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The holiday season is coming to an end, and for many, it feels as though life may be returning to some state of normalcy. January, though cold, is a beautiful time to start writing a new chapter, or start finishing up the last one. Many of you may have even participated in the traditions of New Year's Resolutions, Dry January, or burning notes. As beautiful as these traditions may be, it's important to remember these acts are rituals— that is, they are supposed to be celebratory, they are supposed to help facilitate joy, wellness, and ultimately community into the new year, not stress and self-esteem issues. The beginning of the calendar year is a great time to make positive changes, but it’s not inherently a better time than any other ordinary day. Don’t let pressure to grow stop you. Learn how to use it to your advantage!
The bitter truth is that most resolutions fail. The good news is that yours won't. This is because most resolutions fail due to their rigid and out-come focused nature. That is, try to set goals for yourself that prioritize identity-based growth, rather than ones which require external verifications of success. For example, shifting from ‘I would like to lose weight,’ can be shifted to ‘I would like to exercise more often.’ And, ‘I would like to read x amount of books,’ will prove to be more successful when reimagined as ‘I would like to develop the habit of reading before bed.’ ‘I will get a promotion this year,’ for example, is a goal that offers no personal benefits. Look inwards, ‘I would like to find more excitement in my work,’ may be a more fulfilling and successful perspective with the same end goal. The most common resolution is prioritizing health and weight loss, but rather than setting a specific amount of days to hit the gym, try intuitive movement when it comes to you. Intuitive movement can mean dancing, walking in nature or with loved ones, or simply stretching without timers and routines. Rather than starting the newest diet or counting your calories, try choosing foods that leave you feeling strong and energized. Ultimately, focus on small habits. Switch your perspective from ‘what do I want,’ to ‘who do I want to become.’ Don’t set goals for yourself that only require one bad day to destroy your pursuits. Growth is a spiral staircase, not a straight line. And if you break or have already broken your resolution, rethink your intentions and remember that tomorrow is a brand new day that's never been touched. -Kate Albert
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The holidays are often supposed to be joyful and restorative, right?
Wrong. For most people, this time of year is actually the most stressful of all: financial pressure, uncomfortable family dynamics, travel, social obligations, the weather. The list goes on. Beyond the obvious, the expectation to feel happy can quietly overload your nervous system. But understanding what stress actually is and how to work with your body rather than against it can make the season far more manageable. Stress is not just a feeling; it’s a biological response. When your brain perceives a threat, whether it be emotional, social, or physical, it activates the sympathetic nervous system, releasing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones increase heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar, preparing your body for “fight or flight.” This response is adaptive in short bursts, but during the holidays stress often becomes chronic. Prolonged cortisol elevation can impair sleep, digestion, immune function, and mood regulation. Holiday stress is unique because it combines:
Here’s what you can do to take care of your body.
-Kate Albert I strongly believe that Thanksgiving, as a tradition and cultural ritual, has gravely mishandled two sacred parts of this world: turkeys and the concept of gratitude.
See Free Birds for more information about turkeys. Gratitude is a deeply misunderstood emotion. It’s inextricably linked to the holiday season, which is linked to family, which is linked to complication. November is the only time we are taught to actively acknowledge our thankfulness and appreciation for the world around us. So as Thanksgiving approaches and the number of people demanding an insightful answer to “What are you grateful for?” rises, consider this blogpost preparation. Preparation and a potential spell book for science-based magic. But what is gratitude? We annually encounter it as light expression that is often demanded of us from people who make it difficult to feel it in any capacity at all. But it is so much more than an expression— it is an emotion, a virtue, a habit, a skill, an attitude, and a complex cognitive phenomenon. It is difficult to define but has been recognized to reflect elements such as grace, presence, love, health, food, nature, beauty, and life in a state of fulfillment. It is to enjoy and value the trajectory of these elements more than the end they may bring. It is the vessel for happiness, a way of life, and for me and (arguably) Aristotle, it is the point of life. Most will say habitually that they are grateful for their friends and family. Many of us will likely say this in front of them very soon. But I encourage you to do more than express your thankfulness for your loved ones. I encourage you to take gratitude as an annual prompted expression of love and turn it into a lifelong skill. Gratitude as a skill can be utilized in many forms, but I personally associate gratitude with a type of meditation. It is the act of simultaneously practicing self-love and love for others, love for all as one. It is rewriting the narrative, a tool to change our perspective, and its practice has been scientifically proven time and time again to be one of the most productive ways to lead happier lives. Cheers, Aristotle! There are hundreds of ways to practice gratitude. While noticing our love and thankfulness for the world around us and all its beautiful particularities, we may find the most rewarding form of gratitude be through vocal expression. An exercise for the outspoken may be to tell a member of your community why you are thankful that they exist. When we start to look around, we might find we have a reason to feel gratitude for everyone’s existence, not just our loved ones. For the introspective ones, I find forms of mindfulness to be great ways to practice gratitude. In our world of constant connectivity, it is so difficult to slow down and so easy to overlook how much we have to be grateful for. I like to slow down while I walk and while I eat, taking time to notice what would otherwise go unnoticed. Gratitude is gratitude whether we are thanking a divine power or Mother Nature. Or even just ourselves. And finally, for the visual learners, keeping a gratitude journal is a tried-and-true method. A 2022 study found that gratitude writing was a better resource for dealing with stress and stressful life events than traditional expressive writing methods. A gratitude journal is also known to aid decision making and memory. If you don’t know where to start, check out these prompts. Now that you know how to practice gratitude, allow me to convince you why you should. Gratitude is directly linked to the health of our brains and bodies (Hazlett et al., 2021). It has a healing effect on us, offering endless health benefits from an increase in gray matter volume in our brains (Zahn et al., 2014) to improvements in our immune system (Zahn et al., 2008). Gray matter is where the brain processes cognitive functioning tasks, perception, speech, and learning. Gratitude also activates the reward center in our brains, possessing the ability alter the way we see ourselves and the way we see the world (Fox et al. 2015). Maybe that’s why we practice it during the holidays. But in all seriousness, gratitude is a magic and a medicine within everyone’s reach. But don’t just practice it in the pursuit of happiness, practice it in the pursuit of a more loving, positive world. Because the happier you are, the happier your loved ones are! And that’s what it’s all about. Cited. Thank you for reading, I appreciate you. Kate Albert In August of 2014, I broke my arm climbing a fir tree and Robin Williams took his own life. I was eleven, a camper on the northwest coast, just beginning to gain consciousness of the world and feeling its rage. The details of his death ruptured my small, sheltered understanding of the universe. And soon after, I got an X-ray.
Robin Williams, in my mind and many others, lives on as a beloved face for the nefarious truth that depression is furtive—silent, secretive, and all too easy to miss—and like a broken bone, the more it’s neglected, the more precarious it becomes. The stigma around mental health is systemic, but the solution may begin as a personal pursuit. So, dear reader—reader who is struggling with depression, reader who has neglected their mental health, and reader who loves someone who’s hurting— consider this piece my raw attempt to help catalyze your journey toward a healthier mind and a happier life. There are countless reasons why someone may feel hesitant to seek help regarding their mental health. More intuitively, there are attitudinal barriers— there are systemic gender norms that silence men and pathologize women. There are structural and logistical barriers, worries about insurance, costs, geographical maldistribution of providers and care. There are cultural and systemic barriers, racial disparities in access and quality of care, varying stigma in certain communities, and a huge lack of cultural variation surrounding the mental health field— that is, depression does not look the same for everyone, and as many things are, the studied participants and subsequently the accepted research tends to come from a narrow demographic. The stigma surrounding mental health is a labyrinth built over millennia—one that tells us both to hide our pain and to feel ashamed for having it; denying depression only drives it deeper underground, and the numbness that follows can start to feel like relief. My intention, however, is not to reduce any of these very real, very consequential barriers, but rather to offer equally legitimate reasons to rush joyfully not solely towards treatment, but first towards tranquility. As someone who has spent a great deal of time and energy into pretending that I wasn’t crying, I feel deeply that it is my moral obligation to argue how irrational this kind of mental neglect can be, and how as a species, we have vilified a natural practice that must be redefined as one of the most beautiful parts of being human: working on your mind! In the years surrounding Robin Williams’ death, one question kept resurfacing: why do we fear caring for the mind? You may fear treatment for a plethora of reasons that I know I cannot soothe in a couple hundred words, but for many, the suggestion of medical intervention is daunting because it bypasses the crucial relationship between mind and body. While I invariably advise seeking professional help—indeed, I do not believe there exists a person who would not benefit from some form of therapy or treatment—I also believe that advice alone is futile without a shift in how we understand our own minds. Before we can heal them, we must learn to regard them not as enemies to subdue, but as companions to nurture. If a broken bone deserves a cast painted with signatures of compassion, a fractured mind deserves the same. I want to trace both the roots and the remedies of that fear, in hopes that confronting its fallacies might offer some relief. Us humans feel a tremendous amount of pressure to prove to ourselves and those around us that we are strong of mind from the beginning of our lives to the end, that our minds are impermeable to the oh so embarrassing experience of trauma and pain. Bear with me as I speak in a degree above myself, but what would be the point if our minds weren’t malleable to some sort of corruption? Are we humans or are we robots? And what could possibly be more exciting and more worth living than the consistent pursuit of a happier, healthier mind, and sequentially, a happier and healthier existence? A therapist once told me that healing and growth are unavoidably holistic. Simple enough but think about all the areas in your life that you put blood, sweat and tears into. Maybe you prioritize your physical strength, your career, your art, or your relationships. Hear me when I say that there is no area of our physical lives that won’t improve if we don’t also allow our minds to. There is also no area of our lives that are not actively suffering from a suppression of these very natural experiences. So maybe if you need a push to be vulnerable, redirect your intention. I think it’s really easy for us as humans to separate our minds from our bodies. When we’re hurting or tired, we feel like skinful vessels carrying our brains around to communicate with other brains, hoping those brains don’t pay too much attention to what’s holding us up or how we decided to dress it. We identify so deeply with our consciousness that we objectify and disassociate our physical bodies, and in turn, we feel much more comfortable nurturing them in a way our minds do not deserve. But why, if our minds are so important, so above the rest of the physical world, do we reject their care? Why has depression been given a shameful narrative while a fracture is deemed noble or a consequence of the brave? It is time that we reject the notion that we should subsist on our physical health alone, that the dentist and a balanced diet, a gym membership and Dayquil will suffice, that a hurting consciousness is impenetrable into the real world just because it shouts silently. The truth is that our minds and bodies are intrinsically connected, we cannot neglect one and hope for the other to be unaffected. But these are two sides of the same rusty coin. I will be the first to admit that there was a large sum of truth in my parents’ advice to ‘work out’ or ‘eat healthier’ as a response to some unfounded anxiety in my teenage years. When talking about taking care of our minds and our bodies, we cannot ignore bidirectional influences: poor physical health can worsen mental health, and mental health disorders can lead to worse physical health outcomes. And now, science is catching up with what intuition already knows: the mind and body move in tandem. A 2023 study found that physical illnesses like heart and metabolic disease often co-occur with depression, yet these overlaps rarely receive attention in psychiatric practice. Cardiology research echoes this link, showing that depression and heart disease not only coexist but accelerate one another’s progression. All that goes to say is screening for depression does not have to carry these intense emotional and personal connotations of defeat— it can be as routine as an x-ray. I would even aspire to feel as unashamed of crying as I do of bleeding. There are a million ways to go about caring for our minds. If I’ve inspired you in any way to exercise your stability and adaptability, the next steps might take the form of a depression screening, reaching out to a loved one, or compiling a list of mindfulness exercises that speak to you (some of my favorites include journaling, meditation, and practicing gratitude, but these can take relatively any form). The first step, however, is recognizing that the struggle is not a flaw to be forgiven, but a fact of being alive. Because why learn anything at all if we assume our minds are in their final form from the start? Why bother exercising if we believe our bodies are born strong enough? Everything we do as humans is to become a better version of ourselves, and mental health is no different; as mindful, social creatures, it must be a priority. Healing is not indulgence—it’s maintenance. So, get screened for depression, embrace your imperfections, and start strengthening your mind. The alternative is to keep pretending—vouch for lobotomies, blame it on weakness, call it anything but what it is— being human. And how beautiful is that? - Kate Albert This month (September) is Suicide Prevention Month. While this should always be a priority concern, this month focuses on raising awareness of this important issue. This month provides an opportunity to change public perception, share information, and instill hope. The goal is to make sure that individuals, family and friends have access to the resources needed to address suicide prevention and to get the help needed.
Since the focus of this month is awareness, what exactly can be done to increase awareness of suicide and suicide prevention. It is common knowledge that suicide is a serious problem in our society. The data and statistics related to suicide support this. But how can we look past the statistics and numbers and focus on the individuals, families, and friends who experience the impact of suicide, and what can be done to increase the awareness of this. Awareness Addressing suicide is not just about raising awareness of the problem, but also about raising awareness of the issues that contribute to suicide. Suicide prevention involves changing the mindset by.
Changing the narrative involves a shift the culture of silence and stigma to one of understanding, openness, and support. This starts with communication. Communication # Start the Conversation involves ideas, key messages, resources, social media posts, webinars and other opportunities to learn and talk about suicide prevention. Suicide prevention focuses on having conversations. Having conversations with ourselves, with. loved ones, with community, and about mental health support resources.
Suicide Prevention Month gives opportunities to change perceptions and give hope. It is also a time to remember the lives lost and think about the millions of others who have struggled with suicidal thoughts. In doing this, we can reflect on how we can make a difference. Remember, just asking someone ‘Are You OK’ can make a difference! Peggy Fossen DNP, RN, CNE References #BeThe1To. (2023, September 15). https://www.bethe1to.com/ 988 lifeline. 988 Lifeline. (n.d.). https://988lifeline.org/ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.-c). Suicide data and statistics. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html Fuller, K. (2020, June 18). Compassion, tough conversations and suicide prevention. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-is-state-mind/202006/compassion-tough-conversations-and-suicide-prevention National Suicide Prevention Month. American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. (2024, September 3). https://afsp.org/national-suicide-prevention-month/ Suicide prevention awareness month. Suicide Prevention Awareness Month - MN Dept. of Health. (n.d.). https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/suicide/basics/awarenessmonth.html Suicide prevention month. NAMI. (2024, August 30). https://www.nami.org/get-involved/awareness-events/suicide-prevention-month/ World Suicide Prevention Day. Suicide Call Back Service. (2023, August 31). https://www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au/worried-about-someone/how-to-raise-awareness-world-suicide-prevention-day/ |
Hello friends! My name is Kate, and I’m a senior in college studying Psychology and Philosophy, with minors in Art History and Fine Arts. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, but I now call Boston home while I finish my last year of school.
Art and expressing myself creatively have always been central to who I am. I enjoy painting, playing guitar, and above all else, writing. While I've found that these outlets have allowed me to process the world around me on a deeper level, they have also allowed me to form a connection with myself and my ever changing identity. Writing, in particular, has been my way of grounding myself since early highschool. To me, it is a form of introspection, meditation, and healing. This is what first drew me to Burn Away Your Burdens: the shared belief that healthy and personal coping mechanisms are essential to growth and stability. Beyond journaling, I love to write fictional stories, poetry, and songs. I’m so grateful to be part of this inspiring community, and I can’t wait to keep sharing my personal and academic work with all of you. CategoriesJoin our Monthly E-Newsletter |
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