We are only a few days from the new year, and while we hope that 2022 was one of the best years in your life, we also know that, for many of us, there are things that we want to work on and ways that we want to personally improve.
That is why, so often, we take January 1st of a new year as an opportunity for resolutions – new changes that we’ve set out for ourselves that we plan to continue through 2023 and beyond.
Making Resolutions is Easy
Making resolutions is very easy. It’s keeping the resolutions that is the problem. Anyone can make a resolution. But keeping the resolution is the most important part of the resolution.
On that front, most of us fail. Even the most noble of goals tends to be easily forgotten or put off after January or February. We promise to exercise more, eat healthier, or engage in some type of activity, and then life catches up with us and we get back into our own habits.
No one can force you to keep your resolutions. But there are strategies and techniques that can help you make resolutions that last. This year, consider the following:
Choose Genuine Resolutions – Yes, you may want to exercise more. Yes, you may want to eat healthier. These are things you may want to do. But how badly do you really want to do them? Do you want to do it because you think you should, or is it a genuine interest? Choose only resolutions that you have a very strong interest in, so that you are passionate about pursuing them.
Be Specific – Do you really want to “exercise more” or is there something specific you want to do? Maybe you want to go hiking more, or train for a marathon, or lose exactly 15 lbs. The more specific you are, the easier it is to make progress towards those goals. The more generic the goal, the harder it is to feel focused or accomplished.
Create Sub-Goals and a Plan – Once you have resolutions in mind, turn them into smaller goals and make sure they’re scheduled into your calendar. For example, if you plan to eat healthier, set a goal of cooking dinner 5x a week, make a list of healthy foods, and plan them on your calendar in advance so you know what to do and when.
Create Habits – Let’s say you plan to floss every day. Saying “I’m going to floss” doesn’t always work. Instead, you need to turn it into a habit – a regular part of your routine. You can do this by tying it to another habit (for example, brushing teeth at night), making sure you do it before you brush your teeth, keeping floss visible at all times so you never forget, and setting alarm reminders. You can do this with many other resolutions that you’re considering.
Find a Buddy – Accountability plays a strong role in the ability to keep resolutions. You are far more likely to continue with one if you know that someone is waiting on you or depending on you. For example, don’t join a gym alone, but go with a friend, and make a plan to schedule it in together. Instead of meals for yourself, share meals with a friend, where you both take turns eating them together.
Above all else, make sure that you’re also addressing any issues in your life that may be keeping you from achieving your goals. Stress, anxiety, relationship issues – these are all things that can create challenges that affect your ability to keep your resolutions and make the changes that you’re looking for in your life. If you haven’t yet, let self-care and therapy be a resolution that you strongly consider keeping this year. Learn more by contacting Flourish Psychology today.
We often talk about the different symptoms of anxiety, from rapid heartbeat to sweating to tension and more. But anxiety affects your entire body, inside and out, and the longer you live with anxiety, the more you might start to notice more unusual symptoms that do not always fall under what we typically think about with mental health, but are still directly related to how you feel.
That is especially true of symptoms of the eye. Anxiety is known to cause a variety of eye problems. Both short term anxiety attacks and long term anxiety can lead to challenges related to sight, pain, and more. It’s not uncommon for the symptoms to appear even when you do not feel like you are struggling with anxiety in the moment.
How Does Anxiety Affect the Eyes?
Our eyes are surprisingly sensitive to change. Some of the effects of anxiety have a direct impact on the eyes through neurotransmitter changes in the brain. Others are related to the ways that anxiety affects the muscles surrounding the eyes. At any time, both during anxiety attacks and others, you may see eye symptoms of anxiety that include, but are not limited to:
Eye Pain – Your eyes themselves may feel pain for many reasons. Lack of sleep can cause your eyes to ache and hurt. During anxiety attacks, your pupils dilate, which may cause them to experience sharp pains if they take in more light than they need. Migraines, which can be triggered by stress/anxiety, can also lead to eye pain.
Headaches Around the Eye – Sometimes, it’s not the eye itself that hurts, but a soreness near or surrounding the eye. This can be caused by muscle tension, as any causes the muscles around the eye to contract. It can also be caused by a lack of sleep, which is especially common for those with anxiety.
Vision Problems – Anxiety doesn’t just cause pain. It can also lead to vision problems. These may include tunnel vision (which are common during anxiety attacks), blurry vision, twinkling in your vision, and a sensitivity to light. Vision issues can also lead to further eye pain, as your eyes may not know how to adjust to them, causing you to squint or experience eye strain.
Eye pain and discomfort are typically not the most problematic of anxiety symptoms, which is why not everyone even realizes it may be related to anxiety at all. But it’s important to realize that long-term stress and anxiety can touch almost every single part of your body, inside and out, and some of the strange or uncomfortable issues that you may be experiencing with your eyes, or with some other part of your body, may be directly related to the stress of living with long term anxiety.
Reduce Anxiety, Reduce Symptoms
Rarely is any symptom related to anxiety permanent. If you’re able to control your anxiety and stress, you should also be able to reduce your eye pain, eye headaches, and other issues that are related to that anxiety. Talk to Flourish Psychology today for anxiety treatment in NY, with services for anyone in the entire state.
There are some people that can talk to anyone. If someone is in a room with them, a friend or stranger, they can fearlessly walk up to that person and start a conversation, with no timidness or hesitation in their voice.
But not everyone is that social, and some people struggle to have conversations – especially with people they do not know. Often, these individuals are described as being “shy.” Sometimes, however, these individuals are struggling with social anxiety disorder, and their shyness is actually a form of moderate to severe anxiety that would benefit from treatment by a mental health professional.
Yet how do you know if it is shyness or social anxiety?
Shyness and Social Anxiety Similarities and Differences
Shyness and social anxiety share many common traits. Both make it harder to socialize with strangers or groups. Both can make it more difficult to have the relationships you want, or participate in some of the activities that you want to enjoy.
But there are key differences between the two, and most of them relate to the emotions, thoughts, and behaviors that occur during social situations.
Shy people can often motivate themselves to be social with only a little bit of self-talk.
Shy people may feel a little bit of anxiety, but it is fleeting and easy to manage.
Shy people often still go out and participate in social activities.
Shy people do not necessarily feel significant shame or embarrassment at being shy.
On the other hand:
Social anxiety tends to cause moderate to severe anxiety at the idea of being social.
Social anxiety comes with a lot of negative self-talk.
Social anxiety causes increasingly severe physical responses in social situations.
Social anxiety leads to many negative emotions and overthinking about the experience.
Social anxiety is difficult to overcome, and can get worse over time.
Social anxiety makes people avoid possibly enjoyable social situations.
A person that is shy may feel like they want to talk to someone but have a bit of a hard time speaking up. A person with social anxiety is often fearful about talking to that person, worried they’ll embarrass themselves, and may experience severe anxiety that prevents them from engaging with others.
Still, while the two are different, they are not entirely unrelated. Shyness can lead to someone developing social anxiety disorder if their shyness starts to negatively impact their life, and what we call “shyness” could be a form of mild, manageable social anxiety that has the potential to worsen depending on life experience. It may be a personality trait, but it may also be a form of social anxiety that is currently manageable, but could develop into worse symptoms over time.
Evaluating and Treating Your Social Anxiety
It is difficult to live with social anxiety. It is even more difficult to live with social anxiety here in Brooklyn and NYC, as our area is densely packed, brimming with events and social experiences, and often requires socialization in order to navigate the busyness of the city.
At Flourish Psychology, we believe that what matters most is helping you achieve your goals. Whether you have social anxiety or you’re just feeling shy and want a bit more self-confidence to be social, we want to be here to work with you, helping you achieve these goals and live your life the way you want to live. Contact us today to learn more.
It is stressful to feel like your relationship is struggling. It is even more stressful to not know what you can do to help fix it. Sometimes, that stress leads to desperation. One way that couples try to solve their relationship issues is by choosing to have a baby. The idea is that bringing a child into the world will create something magical that will awaken a shared love as you watch after this new baby.
Will Having a Child Save Your Marriage?
Generally, this is not the type of question that can be given a “Yes/No” answer. There are likely some relationships that have been saved by bringing a child into the world, so a firm “no” is overstating the variability in relationships and personalities.
However, in a general sense, having a child *in order to* save a relationship can be very risky. That is because:
Children Are Stressful – It is true that bringing a child into the world can enhance a strong relationship considerably. It is a joy that many couples share. But if a partnership is already experiencing some very heavy challenges, adding additional stress to those challenges can lead to further problems with less ability to solve them.
Children Are Costly – Finances are the number one cause of stress in a relationship. If your finances are already a source of disconnect, a child is only going to make those challenges worse, which could lead to more arguments.
Coparenting Requires Communication – Both partners are gong to want to parent differently. In order to make sure that there is harmony in the household with how you parent, you will need to make sure that you’re communicating effectively. Typically, a struggling couple is not communicating the way they need to, in which case coparenting can make it worse.
Pregnancy Separates Couples Experiences – Both partners typically struggle to understand each other during pregnancy itself. One partner may not be able to empathize with the experience of the pregnant one or be able to show them they care, and the other may not feel well enough to meet their partner’s needs.
Having a Child Reduces Time for Physical/Emotional Intimacy – If you’re struggling with a lack of physical or emotional intimacy, it is not likely to improve with a child. It becomes more difficult to find time to connect, with a child taking up much of your alone time.
In a marriage, two partners need to be able to talk, show and accept love, communicate in a healthy way, and find ways to overcome obstacles together in order to maintain intimacy and affection. If those are already struggles, bringing a new life into the world is unlikely to help and may make it worse.
Children Are Wonderful – But Not a Miracle Cure
It is possible for a child to reconnect two partners and strengthen their bond. But it also shouldn’t be something you assume will happen, or used to try to save a failing relationship. If you and your partner both want a child, but you also have your struggles, then it is always a good idea to consider couples counseling.
Before having a child, couples counseling can strengthen your relationship and make it easier for you both to withstand the stresses of parenthood. After you have a baby, couples counseling can provide the guidance you need to maintain intimacy, show love, and make sure that you’re responding to each partner’s needs.
If you’re interested in NYC couples counseling, call Flourish Psychology today. We are a Brooklyn based boutique private practice that works with couples throughout New York to strengthen their marriages and support their mutual growth. Learn more or get started by filling out our online form.
Most couples who come to therapy have already had the same argument many times. They know what the other person is going to say before they say it. They know how the conversation ends. Someone gets defensive, someone shuts down, something that needed to be said doesn’t get said clearly enough, and the issue stays unresolved until the next time it surfaces.
The problem isn’t that the two people don’t care about each other or don’t want things to be different. The problem is that the environment where they’re trying to work things out — the kitchen, the car, the end of a long day — doesn’t support the kind of conversation that actually moves something forward. The history between them, the accumulated tension, and the absence of any structure to keep the conversation on track all work against them.
Couples therapy in Brooklyn provides something that conversation at home rarely does: a structured, neutral space where both people can say what they actually mean and actually be heard.
What Gets in the Way at Home
The dynamics that make communication difficult in a relationship don’t pause because both people want to have a productive conversation. The patterns that developed over months or years — the defensiveness, the withdrawal, the tendency for certain topics to escalate before they’ve even really started — are activated by the same environment where they formed.
One partner may feel that any attempt to raise a concern is heard as an attack. The other may feel that their perspective never fully lands before the conversation has moved somewhere else. Both people may care deeply about the relationship and still find that their conversations about it produce more damage than resolution.
A therapist’s office changes the environmental conditions. There’s a neutral third party whose only investment is in the quality of the conversation. There’s structure that keeps things from escalating in the familiar ways. There’s time and space specifically designated for a conversation that doesn’t have to happen between other obligations.
What a Safe Space Provides
Flourish Psychology’s approach to couples counseling is built around the premise that both people in the room matter equally — that neither partner’s perspective is the correct one and neither person is simply there to be corrected. The therapist’s role is to hold the space for both people, not to arbitrate who is right.
In practice, that means several specific things that a conversation at home rarely produces:
Each partner can speak without being interrupted — finishing a thought completely before the other person responds, which changes the quality of what gets said and what gets heard.
Each partner is actively encouraged to listen rather than prepare their response while the other person is still talking.
When something lands poorly or gets misunderstood, the therapist can help find clearer language — not to change what someone means, but to help it reach the other person more accurately.
Each person’s strengths in the relationship get named and recognized, not only the areas of conflict.
The conversation stays in the room rather than bleeding into the rest of the day or the week.
Each of these creates a different quality of exchange than what most couples can produce in their own environment, regardless of how much they love each other or how hard they’re trying.
Why One Partner’s Hesitation Is Normal
One of the more consistent dynamics in couples therapy is that one partner tends to be more ready to pursue it than the other. The hesitant partner is often anticipating a process that feels like blame — an hour of being told what they’ve done wrong by someone who has been briefed by the other person.
That’s not what couples therapy at Flourish looks like. The therapist has no prior relationship with either person. There is no brief, no predetermined side, and no agenda other than helping both people communicate more effectively and understand each other more clearly. The value of couples therapy is that it treats the relationship as the subject rather than treating one person as the problem.
For partners who are hesitant, knowing that the space is genuinely designed for both of them — not structured to confirm one person’s account of what’s happening — makes the process feel less like walking into something adversarial.
Couples at Every Stage
Couples counseling at Flourish Psychology is available to couples at every stage of a relationship — dating, engaged, married, long-term, and non-traditional partnerships. The work doesn’t require a relationship to be at a breaking point to be useful. Some couples come to therapy when things have become genuinely difficult. Others come when they want to build better communication before a major transition — a marriage, a move, a child — creates new pressures they’d rather be prepared for.
Both are appropriate starting points. The structure that therapy provides is valuable whether the relationship is in crisis or simply ready for something better than what it currently has.
Flourish Psychology provides couples therapy in Brooklyn at 300 Cadman Plaza West, Floor 12, and via online therapy for couples throughout New York. Call 917-737-9475 or reach out through the contact page to schedule a session.
Location: 300 Cadman Plaza West Floor 12 - Brooklyn, NY 11201
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