How many times have you heard someone say “I have an addictive personality”? What does this mean? Is it even scientific? Many people today believe that addiction is disease, something that you either inherit and are just unlucky enough to have hidden somewhere deep in the wiring of your brain. Yet addiction is not some biological illness that you have to live with for the rest of your life. It is not a label you have to carry with you till you leave this world. 

Life can be very challenging. We are constantly facing stressful situations at work, home, school, in the car...you name it. In many cases, our reactions to these situations can make things worse. If we let our thoughts and emotions get the best of us, we can negatively impact both our mental and physical wellbeing. As I discuss in my book Think, Learn, Succeed, uncontrolled thoughts and emotions run rampant through the brain, creating neurochemical chaos that can make us anxious, affecting our ability to think clearly and process information. This is one of the major roadblocks to success, and can allow other toxic thinking habits and mental health issues to take root.  

If we do not learn to manage stress correctly it can negatively impact both our mental and physical wellbeing. Prolonged periods of stress, for example, can affect our ability to digest food and sleep, while laying the foundation for mental issues such as anxiety and depression. It is therefore vital that we recognize when our body is in toxic stress so we can quickly move out of the "danger zone". 

As a society, we desperately need to re-examine how we understand and describe “mental health”. We have to reconsider the way we help people who are going through difficult times. We have to stop placing blame squarely on the shoulders of the individual who couldn’t escape the flames of their life, and start looking for sustainable, long-term solutions that help people deal with the vagaries of life. 

We all have those resolutions or goals that, whether we like to admit it or not, have fallen by the wayside. Goal-setting and achieving can be hard, especially when there are so many demands on our time. So why do we fail to achieve our goals?

Failure, as much as we hate to admit it, is part of life. But failure, like Winston Churchill said, does not have to be fatal. In fact, the way we perceive our failures can actually help us succeed in life!

Isolation is no joke. Loneliness actually increases the risk for premature mortality among all ages, while one recent study indicates that social isolation and loneliness kill more people than obesity. Isolation is linked to a number of dysfunctional immune responses and increased blood pressure, which impact our overall wellbeing.

Scrolling through Instagram, it is easy to believe that happiness is what we are all searching for, a “happiness” that usually consists of us smiling in front of commodities like money, cars or even likes on a picture. Marketing adds for new products almost always mention “happiness” as an end goal, whether we are watching an advertisement for a new soda, new holiday or a new drug. Smiling, happy people stare at us from billboards as we drive to work or walk around our neighborhood—there is no escaping them. Life is all about happiness…right? WRONG.

Everyone seems to be talking about mental health these days, and what we should do about it. Many of us have personal experience, whether our own or that of a loved one, of mental distress—we are human, after all. No one said that life would always be smooth and happy. 

We live in a society that is constantly trying to confine people to a box, a neat category that can be described and put in place. Unfortunately, if you don’t define your own identity, the world will try define it for you. 

Today it has become commonplace to say that some people have chemical imbalances in their brain, most notably a disruption in the proper production of dopamine for “diseases” like ADHD and serotonin for “diseases” like depression. These people, it is argued, need drugs to “cure” these chemical imbalances, hence the terms “antipsychotics” or “antidepressants”.

We all know that eating disorders can be incredibly dangerous. They have an estimated death rate of up to twelve times higher than all other causes of death combined for females between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, while recent statistics from NEDA (the National Eating Disorders Association) reveal that ‘anorexia is the third most common chronic disease among young people, after asthma and type 1 diabetes.’