This is a must read for anyone who lives or works with teen girls! Lisa Damour has a delightful understanding and appreciation for teen girls and generously lets the rest of us in on all the secrets. In this book, Lisa aims to untangle the confusion of adolescent development for us and present it as seven transitions that teen girls must go through. In Untangled, Lisa aims to help parents untangle themselves from the “emotional knots we get caught in with our teenage daughters.”

When my clients say they want to control their emotions, they are usually asking me to help them turn off their emotions so that they look like the second group. The second group is often baffled that they have problems since their emotions are so under control. They often see themselves simply as unemotional people, struggle to locate their emotions, and generally have their emotions as turned off as possible. This all makes sense because our culture has long devalued and misunderstood emotions, telling us that being unemotional is the goal. However, neither of these groups is regulating their emotions.

Somehow, when people are able to see that they didn’t run their own lives into the ground on their own, something shifts. They start to believe in themselves again. They start to reject the pieces of culture that don’t bring them life. Things start to get just a tad easier. When we stop thinking that we are the problem, we gain the power to become the solution.

Anxiety is a normal, human experience that comes for a wide range of reasons. While diet is not usually the cause of anxiety, research has found that our diet can play a role in the severity of our symptoms, how we manage anxiety, and the impact of stress and anxiety on our body. There are foods and habits that are best to both include and exclude to help mitigate and manage anxiety. Below are 12 evidence based nutritional considerations when it comes to anxiety.

No one knows how hard it is to live with your chronic pain except for you. Chronic pain is a profoundly isolating experience that touches every aspect of your life. While it is sometimes associated with a specific diagnosis, most often chronic pain is unexplained which can make it hard to hope for improvement. Because of this, chronic pain can easily lead to depression and anxiety.

My best gift ever was the nurse announcing to me that since it was Christmas Day, she would let me hold my daughter for 30 minutes. It still makes me cry to think of it. Thirty minutes of peacefully holding the tiny human that should have been inside of me.

I am sitting here imagining that you definitely don’t like talking about anxiety as much as I do. If you are here reading about anxiety, it’s probably not because it’s a mere curiosity. I’m guessing that your anxiety has gotten way too big, and it’s making you miserable.

Every year at Christmas, when it comes time to decorate the tree, I get super crabby! I seem to be able to handle decorating other parts of the house, just don’t let me near the tree. Is it because I’m not a visual person? Did I suffer some ornamental trauma at age 2?

You have turned to the 3rd post in a series about managing anxiety. Anxiety affects all of us, really. It couldn’t be more common. It’s also complex. We are aiming for it to become a more balanced and helpful part of our lives instead of taking over.

In my first post on anxiety, I painted a picture of anxiety as a potentially helpful signal that something is wrong. I suggested that anxiety is a critical part of daily functioning that we don’t want to get rid of. The goal is to keep it in balance and to pay attention to what it has to say to us. This post is a full confession that sometimes there’s more to it than that.

Anxiety is unsettling by definition. It changes everything from how you digest food, the quality of your sleep, your ability to think clearly and freely, and how you relate to others. It strongly influences the decisions you make and can so easily shut down whole areas of your life.

Have you had an injury that just doesn’t seem to be healing? Sometimes there’s more going on than just tissue damage or things out of place. Here’s what can happen.

My average client received less than ideal parenting. typical responses to emotion in their homes were a wide variety of ways to shut it down. It might have been straight up ignoring the emotion, saying they shouldn’t have that emotion, or, at best, logic, “You can always find another friend, why cry about losing this one?” Some of their parents had such big emotions themselves that the children intuitively knew that there just wasn’t any space for their own emotions.

Simply put, dissociation is “checking out.” It means that you are less present, less aware of what’s going on around you.

Dissociation is just one of the many, marvelous ways that your physical self protects you from fully experiencing the world around you when things feel too intense or unsafe. Like many of the ways we protect ourselves (seatbelts, masks, full suit of armor), this “protection” can get in the way sometimes.

When we are stressed, anxious, angry, sad, depressed or an array of other emotions, food can be a source of comfort. Just like many drugs, food provides us with a rush of the “happy hormone” dopamine, which can help us to feel better temporarily. Unfortunately, this comfort is usually very short-lived and does little to address the underlying cause. It also perpetuates more emotional eating and creates a vicious cycle that can lead to guilt, shame, and an unhealthy relationship with food.