Healthy and Inspired Living
“Sometimes I feel so lonely, it’s palpable.” My client, a beautiful young woman with an infectious laugh, interests she’s passionate about, and a circle of friends and family that care for her, doesn’t look like a “lonely” person. And yet loneliness – whether it’s the situational loneliness that comes from too few or too far… [Read Full Story]
Nothing like a new year to make us dust off our dreams of long-desired transformation! If this is the year you decide to turn those dreams into a plan, there are a couple of researchers you may want to meet. Their names are Prochaska and DiClemente, and together they have spent more than 30 years… [Read Full Story]
One way to visualize emotional equilibrium – that much sought-after sense of “balance” – is as a literal scale or balance. The weight on one side is made up of two factors: your individual vulnerability to distress, and the stressors presently in your life. The counterbalance is made up of your coping skills, and the quantity and… [Read Full Story]
An unexpected pleasure of becoming part of my husband’s family many years ago was getting introduced to their holiday traditions. One of my favourites is my mother-in-law’s annual rendition of the story about the year my husband became so excited by the combination of his December birthday quickly followed by Christmas that he worked himself… [Read Full Story]
As the holiday season shifts into high gear, here’s a plea for a different kind of moderation: let’s all hear it (softly please) for moderate hosting. Moderate hosting means fighting the urge to measure your success as a host by the amount of food and alcohol and sociability your guests consume. It means not pressing… [Read Full Story]
A few years ago, when I was working at a drug and alcohol counselling agency, a client gave me a curious look when she asked me how I was doing and I responded “Fine.” She told me someone she’d met through AA told her that ‘fine’ stood for F***ed Inside, Nice Exterior. Since that day, I’ve… [Read Full Story]
In an earlier posting about the Johari window (a tool for describing the parameters of self-perception and perception by others), I mentioned that perhaps the most interesting pane in the window is the Blind Spot, which is defined as information that is known to others about us, but is unknown to ourselves. Often this information… [Read Full Story]
As Robert Burns famously (and with Scottish flair and inflection) put it: “O would some gift the Power gie us, to see ourselves as ithers see us”. Only slightly less famously, two psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, developed their own tool for exploring the world of self-perception and perception by others. Taking the Brangelina… [Read Full Story]
According to the drinking guidelines published by Health Canada, moderate drinking for men is defined as: no more than three drinks on any one occasion with no more than three occasions on any given week or no more than two drinks on a maximum of five occasions per week (stated another way, a maximum of… [Read Full Story]
I was recently talking with a friend, falling off my chair laughing at her description of a post-surgery reintroduction to the bathroom (I’m sure it was funnier in the telling than the experience). Besides voicing a heightened appreciation for things we typically take for granted, my friend ended the story with “I wonder if my husband… [Read Full Story]
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