascading and flooding ...