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! Writing YOU ARE NOT A ROCK was only something I could do because I learned how to take care of my mental health and because …
Tag: mental health
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 …
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 …
I’m replacing myself! It’s been a wonderful time being me but robots are cool and they can make mental health resources accessible in ways that humans can’t. I can only have one conversation at a time and even though I answer questions at all hours of the day right now, I do get sleep sometimes and my sleep skills are top-notch.
Build a new relationship with uncertainty throughout your life or your daily practices will just logically and rationally have you struggling and suffering and relapsing back into a depressive anxiety hole. This video explains an approach that I credit with helping me recover and maintaining great mental health for the past eight years:
When I bring up the idea that judgment is the first compulsion that leads to all of the other emotions and behaviors we struggle with when we’re sinking into mental health challenges, people can often become very protective of their judgment skills. We can always think of ways our ability to judge has helped us. We’ve gotten positive feedback from others. Maybe our careers depend upon our judgment skills. But it’s not that judgment is necessarily bad. It simply has …
Recently, Daniela posted over on the Everybody has a Brain Tumblr about some anxiety challenges she tackled after getting laid off, then searching for a new job, and then at her new workplace. Her story was such a great example of all the skills we’re always talking about, and it includes vomit! It’s so useful to talk about overcoming these challenges and often that means overcoming very real physical symptoms, like nausea. So I wanted to share Daniela’s post and …
My book, The Mind Workout, all about the steps anybody can take to get comfortable with the stuff in their heads as they do more of what they care about in life, hit bookstore shelves in the United Kingdom on June 1st. You order it on Amazon here: http://bit.ly/themindworkout If you’re not in the UK, you can get it shipped for an extra fee, but there will be other languages coming out in the months ahead AND this summer I’m working on …