Update: Awesome panel! Thanks to Myodetox and Studio YYZ for making the space to have these conversations. This was the first panel I’ve been on where everybody was talking about recovering from mental illness to get back to doing the businesses they’re passionate about. It is amazing to see this cultural shift towards recovery. You can struggle with serious mental health issues and learn how to handle them and be the boss (of your brain and your business). I’ll be …
Blog Posts
While I was in India, I stopped by Bangalore to meet with the Wysa team. They’ve created my favourite chatbot to provide mental health support to people wherever and whenever they need it. You can check it out here: www.wysa.io I sat down with Jo Aggarwal, co-founder of Wysa, to take some mental health questions from their community.
Let’s get together and work on some skills! I love to meet up with people when I’m traveling and share time together building skills and capacity to do the things that matter to us in life. During these workshops, we’ll spend a few hours exploring where we want to go, understanding the challenges that can get in the way, and what supports can help us overcome those challenges and take steps in a direction that we value while having all …
A reader sent in this personal story of overcoming compulsions at a difficult time in his life. He’s now working on becoming a therapist: I’m 26 years old and I’ve been struggling with my mental health ever since I was just a little kid. In December of 2017 my mother got the bad news that she only had a year to live due to her cancer coming back. My mental health, which was already very bad at the time just …
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has evolved and changed significantly over the years. CBT is a category of therapies that include cognitive and behavioral components. It’s a category in the same way that “cardio” is a category of exercise. What a person does within that category, can lead to profoundly different outcomes. And the exercises evolve over time–we find more effective ways to reach the outcomes we’re pursuing. Group fitness in 1988 looked like this: 30 years later, group fitness looks a …
A reader shared this awesome adventure he took his brain on recently: I can experience anxiety and panic attacks pretty regularly. They used to control my life. Any work meeting, restaurant, confrontation, exercise, bodily sensation would send me into an hour long panic. I dealt with this for years-not knowing what was going on with me. I’ve never really been an overly anxious person but after my daughter was born my brain and my body hit their limit. I had …
Anxieties around panic attacks triggered by exercise, and specifically issues with riding bicycles, have been popping up frequently when I’m connecting with people online. Bikes get the heart pounding and bring up physical sensations that we can easily engage in compulsions around. Overcoming these challenges is fun because we get to hop on our bikes and quite literally expand our limits as we adventure into the world with those racing hearts and minds. Brett’s been doing exactly that and he …
I just returned from a 7-day silent Chan meditation retreat at Dharma Drum Mountain in Taiwan, focused on the Silent Illumination technique, and this video covers five of the many things I enjoyed and learned on the retreat.