Empowering people to make strengthening choices
Most of us try to avoid sadness. When we feel low or down, we distract ourselves or push those feelings away. But neuroscience shows that allowing yourself to feel sadness—rather than avoiding it—can actually support your recovery from depression and negative moods. This process is crucial when healing from depression. The Science Behind Feeling Your […]
Finding balance between exertion and relaxation, work and play, is good for your health. And the good news is that there are lots of ways to bring balance and more self-care into your life if you make it a priority.
People are experiencing higher levels of anxiety, in our society today, than ever before. So I want to offer you a powerful process for managing anxiety by sharing a personal story from early in my career. A Daunting Request I had just graduated from the University of Minnesota with my Ph.D. in counseling psychology and […]
I remember a Peanuts cartoon from years back. Here’s Charlie Brown, shoulders slumped, head down and arms at his side as Lucy approached. He says to Lucy, “This is my depressed stance. When you’re depressed it makes a lot of difference in how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and […]
I my last article I talked about how our brains and bodies respond to stress. Today I want to explore the goal of stress management which is achieving an optimal state of arousal in the middle of a threat. As you can see from this diagram, the mind can be in optimal arousal (necessary to […]
Stress is our natural response to a situation or event that we perceive as challenging, even threatening. Stress is good insofar as it motivates us to take positive action or prompts us to adapt to a threat. But it can become harmful when we lack the confidence or ability to adapt in a healthy way. […]
How Resilient Are You? If you’ve been following me then you know that I’ve been writing about resilience. So today, I’m offering you a resilience survey to do a self-assessment on four dimensions of resilience. As you do the assessment, you are establishing a baseline for not only thinking about resilience but measuring your growth […]
I define resilience as our ability to handle hard things. It has to do with the thought and behavior patterns that we develop in the face of adversity and hardship. In my article, today, I want to share some general thoughts about the nature of adversity and then explore ways we can predict resilience and […]
