How to Balance priorities: Redefining Productivity in Overwhelm
How to balance priorities. There’s a saying that’s been around for a while on social media. It goes something like “If you think you don’t have time for something, try saying it’s not a priority’ and see how that feels.”
Gratitude Practice: What I do instead of daily gratitude practice
Objectivity is a core value of mine. So maybe that’s also a reason why I don’t resonate with the typical daily gratitude practice. To me gratitude practice just seems too forced. Too focused on finding a silver lining – which often discounts the struggles we may be facing.
Dealing with Frustration: Lessons from a Highly Sensitive Person
By now, you’ll know that I’m a highly sensitive person and a crier. I quickly burst into tears, especially when frustration gets the better of me. One of my core values is persistence, so I don’t know how to give up. I think I struggle with dealing with frustration because it feels like I’m failing. Like letting something else win. Not that I’m an overly competitive person. But if something stops me from achieving something I want to do – it’s now my enemy. And I need to defeat it.
Trauma Informed Vulnerability
I’ve come to the conclusion that the typical discussion around vulnerability isn’t actually trauma informed or inclusive, and I think that needs to change.
The Art of Setting Boundaries
The typical approach to boundaries – you know, the one that’s all about telling people what you need and then washing your hands of the outcome – might not be serving us as well as we think.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t set boundaries – boundaries themselves are incredibly helpful and necessary if we want to create more calm in our life.
But how we set the boundary is almost as important as the boundary itself.
How to cope with and regulate your emotions as a highly sensitive person
When people talk about regulating emotions as a highly sensitive person, they often use the pot of water heating up on the stove analogy. In this scenario, by suppressing your emotions it’s like you’re trying to hold down the lid on this boiling pot of water, but eventually the pressure from the steam gets to be too much and it pushes out in a little burst.
I don’t like this analogy though because it seems to only speak to the emotions we typically label as negative. But if we truly want to honour ourselves as a highly sensitive person, then we need to feel all of our emotions.
So instead of thinking of it as a boiling pot of water, I like to think of it as holding onto apples. Find out what I mean in this episode.
Beyond Masculinity and Femininity: Redefining Balance Without Gendered Terms
A little while ago, a client of mine shared that they were at odds with themselves because they didn’t feel ‘masculine enough’ and that they operated ‘too much in the feminine’ energy. But at the same time, they didn’t want to be caught up in the culture of toxic masculinity either. They noticed that I had a Yin Yang symbol in one of my tattoos and asked what I thought about the idea of finding a balance between the masculine and the feminine.
Because I believe in the power of words, I told them, “Instead of talking about masculine and feminine, let’s talk about the Inner Warrior and the Inner Poet.”
Three Little Birds – The power of changing anxiety what if’s to even if’s
I’m a few weeks into the Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) for my OCD, which I’ve talked about in the last few posts, so if you’re curious what that’s all about check it out here and here. Basically it’s a way to lean into the anxiety, rather than do something to try and calm it or make it go away.
Turns out this is especially helpful with OCD because my obsessive thoughts only get more and more intense (and creative) the more I try and make the anxiety go away.
It’s been a really interesting learning experience for me for how I manage all of my anxiety, not just the OCD related anxiety, and it really came to a whole new level of clarity for me last week.
Coping Strategies for OCD – Broken & Beautiful
It’s been a few weeks of Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) therapy for my OCD – which is the gold standard treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder where you intentionally create opportunities for anxiety and fear to rise up, and then don’t do the compulsion that normally alleviates that fear.
The problem was, I was hitting a bit of a roadblock.
The good news is that all I had to do was change one word.
Living with OCD (My experience) – Dealing with uncertainty
I came to a realization recently that I thought might be helpful to share because it highlighted one of the sneaky ways we can sabotage ourselves. It’s so sneaky because it feels like we’re really just trusting our own intuition and experience – but really it’s just trying to keep everything the same because, to our nervous system, “the same” is safe. But as I’m learning, living with OCD adds a whole other layer of complexity to everything.