Did you ever find yourself questioning an arrangement between yourself and another person? Not an arrangement that was mutually agreed upon or even spoken about –- but a habit, or series of habits that detrimentally affect you but which you find yourself continuing to do nevertheless?

It could be between yourself and a partner, a parent, a co-worker — even a boss, an adult sibling or an annoying someone you run into every day on your way to work. Likely, it is doing something to temporarily boost yourself or the other person in the mix. Ultimately, however, it is not to anyone’s benefit.

Unspoken bargains, these so-called “arrangements,” are those things that rear their heads in times of challenge, chaos, crisis or just haste. They appear out of nowhere and can be maddening, upon first reflection, demanding us to ask ourselves, “why did I say or do that again to this person?”

One day, when two of my children were only 4 and 3 years old, they wanted to play “let’s pretend” with their dad and me. My older daughter, as older children often do, declared herself the director.

“You and Dad sit over there”, she commanded. “Now, my brother and I are going to be the father and mother you are the day care center.”

With that, the two of them brought us a couple of dolls, kissed them goodbye and went to the next room.

“What happens next?” I called.

“Oh, you play with the babies and then we go to work for awhile and come back and give you a check.”

“And what are you doing at work?” By now I’m curious about where this is going.

“We talk to people and do stuff and get tired.”

With that, they came back in the room, handed us “checks” made of some coupons I had lying around and took their babies off for bath time and stories.

It was hard for my husband and me not to laugh. They were so serious about it. Ahh. A kids’-eye view of adult life. We go do something mysterious at this thing called work, get tired, and then collect them and real life begins again. That was my first indication that maybe we needed to tell our kids a little bit more about the work that took us away from them all day.

I’m sitting down for my yearly physical with the blood pressure machine in view. From the displeased expression on the nurse’s face, I gather it wasn’t a perfect reading. Instead of jotting the numbers down in her notes, realizing that I’m probably just nervous (because I do have “white coat syndrome”), she sighs and expresses the urgency to take my blood pressure again and again, until she’s satisfied with the result.

Then, I walk into the lab next door for a blood test and the line I hear is: “Oh, your blood pressure was high, let me see if I can draw your blood now.”

Wait, what? Do they actually think that these comments will make me feel more relaxed?

When it comes to creativity, distractions “are a mixed blessing,” according to Christina Rosalie, a writer, mixed-media artist and author of A Field Guide to Now: Notes on Mindfulness and Life in Present Tense.

“Sometimes they lead to innovation. Sometimes they lead to hours of time dwindled away without purpose.”

In other words, distractions are not created equal. But more often than not the same distractions deplete us and steer us away from creating.

Whether creativity is your livelihood or an integral part of your self-care, here are 15 ways to deal with distractions.

People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often struggle with everyday tasks and getting things done in a timely manner. For instance, a task that would be otherwise easy to complete in an hour takes 3 days instead.

Do you often find yourself distracted until time is wasted? The challenges of ADHD and attention deficit disorder (ADD) are very real. But there is hope. When you understand how ADHD has been affecting all areas of your life, you can learn to minimize its impact and live successfully with ADD /ADHD.

Here are some steps to help you build confidence, clarify and prioritize your goals, minimize your ADHD challenges, and get you past being stuck to actually following through with your plans.

“You have to decide… Are you a Tigger or an Eeyore?”

That’s one of the questions Randy Pausch, famous deceased Carnegie Mellon professor, asked in his presentation “The Last Lecture.” It went viral, landing him on Oprah and a host of other afternoon and late-night shows.

I loved every other part of his lecture but that.

Because I think the world needs its share of Eeyores: solemn, stoic, realistic, pensive creatures. And I don’t think I’m saying that because I unapologetically claim to be an Eeyore.

I mean, imagine a world of hyperactive, happy Tiggers. How long can you stay with that image before you want to throw something at the striped orange guy?

When I was fresh out of college and deciding what to do with the rest of my life, I worked front-desk in a business center. We had interesting clients who rented offices: Social workers and lawyers, mediators and therapists, and quite a few credit counselors. Much to my dismay, we even rented an office to an exterminator. There is nothing quite like answering the phone and listening to someone screech about the rats that hide behind their stoves.

It was a healthy mix of educated and eccentric people and it was an interesting place to work. The three years I spent there gave me a curious perspective on office etiquette.

I shook a lot of hands during these years. Trust me when I tell you it becomes tiresome stating your name and offering your hand (dousing it in Lysol afterwards) many times a day.  The lawyers had strong handshakes (the criminal lawyers had a hard time letting go); the mediators less so.

Therapists seem to smile more or, on a bad day, grimace while photocopying or drinking the awful coffee I had made.

For many people, work is a pressure cooker. Even if your job is less demanding, there’s still an element of stress. Work is still work, after all. And it comes with high expectations and tough tasks, and requires good results.

As mindfulness teacher Ed Halliwell said, “We’re expected to meet deadlines, make quick and often complex decisions, and manage relationships with others effectively, all the while achieving results in the face of constraints, which aren’t always of our own making.”

Practicing mindfulness on the job offers a bounty of benefits, according to Halliwell. It soothes and calms our bodies and minds. It improves our ability to work and produce great work. Even when stress strikes, instead of getting overwhelmed, it helps us confront challenges head-on, he said.

How? Mindfulness trains us to stay in the present. “It trains us to become more aware of what’s going on in and around us, giving us the capacity to see things clearly and act from a wider perspective.”

Low salaries, lack of opportunity for advancement and heavy workloads have more than one-third of Americans reporting feeling chronic work stress.

And women are feeling it more acutely than ever.  After decades of making progress in the work force, many women are feeling less valued than men, according to a recent APA survey on Stress in the Workplace.  They’re feeling they don’t receive adequate monetary compensation for their work and feel that employers offer them fewer opportunities for internal career advancement than men.

Why are women feeling less appreciated than men, when it comes to compensation and why are they stressed by lack of opportunity?

Possibly because they are.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi’s quote — and others’ psychological research — suggest that we are designed to interact with each other. In fact, our interactions with others come second to our interaction with ourselves.

If interactions with others are so important, why do we struggle to initiate and maintain relationships?

A search on the Internet for articles on interaction/relationships reveals what appears to be innumerable research papers on verbal and nonverbal communication. However, many who highlight relationship-building skills ignore a crucial factor.

To rephrase Descartes (who famously said “I think, therefore I am”), “we think, therefore we interact” confirms that we first have some thought about the person we intend to interact with. If our cognitive processes set the tone for our interaction then highlighting errors in cognition is useful.

Sometimes traits that we think do not go together actually do. Perfectionism and procrastination are one of those unlikely duos.

Most people picture procrastinators as lazy folks who don’t care about doing things in a timely manner. If you’re a perfectionist, however, you know that’s not you. You care. You have high standards. You expect a lot, maybe too much, from yourself.

Then how come you have a tendency to put things off? It doesn’t make sense. But in a twisted kind of way, it does. Here’s why: The same attribute that is your strength — your desire to do things perfectly — also is your nemesis.

Being a highly sensitive person (HSP) can feel overwhelming.

Being an HSP in a big, boisterous city can feel utterly unbearable. That’s because HSPs have a hard time screening out stimuli. Specifically, the problem lies in artificial stimulation, according to Ted Zeff, Ph.D, a psychologist and author of three books on HSPs, including The Highly Sensitive Person’s Survival Guide and his newest book Raise an Emotionally Healthy Boy.

All sights, sounds and smells aren’t created equal. Compare a big city’s bright lights, big crowds, honking horns, pollution and bumper-to-bumper traffic with a smaller town’s hiking trails, chirping birds, ocean waves and scents of freshly cut grass.

It’s very hard to function when grating stimuli assault your senses, and you’re in a constant state of overwhelm. One of Zeff’s students told him that at times she felt like she was “walking around with no skin, like a sponge absorbing everything that comes her way.” Over time, this can affect your emotional and physical health, such as spiking your blood pressure, Zeff said.