Welcome to Toronto Therapist and Counsellor Greg Dorter's blog. Below you'll find blog posts related to mindfulness in counselling and therapy. If you're looking for more information about counselling or therapy in Toronto, please read about my counselling and therapy services.
Bringing Mindfulness into your Daily Life
Mindfulness isn’t just something we practice when meditating: anything we do throughout the day, we can learn to do mindfully. Once we learn to bring mindfulness into our everyday lives, we can reduce a lot of the stress, anxiety, depression and anger that tends to build up when we go through life relatively mindlessly.
It would be great if we could go about our whole day completely mindful, bringing our full attention to whatever we’re doing, while we’re doing it, and not getting carried away by distractions or thoughts of the past or about the future. But although mindfulness sounds simple, it does require effort. It takes a continual effort to notice when our mind’s started to wander and keep bringing it back to the present, and it’s not something most of us can do all day long. Read the rest of this entry »
Mindfulness in Everyday Life
In previous posts, we looked at the importance of giving ourselves time outs, as well as other techniques to manage stress and anxiety. Another great way we can keep things like stress, anxiety and depression from building throughout the day is to start bringing mindfulness into our everyday life.
We often talk about two broad categories of mindfulness practice. Formal mindfulness involves setting aside some time specifically for practicing mindfulness as we do when we engage in mindfulness meditation. Informal mindfulness, on the other hand, refers to finding ways to incorporate mindfulness into our daily lives. Read the rest of this entry »
Give Yourself a Break From Stress, Anxiety and Depression
In a couple of recent posts, we looked at some things you can do to help stop stress and anxiety from becoming overwhelming, and to give yourself a breathing time out from stress, anxiety and depression. In this post, we’ll look at a couple more techniques you can use to manage stress and anxiety, and to help your emotions from becoming overwhelming if you’re experiencing depression or anger.
The first is called the Three Minute Breathing Space, and it was developed as part of the Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy program for people with depression. Like the Breathing Time Out, it’s a way to bring your attention to the present, give yourself a break from whatever stress or emotions have been building up, and then return to the rest of your day, more refreshed and focused on the present. Read the rest of this entry »
Give Yourself a Breathing Time Out
In a recent post we looked at a couple of exercises you can use to help stop stress and anxiety from becoming overwhelming. Another technique you can use throughout the day to manage stress and anxiety, and to help keep strong emotions and feelings of depression and anger from becoming overwhelming, is to give yourself a Breathing Time Out.
Just as a time out can be an effective way to help children calm down when they are acting out and starting to get out of control, when our thoughts and emotions start getting carried away, a time out is a great tool to help calm ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »
Mindfulness From Your Computer or Smartphone
Often, the more technology we have in our lives, the more difficult it is to practice mindfulness. Our computers, laptops, cell phones, HDTVs, iPods, tablets and whatever other new gadget comes along, offer us so many different ways to stay busy and distracted all day long, allowing stress and anxiety to build as we go about our lives without being mindful.
But as people recognize how difficult it can be to stay mindful in our digital world, applications are being developed to help prevent us from getting too caught up in all the technoogy that surrounds us, and offering ways to come back to the present and be more mindful. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Deal With Your Emotions
In some earlier posts on emotions we learned that ways in which we often try to deal with emotions—such as trying to problem solve, control, or avoid them—tend to be counterproductive. We also looked at a number of more helpful ways we can deal with our emotions such as validation and acceptance.
In his book, The Worry Cure, Robert Leahy provides a flow chart that summarizes the various ways we can deal with our emotions and the results are tend to follow. The chart highlights undesired results that tend to arise when we try to avoid our emotions in various ways, or when we invalidate our emotions by telling ourselves that they are wrong.
Stop Stress and Anxiety
One of the most common concerns that leads people to seek counselling and therapy is feeling overwhelmed by stress and anxiety, and not knowing how to get any relief.
What often happens is we let our stress or anxiety build and build all day without doing anything about it, trying to ignore it, and just hoping it will go away. Then, when we finally can’t take it anymore and start feeling overwhelmed, we’re desperate to find a way to manage all of this stress and anxiety and get some relief, but at that point, it can be so hard to get any relief.
The more we allow stress and anxiety to accumulate, the more difficult they become to address. That’s why one of the keys to managing stress and anxiety is to find ways to not let them build up so much in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »
Acceptance in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
In an earlier post, we introduced the concept of acceptance and talked about some of its benefits. Acceptance is one of the foundations of a mindfulness-based approach to treating anxiety and depression called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
In the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy-based workbook, The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression, Kirk Strosah and Patricia Robinson explain some misconceptions people often have about acceptance. First, they define acceptance: Read the rest of this entry »
What Is Acceptance?
Acceptance can be a difficult notion to grasp. If you are suffering or in pain, the idea that you should practice acceptance can seem counterintuitive. So what do we mean by acceptance, and how is it beneficial?
In therapy, when we talk about acceptance, we are referring to acceptance of things such as:
external events outside our control
spontaneous emotions, thoughts and memories
uncertainty
pain or physical sensations
Mindfulness, Depression and Anxiety
The Mental Health Foundation in the UK has developed a Be Mindful webpage that is an excellent resource for information about the benefits of mindfulness. The following quote is from their webpage:
How you handle the way you feel plays a big part your mental health. In difficult times, it is not unusual to focus solely on negative thoughts and feelings and become consumed by them.
Mindfulness helps you change the way they think, feel and act. It helps you to break free from a downward spiral of negative thought and action, and make positive choices that support your wellbeing. Read the rest of this entry »
I'm a Toronto therapist and counsellor incorporating traditional and mindfulness-based approaches to therapy to help people overcome issues such as depression, anxiety, stress and low self-esteem.
For more information about how you could benefit from mindfulness-based therapy, visit my mindfulness therapy webpage. To make an appointment for counselling or therapy in Toronto, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.
For more information about how you could benefit from mindfulness-based therapy, visit my mindfulness therapy webpage. To make an appointment for counselling or therapy in Toronto, please call me at 416-516-6024 or email greg@gregdorter.com.