Coping with Pandemic Blues & Seasonal Depression
Living More Fully
How do we cope with pandemic fatigue, seasonal affective disorder, the holidays blues, on top of post-election stress?
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Coping with Election Stress 2020
Living More Fully
How do we cope with election stress in 2020? A Harris Poll taken in August, 2020 showed that 2/3rds of US Americans are experiencing distress related to the election, regardless of political affiliation.
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COVID-19 Mental Health Survival Guide
Living More Fully
James Guay, LMFT speaks with AJ Gibson & Mikalah Gordon on Channel Q's The Morning Beat Radio Show about his COVID-19 Mental Health Survivor Guide.
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Guided Compassion Meditation
Living More Fully
It's been said that mindfulness without compassion is like a bird with one wing. Both are essential to living an engaged and full life. When we come from a place of curiosity, openness AND kindness to experiences in life, we have greater awareness and a depth of understanding that creates greater internal wealth.
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Guided Mindfulness Meditation
Living More Fully
Practicing mindfulness through meditation is the training ground for becoming more mindful in your everyday life. When we train in this way, we can then develop the internal muscles to navigate life's natural ups and downs.
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Breaking Bad Habits Using Mindfulness
Living More Fully
One of the many reasons people come into my office for counseling, is because they’ve tried to break a bad habit or pattern on their own, and despite their best efforts, they’re still hooked. In this podcast, I'll use the example of the never-ending yoyo dieting that we can use mindfulness to address.
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Stress Reduction Using Mindfulness
Living More Fully
What is mindfulness and how do we actually use it? It’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart because I’ve seen how powerful it changes the lives of my clients and certainly has my own life as well. Today I’ll be defining mindfulness and describing how it can be used to reduce stress through a 4 step process:
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Becoming Your Own Best Friend
Living More Fully
The relationship we have with ourselves is the most important relationship in our lives. It is one that is with us from birth until death, from 24/7, 365 days a year. Literally no one else on the planet can be there in the same way that we can be there for ourselves. How do we befriend ourselves? How do we become our own best friends, especially if we already have a pretty conflictual or toxic relationship with who we are?
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How to End Friendships
Living More Fully
Friendships are vital for our overall health and well-being. In fact, not only are healthy friendships good for our emotional and psychological well-being but they also improve our physical health, like our immune system. However, destructive or even toxic friendships can wreak havoc on our lives. And sometimes, friendships can be problematic in other ways. How do we end friendships when we need to?
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How to Improve Friendships
Living More Fully
There are moments in life where we notice our friendships are just not as satisfying as we’d like them to be. Maybe they’ve become sporadic, one-sided, boring, conflictual, or otherwise just not as deep, fun or consistent as we’d like.
info_outlineJames Guay, LMFT speaks with AJ Gibson & Mikalah Gordon on Channel Q's The Morning Beat Radio Show about his COVID-19 Mental Health Survivor Guide.
COVID-19 has transformed our world. Not only has it led to spiked infections, it’s also instilled mass hysteria, global grief, worldwide trauma and a huge stop to our everyday normal routines.
- Increase Self-Awareness: The first step to managing our COVID 19 stress better is getting ourselves off auto-pilot by increasing our self-awareness. We’re experiencing collective trauma and grief on a worldwide level. Mindful curiosity, without judgment, is the first step to treat what’s bothering us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
- Attend to Thoughts, Feelings & Body Sensations: Attending to our internal landscape, we need to acknowledge what’s there, allowing for whatever exists without trying to force it to be different. When we reject what we find or judge it, it often gets more intense and lasts longer than it otherwise would. Next, by naming what we find we get closer to identifying it and attending to it in ways that are needed.
- Take Mindful Action: There are lots of great lists out there about what kinds of activities we can do while staying at home. To read my full blog article on this, my list & linked resources, CLICK HERE.
- Create Down Time: We are at an opportune time for a global reset on how we manage our time. For far too long, we have promoted production and DOING at the expense of balance and BEING. Both doing and being are essential in living a full life but when they’re out of balance we’re more likely to experience illness, burnout, boredom and overall dissatisfaction in life.
- Spread Compassion: Mindfulness WITH compassion is the antidote for what ails us. When we increase our awareness in the present moment with curiosity, instead of judgment, and bring compassion to whatever we discover, we can navigate our response to real-life threats, like pandemics. We honor our organic response, get to know it, be with it and create space inside for how we can care for it with gentleness, grace and even fierceness.
To read my full blog article, list & linked resources, CLICK HERE.