practices for maintaining your emotional self care
skill weekly
Letting Go of the Argument in your Head
We all know that feeling. Someone said something, (maybe it was you), which was followed by an unpleasant outcome. Maybe an awkward silence, a ridiculing laughter, a disparaging comment. Or maybe the outcome was simply not at all what you had hoped for. Then...
Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work: The Four Forces
You know that moment when the thought crosses your mind, or someone asks you, “Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?” Part of you has a momentary thought about the things you would like to change this year. But your mind, and your answer quickly go to “Resolutions...
A Gift to Yourself
What do you need? Now that the holiday shopping is (mostly) finished, and we look to the New Year, perhaps it is a time when you may be selfish. . . in the best sense of the word! Building your self-awareness is the best gift you can give yourself, and ultimately to...
Pernicious Perfectionism: 3 Pervasive Patterns
If you're a perfectionist, you know all too well how this way of being can trap you. You set high expectations for yourself, which can lead to success, and boost your self-esteem. But with those lofty goals can come a reciprocal mountain of self-criticism and...
Beyond Hacking Your Habits: Moving from Awareness to Action
The essence of mindfulness is training the mind to recognize unconscious reactions, so that we may move out of autopilot and into more adaptive responding. Once you start Hacking Your Habits, there are three simple processes to practice undermining autopilot. Moving...
What’s Your Mind Habit?
Habits are not just behaviors. We can also fall into particular patterns of thinking, which hold us stuck in emotion driven behavior. Knowing your particular mind habits can help you to monitor when you have moved from productive and helpful aspects, to the counter...
How to Hack Your Emotional Habits
You know how it goes when you get triggered. Something happens, and before you know it, you are hooked. Pulled into an auto-pilot repertoire of thinking and behaving, which inevitably leads to a less than ideal outcome. These traps are extraordinarily difficult for us...
Mental Health and Well-Being: What is your Response-Ability
In one sense, we are not really responsible for our mental states. Humans can easily get caught in evolutionarily hardwired mind traps. These are the auto-pilot repertoires of thinking and behaving, which we just assume are ‘the kind of person I am.” These traps are...
THE PARADOX: The Big Secret of Emotion Regulation
The mind-body system for regulating emotions is a paradox! You know how it goes. Whether you are just starting a diet, or trying not to think about 'that guy!' The more important you make it to not think about something, the more you think about it! In the last two...
Passengers! How your Past Effects your Present
You knew it! It was so obvious! You’ve seen this sort of thing so many times before – there was absolutely, positively, not a doubt in your mind. And then…. You were wrong…. We’ve all been there. A gripping thought – a tacit assumption – a core belief, which just...
Listening to Your Authentic Self: The Purpose of Emotions
Answering the BIG Questions Let's face it, in our digital age, we are becoming more and more reliant on reinforcement from the outside to tell us how we 'should' feel and what we 'should' need and care about. Don't know which product to choose? A quick Google search...
Mindfulness Skills for Millennials: An Introduction
Recently I began a new blog series on PsychCentral. The Mindfulness for Millennials blog will be going through all the skills and information I teach in session, step by step. As the first blog, by means of introduction, I’d like to share with you a bit about what...