Mental Health Topics

My anxiety has felt… closer, lately. It used to be this distant threat that I could close the door on or swallow deep down. Now, it’s a heaviness that sits in my throat and weighs on my mind. Sometimes, it hits me like a baseball gone rogue. Most of the…

I’m not going to pretend like I’m a dating expert—in fact, I’m far from it. I’ve gone on a few dates here and there, but I’m notorious for canceling just days (sometimes hours) before. I know what you’re thinking, what a jerk. And I completely agree with you. It’s just…

Any time I’m left alone in a public space, I dig my phone out of my pocket and act like I have important business to attend to. This is never truly the case. I’m just so awkward and so nervous around strangers that I must engage in an imaginary conversation…

Can you still keep a secret in the 21st century? Well, I certainly can and do on a daily basis. For over 30 years, most of my adult life has been about keeping secrets. Although I have one or two of my own which I have shared with a couple…

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, approximately 1 in 5 American adults experiences mental illness every year; and approximately 1 in 25 experiences a serious mental illness that significantly alters their life. Furthermore, 16 million American adults live with major depression, 42 million with anxiety, 2.4 million with…

New research from UCLA finds a new, fairly simple effective treatment for those with OCD: confronting their fears. Say, for instance, someone is compelled to wash their hands consistently throughout the day; facing their fear might involve resisting this compulsion after shaking someone’s hand or perhaps going out of their…

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is fleeting. Love is friendship on fire. Love is sacrifice. Love is…impossible to define. But the good news is, it’s aplenty—even if we don’t know exactly how to give or receive it. Alex Runolfson, Clinical Mental Health Counselor, understands this all too well….

We’re often told to trust our intuition and “go with our gut.” Why? Where did this saying come from? Well, it’s actually quite literal: when we find ourselves in an uncomfortable or potentially troublesome situation, we get “butterflies,” or a nervous feeling in the “pit of our stomach.” In this…

If you had to define love using just three words, what three words would you use? Your answer would most likely differ from mine. Why? Because everybody has at least slightly different views on and experiences with love—of which shape their response to the question above. Now, with this in…

We are all guilty of being overly critical, demeaning, and simply unkind to ourselves. Whether we’re shaming ourselves for gaining a couple pounds, pouting in the mirror for having messy hair, or literally telling ourselves that we’re not good enough. The time is now to crush that superego, stop those…

Over the last few years, I’ve learned more about mental health than I ever thought possible: I’ve learned that exercise is as beneficial to our mental wellbeing as it is our physical wellbeing; I’ve learned that anxiety disorders are the most common form of mental illness in the U.S.; I’ve…

The title says it all: you are not alone in your suffering. Every single person you encounter today—your coworker, your boss, the guy sitting next to you in traffic, the person you just passed on the street—is struggling with something. And more likely than not, they could all use a…