Self Talk

Dealing with Frustration: Lessons from a Highly Sensitive Person

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By now, you’ll know that I’m a highly sensitive person and a crier. I quickly burst into tears, especially when frustration gets the better of me. One of my core values is persistence, so I don’t know how to give up. I think I struggle with dealing with frustration because it feels like I’m failing. Like letting something else win. Not that I’m an overly competitive person. But if something stops me from achieving something I want to do – it’s now my enemy. And I need to defeat it.

The Two Kinds of Daily Self-Care

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I wish I could meet the person who first said that you need 30 minutes per day of self-care so that I could shake them and ask “why????”.
Finding a solid 30 minutes to dedicate to yourself is pretty difficult, especially in the lives of highly sensitive high achievers, am I right? Plus, not all self-care is made equal, and there are some things we think are self-care, but are actually not.
Let’s talk about it.

The Art of Setting Effective Boundaries

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A winter forest scene as the image for the Creating Calm App - an app designed for high achievers to help them navigate the chaos of day to day life

The typical approach to boundaries – you know, the one that’s all about telling people what you need and then washing your hands of the outcome – might not be serving us as well as we think.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t set boundaries – boundaries themselves are incredibly helpful and necessary if we want to create more calm in our life.

But how we set the boundary is almost as important as the boundary itself.

Feeling overwhelmed with stress? Here’s something that works

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A birch forest as a background to pictures on a website that focuses on stress management for high achievers

I never used to be the kind of person that would get anxious or overwhelmed. I used to be proud of that and think it was a skill especially when I was working as an ICU Registered Nurse and things were going sideways that day.
Turns out it was dissociation, aka a coping mechanism from trauma.
What can I say, hindsight’s a jerk sometimes.
Now, the truth is I get very anxious, not just my OCD anxiety disorder, but also just generalized anxiety. I think it’s kind of wild sometimes how creative my anxious brain can be, and how clear it can make the most awful, worst-case what-if scenarios feel so possible and so real.
It’s really easy for the anxious part of me to start drumming up feelings of overwhelm because I can convince myself that I’m not able to cope with whatever my anxious brain or perfectionism have built up. But anxiety is just a friend of mine now, welcome to stay here as long as they need.
Overwhelm, though, that’s a red-flag warning sign for me that I’m heading down the road to burnout.

Beyond Masculinity and Femininity: Redefining Balance Without Gendered Terms

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A little while ago, a client of mine shared that they were at odds with themselves because they didn’t feel ‘masculine enough’ and that they operated ‘too much in the feminine’ energy. But at the same time, they didn’t want to be caught up in the culture of toxic masculinity either. They noticed that I had a Yin Yang symbol in one of my tattoos and asked what I thought about the idea of finding a balance between the masculine and the feminine.

Because I believe in the power of words, I told them, “Instead of talking about masculine and feminine, let’s talk about the Inner Warrior and the Inner Poet.”

Slow Down You’re Doing Fine – letting go of resistance, Prozac, santosha, and be-ing

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Have you ever had a moment where it feels like a part of the authentic version of you just fell into place?
I just had another moment like that this past week, and it shifted a lot of things for me. All the way from sudoku and jigsaw puzzles on my phone, to how I view mental health medications for myself.
In a recent session with my therapist, she told me something which I already have heard a thousand times. She said “Remember you’re a human being not a human doing.”
I found it so frustrating because I felt like I was already doing that…
Kind of…
Mostly…
Maybe…
Okay, so not really.

Three Little Birds: The power of changing anxiety what if’s to even if’s

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I’m a few weeks into the Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) for my OCD, which I’ve talked about in the last few posts, so if you’re curious what that’s all about check it out here and here. Basically it’s a way to lean into the anxiety, rather than do something to try and calm it or make it go away.
Turns out this is especially helpful with OCD because my obsessive thoughts only get more and more intense (and creative) the more I try and make the anxiety go away.
It’s been a really interesting learning experience for me for how I manage all of my anxiety, not just the OCD related anxiety, and it really came to a whole new level of clarity for me last week.

Coping Strategies for OCD – Broken & Beautiful

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It’s been a few weeks of Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) therapy for my OCD – which is the gold standard treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder where you intentionally create opportunities for anxiety and fear to rise up, and then don’t do the compulsion that normally alleviates that fear.
The problem was, I was hitting a bit of a roadblock.
The good news is that all I had to do was change one word.