The Overwhelmed Brain | Stress | Anxiety | Relationship | Critical Thinking | Emotional Intelligence | Emotional Abuse

How do you know if the relationship you're starting (or the relationship you're in) is everything you want it to be? How do you know you aren't getting led into yet another heartbreak? Learning the signs of a healthy, functioning, and even happy relationship is how you know whether the relationship is worth continuing or letting go.

As the holidays come around, you will likely meet up with family and friends. And you may also run into that toxic person or people that you don't look forward to seeing again. Dealing with toxic people requires a few tools so that you can make it through the evening or the week. This episode gives you those tools.

How many decisions do you make in your life that are actually based on what you want instead of how someone else will respond? Sometimes it takes a swift kick in the emotional behind to get moving on your decisions so that you can get out of the emotional rut of trying to please others while losing yourself.

What does it take to become the best version of you? What do you need to do for yourself so that you become more happy and more fulfilled? This episode is all about you and what it takes to become the most supportive, compassionate person to yourself.

When you carry around an inability to be vulnerable, you can build up an emotional resistance increasing the negativity inside of you. When this happens, you end up living a life that isn't as happy or fulfilling as it could be. I explain this process in this episode.

It can be frustrating when someone doesn't understand what you're talking about. In fact, there are probably people in your life that you try to communicate with but keep ending up in arguments. In order to communicate with some people, you have to meet them where they are. That's what today's episode is about.

Silence is golden until it isn't. There are three main levels of silent treatment: 1. Processing time to figure out what you're going to do with what you just learned. 2. Cool down time as a way to regulate what might normally be a heightened response 3. A method to make someone you care about feel bad I'll give you one guess which one I'm talking about in this episode.

Do you enable behavior that you don't like? Is it possible that the people that cause you stress do so because you are allowing it in some way? This is a very important topic that may help you get your power back if you adopt and apply the message.

Social anxiety can be debilitating. In this bonus mini-episode, I talk about one way to start thinking about it differently so that it doesn't have such a grip on you. Take the social anxiety survey at theoverwhelmedbrain.com/safe to share your experience. Survey closes November 2018.

If they're not like you, you don't like them. If you're not like them, they don't like you. You have opinions, so do they, but should your differences separate you and cause you so much stress that you would rather lose relationships than accept people for their differences? This is a full episode with many angles, everyone will get something from it. Also, take the social anxiety survey at theoverwhelmedbrain.com/safe

Trying to find happiness is hard enough, but trying to do it when other people are in your life (or are interfering with your life) is even harder. The first email I read is from someone who has a problem with his girlfriend smoking pot. He wants the relationship, but not the pot. The second email dives into how deeply religious parents might want to continue controlling you even after you leave the nest. This episode is all about finding your true path and making the decision to follow it.

Hurtful people do a really good job of causing us to feel bad about ourselves. Not only that, we end up repeating what they said or did to us in our mind over and over again. The emotional trauma can last for months or years. In this episode I help transform the hurtful messages from others into empowering declarations that help us move on see them for who they really are.

When you end up in a miserable relationship, who's to blame? Do you feel powerless as the relationship gets worse and worse? It's vital to see the signs at the beginning, but it's even more important what you do later on when you are heavily invested.

If you're a commitment phobe or someone who has trouble making and committing to decisions, you probably notice your life coming to a standstill more often than you want. The solution may be a simple change that's a challenge to implement, but could transform your life. It's time to tackle commitmentphobia.

When you get that suspicious feeling that a friend, family member or partner is doing something deceptive, do you investigate further or take their word when they say nothing is going on? When you have that gut instinct kicking in, it's time to listen and perhaps even dig a little deeper just to get to the truth. I also revisit values and what steps to take to show yourself love, respect and compassion so that you don't end up in toxic relationships.

How difficult is it to experience life to the fullest when you have a dark cloud of problems and challenges? In this episode, I help you tackle the problems in your life with many questions designed to loosen the grip emotional challenges have on you. If you can get some relief from the problems in your life, perhaps you could experience more of what it has to offer.

The best relationship, job or event in your life flashes by and now you are afraid that's the best there ever was and it will never be that good again. When you use the words, "never", "ever", and "always", you set up your present and future for a daily misery that never ends. It's time to examine the language we use and make sure we are not setting up our reality to be a nightmare.

How do you know if you are the difficult one in any relationship? Whether it's at home, with friends, or family, when everyone seems a bit unhappier than you think they should be, perhaps the common denominator is you.

In any relationship, mixed messages are the key to diminishing trust and certainty. When communication is based on deception to make others think one thing while you do or say another, you introduce confusion and sometimes even a bit of insanity.

Your level of function or dysfunction as an adult is almost always determined by the most unhealthy or toxic people in your family growing up. When you are raised by those who didn't or couldn't love and support you as you deserved, you may have developed "broken" tools to deal with situations as an adult. When your emotional toolbox has a bunch of broken tools, you may keep getting the results you don't want, causing you to stay unhappy. In this episode, I help you identify those broken tools and what you can do to start utilizing them the right way, or even fixing them altogether.