How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety by psychologist Ellen Hendriksen offers cognitive behavioural therapy-based strategies to help readers overcome social anxiety. The author herself has experienced social anxiety, and I always like when authors are willing to be vulnerable and add that personal touch. The book is aimed …
Self-sabotage seems like it should be a pretty unnatural thing to do, but that’s just not the case, so I thought it would be interesting to chat about it. And since I scheduled this post, my friends Cynni Pixy and Doriondori also posted about self-sabotage, so good timing. What self-sabotage is Self-sabotage involves getting in …
Maja at Lampelina wrote quite a while back about the influence of fear on decision-making, and I’m finally getting around to exploring it on my own. Looking back, I don’t think fear was a big factor in most of my decisions. If I wanted to do something, I did it, including some perhaps high-ish fear …
How Big a Role Has Fear Played in Your Decisions? Read More »
I’ve noticed that a lot of people in the blogging world have quite a strong inner critic. I don’t, and II find it fascinating when it seems like people believe that they should self-criticize in order to do things properly, or in order to avoid being a bad person. So let’s chat about it. To …
Perhaps there are things you want to do, or think you should do, but they’re just not happening. How hard do you push yourself to try to get ‘er done anyway? Do you keep trying even when it becomes clear there’s no way it’s going to happen? I can think of a few factors that …
How Hard Do You Push Yourself Against Mental Illness? Read More »
Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself is written by Kristin Neff, a prominent researcher in the area of self-compassion. It includes research findings, a variety of exercises with room to complete them in the book, and stories from the author’s personal experience. The author draws on Buddhist teachings, and she writes that: …
“Am I a bad person?” It seems to be a fairly common question. Searching for that question on Google yields 263 million hits. I’ve also seen it raised in the blogosphere. Regardless of what the answer may or may not seem to be, though, is it a valid and/or useful question? What exactly is a …
Am I a Bad Person? Or Is That the Wrong Question? Read More »
Being perfect is an ideal that some people may strive for or feel that they are required to attain, but how realistic is the notion of perfection? One of the biggest problems with perfect is that a lot of things in this world are subjective. When it comes to things that are subjective, everyone has …
The Problem With Perfect… Is That It Doesn’t Exist Read More »
Failure isn’t fun. There’s just no two ways about that. But what does that failure mean> I think that, particularly when mental illness is involved, it’s easy to leap from “I failed at [X]” to “I’m a failure.” But taking a step back, they’re not really the same thing. Fear of failure Fear of failure …
When You Fail, Are You a Failure at a Task? Or as a Person? Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is imposter syndrome. I’ve seen a number of people write about this topic lately, so I thought I’d join in. The term imposter syndrome was first used in a 1978 paper in the journal Psychotherapy Theory, Research, and Practice. The …
