It’s mid-January, and if you’re feeling the weight of these dark days, you’re not alone. About 40% of Americans report their mood declining during winter, and today—the second Friday in January—is actually nicknamed “Quitter’s Day” because an estimated 80% of resolutions have already fizzled out by now.
When we’re looking to improve our lives, our instinct is always to add more, new habits, new routines, new rules. We rarely consider that the solution might be taking things away. This is known as Subtraction Neglect.
I’m not here to add more to your already full plate. Instead of piling on more obligations, let’s think about doing less.
Say No Sometimes
We know social engagement triggers endorphins, your body’s natural mood lifters. Shared laughter and conversation reduce stress and enhance wellbeing. But this doesn’t mean cramming your calendar with obligations.
Winter is actually the perfect season to connect more deeply with fewer people. Choose the small dinner over the crowded event. The intimate gathering over the packed social calendar. It’s okay to say “no thank you” sometimes.
Seek Sunlight
Even just 10 minutes of sunlight can benefit your mood. Winter’s shorter days disrupt our circadian rhythms, affecting sleep, mood, and energy levels. Sunlight is harder to find right now, which makes seeking it out more important than ever.
That said—if you’re really struggling with the extra darkness, maybe the answer is leaning into it: an earlier bedtime routine and some added restorative sleep might be exactly what you need.
Move A Little
A brand-new study published this month found that exercise can ease depression about as effectively as psychological therapy. But if launching a giant new gym routine feels overwhelming, think walks, gentle yoga, or stretching instead. Moderate-intensity exercise significantly improves mental health by altering brain chemistry and improving mood.
Winter Isn’t a Problem to Solve, It’s an Invitation to Live Differently
You may have heard those viral phrases like “goblin mode” or “bed rotting”—wanting to curl up on the couch all weekend and not face the cold. In small, healthy doses, this can actually be helpful. It’s the antidote to perfection.
Try gopher mode instead—go under and then pop back up. If you’re cozying up:
Opt for a book over doom scrolling
“Hibernate” with a friend or loved one
Set a time limit, or resolve to go outside right after
Your Mid-January Fresh Start
If your resolution hasn’t been going well, or the wheels have fallen off altogether—it’s okay. The concept of resolutions needs a makeover. We don’t need to “fix” ourselves.
This time of year has too much punishment and demands perfection. Stop drinking! Stop staying up late! Stop, stop, stop!It’s time to stop “should”-ing on ourselves.
Here’s the good news: It’s not too late. Research shows that any moment when we’re “turning a page” (think birthdays, the first of a month, starting a new job, Mondays, even tomorrow) creates added motivation and a sense of new beginning.
Embrace a second fresh start date: February 1, or even this coming Monday. Progress is never linear. Setbacks are expected. Tomorrow can be your fresh start.
We’ve been taught to treat happiness like a vital sign—something to constantly check, measure, and optimize. Open Instagram and you’ll find a thousand gurus telling you to “choose happiness,” “manifest joy,” or “prioritize your bliss.”
But here’s what nobody mentions: the relentless pursuit of personal happiness might be precisely what’s making us miserable. Put simply, the more directly we pursue happiness, the more it eludes us.
When Wanting Happiness Backfires
Psychologist Iris Mauss at UC Berkeley has spent years documenting what she calls the paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Her research found that people who placed the highest value on being happy actually experienced lower wellbeing and more depressive symptoms. The more intensely they pursued happiness, the lonelier they felt.
Think about that. The people most devoted to feeling good were the ones feeling the worst.
The mechanism is surprisingly simple. When happiness becomes your goal, every moment becomes an evaluation. Am I happy now? What about now?You’re constantly measuring the gap between how you feel and how you think you should feel. That gap is where disappointment lives.
It’s like trying to fall asleep by commanding yourself to fall asleep. The trying is the problem.
Think Again
As a psychiatrist trained in positive psychology, I’ve learned that the most powerful interventions don’t involve chasing feelings at all. More often than not, they involve changing what you’re paying attention to.
So here’s a radically different question: “What am I contributing?”
Not “What can I contribute to make myself happy?” because that’s still the same trap. Simply: “What am I contributing right now? Today? This week?”
This shift from hedonic to eudaimonic wellbeing isn’t just philosophical. It has measurable biological effects. Research shows that people with higher eudaimonic well-being—meaning purpose, growth, and meaningful connection—have lower inflammatory markers, better cardiovascular health, and improved neuroendocrine regulation. Their bodies, not just their minds, are healthier.
Why This Question Works
Contribution succeeds where happiness-chasing fails for three reasons:
First, it redirects your attention outward.
When you’re focused on what you can offer, you stop the rumination cycle. Instead of monitoring your internal weather, you’re noticing what others need, what problems you might solve, what small difference you could make.
This attentional shift alone interrupts the self-focused thinking that feeds anxiety and low mood.
Second, it’s inherently actionable.
“Am I happy?” leads to introspection.
“What am I contributing?” is action oriented.
Can you help a colleague think through a difficult decision? Can you bring genuine curiosity to a conversation? Can you make someone’s day slightly easier? These are specific actions, not emotional states to manufacture.
Third, it creates the conditions for connection.
Barbara Fredrickson’s research on “positivity resonance“ shows that moments of genuine connection characterized by shared positive emotion, mutual care, and behavioral synchrony are among the strongest predictors of wellbeing.
But you can’t engineer these moments by seeking happiness. They arise naturally when you’re contributing to something or someone else.
The Neuroscience of Giving
Here’s what makes this approach so compelling: your brain is already wired for it. Functional MRI studies show that giving activates the same reward circuits in your brain as receiving—areas like the striatum and ventral tegmental area that are linked to motivation and pleasure. This is the neural basis of what researchers call “helper’s high” and “warm glow.”
When you stop chasing happiness and start asking what you can contribute, happiness becomes free to show up on its own terms.
The Contribution Reset
This isn’t about grand gestures or self-sacrifice. It’s about reorienting your internal operating system away from mood-checking and toward meaning
Here are three daily practices to make contribution your default setting:
1. Start with direction.
Instead of assessing how you feel upon waking, ask:
“What’s one thing I can contribute today?”
Maybe it’s bringing energy to a difficult conversation, offering thoughtful feedback on a project, or simply making your home a warmer place for the people in it. It’s often in the little things…
2. Redirect in real time.
When you catch yourself in the “Why am I not happier?” loop, try this pivot:
“What needs doing here?”
Often there’s a specific action available, a call to make, a problem to solve, a person to check on. The shift from self-monitoring to task-focus is immediate relief.
3. Close with evidence.
At the end of the day, don’t review your feelings. Review where you added value.
Ask yourself:
“Where did I contribute today?”
Did you listen well? Help someone clarify their thinking? Create something useful? Approach your work with care? This builds what I call “contribution confidence”—a far more stable foundation than transient mood states.
The key to happiness isn’t trying to feel happy. Instead, examine what you’re contributing and whether it aligns with what matters to you.
Are you contributing in ways that match your strengths?
Are you connected to people who value what you offer?
Are you working toward something you consider worthwhile?
Sometimes the answer is that you need to contribute differently, perhaps in different contexts, to different people, in ways that better fit who you are. That’s actionable information.
The Reframe
Happiness isn’t a performance review you’re failing. It’s an emergent property of a life well-lived, one where you’re engaged, connected, and contributing something that feels meaningful.
So the next time you catch yourself asking “Am I happy?”—try this instead:
Pause, redirect, and ask “What am I contributing?”
Then do whatever it is with your full attention.
The happiness you’ve been chasing might just arrive while you’re busy making a difference.
This weekend brought devastating news from two corners of the world. At Brown University, two students were killed and nine injured during finals week. At Sydney’s Bondi Beach, sixteen people—including a ten-year-old girl—were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration. Communities are shattered. Grief is overwhelming.
In the wake of such unimaginable tragedies, a familiar response has already begun: calls for expanded mental health services, more therapists, additional crisis counseling.
These resources matter. But here’s what the research tells us that might surprise you: in moments of crisis, the most powerful medicine often isn’t found in a therapist’s office. It’s found in the people already around you.
The Default Response Isn’t Always the Right Response
We’ve developed a cultural reflex: when something terrible happens, we immediately reach for professional intervention. It makes sense. Trauma requires expertise, doesn’t it? But decades of research on how people actually recover from traumatic events tells a more nuanced story.
After trauma exposure, social support from friends emerges as one of the most significant predictors of recovery. A 2024 longitudinal study published in Behavioral Sciences tracking 151 individuals in the year following trauma found that increases in support from friends consistently accelerated recovery from PTSD symptoms across the entire recovery period. The relationship was bidirectional: feeling supported helped people heal, and as people healed, they were better able to maintain those connections.
What’s striking is that this wasn’t about professional support. It was about having someone check in, listen without judgment, and simply be present.
What Happens When We Turn to Each Other
Think about what actually happens in the hours and days after a crisis. At Brown, students didn’t wait for counseling appointments. They found each other. One student who fled the engineering building ended up sheltering with a classmate he’d never met before—someone who trusted him enough to bring him into her home simply because they shared the bond of being Brown students.
In Sydney, as the horror of Bondi Beach unfolded, lines formed at blood donation centers stretching around blocks. A GoFundMe for the bystander who wrestled a gun from one of the attackers raised nearly a million dollars in hours. The Australian Red Cross reported the biggest community response since the 2009 bushfires.
That immediate human response—the instinct to reach out, to shelter, to protect, to give—isn’t just kindness. It’s the foundation of healing.
Research on community resilience consistently shows that natural support systems activate faster and reach more people than formal interventions. After disasters, neighbors checking on neighbors, friends gathering to process shock together, communities organizing mutual aid—these informal networks become the first responders for psychological wellbeing.
The Therapeutic Power of Being Known
There’s something profoundly healing about being known by the people in your life. When your roommate notices you’ve been quieter than usual, when your friend texts because they had a feeling you might need to talk, when your parent calls just to hear your voice—these moments of recognition carry immense power.
Professional therapy has its place, particularly for those developing clinical symptoms or those whose trauma history makes this event especially triggering. But for many people navigating shock, grief, and fear, what they need most isn’t a stranger with credentials. They need their people.
The evidence bears this out. Studies examining social support after traumatic events found that emotional support—being listened to, feeling cared for—significantly reduces psychological distress. This kind of support doesn’t require training. It requires presence, consistency, and genuine care.
When Professional Help Makes Sense
This isn’t an argument against therapy. Some people will need and benefit enormously from professional support, particularly those who:
Develop persistent symptoms that interfere with daily functioning
Have a history of trauma that this event reactivates
Find their existing support system insufficient or complicated
Experience severe anxiety, depression, or PTSD symptoms
Professional intervention becomes essential when symptoms persist, when someone feels unsafe, or when informal support isn’t enough. But making therapy the default response for everyone affected by a traumatic event can inadvertently suggest that normal grief and shock reactions are pathological—that you can’t handle this without expert help.
What Actually Helps
If you or someone you care about is navigating the aftermath of trauma, here’s what the research suggests matters most right now:
Show up consistently.
Don’t wait for them to ask for help. Text. Call. Knock on their door. One of the most powerful aspects of social support is its reliability. Regular check-ins signal “you’re not alone” more effectively than occasional grand gestures.
Listen more than you fix.
Resist the urge to problem-solve or minimize. “That sounds really scary” is more helpful than “at least you’re safe now.” People need their experience validated, not rationalized away.
Be present with uncertainty.
Nobody knows what to say right now because there isn’t a right thing to say. “I don’t know what to say, but I’m here” is honest and real.
Create normal moments.
Go for a walk together. Get coffee. Watch something mindless on TV. Recovery isn’t just about processing trauma—it’s also about remembering that normal life still exists.
Don’t pathologize normal responses.
Trouble sleeping, replaying events, feeling on edge, crying unexpectedly—these are normal responses to abnormal events. They don’t automatically require professional intervention. They require patience, support, and time.
The Community Holds the Medicine
There’s a reason humans have survived crises throughout history long before we had trauma therapists. We’ve always had each other. Communities heal together not despite the absence of professional intervention, but often because of their capacity for mutual care.
The Brown community faces a long and painful road ahead. There’s no timeline for this kind of grief, no simple path forward. But healing, when it comes, will likely emerge from the ordinary moments of connection—friends gathering in dining halls not because they have answers but because they need to be together, roommates sitting in silence because sometimes presence is all we can offer, study groups that eventually resume not because life returns to normal but because doing something familiar can feel like solid ground when nothing else does.
It will happen through the accumulated small gestures: the text that says “thinking of you,” the offer to walk someone back from the library after dark, the friend who shows up with food because eating feels impossible but must be done anyway.
Professional support can enhance this process for those who need it. But it cannot replace it. Your friends, your family, your community—they’re not just the people who hold you until you can get to a therapist. They are the therapy.
In our rush to professionalize care, we’ve sometimes forgotten what generations before us knew: we heal in connection. The most important question to ask right now isn’t “should I see a therapist?” It’s “who can I reach out to?” and “who might need me to reach out to them?”
The answer to both questions is probably simpler than you think. It’s the people who already know you, who already care about you, who are feeling this same shock and searching for the same reassurance that life goes on.
Oxford Dictionary just named “rage bait” its Word of the Year for 2025, which feels about right for a time when outrage has become the internet’s favorite currency.
The good news is the fact that we even have a term for it means we’re catching on. Those posts designed to make you furious and the takes so bad they seem almost engineered to provoke? It turns out they are engineered. The business model is simple: anger drives clicks, clicks drive revenue, and suddenly everyone’s competing to be the most infuriating voice in your feed.
Recognizing you’re being manipulated is only half the battle. The other half is deciding what you’re going to do about it. Put differently, pattern recognition is one thing. Changing that pattern is another.
The reality is we have more agency than we think. The real question isn’t just how to avoid rage bait. If you’re going to scroll, it’s what you choose to click on instead.
Awe Bait: The Antidote to Smallness
Rage bait makes everything feel urgent and personal. Awe bait does the opposite; it puts things in perspective.
Awe is what we experience when we encounter something vast that transcends our current understanding. It might be images from the James Webb telescope, time-lapse videos of natural phenomena, or stories of kindness. Research shows that experiencing awe reduces inflammation, increases generosity, and makes us feel more connected to others.
What makes awe particularly powerful is that it temporarily quiets the default mode network—the part of our brain responsible for self-focused thinking and rumination. When you’re watching storm clouds gather over the Grand Canyon or learning about the scale of the universe, you’re not thinking about that infuriating tweet or the person who cut you off in traffic.
Seek out content that reminds you the world is bigger, stranger, and more magnificent than your newsfeed suggests. Subscribe to channels featuring deep-sea exploration, astrophysics, or documentaries about ancient civilizations. Let yourself be regularly reminded of your place in something larger.
Beauty Bait: Rose Tint Your Attention
While rage bait hijacks our threat detection system, beauty bait engages an entirely different neural pathway—one that actually makes us feel better. When we encounter something genuinely beautiful, whether it’s an unexpected architectural detail, a perfectly composed photograph, or an elegant mathematical proof, our brains release dopamine without the cortisol spike that comes with outrage.
Beauty bait isn’t about escapism. It’s about refocusing our attention on what enriches rather than depletes us. Follow accounts that showcase design, nature photography, or art history. Seek out Instagram feeds of museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from botanical gardens, and from designers or architects. These aren’t guilty pleasures; they’re deliberate choices to feed your mind something nourishing.
The key is intention. You’re not passively consuming; you’re actively curating an environment that elevates rather than agitates.
Delight Bait: The Power of the Unexpected
Delight bait catches you off guard in the best possible way. It’s the video of the octopus changing colors in real time, the golden retriever cozying up to a newborn, the perfectly timed comedic moment, the child’s genuine reaction to seeing snow for the first time, the cleverly engineered solution to an everyday problem.
Unlike rage bait, which confirms our worst suspicions about the world, delight bait surprises us with evidence that life can be funny, clever, and unexpectedly wonderful. It activates our reward system without exploitation.
The magic of delight is that it’s incompatible with cynicism. You can’t simultaneously feel delighted and jaded. Delight breaks through our defensive posturing and reminds us that not everything has to be a battle.
Look for content creators who celebrate human ingenuity, capture moments of spontaneous joy, or showcase the absurd and whimsical. The account that documents interesting doors around the world. The one that shares satisfying engineering solutions. The feed dedicated to dogs experiencing things for the first time, or to ponies galloping toward bedtime.
If you consistently click on rage bait, you’ll only see more of it. But the reverse is also true. Engage with beauty, awe, and delight, and your feed will shift accordingly.
This isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending difficult things don’t exist. It’s about recognizing that where we direct our attention shapes not just our mood but our entire orientation toward life. Rage bait trains us to see threats everywhere. Beauty, awe, and delight train us to notice what’s worth noticing.
Start small. Unfollow one account that consistently makes you angry. Follow one that consistently makes you think “wow” or “huh” or “that’s amazing.” Notice how you feel after ten minutes of scrolling. Adjust accordingly.
You have more control than you think. The bait is everywhere, but you get to choose which hook to bite.
Or Don’t Bite at All
Of course, there’s another even better option: put the screen away entirely. Close the app. Look up. Notice the actual world in front of you, the one that doesn’t come with an engagement algorithm attached.
Beauty, awe, and delight exist beyond your feed. They’re in the light coming through your window, the conversation with someone you love, the book you’ve been meaning to read, the walk you keep postponing. These experiences don’t need to be curated or optimized. They just need your presence.
Sometimes the best response to all the bait, rage or otherwise, is to simply stop fishing.
Every November, like clockwork, my inbox fills with articles about “surviving” the holidays. Social media feeds explode with memes about toxic family dinners and gift-giving anxiety. Wellness influencers launch special “holiday stress management” programs. The message is clear. Brace yourself: the holidays are coming, and they’re going to be terrible.
But what if our obsession with holiday stress is actually creating more of it?
The Stress About Stress
Here’s the counterintuitive truth: by constantly anticipating, discussing, and preparing for holiday stress, we’re essentially training ourselves to experience it. We’ve created a cultural script that tells us the holidays should be overwhelming, and then we dutifully perform our part.
Psychologists call this “anticipatory anxiety” — when worrying about a future event becomes more distressing than the event itself. Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience shows that uncertainty about a possible future threat disrupts our ability to cope effectively, and that anticipating a stressful event can trigger the same stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline) as actually experiencing it. Oftentimes, anticipatory stress can be even more intense than the actual event.
We’ve turned the holidays into the stress Olympics, competing to see who has it worse. “You think your mother-in-law is difficult? Wait until you hear about mine.” “Three parties this week? I have five.”
This isn’t resilience. It’s catastrophizing with a seasonal theme.
What the Research Actually Says
The interesting thing is that research on holiday stress doesn’t quite support our collective panic. Yes, some people experience increased stress during the holidays. But many others report feeling happier, more connected, and more energized during this time.
According to the American Psychological Association’s study on holiday stress, 78% of people report feeling happiness often during the holidays, and 75% report feeling love. The research found that “the holidays are, first and foremost, a joyful time.” While 44% of women and 31% of men reported increased stress, this means the majority did not experience elevated stress.
When we expect stress, we filter our experiences through that lens. The traffic is evidence of stress. The crowded store is proof of stress. Your aunt’s political comment becomes yet another data point confirming your hypothesis that the holidays are terrible.
By constantly validating holiday stress, we’ve inadvertently removed something crucial: permission to enjoy ourselves.
Think about it. If someone says, “I actually love the holidays,” what’s the typical response? Either skeptical eyebrow raises or accusations of being in denial. We’ve made holiday enjoyment seem naive or fake.
This creates a bizarre situation where people feel guilty for not being stressed enough. “Everyone else is overwhelmed, so what’s wrong with me that I’m actually having fun?”
The truth is that meaning, connection, and even a bit of productive hustle aren’t inherently harmful. The problem isn’t the holidays themselves; it’s the narrative we’ve constructed around them.
The Paradox of Preparation
The wellness industry has convinced us that we need extensive preparation to handle the holidays. Special meditation practices. Boundary-setting workshops. Complicated schedules to manage our social obligations.
But here’s the paradox: all this preparation might be adding to our mental load rather than reducing it. When you treat the holidays like you’re preparing for a natural disaster, you create a sense of impending doom.
Consider this thought experiment: What if you approached the holidays the same way you approached any other busy week? Not with dread and extensive defensive measures, but with normal, everyday coping mechanisms and a reasonable amount of flexibility?
In our achievement-oriented culture, busyness and stress have become markers of importance. “I’m so stressed about the holidays” is a socially acceptable way of saying “I’m important, needed, and living a full life.”
But this creates a trap. We’re invested in maintaining our stress narrative because it validates our significance. Admitting the holidays aren’t that stressful feels like admitting you don’t matter as much.
The result? We unconsciously amplify minor inconveniences into major stressors to maintain our place in the social hierarchy of importance.
Reclaiming Reality
None of this means the holidays are perfect or that real challenges don’t exist. Family dynamics can be complicated. Financial pressures are real. Loss and grief are particularly acute during times meant for celebration.
But there’s a massive difference between acknowledging genuine difficulties and participating in collective catastrophizing.
What if, instead of preparing for battle, we simply showed up? What if we stopped treating normal life challenges—making decisions about gifts, managing our time, navigating relationships—as though they require special crisis management skills?
The Radical Act of Not Catastrophizing
Here’s what I’m proposing. For just one holiday season, try opting out of the stress narrative.
This doesn’t mean being in denial or forcing toxic positivity. It means:
Refusing to participate in competitive stress conversations
Noticing when you’re anticipating stress that hasn’t materialized
Distinguishing between actual problems and expected problems
Allowing yourself to enjoy things without self-conscious commentary
Treating holiday challenges as normal life challenges, not catastrophes
The most counterintuitive thing about holiday stress might be this: we have more control over our experience than we’ve been led to believe. Not total control because life doesn’t work that way. But more than we’re currently exercising.
What if the holidays aren’t the problem? What if the problem is our modern addiction to stress narratives, and the holidays are simply when this tendency reaches fever pitch?
Perhaps the gift we most need this season isn’t another stress-management technique. Perhaps it’s permission to stop making everything such a big deal.
Because here’s the thing: when we stop expecting disaster, when we stop performing stress, when we stop competing for who has it worst—something surprising might happen.
We might actually have a pretty decent time.
And wouldn’t that be the most counterintuitive outcome of all?
One cannot read a book or watch a movie these days without encountering a revelation of past trauma. In the New Yorker, Parul Sehgal calls this the “trauma plot” — narratives that center around a character’s traumatic past experiences that conveniently explain all present-day behavior and personality. The story keeps circling back to that wound as the key to understanding who the character is, often through a revelation or flashback structure where we gradually learn about “what really happened.”
Consider Yellowstone, where the Dutton family’s dysfunction all traces back to the mother’s death and John’s harsh parenting, explaining each child’s particular brokenness. In Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith’s “dark and twisty” personality stems from her mother’s Alzheimer’s and abandonment issues. Nearly every character has a defining trauma; Derek’s father’s murder, Cristina’s plane crash PTSD. The message is simple: the past not only impacts you, it defines you. You are who you were and always will be.
When the past becomes the plot
This way of thinking has spilled into therapy. I increasingly meet people who are convinced that any past suffering has not only shaped who they are but has become a central and immutable part of their identity. A young woman recently told me that the reason she has commitment issues is because she moved a lot as a child. Another explained that her father’s infidelity is why she cannot trust anyone. A third insists that her low self-esteem is rooted in her mother’s criticism.
What troubles me about this line of thinking is the assumption of permanence. “This is who I am,” they tell me.
But here’s what the research actually shows: the majority of people who go through difficult times are resilient, experiencing little if any lasting psychological changes due to their experience. When it comes to attachment issues, there is very little evidence that early experiences determine adult outcomes. Let me say that again: there is very little evidence that early experiences determine adult outcomes.
While your early interactions influence how you relate to others as an adult, the connection is surprisingly weak. Researchers have found that many people who had supportive parents still struggle with insecure relationships, and many people with difficult childhoods end up feeling secure in their adult relationships. Put simply, foundations are not fate.
When challenges become opportunities
Instead of dwelling on past difficulties and allowing them to become a central part of your identity, research from Stanford University reveals a more effective path forward. In a randomized controlled trial conducted two years after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers guided participants through a one-hour intervention designed to shift their mindset about their lockdown experience.
The intervention included watching short videos highlighting how people often grow as a result of living through difficult or watershed events. Common areas of growth included developing a greater appreciation for life, strengthening relationships, deepening spirituality, and pursuing new opportunities.
After viewing the videos, participants reflected in writing on their current mindsets about the long-term impact of the pandemic and potential areas of growth they could pursue in their own lives. The results were striking: those who received the intervention showed lower levels of depression three months later compared to the control group. Blood tests also revealed lower levels of C-reactive protein, an inflammatory marker linked to chronic stress and disease.
Moving forward with purpose and perspective
If you’re having trouble moving forward after a difficult time, here are some questions to consider:
How have your relationships transformed as a result of this event?
In what ways have you noticed that you’ve grown stronger or more resilient?
How has your sense of what matters changed?
What changes would you like to make to better prioritize what matters most to you?
Are there any habits or routines you’d like to break out of?
The takeaway here isn’t to “think positive.” Rather, it’s to restore nuance, to counteract catastrophizing, and to challenge the belief that you are permanently broken and vulnerable.
The question isn’t what happened to you; it’s what you’ll do next.
