The holidays are over, the credit card bill just hit, and the sun sets at 4:47 p.m. If you’re feeling more drained than motivated right now, there’s a biological reason: Research shows that mood-regulating serotonin activity drops during darker months, while melatonin production increases. In other words, your body is…

Divorce is hard. It means that an influential chapter of your life is ending and one of the most important people in your life won’t be there like they were. “Divorce is hugely impactful in almost all aspects of our lives,” says Whitney McSparran, a licensed professional clinical counselor at…

Stress is inevitable, but suffering through it isn’t. The difference lies in having healthy, beneficial coping mechanisms—strategies that actually help rather than just temporarily mask the problem. Coping strategies, also known as coping mechanisms or coping skills, are behaviors designed to help us manage difficult emotions from challenging events, situations,…

In today’s fast-paced world, we’re constantly juggling endless to-do lists and feeling pressure from both society and social media to keep up. Amid all this hustle, a new self-care trend has taken off online: bed rotting. To “bed rot” means to spend the day resting in bed, perusing social media,…

Dopamine detoxes are all over social media, with many influencers talking about doing a “five-day dopamine detox” in which they stay away from social media, podcasts, TV, processed food, and other things that feel unhealthy or take up too much of their free time.  The practice, sometimes called dopamine fasting,…

In the early 2000s, a travel company labeled the third Monday in January as the most depressing day of the year and named it “Blue Monday.” While data hasn’t proven the day to be more depressing than any other, the name stuck. Whether or not Blue Monday is really the…

We all know that self-care is good for you, but it can be hard to know where to start. That’s why we’ve compiled a quick list of simple self-care tips, given to us by our expert clinicians, on practices you can use to create a great self-care routine. These tips…

Stress is simply a fact of nature—forces from the outside world affecting the individual. Sometimes stress can be positive: exciting and inspiring, looking forward to new opportunities. Other times stress may have a more negative effect: intense mental pressure, muscle tightness, or anxiety and nervousness.  Your body responds to stress…

Self-care refers to a routine of behaviors a person performs, on their own with the intention to maintain and improve their own health. Because self-care is inherently unique to a person, it is difficult to say what will work for each. For that reason, I have delineated some of the…

If you’re wondering how to best take care of yourself, self-care may seem like the obvious answer. But exactly how self-care should be executed might not be clear. It’s a process that’s about more than looking good or feeling better than we did the day before. Self-care is about sustainability—on…

Journaling is a powerful tool. It serves as an outlet, allowing us to express our emotions and process our thoughts without fear of judgment — there is no need or temptation to censor ourselves when we’re writing to and for nobody but ourselves. What a gift. And yet, for some,…

To be fully present as a human being—that’s the goal of mindfulness. Though it sounds lofty, being mindful isn’t nearly as difficult or strenuous as it appears on the surface. Mindfulness is about coming to terms with reality and how our personal experiences truly make us feel. It’s about the…