Why cultivate mindfulness?
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Read MoreJust Breathe… A practice to steady yourself during anxious or stressful times
4-7-8 breathing is a simple but powerful practice that reduces stress and anxiety and restores peace of body and mind.
Read MoreWhat Does It Mean To Be Anxiety Free?
How can I be anxiety free? How do I make anxiety go away? How do I get anxiety to stop? What am I doing wrong that I keep having anxiety? I was doing so good and thought I was cured and now it’s back? Am I’m going backwards? What is wrong with me? Am I broken?
These are just a few of the exasperated questions I hear from people I work with who have anxiety. Because anxiety feels so uncomfortable and is so disruptive to life, it makes sense that we just want it to go away and never come back.
In this post, I hope to shed some light on the what it means to be “anxiety free.”
Read MoreThe Best Self-Help Books for Anxiety
Raise your hand if you LOVE the world of self-help or as some like to call it, self-improvement! I know I do!
When it comes to anxiety, going to therapy is my top recommendation for overcoming and managing your worries and fears. It can be comforting to share your struggles with a caring and skilled therapist who understands and who can guide you through the maze of anxiety.
However, not everyone is able to go to therapy…
Read MoreThe Struggle Switch
Do you struggle with anxiety? Do you wish you could just make it go away for good? The truth is, we all struggle with anxiety to a degree. The bad news is, we can’t always make anxiety go away, but we can learn ways to cope with it when it shows up.
Read MoreA Two Minute Tool to Calm Anxiety and Panic
While there are many different tools that work to ease anxiety, breath work is one you will definitely want to try. By working with your breath, you are able to calm your body, clear your mind and exit the anxiety loop rapidly.
Heart focused breathing is a quick and easy tool that calms anxiety and panic. Developed by HeartMath®, heart focused breathing is a technique that targets anxiety in multiple ways.
Read More4 Powerful Questions to Ask Your Anxious Thoughts
The thing that stands between where you are and the life you desire is your thoughts.
Questioning your negative thoughts is a powerful tool to help reduce anxiety when it strikes. The problem with anxiety is how it seems to control our thoughts. We catastrophize, awfulize and fortune-tell frightening futures. This fallacy of thinking—and believing faulty thoughts--only adds fuel to anxiety’s fire.
The truth is, we have control over our thoughts. With keen awareness and unwavering determination, we can choose to recognize our unhelpful thinking patterns, push aside negative thoughts and make room for positive thoughts that will result in more positive feelings. By . . .
Read MorePeace on Earth and Goodwill Toward Men
Peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward MenThe Holidays are in full-swing! For many, the hustle and bustle of the season can create a sense of overwhelm and stress. For others, the holidays can be especially difficult to navigate if experiencing grief, loss, or depression.
Meditation is a great way to step away and reconnect with your spirit. This short guided meditation is designed to help you cultivate a sense of inner peace for yourself, and then in the true spirit of giving, extending peace to others!
My hope is that you will take some time to actively pursue inner peace, because peace on earth begins with you! To help you get started, download my 10 Ways to Cultivate Inner Peace Guide.
The Four C’s for Overcoming Anxiety
Anxiety affects 264 million people worldwide!
My goal as a psychotherapist is to help as many people as I can overcome anxiety and worry and take back their life! In order to help, I am constantly studying anxiety, what it is, how it affects people, and importantly, what to do about it!
Read MoreProgressive Muscle Relaxation for Anxiety and Stress
f you have anxiety or stress, progressive muscle relaxation can help calm your mind and your body, and help you feel better emotionally and physically.
Anxiety and stress not only cause emotional upset and discomfort, but they create tension in the body such as headaches, stiffness in the neck, or tightness in the chest and abdomen. Body tension is a result of the fight or flight response being activated, and it lingers in the body long after anxiety or stress are gone. To make matters worse, we tend to cycle in and out of periods of anxiety and stress, which keeps our nervous system in a chronic heightened state, and then the cumulative effects take a toll on our body.
A big problem is that anxiety, stress, and body tension is our default state and we don’t even recognize it.
Why does Progressive Muscle Relaxation work to decrease anxiety and panic?
Read More4 Steps to Coping With and Releasing Anxiety
Recovering from anxiety takes work!
While commitment and perseverance are required, willingness to accept anxiety and anxious feelings are necessary in order to truly recover. David Gandelman of GroundedMind.com offers the following 4 step approach to coping with and releasing anxiety:
Read MoreWhy I <3 Mindfulness
What is Mindfulness and Why Has it Become So Popular?
It is helpful to look at mindfulness in two ways. First, mindfulness is a way of being that includes a quality of mind and an innate capacity that we all have. Our brain has the capability for awareness, attention, focus, and control, and we naturally flow in and out of these states regularly whenever we are conscious. So rest assured, mindfulness is not something that is available to an enlightened few, you already possess it.
Read More2 Essential Questions: A Simple Tool that Can Create Positive Change in Your Life
Looking for practical ways to improve the quality of your life? This simple exercise is a way to help you do just that.
Read MoreChange Takes Time
Recognizing that lasting change takes time can ease your mind when you’re worried that you are never going to get there. It takes time for problems to develop, and unfortunately, it takes time for solutions to work. For instance, you it may be that you have experienced anxiety and depression for quite some time. With prolonged patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, your brain and body become wired to recognize this as its norm. The good news is that through self-directed neuroplasticity (a fancy term for changing the neural networks or patterns your brain knows), you can accomplish positive and lasting changes!
So while you may feel as though you are slogging your way through, and that change is coming slowly, here are a few tips to help ward off discouragement and frustration.
Read MoreThree Ways to Manage Your Inner World to Weather Life's Shower's and Storms
Have you ever had days where life seems to be spinning out of control? One thing after another keeps happening--you can’t find your keys and you’re late for an important meeting, you have another argument with your spouse, and while you thought your checking account was ok until pay day, your account has over drafted. These are the shower day, and on days like these, it’s easy to become irritable and stressed.
Sometimes, rather than having just a bad day, you find yourself smack in the middle of a storm. During storms, life’s stressors are more severe such as—a recent loss—a job, a partner, a loved one, financial troubles, or health concerns. When this happens, it’s easy to become anxious, depressed, or both!
While you can’t always control the weather, by skillfully managing your inner world, you can dramatically influence how you feel in a positive way.
Inner world? What’s that?
Read MoreHeart Center Meditation
Heart center meditation is a gentle way to approach your true-self and gain access to your hidden inner wisdom. Because of how are minds work, we tend spend the majority of our lives lost in . . .
Read More10 Practices to Calm Your Mind and Create Inner Peace
Inner peace is something we all want and sometimes desperately crave. However, most of us think that finding inner peace is difficult, and that it is by sheer luck that we experience it once in a while. We tend to think that true inner peace is reserved for ...
Read MoreAnxiety and the Healing Power of Sound
Having anxiety is no fun and, for some, can be seriously debilitating. Traditional treatments for anxiety include talk therapy and sometimes medication, while holistic approaches incorporate exercise, massage therapy, and meditation.
On the rise in the treatment of anxiety, as well as other mental health conditions, is sound therapy. Sound has
Read MoreExpanded Three Minute Breathing Space Meditation
In this expanded version of the three-minute breathing space meditation, we begin by observing inner experiences of thoughts, feelings, and body sensations as they are happening. The middle phase of the meditation is spent connecting to and focusing on the breath. The final phase of the meditation is expanding awareness to observe all sensations and the body as a whole.
Read MoreA Poem to Celebrate the Season and Ring in the New Year
Wishing you, and those you love a wonderful holiday season and a happy New Year!
As we celebrate the holiday season, and as another year comes to a close, I often take time to reflect on what is meaningful to my life and what values are important to me. One way I like to do this is through reading and contemplating beautiful works of poetry.
I was introduced to Desiderata many years ago ...
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