Clarity Counseling Center Blog
Ways to Manage Your Adolescent’s Screen Time
Summer break is on the horizon, and for parents and caregivers, this means adapting to more downtime for adolescents. In preparation, it’s a good idea to reflect on how this will affect the family, and to develop a plan to implement the necessary changes.
Three Ways to Increase Healthy Body Image this Summer (and All the Time)
It’s officially spring, and before we know it, summer will be here. For some, this is a time to look forward to: no school, trips out of town, long days on the beach or at the pool, barbecues with family and friends. But for others, these same things may cause fear due to the related…
The Storm of Adolescence
The years of adolescence are a time for children to establish independence from their parents, learn new concepts and skills, and claim an identity to help with transition into adulthood. This is a period of significant, and sometimes rapid, growth on many levels, which can be difficult to cope with for all parties involved. In 1904, the first psychologist to formally study adolescence framed it as a period of “storm and stress,” a view that still resonates with modern research on the now popular subject.
Demystifying Mindfulness
Originally a concept rooted in Buddhism, mindfulness has become a common term in today’s society and pop culture, generally touted as a way to reduce stress and foster personal growth. Simply put, mindfulness is the act of living fully in the present, whatever that looks and feels like in that particular moment. This process allows us to redirect our thoughts away from the past and the future—where feelings such as anxiety and depression live—and to focus on the here and now.
The Emotional Love Tank
Dr. Gary Chapman writes that the euphoric, in-love feeling lasts 18 to 24 months. Others have compared being in love to insanity. When we’re in it, we walk around with our head in the clouds, sometimes unaware even of what day it is. If we were able to remain permanently in this state, would we get anything done or be capable of keeping our jobs?
Social Media and the Unrealistic Pursuit of Perfection
Women today have images of perfection thrown at them any time they log onto one of their social media accounts. We’ve all seen it—that one gal whose hair is always perfectly coiffed and make-up expertly applied by at 6:00am.
Male Celebrities Changing the Game around Mental Health
You’ve heard the clichés before. Hell, you may even have used them yourself:
Healthy Boundaries: Why, When, and How to Say “No”
So many of us experience difficulty saying something as simple as “no.” We feel obligated, or even forced, to agree to everything requested of us, often without considering the toll this may take on our physical, emotional, and mental well-being.
Relational Balance and the Gray Area
In the beginning, everything is great. You meet, you fall head over heels, and you want to spend every moment with this incredible, new individual. Next thing you know, it’s four years later, you’re married, and you avoid checking your cell phone because their might be a text from your spouse asking, “How was your day?”
False Internal Beliefs
We have at least 50,000 thoughts a day. That’s 35 thoughts per minute—nearly one every other second!—and yet we act only on a select few. How do we decide which ones?