Staying mindful during anxiety-provoking times is incredibly difficult. Using mindfulness skills can help.

As I sit here and write this article about silver linings, please don’t mistake me for being glib or for not caring. My husband is working directly with COVID patients in the ICU at this moment. My father is in a nursing facility where several residents have died of COVID.

Part of dealing with rising fear is to focus on resiliency. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we like to say that the opposite of depression isn’t happiness, it’s psychological flexibility. Resiliency is the capacity to be psychologically and emotionally flexible in the face of stress.

Use your values to help generate and stick to goals in the new year.

Wise Mind is a term from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, an evidence-based psychotherapy developed my Marsha Linehan, to help people regulate their emotions.

Using evidence-based psychotherapies such as CBT and ACT helped me cope with my first earthquake.