New Year New You? 5 Tips to Setting Attainable New Year’s Resolutions

As December winds down, we find ourselves in the final throws of 2018. With 2019 around the corner, many of us will engage in the common tradition of making New Year’s resolutions. From weight loss to career goals everyone will have their resolutions ready and their “New year, new me” mantras ready to back them up. However, many people find out it takes more than a mantra to commit to their goals and a whopping 80% of resolutions fail by the second week of February. This may sound daunting but don’t let a fear of failing stop you from making new year’s resolutions. Here are 5 tips to ensure you stay on track and achieve your new year’s resolutions. Set Small Goals A common mistake with many New Year’s resolutions is often times they’re too big or too broad. Wanting to make a new career change, for example, has a lot of involved details that might leave you overwhelmed and afraid. Instead of wanting to make a career change, learn a new skill with the intent to make a career change. By committing to learning a new skill as opposed to making a drastic leap, you’re more able to see…

Continue Reading

How to deal with Holiday depression?

While the holidays are often a very joyous time, they can also be a very stressful time. All the planning, organizing, spending, and group events can become very overwhelming very quickly. It isn’t uncommon for the stress of the holidays to trigger feelings of sadness and depression even. While it is the holiday season, people are often expected to uphold a certain cheerful exterior. This pressure to be happy can often cause the feelings that are quite the opposite. There are multiple contributing factors to holiday depression, but luckily there are also ways to cope with these feelings. Be aware of underlying expectations Often holidays can lead to disappointment. Why is that? Many times, we get our hopes up about how things will play out over the holidays, whether it is expectations of other people or of ourselves. Try to keep your expectations in a balanced state to avoid getting let down or letting others down. Remember that things going wrong is a part of life, don’t expect everything to be perfect or you are bound to end up disappointed. Stay positive, but don’t build up your expectations. Don’t overdo it Many people tend to overdo it during the holidays….

Continue Reading

3 Tips To Overcome Destructive Self Criticism

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You have an important meeting or a school project that is due tomorrow. As you’re checking through everything and putting on the final touches you realize you’ve done something wrong. This something being redone will take you forever to fix and it’s already late. You start thinking about how ridiculous this whole situation is until finally, it happens. Those criticisms of the situation become criticisms about you. “You’re such an idiot! Why didn’t you check this before you started?” or comments like this are lambasted at you. It’s like a punishment you feel you deserve for not doing it right the first time. While it might seem warranted, you soon realize the effects. You feel like nothing you do is good enough and begin to doubt your own ability to correct the issue. Familiar, isn’t it? Destructive self-criticism is a dangerous tool. It robs you of your self-confidence and can affect your ability to set healthy and attainable goals. It’s a vicious cycle too. To overcompensate for failing the last time you set a higher and even more difficult goal to achieve only to let yourself down again. But life doesn’t have to be…

Continue Reading

How To Heal After A Traumatic Experience

Life can really be wonderful, but unfortunately, life sometimes brings us hardships. Some people face more difficult hardships or traumas than others, just as some people deal with those traumas better than others. Learning how to deal with that trauma and heal afterwards can be difficult, but there is hope, and that is important to remember. You would be amazed what your brain is capable of, one of those things is healing and recovering from traumatizing hardships. It is important to realize that one cannot repress and forget the feelings that come from a traumatic experience, but the only way to heal is to face those feelings and deal with them head on. If you don’t take the time to face your post-trauma distresses, it is highly possible that it could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, which will be even more difficult to overcome. It is important to not repress your feelings or hide yourself from others, but to directly face your feelings and hold on tight to your relationships in life that give you strength. Whether your trauma is a divorce, the death of a loved one, falling ill, or even experiencing events such as natural disasters or war,…

Continue Reading

Sadness and Depression: How to tell the difference?

Sadness and depression quite often go hand in hand. However, it is important to know the difference from when you are just sad, and when you are actually suffering from depression. It can often be difficult to differentiate between the two, but for your own mental and emotional health it is important that you do. It is very common that a person is suffering from depression, but just think that they are just sad a lot of the time. Depression is a condition that should never be neglected, which is why it is so very important that one can tell the difference between the two psychological states. There are a few key differences that will help to decipher whether it is sadness or depression that you are suffering from. Symptoms of depression Although some of these symptoms can occur with sadness, they are temporary. If you experience these signs for an extended period of time it could be more than sadness. If you are suffering from depression, the common symptoms will likely be associated: Feeling sad constantly Changes in your eating or sleeping patterns Difficulty focusing Irritability Loss of interest in activities or things that once brought you happiness Feelings…

Continue Reading

Signs Your Therapy Is Working

Making the decision to go and see a therapist is a big step. After making such a big step, you will find yourself wondering, is seeing a therapist paying off? Every week you go and see your therapist, and some days you may feel good and other days not so much, but regardless of how you feel on a given day of therapy, there are certain signs that you can look for to identify whether your therapy is really working. If you have noticed any of the following signs, then you are on the right track. You look forward to going to your therapy appointments The first few weeks of therapy will feel overwhelming. Opening up and talking to someone about your innermost issues and feelings is extremely difficult. If you have found yourself reaching a place where opening up feels good, or at least comfortable, then you are definitely making progress. Looking forward to going to your sessions means that subconsciously you know it is helping. You are taking better care of yourself If you have noticed that you are taking better care of yourself and making that self-care routine more of a priority, it is a sign that…

Continue Reading

Why Self-Care Is So Important

We often are very good at taking care of our family, our friends, and sometimes even strangers, but so often we forget that we need to also take care of ourselves. When we get caught up in life, work, or family, we sometimes neglect important actions of self-care. We put the to-do’s that involve taking care of ourselves at the bottom of our list and prioritize other things that we think need to get done first. The problem with this is that if you aren’t taking care of yourself, you won’t be able to go on taking care of other things because you won’t be your best self. Very often, it takes a very impactful event for us to wake up and realize that we have been neglecting ourselves. Often the world goes by so fast around us and society pushes us to focus too much of our attention on things in life that don’t benefit our own health. Making self-care a priority is extremely important for your mental, emotional, and physical health; and to live a happy and full life, you must practice it. Following these few tips for self-care can help you get there… Know your worth and…

Continue Reading

8 Ways to Ease Loneliness

Everyone goes through stages of loneliness, some of us more than others. Loneliness can be an empty and defeating feeling that drains you and can leave you with low self-esteem, feeling worthless, or unloved. Different people suffer from varied severities of loneliness and different people deal with it in different ways. We as human beings are made to interact with other humans and have meaningful relationships, it is how we get by. Although, the conflicting part of it is that even sometimes when we have people around us, somehow, we still feel lonely. Fortunately, there are ways to deal with it. If you are feeling lonely, keep reading to learn how to ease that loneliness. #1 Identify why you are feeling lonely The first thing you should do is identify why you are feeling lonely. The only way you will be able to mend your feelings of sadness is to identify where they are coming from. Say you have a lot of friends, but maybe you have so many friends that you don’t have any truly deep and meaningful relationships with any of those particular people. It is possible to have relationships that not only don’t cure your loneliness but…

Continue Reading

How to let go of the past and move on

Throughout our lives most of us will at some point experience trying emotional difficulties. Sometimes the emotional pain left over after these encounters are seemingly impossible to let go of. It isn’t difficult to get stuck letting the past affect your everyday life and future decisions, but that is no way to live healthy or happily. There are actually positive ways to let harmful past occurrences shape a better future for yourself, and that is by learning from them and then letting them go. Of course, letting go is easier said than done. There is no simple way to do it. It takes a strong will and the courage to try and learn to control your thoughts and change your mindset. Try to recognize your reasons for needing to let go You need to try and recognize the reasons why you need to let go of what it is that is causing you emotional turmoil. You need to recognize that this past experience doesn’t need to continue hurting you forever and nor do you want it to. Write down the reasons why you no longer want to hold on to this harmful thing in your mind and use these reasons…

Continue Reading

Is summer depression a thing?

The first official day of summer is nearing, and with it comes intense summer heat, backyard BBQ’s, and fun vacations; it’s safe to assert that summer is a time of happiness. However, if you are suffering from summer depression, it probably isn’t. Many people believe that seasonal affective disorder is only prominent in the winter, but the sad reality is that so many are also affected in the warm, summer months. Symptoms of summer depression Difficulty sleeping Loss of appetite Anxiety Weight loss Unexplained stress or feelings of sadness Agitation Isolation What causes summer depression? There are different possibilities in terms of why people suffer from summer depression. While for some people it stems from environmental stressors like intense heat, vacation envy, being “out-of-shape”, or a lack of structure and responsibility, for others it actually has to do with their biological structure. For those who have this innate biological influencer, it is called summer-onset seasonal affective disorder, or summertime SAD. #1 Summer-onset Seasonal Affective Disorder First, let’s discuss the biologically related reason behind summer depression. You may have heard about SAD (seasonal affective disorder) from the opposing end, where people experience depression in the colder winter months. Unfortunately, a small…

Continue Reading
Contact Us
close slider

Start The Conversation

  • We want you to live life well in all aspects of your life: individually and relationally; at work, at home, and at play.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.