Category: Exhaustion

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 ...

Turning off endless thoughts and rumination can be a difficult task for many people (in fact, 6.8 million people across the US).  So, it should not be shocking that we all may experience similar instances, or even times of day when we find it difficult to turn off the worry.  Some people may experience anxiety in the morning, throughout the day, or all-times revolving around sleep.  Have you ever been abruptly woken up from a deep sleep trying to figure out the world’s problems—many of us have! Or, are you the jealous type who envies your spouse for catching ZZZ’s moments after hitting their pillow—meanwhile, you are left alone with your thoughts for hours on end?! The thoughts can be endless, and thoughts do not necessarily have to be distressing in nature to be, well, distressing. 

Humans have the ability to think and think and think, without ever really finding the end of the thought—we simply ruminat ...

Having a child is a huge transition and brings changes for the entire family. This time of transition is often difficult for all members of the family, but is further complicated when PMADs enter the picture. PMADs stands for Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders and encompasses diagnoses of depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and postpartum psychosis. Symptoms can occur at any point during pregnancy and within the first 12 months after childbirth, so it is important to continually be on the lookout for changes. PMADs impact 1 in 5 women and are the number one complication of childbearing. Research is also showing that PMADs can occur in around 10% of fathers, and this number can increase if the mother is experiencing symptoms. The good news is that there is help. Postpartum Support International believes that, “You are not alone. You are not to blame. With help, you will be well.”

The first step in that process is knowing what to look out for. O ...