Take the toughest challenges you have to tackle at work, at home or with extended family and friends:

– Bosses who seem clueless to your job requirements; colleagues who can’t relate to you (or vice versa); the stress of deadlines and dissatisfaction of being in a job you are not even sure you belong in.

- Family members who throw plans into disarray, disregard you and have you questioning your commitment (as well as your sanity). Perhaps adult siblings who ask for money or come to you for advice, only for you to soon find yourself involved in maddening family triangles, or aunts and uncles who pull you into long-entrenched but silly feuds.

- Then of course there are friends who you would like to shake to knock some sense or self-reflection into.

Get the picture?

How do you cope with the trials and tribulations of being human and having to live and work among others? Laugh it off? (That’s a good element, actually.)

While I believe mindfulness meditation has been the keystone to my recovery, I still think of it as an adjunct therapy. I couldn’t manage mental illness as well as I do now if I did not meditate. But I acknowledge that the medication my doctor prescribes and the therapy visits I have with him are crucial as well. Only through the consistent application of all three therapies am I well.

Mindfulness meditation is currently all the rage, and it works. But I am wary of its proponents who claim it can treat (or even cure) mental illness by itself.

Meditation is a powerful tool when used to decrease stress and increase well-being. But if we are to maintain that mental illnesses are biochemical malfunctions of the brain and nervous system, then we must allow room in treatment for medicine. Therapy also has a long history of positive impact on the lives of those challenged by psychiatric disease. Meditation, when added to more traditional and well-tested methods of treatment, can help a patient successfully manage a challenging life. I, and so many others like me, am proof of that.

Psychologists are increasingly integrating alternative and complementary treatments into their work with clients, according to a recent article in Monitor on Psychology.

So what is alternative treatment? You may already have some experience with the most popular, according to the Monitor on Psychology. Meditation, biofeedback, hypnosis and progressive muscle relaxation are all popular complementary or alternative psychological treatments. 

Although you may be familiar with the most popular, there are dozens of alternative and complementary treatments, which typically fall into four categories:  mind-body medicine, biologically-based practices, manipulative and body-based practices and energy medicine.

Don’t-Know Mind, or Beginners Mind, is a Buddhist principle. It helps remind us that clinging to certainty, although natural, can cause us suffering. In parenting, it can interfere with our children’s innate ability to learn from experience.

There aren’t many jobs we sign up for in life where the stakes are as high as they are in parenting. We are suddenly required to be on call 24/7 without prior training, schooling, or mentoring. No matter how many books we have read, or how many children we have spent time with, we enter this job mostly ignorant of what it entails. Living outside of parenting and observing it is unfathomably different than living inside of it.

In our culture we like to “know” what we are doing. We read books, we do research, we seek control over our lives in myriad ways.

Good parenting, however, requires “don’t-know mind.” It is a letting go of preconceived ideas and a letting go of the notion that we have control over how things are.

I have been practicing mindfulness meditation for many years. However, bringing it into my life as a daily practice can still be a challenge, especially when things get busy.

This has made me wonder why we struggle to maintain those things in life that we know are good for us. In a world where choice is overwhelming, and access to possibilities via the Internet are creating an obsession with connectedness, it has become harder to stay focused. And it is through this hyper-connection to the external world that we are losing the connection to ourselves.

Meditation offers a way to unplug from the incessant stream of information and noise, whether external or internal, and be reminded that there is a place to reside that is beyond time and beyond needing to be somewhere else. Meditation brings us close to the simple miracle of consciousness without needing a tragic shakeup to get there.

How often do you stop in your day and feel gratitude for the mere fact that you can see? Did you actually taste the last meal you ate? Were you really listening to the last friend who was speaking to you, or were you already thinking about what you wanted to say next?

Have you tried to lose weight? 

More than one third of U.S. adults currently are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Physicians and other health care professionals urge us to lose weight or risk becoming vulnerable to a host of diseases, including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. Weight loss has become a national conversation.

On an individual basis, most of us either have tried to lose weight or are actively engaged in maintaining a healthy weight.  Why we struggle with weight and how best to lose weight are hotly debated topics.  The nation’s current weight struggles have been attributed to a range of biological, societal and personal problems such as unhealthy school lunches, media advertising, too much corn and corn syrup in our diets, sugar substitutes, lack of willpower, overreliance on fast and prepackaged foods and many more.

But what gets in the way of your ability to lose weight?

“Life has a way of testing our ability to stay calm,” according to Carla Naumburg, Ph.D, a clinical social worker and author of the blog Mindful Parenting on Psych Central.

It could be anything from a tantrum-throwing toddler to a broken appliance to a family crisis to an eleventh-hour project at work, she said.

But even on the days when you’re not putting out fires, peace might still be missing. Below, you’ll find tips for creating calm every day and finding peace in stressful situations.

1. Remember thoughts are not facts.

Our thoughts are highly influential in determining how we feel throughout the day. Fortunately, we’re not shackled to negative cognitions. “Thoughts are just thoughts,” Naumburg said. They’re “the result of neurons firing for reasons we may never understand.”

When any kind of thought arises, you can decide what to do with it. “You might want to explore [your thoughts] or act on them, or you might want to let them go and move on. You can decide.”

It would be wrong to say that the mentally ill are undisciplined.

Yes, I have been scattered, unkempt, flighty, undependable, and absent. But I have also, at times, been able to carry out with incredible focus to minute detail tasks that I could never stick with if not at least mildly manic.

While the energy to work and the attention to detail did not always congeal on a reasonable or desirable task, the results were often impressive.

But then, I’ve also spent an awful amount of time lying around doing nothing. Not contemplating, not planning, not even daydreaming. Just depressed. Could there be a way to predict moods? A way to harness and apply a disciplined approach to managing symptoms?

“A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.”
~ Anonymous

The one thing about life that is certain is its unpredictability. Nothing stays the same forever. Every day we are bombarded with new stimuli, new challenges and new events.

For some of us, unpredictability creates a state of panic; it keeps us up at night and distracts us from enjoying the world around us. People like being in control of their social world and vulnerability is seen as a sign of weakness.

Uncertainty is so abhorred that Berger and Calabrese (1975) proposed the uncertainty reduction theory. The theory asserts that the anxiety created by uncertainty of the social world motivates people to reduce and avoid uncertainty.

So how can we better navigate around life’s inevitable detours?

In the emerging field of alternative, holistic health, much of the focus is on the external. Those who want to incorporate good habits into their lives tend to start with nutrition and fitness.

While those areas certainly require attention, if we want to have lasting change, it’s our emotional health which needs to be explored. The challenge is that sometimes we become stuck emotionally — we seem to be treading water with our emotions instead of feeling them fully.

What can you do? Here are 8 ideas for how to become more emotionally unstuck in your life that I hope may help.

1. Sit down with yourself in a quiet place, without distractions.

Schedule the time on your calendar if you have to and keep it sacred. You want to start developing your inner voice. Then you have to listen to it, so that it will be directive and get you “unstuck” as you begin to identify what is going on inside yourself. You will find what is needed for healing and recovery. If you use these tools, you will learn to self-regulate and stay healthy on this journey of life.

There are times when we encounter others who just “rub us the wrong way.” Have there ever been times in your life when others would say or do something that gets “under your skin,” or as I like to say, “pushes your button?” The kind of people that irritate you every time they speak, or certain actions that just leave you feeling like you want to scream and pull your hair out?

Some things or people may not push your buttons that hard. Some just cause you to feel minor irritation, or give you that roll-your-eyes feeling.

Whatever the case, have you wondered why these actions or behaviors push those buttons? Better yet, do you know what those buttons are?

We’re hoping that you can join us for the first Psych Central Conference this coming June 3-4. It will be held at the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center, located in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts. Early-bird registration is now open, with a savings of $30 if you register before March 1.

The 2-day conference will highlight mental health, mindfulness, stress-relief, psychology and other self-help topics from a wealth of knowledgeable speakers from around the country. Workshops will be available in multiple tracks throughout both days, along with plenary sessions highlighting key topics each day.

We’ve posted some of the conference plenaries and general talks as well as the full list of conference workshops and presentations we’re hosting this year. It looks to be a packed conference, full of something for everyone!

Early-bird registration ends Feb. 28, so now’s a great time to register and save $30 off the price of a normal admission ticket.