We can all look for ways to think positively when feeling depressed or down. Sudden bouts of the blues can strike anyone at any time. Often these feelings can stem from a sudden occurrence, be hormonal or because of an underlying health condition. Whatever is causing your mood change or the feelings of depression you may be suffering from, we all know they can bit quite debilitating and can have an effect on all areas of our lives.

More than ever people feel as if they are failing in their lives.

We all live in what seems like an endless cycle of perfect images on social media, people with perfect lives, perfect bodies, relationships, homes and careers, for many it seems hard to reconcile their own lives with what they are exposed to and they feel like they have failed for not having this perceived perfect world.

Of course, it’s all smoke and mirrors, nobody has a perfect life, and those images that we see on social media aren’t real. Behind the filters, the staged sets and poses life for everyone have flaws and imperfections.

People have equal amounts of success and failure, so why do some people only ever look at the failures in their lives? What is it that makes some people feel that everything they do is worthless whilst others always just look at their successes?

As a coach, one of the main areas I work in with clients is thinking BIG! They often want to know how to train themselves to think big and get the results they want fast.

You live in your head all of the time and so you need to know how to talk to yourself in your head in a way that is going to be beneficial to you.

That internal constant chatter can either raise you up or bring you down depending on what you say to yourself.

Self-talk is that inner chatter that is influenced by your subconscious mind that highlights your thoughts, feelings, questions and beliefs. The way that you speak to yourself will determine how you feel about yourself and how you treat yourself. It will also determine how other people view you and treat you.

People who are confident in themselves and their abilities will have a good inner dialogue but people who look negatively towards themselves, and have little or no self-confidence will talk negatively to themselves.

Shame is a very coming emotion for humans but can cause great suffering and pain. We often feel it as an unpleasant, disturbing sensation in the pit of our stomach. It is often related to a sense of failure or the thought that we have done something immoral or embarrassing.

It is a complex emotion that will feel different to each person but is an emotion that everyone will have experienced in their lives. Many people can carry shame around with them for many years. Situations from when they were children can still cause them to feel shame many years later.

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We will all react to shame in our own way, and we can all experience it for different reasons. The one thing that many people will have in common is their desire to know how to change their thinking about shame.

I bet you have had many conversations along the lines of “ know let’s it here I prefer it,” or “no if you got his way it will save so much more time than the way you are suggesting.” These simple sentences may seem innocuous enough but if you hear them enough, they may highlight a more insidious problem, that you have a controlling person in your life.

Once you realise this is the case, you may start asking how you live with controlling people. It could be that the p controlling person is someone that you can’t just drop from your life, so you are going to have to learn some empowering ways to deal with them.

There are many people who can be controlling, a partner, friends, work colleagues, your boss, parents, family members and neighbours.

Seasonal adjustment disorder or seasonal affective disorder is a type of depression that comes and goes during the seasons. Most people who suffer from SAD do so during the winter months, though there are people who can feel fine during the winter months and who suffer during the summertime. SAD can often be known as winter depression because it is more prevalent during the winter months.

You walk into a room and forget why. You can’t remember the name of someone you have just been introduced to and feel mortified or, you are fed up with constantly looking for things you have just had and can’t remember where you put them.

These everyday occurrences seem innocuous enough but you can’t get rid of the nagging feeling that something is wrong with you and you are starting to lose your memory at a young age

What you think about becomes your reality. This is a certain fact that we can’t escape. You need to be thinking about how to make your thoughts become the reality that you want to be living and release thoughts that don’t serve you.

There can be no doubt about it the last few years have been an incredibly stressful time for many and with so much looming on the horizon, you may be wondering about how to increase your resilience to stress and anxiety for 2023.

Globally, there has been a pandemic, war, talks of recession, rising energy, fuel and food bills and a general sense of uncertainty, so it is no wonder that many people are starting to feel stress and have anxiety levels rising as we start to approach 2023.

Most of us want to take care of our physical and mental health and one of the simplest ways of doing so is to recharge our batteries as much as possible. This means taking some well-earned rest and time for ourselves, stepping away from life’s pressures and doing something that we love and having a mental and physical rest.

Recharging your batteries is an essential way to eliminate stress and overwhelm from your life, and to remove the build-up of pressure that modern living brings.

Charles Duhigg in his book “The Power of Habit“ coined the phrase keystone habit. These small habits lead to routines that can impact unintentionally other areas of our lives. They are according to Duhigg, “they are that central stone in an arch which locks the whole structure together.”

Are you tired of you, of who you are and what you are doing? Do you wake up dissatisfied even though you may have the “good life” that we are all told is what we should be aiming for? Do you have a nagging feeling that you want something else, that there is something missing in your life but you don’t know what it is?

We generally tend to spend a lot of our lives working on automatic thoughts. You don’t think, “I will get up in the morning and go to work”, instead you just do. The same with getting dressed, showering, having your breakfast or locking your front door. These are all actions that the brain just does automatically without you needing to think about them. The brain works from habits, habits learned over a long period of time. In the main these automatic thoughts help us in our day to day activities they save us time and aid our progress throughout the day.

CBT or cognitive behavioural therapy is a non-medical treatment that focuses on how what you think and believe has a direct effect on how you feel and behave. It teaches you tools and techniques for coping with the problems that you are experiencing. CBT as a treatment involves talking with someone to identify any negative thoughts and patterns that you may have and then investigates ways that you can change your thinking and feeling enabling you to make changes in a positive way behaviorally in the future. CBT treatment combines cognitive - things that you think and behavior - things that you do. It is a common treatment for a range of mental problems such as anxiety and depression.