Much like a plant, neural pathways never fully disappear once established. So if you are to water the weed again, it will revive. For example, if you’re under extreme stress, or a particularly hard trigger arises, you may resort back to the default coping because it’s still a well established behaviour…

In today’s world, there are stressors everywhere. We open our phones to distressing news. We walk outside and there are images and text all grabbing at our attention.

Not to mention people, they exist, and they can be very annoying.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for the few of you that don’t have body image concerns.

For the rest of us, it’s stressful af. This is your guide to navigating the holidays, and any guilt around eating and drinking that might arise. 

Burnout is a term you may have heard thrown around in conversation lately. Especially as the year comes to an end, many people will describe feeling burnt out by work, the pandemic, and other life stressors. Burnout is often associated with stress. When people describe themselves as ‘burnt out’, it usually implies their ability to cope with stress has run out.

All boundaries can be backed up with consequences. This shows people how seriously we aim to take our own needs, as well as live by our values. Creating consequences can be difficult because it requires not only the energy of setting the boundary, but following through.

Performance anxiety can be maintained by a cycle of avoidance. This usually involves a difficult or negative experience where anxiety was first experienced, and where anxious symptoms occurred. Some avoidance behaviours can creep in, like avoiding sex altogether.

Anxiety involves a series of changes in your body that prepare you to act in order to regain a sense of safety. An effective way to do this, is to escape or avoid whatever might have triggered you. While avoidance helps to reduce anxiety in the short term, it tends to increase in the long term as you eventually have to face the trigger again.

The evolutionary value of shame is to protect us from rejection from our community. Shame makes us want to hide whatever it is that might make someone kick us out.
Marsha Linehan (creator of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy) would prompt us to consider- Is shame justified? Does your experience of shame fit the facts of the situation? Will you actually get rejected?

Terms like positive/negative, good/bad imply some emotions are desirable, while others are to be avoided. However, all emotions are natural, and serve a purpose. By using terms like comfortable, or uncomfortable, we remove the expectation of emotions being desirable, and instead acknowledge the physical sensation might not be pleasant.

Managing Emotions Part 1

The spectrum of emotion goes beyond the vocabulary we have today. For example, you know the feeling of putting freshly laundered sheets on the bed then crawling in? We all know this feeling of crispy, fresh, bliss- but no one word exists to describe the feeling.

Sexual distress is a term used to describe any sexual concern relating to arousal, desire, orgasm or pain. In my practice, and in my research on female sexual dysfunction (FSD), I found that the term sexual distress described a plethora of issues, from experiencing sexual pain, to difficulty reaching orgasm.