Starting therapy can be a daunting affair, and as it is with all new and unfamiliar things it can often elicit feelings of trepidation and nervousness. One of the most challenging barriers to getting started in therapy is deciding who to see. If you have ever done an internet search for therapists, you’ll know just how many practitioners and types of therapy there are, and sorting through all of the choices can feel overwhelming. While there is no exact formula for selecting a therapist, here are some things to consider that will hopefully get you or someone you’re supporting to get started.

Stay with me here… You can’t stop your thoughts. Why? Because your thoughts are generated in your brain. Your brain’s job is to think. Just the same way that your heart’s job is to pump blood, your lung’s job is to breathe, your stomach’s job is to digest food, etc. So how can you switch off your thoughts if your brain’s job is to think? We cannot help what pops into our brain, but what we can do is work on how to manage them. Managing thoughts is no easy feat but there are a few things that can help.

Our hormones can do weird things in our bodies. They can make us feel and behave in ways that can leave us scratching our heads especially when we’re lacking in certain hormones. The hormones in our brain are no different. There are four main hormones that are implicated in our ability to regulate our mental health which are: Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphins. So what do they do exactly and how can we up our daily D.O.S.E?

We’ve all heard people say that movement is great for our mood and for very good reason. Research has been able to demonstrate for a long time that movement can positively improve mood, decrease stress, improve clarity of thinking and memory capabilities and improve motivation and confidence. With all of these positive associations it makes perfect sense that we would give it a try. So why does it work?

Slow breathing practices have been a part of many cultures around the world for centuries and are very well understood as being of great benefit to psychological and physical wellbeing. Unfortunately, in spite of the many benefits of slow breathing practices being fairly well known we all tend to breathe quite fast and many of us find slow breathing practices really hard. Research has suggested that we would benefit from breathing less than 10 breaths per minute however most of us exceed that and breathe between 10 and 20 breaths per minute instead! Today we reflect on some of the common barriers to slow breathing practice we see in our practice and offer you some beginner slow breathing exercises to try.

A couple of weeks ago my husband was talking to me about a “thing” he had read called “revenge procrastination”. Now, he and I are both notorious for procrastinating and so this tweaked my interest. As I listened to what revenge procrastination was about, all I could think about was how relevant this explanation for why we procrastinate so much, especially when it’s bedtime, felt.