When we’re school aged, it’s easy to make friends. But as adults, women can sometimes feel on-guard around other women, especially in the workplace, and friendships can be harder to foster. Not only does this lack of friendship make going to work each day feel more challenging, but studies have found friendships, or a lack of friendships, has a big impact on our overall health and well-being.Here are some ways you can foster real friendships with other women at work.Make it a PriorityIt’s easy ...read more
5 Replacements for Your Smoking Habit
The decision to quit smoking is not an easy one – but it is one that will help you live longer. The toxic chemicals in cigarettes, including nicotine and carbon monoxide, are not only responsible for causing high blood pressure and heart disease but they’re also the number one cause for lung cancer, as well as cancer of the larynx, oral cavity, and esophagus. Not to mention, secondhand smoke puts your loved ones at risk for developing cancer and other diseases.“But everyone needs a vice. What ...read more
5 Daily Self-Care Exercises for Survivors of Abuse
Unfortunately, being a survivor of trauma or abuse is exceedingly common. According to the National Children’s Alliance, nearly 700,000 children are abused in the U.S. annually. And according to the Center for Disease Control’s 2017 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, nearly 1 in 4 adult women and approximately 1 in 7 adult men report having experienced severe physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime.While it is challenging to be a survivor of abuse, the ...read more
How Meditation Can Help Manage Symptoms of Trauma
Meditation offers practitioners powerful benefits, yet many people are confused as to what exactly those benefits are. In a nutshell, meditation focuses attention in a deliberate manner, taking you from a state of noisy mental chatter to calm and quiet inner peace. And isn’t that something most of us could use?While meditation has been practiced for thousands of years in the east and – more recently – west as a way to grow spiritually, modern medicine is now finally extolling the numerous health ...read more
5 Personal Techniques to Work Through Flashbacks
Flashbacks are our brain’s way of processing traumatic events that we’ve experienced. But what tends to happen is, our subconscious goes to our storage cabinet to access some important memories regarding the event, and everything sort of tumbles out of the cabinet all at once. This falling out or flashback experience can feel almost as traumatic as the initial event.Flashbacks usually happen without warning. Most result from a “triggering” that occurs by an external experience. Triggers are ...read more
5 Empowering Mantra for Women Dealing with Workplace Disenfranchisement
As spiritual exercises like meditation and yoga rise in popularity, the concept of mantras has become more familiar. A mantra is a phrase you use in meditation to help you focus and create an intent that will be a positive driving force in your life. As you repeat the mantra during meditation, either out loud or in quiet thought, you’re planting a seed in your mind that will grow as you continue to nurture it through consistent meditation practices. Mantras can be very powerful tools used to ...read more
4 Subtle Signs of Trauma: When You’re Dealing with More Than You Think
When you think about someone experiencing trauma, incidents such as a violent or sexual assault or a terrible car accident might come to mind. But there are other, subtler forms of trauma that can negatively affect our lives and hinder our relationships.Emotional trauma is often overlooked and minimized, and we may think we’ve “gotten over” some emotional pain that we’ve simply buried, and not dealt with. A break up, being passed over for a promotion at work or even a simple but negative ...read more
How to Practice Self-Care as a New Mother
While there are many surprises and challenges that await you in motherhood, one of the biggest shocks may be time management, or the feeling of being overwhelmed. No matter how happy and fulfilled you may be as a new mom, if you don’t take time out of your busy day to take care of yourself, you’re not giving your precious baby your best self. Ensuring that you practice self-care might seem like the lowest of your priorities, but being rested and cared for yourself is an essential part of being a ...read more
How to Address Your Partner’s Sexist Behavior or Comments
One of the serious issues women face in life is sexism; sadly, we’re not taught how to see it, react to it, or correct it. For heterosexual women, sexism is a problem they will likely face throughout their relationships. Being raised in a patriarchal society, women are taught that they are inferior to men through countless direct and indirect cultural and societal cues.Even if you were raised in a feminist household, you still grew up in a society where men are predominantly the ones in power; ...read more