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 …
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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.
Since YOU ARE NOT A ROCK launches in North America this week, I wanted to share about how we got here and what goes into a book like this. Everything begins with sticky-notes. I had a seething mass of constantly evolving sticky-notes that helped me layout the structure of the book before I began writing. I don’t have those notes anymore—they’ve been taken over by ideas for the next book—but I do have a rock. That rock up there in …
Five tips for when you’re struggling with stuff from the past.
When I was a kid, out at summer barbecues, I always went hunting through the coolers for the grape soda. So when Toronto got sweaty in a heatwave this August, and I just happened to be at home for a few weeks without any workshops to travel for, I got brewing some batches of kombucha and I wanted grape soda. One of the things I love about kombucha is those tiny armies of fizzy bubbles created during the second …