How Meditation can Reduce your Anxiety

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Anxiety feeds on our concerns for what we don’t know and can’t control. In life, there are many things we don’t know, uncertainties that haunt or beguile us. This sense of worry about the future or things beyond our immediate control is what vexes so many that contend with anxiety. Things like giving a speech,

Am I a Failure For Relapsing?

It may feel like it. After all, the objective was not to relapse—right?   Actually, no, not exactly: the objective was—and still is—to recover. Relapse is just a bump in the road, so long as you don’t let it stop you from continuing your journey. If relapse meant failure, then the world wouldn’t be full

Staying Positive In the Midst of Chaos

Stress happens, quickly and unpredictably.   We can’t always prepare ourselves for overwhelming feelings of stress, of feeling trapped and pressured. Many times, we react by becoming highly emotional, to the point of overreaction. We all lose our temper sometimes—most of us, at least.   Addicts can become stressed just like anyone else, but their

Alcoholism Pulls Fathers from the Home

Fathers play an important role in a family’s life. Children especially benefit when a father is present to spend time encouraging and demonstrating things in a unique way only fathers can. However, the difficult reality for millions of people is that addiction to alcohol fractures and damages families, often separating fathers from the home emotionally

Moving Forward Through Overcoming Your Fears

Early in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the character Lucio tries to convince Isabella, a shy woman, to move forward with a plan by arguing that “[o]ur doubts are traitors/and make us lose the good we oft might win/by fearing to attempt.” We can take this as proof that, even in Shakespeare’s time, people were reluctant

Are You An Alcoholic?

If your drinking has progressed to a point where you’re asking yourself if you’re an alcoholic, you can easily convince yourself that the answer is “no”. You might have had one or two nights of binge drinking and woke up the next day with little memory of the previous evening, but in your mind those

Three Steps to Relapse

After recovering from a serious drug addiction, the last thing you want to do is consider going through that ordeal again. Once you’re done, you want to be done with that forever, right? Unfortunately, the nature of addiction is complex and frustrating and you will have to fight off temptations and relapse triggers for some

Keep Calm and Kick the Habit

The popular Internet and T-Shirt meme has a catchy and shareable nature to it; Keep Calm and…  The phrase is usually followed up with some activity but the central idea of this viral idea is that only when you take a breath and calm your agitated nerves can you truly enjoy what you’re doing, whatever

Anxiety and Addiction

Addiction is well understood by clinical psychologists to be a brain condition resulting from impaired cerebral function. Anxiety is understood to be, at least in part, a combination of genetic factors, environmental stress, and personal idiosyncrasies. Or in other words, it is a cocktail combo of the influence from parental genes, cues in your surrounding

Is Social Media the 13th Step?

Human beings, like many other animals, exhibit a tendency to emulate each other’s behavior. The more individuals behave in a particular way, the more powerful the tendency becomes. To a degree, we become like those we spend the most time with. This is called “herd mentality”. It is a phrase that describes how we are