Handling The Hard Stuff

Tag: Mental Health

  • Keep Your Word to Yourself

    Often as we go through life being busy adults with lots of responsibilities, we push ourselves further and further back on the priority list. Your kids and their activities take up your attention. Or your work requires a lot of focus. You spend your energy on your relationships and you have nothing left for legit…

  • There is No Normal

    One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is “next week things will go back to normal.” What is normal? It seems like literally every day there is something that’s requiring our immediate attention or pulling us out of our default position. Things never get back to normal. Things evolve. We’ve recently started calling changes…

  • You are Doing Better than You Think

    We are terrible at reasonable self-analysis. Invariably we are our own worst critics. We second-guess every choice we’ve made and consider whether things would be better if we’d done things differently. Stop. You are where you are and you’re doing better than you think you are. You are trying. You are changing. Those two things…

  • Trying Harder

    I have a lot of quit in me. I am really good at pushing myself a little but not a LOT. I have never gone “to failure”. I’ve never pushed myself so hard I literally can’t keep going. I’ve never tried to lift something so heavy I needed a spotter to help me finish. I’ll…

  • Safety Net

    A friend of mine messaged me today to tell me she quit her job – her first professional, career, JOB job – without having another lined up. She was freaking out. She sort of had a plan, she’d loosely lined up additional work to fill the time and space and has a strong likelihood that…

  • Boundaries do not Mean Beef

    Drawing boundaries does not mean you are picking a fight. It is not an adversarial thing. You are not doing this at someone, you are doing it for yourself. Choosing to unfollow someone on social media does not mean you dislike them or don’t wish them well. It means that your mental health is negatively…

  • Reward Yourself

    We don’t celebrate our wins much as adults. We have a hard time prioritizing the small victories in our daily lives. And even when we do celebrate the little things, we rarely reward ourselves in big or useful ways. When I was little any celebratory act was rewarded with treats. Ice cream or chocolate or…

  • Quiet Quitting

    This is a phrase that’s come about in the last few years that essentially means you’re not “giving your all” to something. It is mostly used in relation to your work identity. It goes hand in hand with someone over the age of 50 grumbling “no one wants to work anymore”. That’s true Jim, no…

  • Don’t Mistake Peace for Boring

    Let’s be honest, we love the drama. We listen to all the true crime podcasts and audiobooks, we make celebrities out of housewives and Jersey Shorers who spend all their time gossiping and fighting among one another. Every other show on television is about emergency services or surgeons or crime investigations. We thrive on trauma.…

  • Don’t Require an Apology

    In so many of my divorce cases, my client will spend so much time and energy being angry at the way their soon-to-be ex has treated them. That anger often dissipates after the first month or so – people learn to cope with their new life, they figure out what it’s going to look like…