In a previous blog post, I talked about the importance of sleep. I believe sleep is the #1 self-care activity you can do for your brain. I think it’s so important that I wanted to make an entire post just about sleep and how you can work towards improving it. Let’s start with a fun fact! An average human sleeps about ⅓ of their lifetime. This is roughly calculated to be 227,760 hours of sleep. As we sleep our body works to consolidate memories, repair our body, fight off infection, and so much. Most importantly we want to get into REM sleep. This is a stage of sleep where our eye movement goes into rapid back-and-forth movement. This stage is when we dream and as mentioned earlier consolidate memories and process emotions/events. 

Cell phones are pretty cool devices! My first cell phone was a flip phone (not a Razor, I was not that cool). All this phone was capable of doing was make phone calls and that was pretty amazing. The minute I got a phone I knew it represented freedom. I now had endless connection to my friends through texting and calling. Then as I entered college came the ability to access the internet, it became a great camera, GPS, and so on. Eventually, the cell phone became what it is now. It’s a small computer that we can put in our pockets. And yes, the saying my math teacher would say, “You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket” is now so untrue. Plus I also can search the internet and put in that math problem and get an answer. 

Have you ever sent an impulsive text or in an anxious moment did something that you would later learn was not the best idea? Why do we do this?!? Why do we sometimes act on anxious impulses? Well, I can’t wait to walk you through why the brain does what it does and how it thinks it’s helping. 

Mid last year I unexpectedly went into labor three months early. At the end of a four-day endeavor, I delivered a very small baby boy. Like most births this is very exciting however, my journey would start by leaving the hospital the following day without my child in tow. My husband and I would spend the next consecutive 52 days driving back-and-forth to the hospital, sometimes that round trip being a total of 3 hours in the car. 

During this time I frequently received comments like, "You are handling things so well"…

It’s the start of a new year! For some, it’s important to set New Year's resolutions or intentions. As this might be helpful for some it can often leave many feeling disappointed in themselves as once again they did not achieve their goals. There are many reasons why that person did not achieve their goals, however, today we are not going into how to set SMART goals. Today I would like to share with you another way to make meaning of a year. Many years ago, I ditched the resolution and intention tradition and chose to go with a more freeform technique. I call my way: The New Year Theme.