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...

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...

Today, it’s challenging to have a great social life. This was true even before Covid-19 became an issue.

In the not-so-distant past, it used to be so boring to stay at home during the evenings and the weekends that people always looked for an excuse to get out of the house. But now, between streaming services, the internet, smartphones, and video games, it’s much easier to find an excuse to stay home.

Covid-19 has only made the situation even more challenging. Now, there is a legitimate reason to avoid others.

While a few select people seem to thrive with very little human contact, most people need to spend time with others to stay emotionally healthy and happy.

Luckily, there are still things you can do to help maintain your emotional health, even when your time with others is reduced.

Learn how to ease the discomfort of social isolation with these tips:

1. Be productive. Just because you might be spending a lot of time alone doesn’t mean you just have to sit...

Unless we have faced and dealt with the wounds we have accumulated in this lifetime or other lifetimes, our growth can be limited or even blocked. I personally believe that everyone is working through something, some of us more than others. The desire to be happier, healthier, and live a fuller life. 
 
Self-care is the mindset, activities, practices and habits we bring to bear against our stress, unhappiness, illness, depression and many more negative emotions.

Self-care is about giving ourselves relief when we feel overwhelmed, or once we get good at it, before we get to overwhelm. To care for yourself, you need to know your needs and seek them out. The first thing to remember about self-care is that it is not indulgent.

Everyone uses the analogy of putting on your oxygen mask before helping another on a plane, and yet we don’t often believe that self-care is equally important, it is your oxygen mask, it allows you to be able to do more for others and be more alive.
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