The New Year represents new beginnings, a fresh start, a chance to get closer to the person you would like to be, the life you want to be living. Setting aside bad habits, letting go of crutches that you may have outgrown or no longer need and patterns that are no longer serving you can be both empowering and challenging. Ultimately, we all want to feel better about our bodies, minds, capabilities, or station in life, but how do we implement our ideas of being more fit, well educated, healthier, or more financially secure?
According to the blogpost Hacking Habits: How To Make New Behaviors Last For Good by Jocelyn K. Glei on www.99u.com , there is a very specific protocol for changing behavior. Through modifying habit loops, which include the 3 steps ‘cue, routine, and reward,’ we are able to set ourselves up for success in our new endeavors.
If you are seeking to create life changes this new year and would the support of a Licensed Professional Counselor, contact me to set up an appointment. It would be my honor to help you to create and maintain positive change in your life!
As an Asheville Counselor, I often see individuals who are dealing with varying degrees of anxiety and depression. It is my belief that we all deal with these feelings, to some extent, in our individual life-spans. Both can be debilitating, constricting conditions which cause life to feel like an incredibly uncomfortable, even miserable experience.
Recently, I have come across two resources that both speak to these states of dis-ease. The first is a TEDxYouth talk, by 18 year old Kevin Breel, who delivers an insightful speech on depression: both his own struggle, and our struggle as a nation, in accepting and understanding this condition.
The second is a recent article that way published in the New York Times by ‘anxiety-blogger’ Daniel Smith. In it, Smith recounts the experience of Alice James, the writer who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1891 at the age of 42, and the impact that the diagnosis had on her twenty-year experience of anxiety. You can read the full article by clicking the link:
I think one of the most important things to understand about anxiety and depression is that we all deal with them at some point. Exploring your feelings and gaining a greater understanding of the root of these issues in a confidential space can be beneficial and lead to insight and new ways of operating in the world. It is an honor to provide counseling in a sacred space to individuals of all ages to work through the anxiety and depression that is preventing you from living a life you love.
