Stress & Anxiety

What exactly does it mean to “process your feelings?”. It is certainly very common advice, and generally we tend to believe this to be true – identifying our emotions and expressing them in healthy ways is an important part of healthy human emotional development. But what exactly does this entail? How do we avoid simply…

Baby Boomers (born between 1946-1965) are entering into their “winter years” and in the process are facing a variety of stressors which they may not know how to manage. Mis-managed stress (distress) can contribute to a variety of mental and physical health challenges. When Boomers were children and young adults, the popular method for dealing…

An attractive 16 year old girl was describing how hard it was for her to go to school each day. She complained that while she had two friends at school, neither was in any of her classes. I suggested that this gave her an opportunity to reach out and make some casual connections with her…

“Please bring him back if you can, he makes such a positive difference.” a client says to me at the end of the hour, much to my surprise, after the unexpected addition of my dog to a therapy session. This happened already ten years ago; I didn’t have time to return home after a visit…

September 10th 2019 is a day Rick will never forget.  He was sitting at an intersection on his motorcycle when a car hit him from behind, sending him flying.  The accident left him with a range of serious injuries, in addition to what Rick refers to as ‘the three’: PTSD, anxiety and depression.  Writing poetry…

The tragic death of George Floyd is yet another example of the nastiness of discrimination and prejudice that exists in the United States and across the world, including Canada.  The sense and tone I’ve gotten from social media is one of frustration, anger, sadness and confusion.  How can this still be happening? What can be…

Sometimes you don’t know how fast you are moving until you are forced to stop.  COVID-19 has forced a lot of us to slow down and adjust our routines.  Luckily, as a result, I have been able to allocate more time to reading and exploring ideas. For this Psychealth article I’m going to do something…

About three and a half years ago I wrote the article: ‘Up In Flames’ that can be found at Psychealth.com. It was written shortly after my apartment burned down and shares my experience navigating through that challenging life event. This article is the follow-up. It took over three years to rebuild my home. I recall the first…

Why are so many people struggling with anxiety? This was the question posed to me by a good friend over coffee this week, who was concerned about the levels of anxiety she was seeing in her workplace colleagues. With all that is happening in the world around us – natural disasters, immigration crises, worldwide political…

The headline in the Globe and Mail read, “Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down?” by Eric Andrew-Gee. As I began to read the article I became alarmed by the research quoted. Internet companies have spent “billions of dollars” trying o figure out how to hook…

Empathy differs from sympathy. Sympathy reflects an understanding of another person’s situation- but viewed through your own eyes. In contrast, empathy is what you feel when you can step outside of yourself and enter the internal world of another person. You experience the other’s emotions and conflict without abandoning or losing your own perspective. It…

Lying destroys relationships and damages the bonds between human beings. The Journal of Intercultural Communication Research (2016) states that “we all lie, but not all lies are the same. People lie to achieve a goal: WE LIE IF [we believe] HONESTY WON’T WORK. Essentially the truth comes naturally, but lying takes effort and a sharp,…