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Dealing with Holiday Stress: Tips to Keep Anxiety Levels Low
Holiday stress! Remember when the holidays were fun? Perhaps you had to harken back to early childhood to answer that question accurately. Let’s face it, the holiday season can be joyous and fun, but it has also become synonymous with stress. Travel plans, enormous...
Lost in the Middle: 6 Tips to Manage the Strain of Caring for Your Parents & Your Children
November is National Family Caregivers Month, where we acknowledge and honor the dedication of family members who provide care to loved ones, often with long hours of juggling demanding responsibilities with little time for themselves. Have you ever heard of “the...
Anger Management: 7 Tips for Taming the Inner Beast
Stress builds up, frustrations arise, and sometimes you just have a bad day. It’s not uncommon to feel anger or irritation by certain things (or people). While getting annoyed once in a while isn’t a bad thing, it can become a problem if it becomes a pattern. It can...
When Anxiety Takes Over: Recognizing a Panic Attack
Anxiety can manifest itself in many ways, including a panic attack. It is important to recognize the symptoms and know the difference. Some of the most common symptoms of anxiety include feelings of fear or hopelessness, fatigue, sweating, and a lack of concentration....
Coping with a Diagnosis of Breast Cancer
Over 250,000 women get diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the United States, alone. While there have been huge strides in breast cancer research and treatment options, receiving that official diagnosis from a medical professional is never easy. Any type of...
Mental Health Awareness: What You Need to Know
October 2-8 Mental Health Awareness week. Mental health is a huge subject, that is impossible to cover completely in one article However, if you’ve never given much thought to your own mental health, there are some basics to consider that may help you. Mental health...
Hidden Despair: Recognizing Signs of Depression in Men
Depression is the most common mental health condition in the world. While certain groups of people may have greater risk factors for it, it can affect anyone. There appear to be fewer cases of male depression, but one of the reasons behind that is that fewer men seek...
Coping with Anxiety: Why is my body so reactive and jumpy?
Anxiety is your body’s response to stress. It’s natural in many ways. But, if you suffer from an anxiety disorder, it can completely take over and make you feel overreactive. The symptoms of anxiety include everything from sweaty palms and trembling to a racing heart,...
5 Ways to Ease into the Empty Nest Transition
There are plenty of stereotypes about what people go through when dealing with the empty nest transition. When you last child leaves the home, it can feel bitterswewt. Of course, you want them to “leave the nest” and create a life for themselves. But, for many...
Suicide Awareness & Prevention Month
September is National Suicide Awareness Month. None of us want to think about losing someone we love due to suicide. Unfortunately, it happens all too often. On average, one person commits suicide every 16.2 minutes. Two-thirds of the people who commit suicide suffer...
Key Benefits of Gratitude Practices: More Than Just Positive Thinking
Gratitude practices are tremendously beneficial to our mental heath and well being, but are often misunderstood or thought to be the same thing as positive thinking. There are certainly benefits to thinking positively and getting rid of negative self-talk, but...
Good Mourning – Understanding Grief
Aug 30th is Grief Awareness Day. Most people think they know what grief is. But, there are so many stereotypes surrounding the process that it is often misunderstood. Grief is a normal, healthy process people experience after a loss. While you might tend to associate...
7 Everyday Ways to Build Social Support & Make Friends
Friendships are crucial to everyone’s well being. Having a social support system, whether it’s in your church, your community, etc., can help to reduce stress, anxiety, and let you know you’re not alone. But, it’s not always easy to put yourself out there and make new...
Social Media and Mental Health
Whether you think of it a good or an evil, social media is a large part of our lives in the 21st century. Most of us are on it more than we’d like to admit. So many social interactions happen through our screen these days. In some ways, this is a blessing: we can stay...
Rules of “Fair Fighting”
We all know that good relationships don’t just happen - they take work. Whether the relationship is brand new or you have been together for years, you will still have times where you disagree and have conflict. This doesn’t mean that the relationship is doomed....
Self Care Strategies – More Than a Luxury Spa Day!
When you think of the term “self-care,” do images of spa days and bubble baths come to mind? While it’s true that self-care can definitely include pampering yourself from time to time, self-care is about a lot more than treating yourself to a luxury day. You need to...
What to Do When Faith isn’t Enough to Prevent Suffering
As much as we might hate it, suffering is a part of life. The scriptures even tells us that there will be much suffering throughout our lives, and it can be used to draw us nearer to God and increase our faith. But, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Wen you’re in...
How To Cope When A Diagnosis of Cancer Changes Everything
Hearing the words “you have cancer” can make it seem as though your whole life has come to a screeching halt. Those words confirming a cancer diagnosis affect you and the people who love you profoundly. Instantly, you are faced with challenges and decisions that no...
How Heaven Helps You: 5 Key Benefits of Living Your Faith
Being a Christian is often misunderstood, even by our own expectations. Sometimes we expect that having faith means life will be easy. The reality is, it isn’t supposed to be “easy” to be a Christian. But actively living your faith allow Heaven to lighten the load....
Why Self Care is a Necessity, Not a Luxury
The phrase “self-care” gets thrown around a lot lately. So much so, that many people think it’s a luxury. Self-care can take many forms, and is vital for a balanced life. It is especially essential for those with chronic stress, illness or pain, who feel...
National PTSD Awareness Day
June 27th is the National PTSD Awareness Day. It is a day to recognize the effects that PTSD has on the lives of everyone affected by it. This day was chosen in 2010 by the United States following then-Sen. Kent Conrad’s efforts to designate a day of awareness as a...
Tips to Save Your Friendship if Anxiety Makes You Cancel Plans A Lot
We can all sympathize with a friend who cancels plans because of a sick day. Few people expect a sick friend to show up for coffee! Anxiety, unfortunately, doesn’t always work the same way. When we need to cancel plans because we feel anxious, it can be easy to worry...
Retired – Now What?
Congratulations on your retirement. After working for so many years, you’ve earned the opportunity to relax! But, for many people, retirement can start to feel overwhelming very quickly. If you’ve worked most of your life, you probably looked forward to this time....
Pointing Fingers of Blame
Who’s Fault Was It? As I talked about in this blog post, there are three broad reasons why bad things happen in our lives—the results of our choices, the consequences of someone else’s behaviors, and the natural effects of living in an imperfect, mortal world with...