How Are You Coping with Covid Fatigue?

 

I know, you’re as tired of Covid as I am. For months, we’ve all had to deal with the constant threat of illness, layoffs, and deaths while being denied our typical coping strategies like social gatherings, eating out, and family holidays. It’s led to widespread emotional exhaustion that has a name: COVID fatigue.

Covid fatigue hurts more than our mental health. It puts our physical health at risk, too. Covid fatigue causes us to get sloppy about the precautions we know we should take like washing hands, wearing masks, and maintaining physical distance. As we enter the second year of this the exhaustion is paramount.

So What is Covid Fatigue?

Like any stressor, Covid causes our bodies to respond with what is known as the fight-or-flight response (which despite the name is four possible responses):

  1. Fight (resist the threat)
  2. Flight (evade the threat)
  3. Freeze (become paralyzed in the face of the threat)
  4. Faun (give in to the threat)

Stresses are not supposed to be...

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The Biggest Obstacles to Your Creativity

Do you feel like you lack imagination? Do you struggle to create or to find solutions to the challenges in your life? It’s possible you’re suffering from a few creativity-blocking obstacles. By identifying the obstacles in your path, you can find ways to work around them. 

Eliminate the creativity blockers from your life:

  1.   A cluttered mind makes creativity a challenge. Have you ever noticed that your best ideas come when you’re alone? You’re either being quiet or doing something very routine, like driving on a low-traffic road or taking a walk. It’s hard to get the creative juices flowing when you have too much going on.

Find time to sit in silence, spend time with yourself, meditate, go for a walk, journal, take a bath. These are all important self-care techniques that will also help you boost your creativity. Want a great start to your day come meditate, and journal with a community of women who are on their own healing journeys.

  1. ...
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Are You Giving Away Your Personal Power?

This past week in our Morning Calm Program we were talking about personal power, and I wanted to share some ways that we as women tend to give our power away. As much as it feels good to give, that's never true for your personal power. 

 

  • Being Passive

 

The only time it is acceptable to be passive is when you really don’t care. Letting people treat you like a doormat will drain your energy. Have enough personal power to stand up for yourself. Otherwise, people will keep on putting you down. 

Practice saying no to the little things and it will get easier for the big things. Let your voice be heard. This can sometimes feel scary, again try with smaller things, like what you would like to eat for dinner, and work your way up to the larger things.

 

  • Giving Your Inner Critical Voice Mind Space

 

Be aware of your consciousness because that's the critic that will drain you the most and keep on taking. If you find this becoming problematic,...

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Journaling for Healing

Do you feel like your emotions are complicated and confusing? If you struggle to understand why you feel or react the ways you do, you might benefit from using a journal. Journaling can help you appropriately identify and express your feelings to increase self-understanding. 

Once you learn to identify and deal with your feelings in acceptable ways, you have truly mastered self-understanding. By simply jotting down what's going on with you and how you feel about it, you can get a handle on your emotions.

Writing your feelings in a journal helps increase self-understanding in four ways:  

  1. Journaling compels you to think about and process a particular situation or occurrence. When you write about an event, you automatically process the event through words and description. Recording the situation in writing can lead you to notice details you hadn't noticed when the event took place, thus increasing your insight about the situation.
  • While journaling, put aside other...
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5 Ways to Develop Positive Thinking

Not feeling well? Kind of blah and wishing you had something better to say about the day than a mumbled ‘fine’ when someone asks you how you are? The solution might be simpler than you think.

Our attitudes really are everything. When we’re not feeling great about our lives or how the day is going, everything can seem to go wrong. The problem is, life isn’t a steady thing. You might have one really good day followed by another equally bad. With so many things outside of your control from the weather to politics it might seem impossible to ever truly feel good about anything.

The answer lies in your thinking. By being able to think positively, you will find your entire outlook changes. 

How do you develop the habit of positive thinking?

Rephrase

The obvious answer is to use more positive words. Instead of saying something negative, either out loud or in your head, try to find a better way to say things. For example, work isn’t grueling so much as it...

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9 Ways to Live a More Authentic Life

Authenticity is to be true to one’s personality and character. It means you’re willing to show the world who you really are. You’re willing to live the life that you were meant to live. Authenticity is the ability to show your uniqueness to the world.

There are very few authentic people in the world, but you know them when you see them.

We’re naturally drawn to authentic people. We feel comfortable with those that are willing to be themselves.

Use these strategies to live a more authentic life and show the world the real you:

1. Know your values. What’s important to you? Make a list of every quality you think is important for a person to have. Now, put that list in order. What are your five top values? When you know your values, the authentic choice in any situation is more obvious than when you don’t know your values.

2. Stop doing things you don’t want to do. You still need to pay your bills and take out the trash. However, you don’t...

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Show Yourself Some Love

Valentine's day was yesterday and for many people this day is emotionally charged. Maybe you are single, widowed, divorced, or maybe in a relationship that is unfulfilling. There are so many reasons for Valentines day to be emotionally charged. There are a lot of expectations around Valentines day.

So, if you spent yesterday feeling unloved. Know that the only person that matters is you. Self love is the most important. Be kind to yourself, allow yourself to feel your feelings, but also know that ultimately you are the only one who can make you happy.

How can you be happy if you don’t love yourself? Having a high degree of self-love makes it easier to take good care of yourself. If you love and respect yourself, others are more likely to respect you, too. When you love yourself, you’re more gentle, kind, and considerate with yourself.

Life can be hard. It’s even harder when you’re hard on yourself. Ideally, you are your biggest fan in life.

Use these ideas to...

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Free Yourself from Social Comparison and Learn to Love Your Life

Do you sometimes find yourself comparing your life to that of others? Do you crave more fulfilling relationships and greater satisfaction? Do you compare what you have or your skills against others? To create the happiness you deserve, you can liberate yourself from social competition.

Comparison becomes a problem when it makes you feel bad about yourself or your own work, or your skills. Being aware that there is room for improvement is one thing. Feeling discouraged from pursuing something you are interested in, because you feel like you’ll never be as good as someone else is a totally different thing, and it’s not healthy.

Sometimes competition is good. Playing poker, dominoes, or indulging in a friendly challenge with your loved ones can be fun and relaxing. But when you start comparing yourself to others, you may find that there's no winner, and everyone feels hurt afterward.

For instance, if creating art is what you enjoy, it is highly improbable that you will ever...

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Do You Have the Courage to be Vulnerable?

Many of us were taught to be strong and to keep our problems to ourselves. We were taught that the world is a hostile place and we should practice “survival of the fittest.” It’s not easy to allow the world to know your flaws, weaknesses, and failures.

We’re ashamed that we’re not perfect, but make every effort to convince others that we are. 

Vulnerability doesn’t come easy, but it provides tremendous freedom and many other benefits. If you can be vulnerable, it means that you accept yourself and don’t feel the need to hide yourself from everyone else. 

Use these ideas to practice self-acceptance through vulnerability:

  1. Realize that fear is the primary obstacle. The fear of rejection and ridicule are the main culprits. You might also feel that you lack privacy if you let the world see you for who you really are. The fear of rejection is a common human phenomenon.
  2. Think about the times you’re least likely to be vulnerable and...
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What is Healing with Creativity, and Why do I Need it?

Healing through creativity helps you to explore your emotions, improve self-esteem, manage addictions, relieve stress, improve symptoms of anxiety and depression, and cope with a physical illness or disability.

"Creativity healed me. I don’t know that I could think of any word that I get more inspired by than the word healing." -SARK

Research shows that being creative can improve well-being by increasing positive emotions and decreasing negative emotions. It shows that creativity can reduce depression, stress and anxiety, and improve our ability to express difficult emotions such as grief and sadness.

Being creative gives us opportunities to try out new ideas, and new ways of thinking and problem-solving. Creative activities help us acknowledge and celebrate our own uniqueness and diversity. Creativity encourages self-expression, a way to create something from personal feelings and experiences.

Studies also show that creating stimulates the release of dopamine. This chemical...

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