Managing Your Time...

Do you sometimes feel like you spend all your time managing crises? That your life is basically spent putting out one proverbial fire after another?

“Neither comprehension nor learning can take place in an atmosphere of anxiety.”

~  Rose Kennedy

What is Stress?

Stress is the body’s reaction to a challenge. Though stress is often perceived as bad, it can actually be good in many ways. The right kind of stress can sharpen the mind and reflexes. It might be able to help the body perform better, or help you escape a dangerous situation.

Stress produces a physiological reaction in your body. When a stressful event is perceived, the subconscious mind directs the release of certain hormones, which results in a physical reaction. These reactions can include slowed digestion, shaking, tunnel vision, faster breathing and heart rate, dilation of pupils, and flushed skin. This process is often re...

“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”    ~   Carl Jung

For me, it starts really quietly. I feel a little sad and I can’t quite seem to put my finger on why. It seems to come out of the blue. My training and experience has taught me to look a little deeper, and to spend some quiet time with myself to examine what I’m feeling. I try to identify the emotions that I am experiencing, as if I am looking in from the outside. Yes, that looks like sadness, and that looks like a little hopelessness, and that there, that looks like self-pity.

From ...

Learning Anger

Although everyone experiences anger in response to frustrating or abusive situations, most anger is generally short-lived. No one is born with a chronic anger problem. Chronic anger and aggressive response styles are learned.

There are multiple ways that people learn to respond in an aggressive and angry way. Some people learn to be angry in childhood by copying the behavior of angry people around them. Children learn how to act by watching people, so if they see their parents, older siblings, or caregivers influence others by being hostile and making threats, they are likely to adopt that behavior as their own.. For instance, children that grow up in a home where one parent constantly berates and belittles the other parent re...