Category: Effort

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 ...

Do you think it’s possible to walk away from an event, situation, relationship, or opportunity and not ask the question why? I’m not sure what the “right” answer is, but I think it’s incredibly difficult for us humans not to ask the question why. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. When we talk about meaning in psychology, we are often referring to an explanation of why something has happened or why something is important. 

As we consider this question of why and create meaning from our experiences, what would you consider to be most meaningful to you? Is it people, events, experiences, hardships, or all of the above? Take a moment and take a look at the pictures in your phone. What is in the pictures, why makes them meaningful? How do I feel about them? What do they make me think of? This may seem like a trivial exercise or question to ponder but if we sit with it long enough, we may be surprised at how we create meaning from our experienc ...

For years I often heard people say that you have to go through grief and pain, you can’t go around it, you can’t go above it, you have to go through it. For years I didn’t understand what that meant. We live in an incredibly emotionally avoidant culture which then leads to chronic mental emotional health struggles, high addiction and disconnection from self and others among other symptoms. 

In order to move through grief or pain a person must create a safe space for emotions to build. Like a wave on a beach, emotions need to be able to build and crash safely on the shore before they can recede out and become calm again. Instead of allowing the natural flow, we often dam up the water as high as we can to keep it from crashing, but then when it inevitably breaks the dam, and the lifetime of suppressed emotions can come cascading and flooding ...