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Winterize Your Mental Health

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Hello FPA community! I was recently chatting with a patient of mine who works as a cattle farmer. We were talking about how to prepare a farm and a herd for the winter months. Just as we change our habits to keep our animals safe and comfortable when the weather changes, we also need to change our own habits to keep good mental health in the winter months. As the days get shorter and the weather turns colder, many people notice their energy, motivation, and mood start to dip. It's known that less sunlight affects our neurological functioning. The good news? There are small, effective steps you can take to ease symptoms and help protect your mood through the darker months. Seek out natural light whenever you can Sunlight helps regulate your body’s internal clock and supports healthy levels of serotonin — the “feel-good” brain chemical. Try to get outside during the day, even if it’s cloudy. A short morning walk or lunch break near a window can make a real difference. Move your body ...
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Embracing Change: A Study in Acceptance

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Hello dear FPA community! Happy October. I hope this time finds you crunching leaves underfoot, enjoying fireside chats with your loved ones, and baking all the spiced goods for the season. This season I personally am facing the challenge of embracing a big change and wanted to share some thoughts with you on why change is hard for many of us and what we can do to navigate it with better agility and grace. Change is the one constant of our human experience- ironic, isn't it? Change happens in big and small ways, across our health, our relationships, our work and even our identities. Change feels hard for most of us. As beings of nature humans are wired to seek predictability as a way to minimize risk and maximize survival. Uncertainty usually incites fear, in turn triggering a stress response in the body and in the mind. Emotional responses to change might include grief, anxiety, resistance, and irritability among many others. We are constantly faced with options in confronting cha...
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Don't Believe Everything You Think

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Hello FPA and happy September! This month I wanted to share some thoughts with you about something I work with almost all of my patients on. My first meeting with a patient I usually set the expectation that in therapy we will often think about how we think and talk about how we talk. I know that might sound a little funky, but it's true! We don't take much time in our day to day lives to think about how we're thinking and talk about how we're talking. Our thoughts are so automatic within our own minds, but not every thought we have is accurate or helpful. Read that again real quick… not everything we think is true. Not every thought reflects a fact or a full reality. Each of our thoughts are influenced by past experiences, emotions, or biases. Sometimes our brains fall into patterns that overlook or neglect certain truths. We might get caught in black and white thoughts, or overgeneralizations, or catastrophizing. Black and white thoughts might sound like "If I ...
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Hot Temperature. Hot Temper?

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  Hello FPA friends and family! We have arrived in the month of August. We're gearing up to send our kiddos back to school and resume some of our normal rhythms. We're also on the edge of a changing season, shifting away from the heat of the summer into the crispy cool of the fall. You may have noticed (I'd be shocked if you didn't) that our summer came with some intensely high temperatures. I stay curious about the relationship between external environment and internal experience. The heat waves of the season made me wonder about the impact of hot weather on irritability, mood, and relationships. There are some real implications of abnormally hot weather on our physical, emotional, and relational well-being. You might notice during heat waves that you have a shorter fuse, you tend to snap back at others, you might have difficulty concentrating, some general restlessness or an antsy feeling, your baseline frustration might have risen. This is all directly correlated wit...
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Vacation Mode- But I'm Still Stressed

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Happy July FPA friends! Tis the season for travel, sunshine, pool days, and time off. Except, even when the hotel is booked, the out-of-office message is set, and the bag is packed… sometimes our brains don't get the memo that it's time to turn off. Why is it hard for some of us to unplug? Even in the best of circumstances, we can still feel restless, guilty, or just have a hard time relaxing. Some of us are too used to going a hundred miles a minute that we've forgotten how to slow down. Or we're just so out of practice slowing down, being still, and enjoying the moment that when we get the opportunity to take it easy, it feels hard. Our fast-paced culture and productivity-driven expectations as well as our attachment to our digital devices can keep us constantly activated. We've grown accustomed to being available to literally the entire world every waking moment of our lives. The notifications keep coming. The to-do list is never actually complete. Our minds are...
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Unspoken: (The Hidden Crisis of) Men's Mental Health

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Hello to FPA as we welcome the month of June! You might not be aware that June is designated as Men's Health Month , which is why I want to share some thoughts with you specifically about men's mental health. You'll notice as I write that I make some generalizations about both male culture and female culture, and I want to note up top that of course these things are not true for all individuals and that my language choice of men/man is not exclusionary to other masculine gender identities. So why am I writing about this and what's the problem here? Men don't talk about things that need talking about.  What outcome does that yield? Men suffer. They suffer in silence. They feel alone. They are at much higher risk of death by suicide.  What are we going to do about that? Talk to our men. Men, talk to each other. The conversation is truly just beginning about men's mental health and how it intersects with our cultural ideas of masculinity and the expectations we pla...
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More Than Sick: Chronic Illness and Identity

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Hello FPA! Today I want to share some thoughts with you about how we can untangle our identities from our medical and mental health illnesses. In our fast-paced world of diagnoses, prescriptions, and quick fixes, it can be easy to forget a simple truth : you are more than your symptoms . You are something more than your anxiety or your high blood pressure. You are a whole person. This is especially relevant if you are a person with a severe or chronic illness. At FPA, we believe in whole person care. I've written before about my treatment model as systemic- meaning all parts of us are connected to all other parts of us. Being a daughter impacts being a mother. Being a friend impacts being a colleague. The same is true for your medical conditions. Having a chronic illness, such as an autoimmune disorder, impacts so much more than your immune system. It impacts how available you can be socially, how much energy you have to play with your children, how many days you need to call off ...
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