Self-care

Tips on How to Defeat Negative Thought Patterns When They Emerge

Sometimes motivation is lacking, you’re feeling out of sorts, your energy is low, and your focus is waning.

It’s not abnormal to go through these mental phases from time to time and it’s just as equally likely to climb out of these ruts with some regularity.

Typically, negative thought patterns surface in two kinds of scenarios:

Physical: You’re not sleeping enough. You’re spreading yourself too thin at work or in your personal life and you’re mentally exhausted. You’re exercising more than what could be considered healthy and productive. You can barely keep your eyes open.

Mental: You allow your thoughts to spiral and reel into dark places. Your self-doubt, uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety, and impostor syndrome run wild. You lose focus and allow thoughts to run away with themselves and you lose any sense of self-esteem.

When I’m overly tired, overly worried, starting a new job, going through an interpersonal conflict, or I’m not sleeping enough, these two factors can often times work in tandem.

It’s important to to take a step back mentally, in times like these, and learn to filter out the noise.

How Do I Overcome My Cynicism and Embrace Happiness?

Does mistrust of others hold you back in life and prevent you from being happy, showing love, being transparent about your feelings, or accepting love yourself?

Cynicism is the inherent distrust of other people’s perceived selfish motivations. Especially in our current world, cynicism is in no short supply. You believe that there’s nothing waiting for you in other people beyond betrayal and manipulation.

While being skeptical is an important life skill, cynicism shouldn’t be its default setting.

How You Can Make Important Changes and Maintain Them Permanently

Change is hard. Everyone has things about themselves, their environment, or their lives that they want to change, but find it difficult or impossible to pivot and keep momentum after the initial sprint.

New Year’s resolutions are the perfect example of change we want for ourselves, but often allow ourselves to forget about. We go into the new year with a whole idea in our head of all the things we want to improve, but by February that resolve is long gone.

There are paths to change, however, and ways to improve the chances of sustaining those changes long-term. Nothing good comes easily. Failure is inevitable at some point in human life, but each failure is another step toward success.

The Beautiful, Beneficial Relationship Between Baths and Mental Health

baths and mental health

Life can be hard sometimes. There are the daily stresses of work, family, friends, rambunctious pets, a commute, and simply days where you wake up feeling off-balance. How do you go about finding a release for all of these pent-up feelings and anxious thoughts?

Something you can do to treat yourself is to find time for a relaxing daily bath.

Since even before the pandemic forced us all into quarantine for our own safety, I’ve been a staunch proponent of taking daily baths.

As someone who has struggled with clinical depression for his entire life, I’ve noticed a clear link between my long baths and an improved mood, mindset, and relaxed demeanor going into the late evening.

My mental health has vastly improved since taking this type of time for myself every day to let the day’s and world’s problems escape my skin and my muscles and my brain and just allowing myself to be present in a single, comfortable moment.

There is an obvious relationship between mental health and baths and the various reasons for this connection span multiple layers of experience.

The Role of Your Job in Your Self-Care

In most people’s minds, self-care refers exclusively to that time outside of your job when you’re settling into a bubble bath or going on a long nature walk. However, your career is also a part of that process and shouldn’t be seen as something exclusive of it.

Self-care refers to the activities you engage in with the purpose of maintaining mental, emotional, and physical well-being on a regular basis. They’re acts that re-energize and rejuvenate you.

Effective self-care shouldn’t be something that you mark on your calendar as 3 hours a week and then the rest of your time is spent miserable and helpless. Self-care is a 24/7, constant process of acceptance, being attentive of your own wants and needs, and analyzing your own behavior.

These rituals are key to improving your anxiety, anger, depression, and can positively impact how you interact with both yourself and others.

How To Plan For Professional Networking

The old adage about “who you know” seems contrite, but the art of effective networking can completely change your life, your career, your opportunities, and your compensation.

If you’re someone who keeps to yourself or you’re more socially awkward than most, you’ll need to put in some work. It’s called net-“working,” after all.

Do Something: the How and Why of Volunteering

The average person volunteers very little of their time to helping others. It’s incredibly easy to sit back and complain about things, maintain a cynical view on life, and focus only on the negative aspects of life and human suffering. While there are an insurmountable number of calamities in the world, sitting back and lamenting about them gets you nowhere.

No matter how insignificant you feel your contribution may be, even the smallest iota of positive influence and change you endeavor to send out into the world is worthy of your time and effort. No fight was ever won with a single battle. It’s a “death by a thousand cuts” situation. Every little bit helps.

An Argument in Support of Remote Work Opportunities

Work / life balance is a popular phrase to throw around to describe the intersection of a person’s career choices and their social pursuits outside of their working life, but most of the discussion focuses on spending that work life inside of an office. That doesn’t have to be the case.

Due to the evolving nature of technology, the ability to work from wherever the hell you want on planet earth is more of a reality now than it ever was before.

Transformative Exercise: Why You Should Take a Hike

Everyone seems to put “hiking” as a hobby on their dating and personal profiles, but why is it so common? Maybe it seems like a symptom of the “hippie” attitudes pervading food and exercise culture the past few decades, but there are a huge list of reasons that myself and so many others are taking to the trails, beaches, forests, mountains, and national parks to experience hiking firsthand. Find one or several reasons for hiking that I’ve listed below and use the motivation to help transform your own life in a positive way.

The Art of the Work Life Balance

If I hear one more person say that millennials are “lazy” or “entitled,” I’m going to explode like a shaken up can of Mountain Dew pitched full-force onto asphalt.

Just because we strive for a balance between work and life doesn’t make us bad people. It makes us smart people.

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