
Blog
What Are the Stages of Grief?
According to Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, everyone experiences five stages of grief. Understanding these stages may shine some light on emotions you may be experiencing after a loss.
Stop Trying To Keep Up With The Joneses
It is natural to compare ourselves to others and to get caught in a mental comparison loop, and yet this seldom is beneficial. You may have heard the expression, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
What is the Link Between OCD and Addiction?
There are several possible reasons for the link between OCD and addiction, such as a desire to decrease symptoms or the fact that both share similar risk factors.
How Does Mental Health Affect Physical Health
Mental health is comprised of emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It forms part of your overall mood, how you think, feel, and behave. Research demonstrates a strong relationship between mental and physical health, both of which are important components of our overall health.
Are New Year’s Resolutions Helpful?
Hello, 2024. It’s that time of the year again. The start of the new year is a natural time to think about your current behaviors, what you may want to do differently, and your goals for the upcoming year. It is a common practice to create New Year’s resolutions, yet are they actually helpful?
Decrease Reactivity: Pause and Tune Into Internal Experience
Emotional reactivity refers to the frequency and intensity of emotional arousal. It includes the threshold and ease with which someone becomes emotionally aroused and the intensity of emotional experiences. For example, someone who becomes irritable very quickly and easily and experiences high irritability may be emotionally reactive.
How to Communicate Effectively
The holiday season is often filled with social gatherings with family, friends, and colleagues. Interpersonal interactions are not always smooth and conflict-free this time of year, particularly with the stress of the holidays. One way to improve socializing is to practice effective communication skills.
How to Practice Self-Care During the Holidays
Self-care is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the holiday season. It tends to be a busy and stressful time of year that may include many social gatherings, travel, and perhaps tighter finances. That is why it is important to find ways to engage in self-care this time of year and refill your cup.
Thoughts Are Just Thoughts
Learning to create mental distance from unhelpful thoughts is a useful skill to practice and cultivate. The technical term for this skill is cognitive defusion, a core clinical process of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
Coping With Long COVID
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), most people fully recover from COVID-19 within days or weeks of being infected. Yet, some people have symptoms that last for weeks, months, or even years, and in some cases, a person may initially recover and then have symptoms reappear.
Intuitive Eating
We are approaching the holiday season which is a time of year that often includes a lot of food and eating. Developing a helpful relationship with food involves practicing balance and flexibility in eating and intuitive eating can be a part of this practice…
Are You Preoccupied With Pain?
Pain can easily occupy most of our thoughts and attention. When pain is highly uncomfortable, it can be challenging to focus on anything else. This can lead to a vicious cycle as the more you ruminate on or catastrophize pain (imagining the worst possible outcome), the worse it tends to feel.
The Health Benefits of Having a Pet
Ask any animal lover, and they will likely tell you that having a pet benefits their health and well-being. Nonetheless, the benefits of pets are more than just anecdotal. Pets positively impact health including decreasing cortisol, lowering blood pressure, reducing loneliness, and improving mood.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Insomnia
Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) is a short, structured, evidence-based approach to treating sleep difficulty and insomnia. CBT-I focuses on the connection between our, thoughts, behaviors, and sleep.
Increasing Psychological Flexibility Through Mindfulness
We all get cognitively, emotionally, or behaviorally inflexible and stuck. We fixate on the same thoughts over and over again, feel trapped and overwhelmed by certain emotions, or constantly repeat the same behaviors.
Couples Therapy: Strengthening Relationships
Couples therapy focuses on the relationship itself as the primary client, addressing patterns of interaction between partners to strengthen their bond.
Adolescent Therapy
Adolescent therapy at CBT Denver addresses the needs of adolescents through CBT, DBT and social skills training. Parents of adolescents can learn effective ways of providing support and striking a balance between offering support while respecting your teen’s sense of independence.
How to Build Body Acceptance
It is natural to dislike things about our bodies and focus on these perceived inadequacies along with our limitations and all we think we cannot do. Sometimes our thoughts may be somewhat accurate. For example, chronic pain, or an injury, may limit how far you can walk or run. Yet, self-judgmental thoughts are rarely helpful or flexible.
Helping Your Socially Anxious Child with Back to School
Back to school can bring up anxiety for kids. For children and teens with social anxiety, back to school can be particularly challenging. Social anxiety disorder in kids is characterized by fear of social situations with peers in which they may be judged negatively and in which their peers may notice their anxiety leading to rejection, embarrassment or other negative outcomes.
End of Summer Blues
For many of us, summer is an enjoyable time of year that we look forward to and relish. Warm and sunny weather, longer days, more time spent outside, and perhaps feeling more carefree. So, it is understandable that we can feel down when summer ends, what is sometimes called the end-of-summer blues.