I’ve joined the guys on the Rust Belt Running podcast twice now for interviews. It’s been awesome to explore a mental fitness approach with a podcast that’s focused on running and physical fitness. And of course everybody that goes running, also has a brain, which means they also have mental health. No matter how far…
One of the reasons I originally started to share about mental health and recovery skills was because I was fortunate to get effective help, but when I started to join online mental health communities, I would hear people sharing about the help they were getting, and it wasn’t at all in line with where the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Be 👏 kind👏 to👏 yourself👏 When I started out taking care of my mental health and digging out of the mental illness hole, I had to make a lot of changes around things I thought were totally normal and necessary. Making those changes were tough because I’d spent years practicing and perfecting compulsions that made…