Learn healthy coping skills to deal with the stressors of life.
Trauma is experienced when you face or witness a potentially life-threatening experience. A traumatic experience overwhelms the coping system of your mind. While most of us can deal with everyday stressors, a traumatic experience puts us in a state of permanent alert. It is an overactive and lingering stress response. Trauma that is experienced in …
A trigger is anything that generates a cognitive, emotional, or behavioral response in us. It’s a stimulus in the environment to which we react mostly automatically. Here, the environment includes not only the external environment (people, places, and things) but also things that happen in the mind and body, i.e., the internal environment (sensations, feelings, …
Just as we feel physical pain when there’s something wrong with our bodies, we feel emotional pain when there’s something wrong with the non-physical parts of our lives. Pain is a feedback signal telling you that you must pay attention to and solve a problem. Emotional problems, real or perceived, cause emotional pain. Bigger emotional …
Overstimulation, or sensory overload, is when the sensory information you receive from one or more of your senses exceeds the information processing capacity of your brain. Our brains have a limited capacity to process sensory information. Processing sensory information consumes mental energy and bandwidth. The brain does what it can to conserve energy. It’s designed …
The following traits characterize a narcissistic personality: Not everyone with these traits has a full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Most people have a mix of narcissistic and empathic traits. In some people, their narcissism overshadows their empathy. They’re the ones likely to hurt others and have NPD. Narcissistic abuse Narcissists are like children who think …
The human mind is a forgetting machine. We’ve forgotten most of the things that we’ve ever come across. The mind is always trying to forget stuff because it has to make space for new items. Memory storage takes up resources, so memory needs to be constantly cleaned up and updated.1 Research shows that the conscious …
Dissociation is a psychological phenomenon where a person feels disconnected from reality- or from themselves. Dissociation occurs on a spectrum, ranging from mild to severe. Spacing out and daydreaming are common examples of mild dissociation. You may have noticed that they’re often triggered by mild discomforts such as boredom and information overwhelm. The mind going …