My post on the newly launched Unsinkable Stories is all about an issue that I now know is quite common when people are making progress on recovery from mental illness, but it’s not something anybody had prepared me for when I was interacting with the mental healthcare system. Overcoming this challenge is key to preventing…
I didn’t wake up to the fact I was struggling with my mental health until I couldn’t write anything. I loved writing and I couldn’t do it anymore. Forget anxiety about being poisoned or going back to check the door locks over and over again or being paralyzed by anxiety attacks–here was a real problem!…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Dating is all about uncertainty and learning how to sit in emotions! I had a chat with the Bustle Huddle about learning how to embrace the big feels and keep the focus on building a healthy relationship through the things you do control (hint: your actions).
A client 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…
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…
It’s easy to get caught up in compulsions around things that really happened. In fact, over the years, I’d say that getting tripped up by real events and judging them as a rational reason to do compulsions, inside and outside of our heads, tends to be the biggest reason people relapse. So it’s useful to…