No matter what you do for work, chances are it is a stressor in your life. Even if you enjoy your job, there might be tasks or colleagues you’d rather not deal with. Work is a necessity not just for income, but also purpose, goal setting, community, and future planning.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t stressful.

Below are a number of ways you can support your mental health as a worker.

Basic Maintenance Goes a Long Way

You might already know that routines, rituals, and structure can support your well-being, so focusing on identifying working hours (and rest or play hours), practicing good sleep hygiene, and implementing boundaries around your work phone or logging in can be incredibly helpful for supporting your mental health. It can also be helpful to create a transition ritual where you let your nervous system know that you are changing from work you to home you. Listen to a meditation app on your commute or change clothes as soon as you are home. These can signal to your body that it...

With the start of a new week, month, or year, it can be tempting to overhaul your life. This might look like starting a new diet, adhering to an intense exercise regime, doing a detox, or trying to white-knuckle your way to change.

How often have you tried this approach?

It isn’t a bad thing to want to change your habits, but how often does your motivation start out from a place of criticism or feeling not good enough? You can’t hate yourself towards change. Instead, coming from a place of compassion is a great way to soothe and support yourself!

Consider The Words You Use

When coming from a place of compassion, you don’t tear yourself down by picking apart your body or criticizing your abilities. This inner critic can be really mean! You can start by asking these two helpful questions when this inner voice gets loud. The next step is to start changing the words you use to talk about yourself. It doesn’t have to be fake or super positive, you can aim for neutral comments like “I am...

Social gatherings can be stressful at the best of times: they require your time, energy, money, and you have to figure out what to wear. Add in the expectation that someone will comment on your weight, what you’re eating, how you vote, or how you choose to live your life and the anxiety can build as soon as the event is on your calendar.

If you are already dreading a few get-togethers on your calendar, below are some helpful scripts you can use to shut down unwanted comments and criticism. Read through and choose which ones might be helpful to you. Feel free to bookmark this blog post or take a screen shot on your phone so you can come back to this anytime you need to feel empowered to redirect an uncomfortable conversation.

 Try being warm and polite:

• “It’s the holiday season, let’s focus on the positive. What are you excited about right now?”
• “Let’s keep things light today. Tell me something wonderful that’s going on with you lately?”

 Try being gentle but clear:

• “That is
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Managing your inner critic can be difficult. Its comments are cruel, judgmental, and criticize everything from your body to your intelligence to your dreams. That voice inside tears you down with comments taken from friends, family, society, and social media. Sometimes they are word-for-word and sometimes your inner critics twists them to be extra painful. We tend to internalize these negative ideas and our brain feeds them back to us as if they are true.

They aren’t.

There are a few ways to address your inner critic. I’ve talked before about how to push back against these inner comments (without falling into toxic positivity!) and today I want to give you another strategy to try out: listening to your inner critic.

Now, that doesn’t mean believing your inner critic. When thoughts like “You’re so dumb” or “No one likes you” come up, see if you can sit with them for a moment. These thoughts often jump to the surface when you’ve been triggered by a situation and your immediate action ...

Routines don’t have to be boring! One of the best ways to create certainty and predictability in your life is to have routines, structure, and rituals. These can be big or little things: taking the same route to work or buying the same shampoo so you’ll know how it will smell. It can be having Taco Tuesday’s or reading 30 minutes before you turn the light off for sleep.

Here are three key ways routines can support you:

Helps support your sleep. This is probably one you’ve heard of, but a good routine or ritual before bed can help you get a better night’s sleep because it keeps your body on the same wake-and-sleep ‘clock’. Try lowering the lights (even lighting a candle), putting your phone on silent, or watching your favourite comfort show.

Creates a sense of safety and reduces stress. The predictability of knowing what comes next is a great way to calm your nervous system. Consider the times you worry or are anxious about a situation, chances are you can’t predict how it will turn ...

There are many benefits to being able to bring a sense of grounding into your day-to-day life! You don’t have to be someone who has high levels of anxiety (although the strategies below can be helpful), grounding can also make you feel more present, grateful, and connected.

Emotional eaters use food as a way to escape their body, to avoid experiencing certain feelings, either as distraction or numbing. Learning how to ground yourself can help lessen the intensity of these emotions that lead you to use food to cope and even help you emotionally eat less frequently. Try one or all of the strategies below and see what works for you!

Deep breathing. This can be as simple as taking slower, deeper breaths at your own pace or finding a patterned technique that works for you. This is such a great strategy that you can use in a meeting at work, around the dinner table, or just before bed.

Be in nature. Take off your shoes and feel the earth beneath your feet, turn your face to the warm rays ...

Our modern society keeps us hustling: from work to parenting to errands to all kinds of activities. We’re taught that there is value in keeping busy, that being productive should be celebrated. We also are constantly bombarded online with content that highlights people having it all together, going on their next vacation, workout out at 5:00 a.m., or getting a promotion. You feel you have to keep doing to keep up!

And being busy can be a coping mechanism too.

There are a number of reasons you might keep adding to your to do list. First, keeping your mind constantly focused on what you have to do next stops you from having any space to think. It becomes an avoidance tactic that keeps you from feeling or thinking about what you don’t want to. Ever notice when the chaos of the day ends—driving home from work or after the kids are in bed—you end up reaching for food? That’s because constantly being busy is an avoidance tactic just like emotional eating. You can rely on food when your day...

Often here at the Centre for Emotional Eating we talk about how your patterns and habits with food are influenced not by the cravings themselves, but the root cause behind what makes you act.

For many, the root cause can be found in childhood or adolescent experiences. This is because as our brains and bodies grow, we are learning and are influenced by examples displayed around us—to finish what’s on our plate, diet talk, stuffing down emotions, just to name a few. We learn from parents, caregivers, teachers, coaches, siblings, and friendship circles! But not all of these lessons will serve you as you grow into your own adulthood, some might be downright painful or destructive.

It is incredibly common to reach a point in your adult life and know things need to change but not know how. This is where therapy can be a very helpful tool in helping you sort through your thoughts and feelings, gain confidence to make your own decisions, and help you feel more resilient.

And one effective ...

There are many reasons people emotionally eat: to distract themselves, to feel numb, to have something to control. But one of the common reasons I hear from clients is that food brings them a sense of happiness that they feel doesn’t compare to any other experience currently in their life. This makes emotional eating incredibly difficult to stop relying on when you don’t have others ways of accessing this feel-good emotion. Does any of this sound familiar?

• A snack feels like an only acceptable break from grinding away at work or your to do list. Your brain makes the connection that not working = food.
• You only feel your body relax once the kids are in bed and you can eat alone in the evening. The connection your brain makes here is alone time = food time.
• You only allow yourself to have foods like cake or popcorn at events like parties or at the movie theatre. Here your brain connects special events (happy times) and specific foods.Our brains love to work on auto-pilot because it
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You might have heard of, or experienced, seasonal affective disorder (also known as SAD) during the colder months of the year. Common symptoms of SAD are irritability, changes to your sleep patterns or the way you eat, and worsening of anxiety or depression. If you’re reading that and thinking “that sounds familiar” but it is the Summer and you dismiss your symptoms, we’re here to tell you that SAD can also happen during the sunnier, warmer months.

Our brains and bodies like routine: it makes things feel in control and predictable. So, any time there are changes introduced—like hotter weather, later sunsets, or change to homelife—it is understandable that our system would react in a certain way, no matter if it is Winter or Summer. There are a number of reasons why Summer SAD can happen, but here are two big ones:

Day-to-Day Disruptions

You might be planning vacations (hello travel stress!) which can add to your mental load or are having to navigate having kids home on school break....