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According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 264 million people suffer from depression worldwide. Depression is one of the most common mental illnesses in the United States. Depression can look very different depending on the person, with over 50 symptoms associated with depression. You may not even realize depression could be affecting you, so it’s important to be aware of your thoughts and how they influence your behavior. By challenging and redirecting any negative thoughts you have, you can ease the symptoms of depression and find a piece of the solution to overcoming your depression.

Turning off the voice inside our heads that tells us we need our next quick fix is made much more complicated by the world around us continually reinforcing that instant gratification is entirely normal. Everything is available to us at a push of a button, from the information we want at a second’s notice online to the food we can get delivered to us from almost any restaurant. Living in a world that promotes instant gratification makes it harder to exercise impulse control. However, by self-imposing delayed gratification into your lifestyle, you may become more successful in long-term recovery.

Springtime signifies a season of rebirth and new beginnings, popularly used as a time for cleaning our homes and reorganizing our belongings. Realizing that the environment we create might reflect our internal state of mind can help us understand that if our rooms need tidying, our minds probably do too. Two simple but powerful ways of helping “clean” our minds to lower stress, improve focus, and support good mental health are through meditation and visualization.

The addiction world is full of helpful resources and information, compelling stories of individual recovery journeys, and countless recovery centers dedicated to the success of helping those struggling to find lasting sobriety. Among this beautiful world of helpers and healers trying to support and encourage others in their path to sobriety, myths and misconceptions persist and prevent some from getting the treatment help they need. Probing the truth behind these claims helps to bring greater understanding to the reality of addiction issues. Dispelling common myths about addiction can stop the cycle of hurtful misinformation that brings unnecessary pain to family, friends, and those suffering from addiction.

March 2020 was the month that marked a complete 180 turn in every American’s lives (along with everyone around the globe). Now one year later, for better or for worse, we have all learned a thing or two about how to better care for ourselves in totally new ways. Some of the most important lessons we learned were how to better care for our mental health through self-care routines. We realized that contrary to what we believed self-care to be, it turns out to be some of the least glamorous things we may have to do in our day.

Addiction affects every facet of a person’s life, but those suffering from the disease may not realize the extent of the impact of their drug or alcohol use. Addiction can develop beneath the surface over a long period before a person realizes that they have developed a genuinely unhealthy practice. At that point, addiction may be extremely difficult to overcome with willpower alone. Reevaluating one’s relationship with drugs and alcohol frequently can help an individual identify problematic behaviors early in addiction’s development. However, it is also possible that a person is continually rationalizing or normalizing their behavior to avoid confronting the problem. Normalizing dangerous behaviors can not just lead someone away from getting the help they may need to overcome an addiction; it can lead to romanticizing the meaning of drugs or alcohol or otherwise avoid the adverse effects of addiction in one’s life.

Do you ever feel like you have to explain yourself or justify why you did something? Understanding what JADE means and the times you may be JADE-ing yourself or others can change how you interact with life for the better. If you aren’t familiar with the term, it originates from Al-Anon and stands for Justify, Argue, Defend and Explain. It becomes particularly problematic when used in communication with abusers, toxic relationships, or with ourselves.

Everywhere you turn, stress is all around, and you don’t have to look any further than the ensuing global pandemic to see how stressful everyday life is. Being mindful of stress is important because it wreaks havoc on our minds and bodies, and since it isn’t going anywhere, we have to learn how to properly manage it, so it won’t have negative impacts on our health.

Once you’ve made the conscious decision to quit using drugs or alcohol, you may decide to begin abstaining right then and there and without outside help. This method of quitting drugs and/or alcohol is commonly referred to as “quitting cold turkey” and is commonly done without the supervision of medical professionals. Before you decide to quit cold turkey, know that it may carry health risks depending on the types of drugs you use, your level of addiction, and the presence of any co-occurring mental health conditions.

Depression has a way of rewiring how a person operates, from their eating and sleeping habits to their activity level and how they communicate with others. Sometimes people struggling with their mental health may be discreet in hiding their depression and conceal their innermost thoughts or feelings, so knowing if a loved one is struggling with depression may be difficult. By looking for certain patterns in their language, you may be able to detect they are struggling. In recent years, there have been breakthroughs in the study of language and depression with researchers developing new computerized text analysis methods to determine the linguistic patterns unique to people struggling with depression.

This is a sample post.

After fully diving in and understanding the first three steps in a 12-Step Program, a person in recovery may begin working the fourth and very critical step, “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Step 4 is one of the key foundational steps in everyone’s recovery journey as this is the step where they make a personal inventory to account for what actions and behaviors of theirs lead them to addiction. This step not just encourages but requires honesty and accountability of a recovering addict to examine their past, so they may finally break the cycle of addiction in their life.