When bad days start to feel like bad weeks, know that you are not alone. In fact, the CDC reports that 3 out of 4 young adults are already struggling with at least one mental health concern. This includes anxiety, depression, trauma, adjustment to stressors, and substance use.
We are so excited to announce a new January Initiative—30 Days of Self-CARE! We will be partnering with local businesses and CARE Clinicians to bring you unique and helpful content each day. We hope that this will help you start 2021 in the healthiest way possible and help you to become the best version of yourself.
As we look toward 2021, many of us may take time to reflect on resolutions and intentions to carry into the upcoming new year. For those who struggle with disordered eating and poor body image, this time of year may be especially challenging due to the constant rhetoric and messages around programs designed for weight loss. If you are in recovery from an eating disorder, diet culture’s strong presence during this time may activate parts of you to feel ambivalent around your recovery goals. This is normal and this does not mean you are failing for having those thoughts. You are not alone!
The holidays can be a tough time of year, especially for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, genderqueer, queer, intersexed, agender, asexual, and ally community who experience homophobia during holiday gatherings. We all need to feel physically and emotionally safe, to feel connected within relationship. If these elements are not present or lacking in family gatherings, individuals within the LGBTQIA+ community can feel especially vulnerable to rejection which can exacerbate underlying mental health symptoms such as depression and anxiety.
Feeling the pressure to fit in with what one’s friends or family are doing this holiday season can be stressful! After all, it seems easier to “give in” [and conform] than to “rock the boat” and go against others’ expectations.
What may have started out as tradition may begin to feel like an overwhelming obligation. It might begin to feel as though others have control of your schedule and choices. I “have” to visit this person, then I “have” to visit that person. I “have” to make this, then I “have” to make that. I have to buy…I have to go…I have to do… !!
The Oxford Dictionary defines the word grateful as “showing an appreciation of kindness.” Being grateful is an action whereas being thankful is a feeling. While the holidays have looked different this year, especially compared to past years, I reflect on thankfulness and choose to practice gratitude.
When you value kindness, you are also valuing the needs of others– demonstrating CARE and concern for another human being. A warm smile is a universal language. What is the nicest thing anyone ever did for you? Do you remember how you felt?
Adjusting to life after being diagnosed with T1D can be overwhelming as you are navigating through a new “normal”. Continue reading for some helpful tips to help you adjust to your life.
Failure is excruciating. But it’s not as excruciating as watching your child fail. It’s not just that parents are biologically programmed to care about them. We really want them to succeed, partly so they have a great life and partly because, frankly, their success reflects well on us.
But as parents increasingly navigate their kids’ lives so that they avoid failure, those kids lose an important life skill, and one one they will inevitably need: how to find the courage and motivation to get back up. So how do you help kids fail, or rather, how do you help kids deal with failure? Brené Brown, whose new book Rising Strong is about coming back from failure, has spent nearly her whole career studying shame and courage, and in a recent interview with TIME she gave this advice: first, don’t try to fix it.
“If my child, you know, tries out for a team, or you know really wants to get into a certain college or gets shunned at lunch,” she says, “am I willing to sit with her or sit with him and not fix it, but just be with her or him in the struggle? Am I willing to look over and say, ‘God, I know how crappy this feels right now?’ “
Brown wants parents to let kids feel the sting of failure and learn to overcome it. Even when parents can fix something, she sees more value in teaching kids to feel the emotions failure produces. “Teaching them how to get curious about it, teaching them how to name it, teaching them how to ask for what they need,” she says. “That’s the gift that parents give.”
Brown, who has two kids, also thinks it’s helpful to give kids a reality check, to retell their stories to them. “I’ve got a 16 year old daughter who sometimes can compare her life with Instagram,” she says. “And the stories she makes up: this is what everyone looks like, the fabulous stuff everyone is doing, the time with the entire posse of friends. A lot of times I’ll say, let’s reality check the story you’re making up right now.”
Brown then recounts her daughter’s story a slightly different way. “You’re at home studying chemistry, and you’re making out that everyone is out having a fabulous time. Where are your friends tonight? They’re studying for chemistry. Right. And did anyone ask you to do something tonight? Yes, they did. And why didn’t you go? Because you’re making a choice to study for chemistry.
Getting kids to cast themselves in their own narrative helps kids recall what they consider success and reminds them what their aims are. “We don’t want to be victims in the story. We don’t even want to be heroes in a story,” says Brown. “We want to be the author of the story. And you can’t do that unless you own the story and dig into it.”
http://time.com/4025350/brene-brown-on-teaching-kids-to-fail-well/
It is well known that telling a kid she is smart is wading into seriously dangerous territory.
Reams of research show that kids who are praised for being smart fixate on performance, shying away from taking risks and meeting potential failure. Kids who are praised for their efforts try harder and persist with tasks longer. These “effort” kids have a “growth mindset” marked by resilience and a thirst for mastery; the “smart” ones have a “fixed mindset” believing intelligence to be innate and not malleable.
But now, Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor of psychology who spent 40 years researching, introducing and explaining the growth mindset, is calling a big timeout.
It seems the growth mindset has run amok. Kids are being offered empty praise for just trying. Effort itself has become praise-worthy without the goal it was meant to unleash: learning. Parents tell her that they have a growth mindset, but then they react with anxiety or false affect to a child’s struggle or setback. “They need a learning reaction – ‘what did you do?’, ‘what can we do next?’” Dweck says.
Teachers say they have a “growth mindset” because not to have one would be silly. But then they fail to teach in such a way that kids can actually develop growth mindset muscles. “It was never just effort in the abstract,” Dweck tells Quartz. “Some educators are using it as a consolation play, saying things like ‘I tell all my kids to try hard’ or ‘you can do anything if you try’.”
“That’s nagging, not a growth mindset,” she says.
The key to instilling a growth mindset is teaching kids that their brains are like muscles that can be strengthened through hard work and persistence. So rather than saying “Not everybody is a good at math. Just do your best,” a teacher or parent should say “When you learn how to do a new math problem, it grows your brain.” Or instead of saying “Maybe math is not one of your strengths,” a better approach is adding “yet” to the end of the sentence: “Maybe math is not one of your strengths yet.”
The exciting part of Dweck’s mindset research is that it shows intelligence is malleable and anyone can change their mindset. She did: growing up, she was seated by IQ in her classroom (at the front) and spent most of her time trying to look smart.
“I was very invested in being smart and thought to be smart was more important than accomplishing anything in life,” she says. But her research made her realize she could take some risks and push herself to reach her potential, or she could spend all her time trying to look smart.
She and other researchers are discovering new things about mindsets. Adults with growth mindsets don’t just innately pass those on to their kids, or students, she says, something they had assumed they would. She’s also noticed that people may have a growth mindset, but a trigger that transports them to a fixed-mindset mode. For example, criticism may make a person defensive and shut down how he or she approaches learning. It turns out all of us have a bit of both mindsets, and harnessing the growth one takes work.
Researchers are also discovering just how early a fixed and growth mindset forms. Research Dweck is doing in collaboration with a longitudinal study at the University of Chicago looked at how mothers praised their babies at one, two, and three years old. They checked back with them five years later. “We found that process praise predicted the child’s mindset and desire for challenge five years later,” she says.
In a follow-up, the kids who had more early process praise—relative to person praise—sought more challenges and did better in school. “The more they had a growth mindset in 2nd grade the better they did in 4th grade and the relationship was significant,” Dweck wrote in an email. “It’s powerful.”
Dweck was alerted to things going awry when a colleague in Australia reported seeing the growth mindset being misunderstood and poorly implemented. “When she put a label on it, I saw it everywhere,” Dweck recalls.
But it didn’t deflate her (how could it, with a growth mindset?). It energized her:
I know how powerful it can be when implemented and understood correctly. Education can be very faddish but this is not a fad. It’s a basic scientific finding, I want it to be part of what we know and what we use.
https://qz.com/587811/stanford-professor-who-pioneered-praising-effort-sees-false-praise-everywhere/
