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Self Help

Helping you find balance in the flow!

None of us at Therapy Austin blog for a living, but every once in a while we like to compose an offering that serves to inform, uplift, remind or resource you. Enjoy!

Mood and Food: The Interplay of Nutrition and Mental Health
As a community-focused practice, Therapy Austin is continuously dedicated to enlightening you about the comprehensive nature of mental health. There are numerous factors influencing our emotional and psychological well-being, and today, we want to discuss a factor that’s often overlooked – the connection between our food and our mental health. It’s fascinating to know that how and what we consume can have a direct impact on our minds and mood. The correlation between food and mood is...
Self-Care: Dare to Care for Yourself
In a world that sometimes feels determined to suck the life force right out of you, caring for yourself can be a truly radical and incredible act.  We are asked to give so much of ourselves to our jobs, our partners, our families and children, and often all that’s left for us are the scraps.  I hope that this blog post will show you that self care is accessible, in some way, to everyone.  Here at Therapy Austin we work hard to create routines of self care with our clients so that eventually they...
It Doesn't Take Long to Shift Thought Patterns Toward Happiness
Happiness researcher Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage and Big Potential, contends that making small changes in our daily routines can transform our thought patterns, yielding greater life satisfaction and meaning. It only takes 21 days—three weeks of daily practice—for a new activity to become habit, Achor shares in an interview on the 10% Happier podcast. He identifies five evidence-based daily activities that can quickly increase gratitude, meaning, and pleasure in our everyday l...
Science-Based Sleep Tools
Psychology Today article The New Science of Sleep offers helpful tips on getting into a sleep routine and normalizes some of the common sleep issues that people experience in our busy, modern, and often dysregulating society. This article on sleep hygiene provides helpful psycho-education purposes and can be used to cultivate healthy sleep practices that in turn help regulate mood. This Resource Rec was brought to you by Emily Bray, LMSW.
Gratitude in a Season of Darkness and Light
Daylight Savings is done, the sky grows dark, and yet it is also a season of celebrating light and giving thanks. In India and Nepal, November 7 marks the beginning of Hindu celebration of Diwali, the joyful festival of lights, symbolizing the victory of light over darkness. In Thailand, Yi Ping, a celebration of the full moon, will take place November 22, with the launch of thousands sky lanterns into the night sky. It can be easy to focus on the darkness. Our brains evolved recognize threats, ...
When Others Can't Fill the Void: Understanding Loneliness and the Path to Self-Connection
It’s a familiar feeling for many of us, that deep-seated sense of loneliness that doesn’t always vanish when we’re with friends or surrounded by family. This paradoxical feeling, where you can be in a room full of people and yet feel alone, is more common than we might think. At Therapy Austin, we understand the complex emotions that surround loneliness, and we believe it’s essential to explore the underlying causes and find personalized paths to self-connection. Understa...
From Languishing to Flourishing
A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article about the feeling of “blah” people are experiencing during the pandemic, which they attributed to languishing. A few days later, a sister article discussed moving from languishing to flourishing and offered coping skills. While many things can contribute to a feeling of languishing (some of them are systemic and not a matter of individual responsibility to overcome) the article proposed some nice ideas to help improve one’s mood. One was a...
The Elusive Pack of 100 Colored Pencils
Coloring books are just about everywhere right now. If you didn’t get one as a gift over the holidays, you’ve definitely seen them in Target or Barnes and Noble. Adult coloring books are so popular that they were partly responsible for a spike in printed media in 2015 in the US. So what’s the deal? Why are our grown-up friends and family members (not to mention our therapists!) curling up on couches across the country to … color? Humans have been using art as therapy for ...
Burnout
Burnout has become familiar in today’s hustle culture. If you are unfamiliar with the word, you’ve likely felt it or something similar after a deadline, project, or busy season. For those struggling with burnout, the short breaks are not enough. Instead of feeling rejuvenated and ready to return to their routine, individuals with burnout might feel dread or resentment at returning to work or parenting. These thoughts and feelings can be distressing. Burnout is when you’ve been overworking for a ...
Keeping a Pillow Book
Is there any form of writing more overlooked and disposable than the list? Perhaps cereal box copy or graffiti. Fleetingly relevant, the list is written to be scrapped. Yet, astonishingly, the lists of one Japanese noblewoman have endured for a thousand years. While serving as a lady-in-waiting, Sei Shōnagon famously compiled a loose collection of musings and narratives in list form known as The Pillow Book. We associate lists with utility, though under Sei Shōnagon’s brush, the form is expansiv...
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