Blog — stress

Silver Lining Series of Workbooks, Journals, and Planners 0

Through my work as a counselor, I’ve seen firsthand what helps people build resilience, improve relationships, and create positive change in their lives. I bring that experience into my writing, creating resources that are both self-help (for individuals) and helper-help (for professionals like therapists, teachers, and group leaders).

Whether you're working through anxiety, exploring emotional intelligence, or simply looking for a better way to track your to-dos, these workbooks, journals, and planner provide structured support for real-life challenges.

Building Resilience: 20 Life Lesson Quotes with Graphics 0

Building resilience is key to navigating life’s challenges. It helps you adapt, recover, and grow stronger when faced with difficulties. Healthy, resilient coping mechanisms help you bounce back after adversity. This post explores how hard times both require and strengthen resilience, highlighting six key qualities that support it: courage, patience, optimism, gratitude, flexibility, and perseverance.

Discover 20 short, inspiring, motivational resilience quotes to help you turn obstacles into opportunities for personal growth.

Tackle Emotional Triggers: Learn What Sets You Off 0

Emotional triggers are feelings, events, situations, places, people, and things that propel overreactions, anxiety, anger, withdrawal, or other negative automatic responses. They are often associated with negative past experiences that get tapped into by current events. 

Recognizing and managing your triggers is vital for your own well-being, happy relationships, and career success. 

100 Overcoming Challenges and Adversity Quotes to Lift You Up 0

To help you deal with the stress without losing your mind or ruining your relationships, I put together a compilation of 100+ positive inspiring quotes for navigating challenges, adversity, and obstacles thrown in your path.

I've divided the quotes into topics to make them more digestible, added graphics to boost the inspiration, and include a section of tools and how-to steps for facing and overcoming life's challenges. 

Hopefully, one or more of these encouraging quotes from a wide range of people will spur you on and lift you up during hard times. 

What Is Mental Filtering? Exposing This Cognitive Distortion 0

Mental filtering is one of the most common cognitive distortions, impacting your outlook by causing a hyperfocus on the negative while ignoring the positive.

If you've ever allowed one small piece of constructive criticism to overshadow lots of positive feedback for a job well done, that’s an example of the mental filter cognitive distortion.

Over time, these negative thought patterns undermine your self-esteem, relationships, and career path, while boosting stress, anxiety, and even depression.

By learning to recognize mental filtering and using tools to address it, you can gradually reshape your mindset toward a more balanced and realistic view.

Let’s explore what mental filtering is, its effects, and practical ways to counteract it.

Four Fs of Stress and Trauma: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn Explained 0

Have you ever found yourself reacting to stress in ways that seem out of your control? Those automatic responses can get you in trouble! They can mess with your relationships, work life, and personal well-being.

You are probably aware of the fight-or-flight emergency stress response concept but may not know that 2-only list of instinctual reactions has been expanded as more research into stress has been performed.

As the list has grown, the F alliteration has remained. The expanded list includes Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. (Some have added others like Faint or Flop, and Friend. I'll explain why I don't typically include these when talking about the stress response.)

I added freeze to my stress response explanations to clients many years ago, but I resisted the idea of growing the list beyond three until I investigated fawn recently for a writing project and got excited about how well it explained some of what I have witnessed in client stories.  

Recognizing the Four Fs stress response can empower you to better manage stress and make healthier choices in challenging situations.

Let's explore the Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn stress response and its implications on your daily life.