The Wellness Diary

Insights, advice, new research, tips and tricks, and new resources to help you with your mental health journey.

Resources Sandra Kushnir Resources Sandra Kushnir

Help! Driving Anxiety is Ruining My Life

Driving anxiety can have a profound impact on your emotional, mental, and physical well-being, affecting your social and professional life. This comprehensive guide explores the causes and symptoms of driving anxiety, its far-reaching effects, and practical strategies to overcome it. Learn about various therapeutic approaches, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Exposure Response Interventions, and discover effective coping techniques to help you regain control and confidence on the road. Don't let driving anxiety control your life—find the support and resources you need to drive anxiety-free.

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Sandra Kushnir Sandra Kushnir

Navigating the Roadblocks: Overcoming the Challenges of Driving Anxiety

Experiencing driving anxiety can have a profound impact on one's everyday life, turning what should be ordinary, simple errands into challenging tasks that feel insurmountable. This type of anxiety is far from trivial, as it can manifest in various ways that may be debilitating for the individual experiencing them. These manifestations can range from physical symptoms such as nausea, excessive sweating, and dizziness, to emotional reactions like panic, uncontrollable worry, and high levels of stress

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Understanding Ketamine Therapy: Who Should Avoid It?

Over the last several decades, our understanding and application of the drug ketamine has evolved and expanded significantly. Originally known for its anesthetic properties, ketamine has demonstrated a unique ability to provide relief for individuals suffering from severe mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This is particularly notable in cases where traditional treatment methods, such as psychotherapy and antidepressants, have failed to produce effective results. The emergence of ketamine as a potent tool in the battle against these debilitating conditions marks a significant and promising advance in the field of mental health treatment.

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Three Simple Ways to Find Calm and Nourish Resilience

Tame anxious thoughts, strengthen emotional agility and cultivate compassion and connection with mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness is a gesture of kindness toward yourself, your family, and your community. Taking time for intentional rest, learning to build emotional agility, and connecting with your undefended heart are the skills that mindfulness practice teaches us.

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Three Simple Ways to Find Calm and Nourish Resilience

Tame anxious thoughts, strengthen emotional agility and cultivate compassion and connection with mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness is a gesture of kindness toward yourself, your family, and your community. Taking time for intentional rest, learning to build emotional agility, and connecting with your undefended heart are the skills that mindfulness practice teaches us.

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High Functioning Anxiety: How To Live With It

People with high functioning anxiety experience many typical symptoms of anxiety, such as excessive worry and fear, overthinking, and poor sleep. Effective treatment is available for all types of anxiety. This article provides an overview of high functioning anxiety, its symptoms, and the potential treatment options.

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Toxic Positivity: It’s Okay To Not Be Okay

Toxic positivity refers to a pattern of behavior wherein a person adopts a lifestyle that engages in being positive at all points of time no matter what, because ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. It involves rejecting the negative triggers of your life, thus investing all your attention and energy into the positive stimulants. How come a lifestyle that sounds like a mental detox, be labeled as toxic?

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5-Simple Ways to Help Someone With Anxiety

Anxiety is a normal part of life, with everyone experiencing it to varying degrees. Anxiety is one of the things that has allowed the human species to survive and evolve, allowing us to assess situations and react accordingly to them. And while it is normal for everyone to experience feelings of anxiousness at some point in their lives, many people suffer from more serious and at times debilitating forms of anxiety disorders.

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Relationships Sandra Kushnir Relationships Sandra Kushnir

4- Ways To Stop Projecting Onto Your Romantic Partners

Projection is the process by which we displace our own feelings, beliefs, values or unmet needs on to others. We do this most often and most intensely with romantic partners. Our mind tricks us into seeing our romantic interest as someone different than who they are. We see them as a “savior”- someone who can alleviate us from our own emotional distress.

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The Skeletons in Your Mind

Jung was very well known for contributing new concepts to psychology that invoked a sense of imagination and symbolism, and simultaneously, an appeal to science and rational skepticism. Jung is probably best known for developing a framework to understand our conscious and unconscious by looking at it through a prism of archetypes and symbols as well as looking at our own past events to understand the present.

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COVID-19: How Humans Are Changing

There is little doubt that the global pandemic is going to change life as we know it forever. But how, exactly? Look out below for a few temporary – and sometimes hilarious – ways life has changed, as well as a few of the more impactful ways that the world will never be the same.

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Collective Crisis: How And Why People Respond So Differently To Fear

When life-threatening emergencies arise, fear begins to work in mysterious ways and it invokes a wide range of individual responses. To better understand the collective crisis and process the seemingly odd behavior of others, let’s demystify the varying degrees of the fear response. More importantly, building awareness around why you may react in a certain way and why others may respond so differently has the power to transform exasperation and judgment into empathy and collaboration, in a time where we are in dire need of the latter.

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An Open Letter To My Fellow Women

Women have been pitted against one another for centuries. Whether it be for the attention of men, careers, looks, or even family life, women are no strangers to the fight. Moving forward, we have turned our fight from one another to the betterment of our own and to nurture the quality of our society.

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5-Warning Signs You Might Have a Drinking Problem

For many people, an addiction to alcohol can be somewhat of a surprise. It's not a dependency that happens immediately, it progresses and builds over time. Sometimes it's difficult to see the signs before it's too late. Addiction is a progressive disease, so to become aware of it is not usually so obvious. So how can you recognize whether or not you or a loved one might have a problem with drinking? Read on to see if you can relate to any of these 5 warning signs.

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Dating Yourself and Your Partner

In the month of February, we celebrate love! Love of our partners, of our friends, family, and ourselves? Recently a friend of mine reminds me of the importance of teaching others about dating ourselves and our partners at the same time. This is more than just a practice of self-love but, a topic of creating a relationship of mutual love, respect, and confidence in ourselves.

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The Ultimate Secret of Yoga for Mental Health

Yoga is therapy, the full practice serves us work with the nature of being a human, the nature of the mind, how feelings live in our bodies, how they influence our minds and our behavior. In fact, yoga is much more than holding poses and stretching; yoga is a more widespread practice indeed, a lifestyle that includes several life principles.

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How To Silence Your Inner Critic

Your inner critic is the voice inside your head that judges, demeans, and disapproves of your thoughts and actions. This voice is a manifestation of your fears and doubts. In fact, The New York Times notes that people beat themselves up because of a negative value they've attached to past experiences. This self-criticism can easily lead to poor mental wellbeing, low self-esteem, and a greater risk of failure.

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