Category: Anxiety & Performance
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Math Anxiety in Adults: What We Really Mean When We Say “I Can’t Do Math.”
The other day at Trader Joe’s, I got into the express line to check out. “Do you have 15 items or less?” the cashier asked. “I think so,” I said. “Approximately.” She smiled. “That’s okay. I can’t count, anyway.” We laughed. But the subtext was all too familiar. I’ve said it, too. While calculating a…
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Thanking Your Mind: An ACT Technique for Coping with Unhelpful Thoughts
As a clinical psychologist who practices CBT, I’m focused on helping therapy clients explore the relationship between their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I’ve written about some of these ideas and techniques in articles about automatic thoughts, distorted thinking, and how to use mindfulness and thought records to recognize and challenge unhelpful thoughts. In addition to…
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4 strategies for dealing with difficult emotions
The world can be a scary and confusing place. Life can be hard. People can be cruel. For better or worse, difficult emotions are a part of life. So here are four strategies for dealing with them: Feel, Don’t Resist, Your Feelings Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “No feeling is final” and the poet Robert Frost…
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By virtue of being alive.
This is a concept that comes up for a lot of the clients I work with who were programmed, taught, or otherwise given the message that they were somehow not enough: You have value and worth…by virtue of being alive. What does this mean? It means you do not have to earn your place on…
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You are probably doing better than you think.
If you are a person who tends to get down on themselves and beat themselves up, this post is for you. I know you might not believe me, but…you are probably doing better than you think. I know you feel like you’re never good enough and you never will be, but…you are probably doing better…
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10 ways to cope with college rejection
It’s almost April and we all know what that means: thousands of young people across America are hearing back from the colleges they applied to months earlier. This was a record year for college applications (global pandemic, anyone?) and while many college applicants will receive acceptance letters, even more will rejection letters. Being told “no”…
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Give Yourself Permission to Suck in 2020
There is a no rule that says you have to be perfect right out the gate, such as on the first day of school or work or trying a new exercise or project or undertaking. But sometimes our critics – both self-imposed and external – will tell us we don’t have the right to a…
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Build Your Flexible Thinking Muscles With This Simple Tool
I recently wrote about all or nothing thinking (also known as “black or white thinking”), and the negative impact that rigid, inflexible thought patterns can have on a person’s well-being. In the aforementioned blog post, I discussed mindfulness as a powerful, key tool for challenging these types of distorted thoughts. In short: by using mindfulness,…