selfcare
The importance of self-care is paramount; enhance your health and wellbeing, manage your stress, and maintain control under pressure.
Bare Branches
As I was driving home from town earlier this month, I suddenly noticed that the trees had no leaves on them. It struck me in surprise, because the last time I had noticed them, the trees were just beginning to turn colors. Time had slipped right past me, and I had flowed right along for the ride, never once paying attention to where I was going - not even lifting my head one time from what I was doing to look at the beauty of my surroundings and my favorite season. Looking back, I realize that the social media/internet break I had planned had turned into a walking fugue state.
By Mother Combs2 months ago in Psyche
The Power of Resilience: Developing Mental Toughness in the Time of Adversity
Adversity is something that we all encounter in life at some point or another. Whether it's loss personally, financial struggles, career disappointment, or even mental challenges, life has a way of challenging our resolve. While we can't always control the circumstances that cause us pain or distress, something we can control is our response to them. That's where resilience comes in. Resilience is the ability to rebound from adversity and transform positively amid adversity. Yet it's not about rebounding but being stronger, wiser, and better capable in the process.
By The Chaos Cabinet2 months ago in Psyche
Why Identity Is Not Self-Constructed: Mental Health and the Social Feedback Loop
Whitman Drake Abstract Contemporary mental health discourse frequently treats identity as an internally authored construct—something individuals can revise through cognition, self-reflection, or therapeutic insight. This assumption underlies popular clinical and cultural narratives that emphasize self-esteem, positive self-talk, and personal meaning-making as primary mechanisms of psychological stability. While these approaches offer partial benefits, they obscure a deeper and empirically supported reality: identity is not self-constructed in isolation. Rather, it emerges through sustained social feedback, recognition, and institutional response. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, social psychology, and mental health research, this article argues that mental health outcomes are inseparable from relational processes that validate or destabilize identity over time. Understanding identity as socially constituted clarifies why individual-level interventions often fail, why distress clusters around structural conditions, and why durable mental health requires collective as well as personal change.
By Whitman Drake2 months ago in Psyche
Alcohol Gives Me Hangexity
“Never lie, steal, cheat, or drink. But if you must lie, lie in the arms of the one you love. If you must steal, steal away from bad company. If you must cheat, cheat death. And if you must drink, drink in the moments that take your breath away.” — Alex Hitch, Hitch
By Chantal Christie Weiss2 months ago in Psyche
When Winter Teaches Us How to Feel Again. AI-Generated.
December doesn’t arrive loudly. It seeps in. Earlier sunsets after a day of rain. Streets that look familiar but feel emptied of color. The air sharp enough to make you aware of your breath. Winter, more than any other season, doesn’t ask for productivity or performance. It asks for honesty.
By Ahmet Kıvanç Demirkıran2 months ago in Psyche
The Psychology of Emotional Contagion. AI-Generated.
Walk into a room where tension hangs in the air, and you may feel uneasy before anyone says a word. Enter a space filled with laughter, and your mood often lifts almost instantly. This phenomenon is not coincidence or imagination; it is emotional contagion at work. Emotional contagion is a subcategory of social psychology that explores how emotions transfer from one person to another, often unconsciously. It shapes group dynamics, relationships, workplaces, and even entire societies, influencing how we feel and behave in ways we rarely notice.
By Kyle Butler2 months ago in Psyche
Watch Out Wednesdays (12/17/25)
During the holiday season, here are some things that we all need to watch out for on this Watch Out Wednesday! Wow! 1. Beware of the flu season. This is the time that we are normally around family more than usual, but this flu season is more than aggressive this season. The new flu strain this year is called subclade K that affects adults over twice as much more than children. This strain is shown to be more resistant than the ones from last winter. Social distance comes to mind, especially with who is currently the US Health and Human Services Secretary.
By Adrian Holman2 months ago in Psyche
The Gift of Detachment
For most of my life, I believed that holding on tightly was a sign of love, commitment, and responsibility. I held on to plans, to expectations, to people, and to outcomes. I told myself that if I cared enough, worried enough, and tried hard enough, things would turn out the way I hoped.
By Fazal Hadi2 months ago in Psyche
The Simple Science of Self-Love
For a long time, self-love felt like a mystery I couldn’t solve. I saw people talk about it online—loving yourself, choosing yourself, accepting yourself—and I wondered what they were doing that I wasn’t. I assumed self-love was a feeling you woke up with one day, like confidence or happiness.
By Fazal Hadi2 months ago in Psyche
