The past year has been wildly disruptive to community and social relationships. I did not expect to find more community in a year of so much isolation, but that’s what happened with the Mental Fitness Discord Server. It was totally unexpected. I only knew of Discord as something for video games. So when a viewer…
One of the biggest help with recovery from mental illness was learning how to do things differently in my head. In particular, learning how to NOT do things in my head was a tremendous help. Doing compulsions inside our heads is no different than doing them outside of our heads, so just like we might…
I’ll be joining Cyrena Gawuga to host a townhall with the Stanford Medicine X community to explore mental health experiences of the past year. We’ll consider the implications of those experiences for how we understand mental illness and for how we design the mental healthcare systems of the future. Join us Thursday, May 20th, at 10…
It helped me with recovery to recognize that judgments are the first compulsion. Non-judgment is something I now work on frequently with clients. We have a superpowered label maker in our skulls. It’s incredibly useful, but when we start slapping those labels on random brain indigestion, we can create so much struggle for ourselves.If we…
I get asked questions like this a lot when I’m doing presentations or Q&As on Twitch and YouTube. The simple fact is I’m not struggling with or managing or dealing with any of the mental illness diagnoses I had in the past. I’m not managing OCD or GAD or depression or addiction. And it’s been…
When I struggled with mental illness, the winters were often more challenging, but I wouldn’t blame that on the sun because I was very skilled at descending into self-destructive, depressing cycles of compulsions in the middle of the sunny summer, too. So with this review, I can’t make an assessment on what impact a light…
In my book, YOU ARE NOT A ROCK, I shared a bunch about the anxieties and compulsions I struggled with around driving. I wasn’t just anxious. I would see terrible things happening to other people, worry about them happening to me, be constantly checking my memories about driving experiences I had in the past. So…
I’m teaching another round of my writing workshop! The Write Your Brain mental health writing workshop starts February 13th. It’s focused on building writing skills around sharing about mental health topics, and developing a writing practice that’s healthy for your brain. 5 weeks of writing exercises covering a range of writing formats, from social media…
I always enjoy collaborating with OCD UK because they have such a helpful focus on recovery and promoting effective treatments for overcoming OCD, so when they launched an online conference this year, hosted at “Hotel Recovery”, just as I’m wrapping up a decade post recovery, I figured it’d be a great time to talk about…
Bring your brain by the Toolkit Shop for the Tune-Up twice each month on Twitch. Working on recovery from mental illness and just generally building mental health and fitness skills isn’t something that needs to happen in isolation. It also doesn’t need to be some magical mystery. Mental health skills are practical, the challenges you’re…