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…
I just returned from a 7-day silent Chan meditation retreat at Dharma Drum Mountain in Taiwan, focused on the Silent Illumination technique of meditation. Basically, Silent Illumination or “just sitting”, is about, well, just sitting 🤣 It might differ from some other types of meditation you’re familiar with in that we’re not doing things like…
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…
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:
Recently, Matt and I did a couple of videos exploring intrusive thoughts or anxieties and why it’s useful to look at why we’re afraid of the consequences of those thoughts or anxieties coming true. There’s an exercise for doing that, The 5 Whys, which I shared in my book, The Mind Workout, and Matt explains…
We can always come up with a rational reasons to excuse self-destructive compulsions while we chase safety. But chasing that feeling is no different than chasing any other feeling: it only leads to more of the experiences you’re trying to avoid.
For OCD Week, I joined The Mighty for a live Q&A on their Facebook page all about my journey with recovery from mental illness. I usually keep my videos focused on mental health and where I’m going now, so I don’t often talk about the specific symptoms I struggled with but in this video I…
I sat down with Stuart from The OCD Stories for another wide-ranging interview (you can find the first one here) on a variety of mental health and OCD issues, from Internet/cellphone compulsions, to health anxiety, to false-memories, uncertainty, control, mindfulness, recovery, and why your therapist better start learning how to run marathons…
If you’re starting off the new year with plans to make changes that will support recovery from mental illness, be honest about where you are and the skills you’ll need to learn to get to where you want to be. Our goals are often the results of the skills we need to learn, so be sure…
Stuart Ralph has launched a podcast to go along with The OCD Stories site, all about exploring OCD and recovery from OCD. For the first episode of the podcast, which you can watch here in video, we discussed a slew of topics about recovering from OCD. Check it out: