Blog

I felt inadequate and ill-prepared to speak to licensed mental health professionals about ACEs. But when I was asked to attend the 40th Annual Training Institute on Behavioral Health & Addictive Disorders in Clearwater, Florida to represent ACEs Connection, I was honored and eager. My background is in health planning, not mental or behavioral health. I review health data and look for gaps and inequities. My time is spent looking for and addressing the health needs of a community. So,...

CRI Course 1: Trauma-Informed Training Webcast! Date: February 26, 2019 Time: 8am - 3pm Pacific Time A dynamic six-hour WEBCAST course, Course 1 introduces CRI’s capacity-building framework for building resilience, KISS. Knowledge, Insight, Strategies and Structure describes our community’s learning and movement from theory to practice and how to implement evidence-based strategies into action. The training includes three groups of topics: the NEAR sciences , a cluster of emerging scientific...

While some marathon runners raise money for their favorite causes, Shemaiah Weekes asked his friends and followers to pledge random acts of kindness. When he finally crossed the finish line after 26.2 miles, his community had committed to perform more than 100 kind acts. “I’m hoping this will spread a wave of kind acts which goes far beyond those who make direct pledges,” says Weekes. He came up with the idea after taking the GGSC’s free online course, The Science of Happiness , which...

I’ll bet that you’ve experienced butterflies in your stomach or an unmistakable, strong gut feeling before. So, you’ve pretty much always known that what goes on in your head affects your stomach. But did you know that what goes on in your belly affects your brain too? It works both ways. Science has proven that what happens in your gut dramatically impacts your brain operation and mental health. Your gut bacteria modify your overall health in many ways. They help build your immune system,...

Valentine’s Day prompts many of us to send messages of love to the special people in our lives. But I’d like to propose a new tradition. Why not use this day to start being kinder to ourselves? Being nice to yourself, particularly during a personal setback or a stressful experience, is known among psychologists as self-compassion. It’s a simple concept — treat yourself as kindly as you would treat a friend who needs support — but it’s one that most people find exceedingly difficult to adopt.

Mindfulness meditation has long been touted as a way to reduce stress and pain. More recently, it also has gained traction as a tool to improve our relationships, helping us to be more kind and less biased and angry when we regularly practice it. Yet when we talk about mindful meditation, often we are thinking about a combination of practices that have been taught together for millennia. These might include breath awareness—focusing on your breath and letting thoughts and feelings pass by...

What Is Self-Care Anyway? I spend a lot of time talking about “self-care,” particularly when I am advising my clients, colleagues, and loved ones to practice it. I tell people to take care of themselves or give specific instruction, to “eat,” “sleep,” or “get outside.” The more I preach the gospel of “self-care,” the more I feel inclined to explore the term itself and its history. Sometimes, what we, or our clients are already doing by “showing up”, is in itself all the self-care that can be...

Mindfulness is a powerful painkiller that can dramatically enhance the quality of life in chronic pain sufferers, suggests new research. The findings add weight to previous studies which discovered that mindfulness can reduce pain severity by around 50 percent. This new meta-analysis, published in the peer-reviewed journal Evidence-Based Mental Health , analyzed the evidence from 21 previous studies involving 2,000 chronic pain sufferers. It was designed to assess whether mindfulness was as...

Exactly six years ago this week, I wrote a post, “ The Neurobiology of Grace Under Pressure, ” which offered some practical advice on different ways to increase parasympathetic activation within the autonomic nervous system (which counterbalances fight-or-flight responses) by engaging the vagus nerve . One section of that 2013 post recommended practicing Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM) . Typically, during LKM you systematically direct warm-hearted thoughts of love and kindness to four...

The feeling of having a healthy supply of self-worth is something I can only imagine might have been more readily available, natural and automatic if I was able to see that in myself as a child. As an adult survivor of childhood abuse, self-worth was not supplied in healthy doses while growing up.

How do you handle good things that happen to you? Do you relish in the success or let your mind go to something that brings you down? You might be inadvertently sabotaging your own happiness by allowing negative thoughts to creep in when something good comes your way. For instance, consider something good in your life – a small accomplishment on your work project, the desire for the chocolate ice cream cone you are ordering, the joy of your team winning a game, or the connection you feel...

It takes moxie to flip an unhealthy lifestyle to a healthy one — particularly for folks over 60. Most baby boomers approach retirement age unwilling to follow basic healthy lifestyle goals established by the American Heart Association, said Dr. Dana King, professor and chairman of the department of family medicine at West Virginia University, referencing his university’s 2017 study comparing the healthy lifestyle rates of retired late-middle-aged adults with rates among those still working.