It all counts.

After some heavy conversations—grief, stress, and the weight of the holidays—this article is meant to lift us up. It’s a reminder that healing isn’t only about hard things. Progress, growth, and recovery aren’t punishments or proof that something was broken; they’re invitations to evolve. They’re about movement, expansion, and restoration—sometimes after pain, but often toward possibility. Understanding the difference matters for how we measure ourselves, how we heal, and how we remap the way we think.

The day after Thanksgiving can feel like a minefield of “shoulds.”

The turkey is gone, the dishes are mostly done, and suddenly the inner commentator shows up with a clipboard. We should feel grateful. We should not eat leftovers. We should get up early for Black Friday deals. We should be productive on our day off. It sounds like accountability, but the tone is more courtroom than compass. “Shoulds” tend to flatten the complexity of our lives into a binary: either we obey the rule or we fail. On holidays—when grief, recovery, family systems, and cultural scripts collide—those rules can feel louder, harsher, and more absolute.

Sometimes the train wreck isn't a train wreck.

We can usually predict when we’re heading into a situation that could trigger us. This isn’t our first holiday rodeo. We know the stress points: family dynamics, travel logistics, food and drink choices, and the emotional weight of traditions.

Most of us have a mental highlight (lowlight?) reel of past holidays—the moments that went sideways, the conversations that left us tense, the feelings that lingered long after the dishes were done. So when we sense that familiar knot in our stomach, it’s not because we’re imagining things. It’s because experience has taught us what’s hard.

These were too easy to write. Probably because I've thought most of them.

Thanksgiving is often painted as starting a season of warmth and joy, but for many people, it’s tangled with old habits, cultural expectations, and unhelpful patterns of thinking. If you’re working on remapping yourself—learning to spot and shift these patterns—the holiday can be a powerful moment to notice what keeps you stuck in scarcity, shame, or perfectionism. It’s the perfect time to build mastery as you address them.

Living on high alert: this is fine.

Hypervigilance is one of those words that shows up in therapy offices and trauma books, but, too often, we don’t really know we’re living it until we finally step out of it—and realize how long we’ve been on high alert.

Hypervigilance is more than feeling “on edge”—it’s a psychological state that can reshape our experience of everyday life. Whether we’re navigating trauma, anxiety, caregiving, or the weight of chronic stress, hypervigilance primes our minds and bodies for threat, even when none is present. It’s a legacy of survival, and it can be exhausting. I’ll keep this article out of the political space, but want to acknowledge how many of us have to live our lives in a perpetual state of hypervigilance. Many people, more than others. There is privilege in a lack of hypervigilance, both systemic and personal.

Why we're told to keep gratitude journals (even when we hate them).

Cognitive distortions—are shortcuts our brains use when we’re stressed, overwhelmed, or trying to make sense of uncertainty. They simplify reality, but they do it at a cost: accuracy, nuance, and hope.

Cognitive distortions aren’t random. They tend to cluster around the same themes: safety, control, worth, and belonging. They show up when we need reassurance, when we’re trying to protect ourselves from disappointment, or when we’re searching for certainty in a world that rarely offers it.

Even doing nothing is doing something.

Motivation is one of those words that gets tossed around a lot—especially in recovery, caregiving, and career change conversations. But what does it actually mean? And why does it sometimes feel so slippery?

It’s not just about drive or discipline. Motivation is the internal process that moves us toward action. It’s the “why” behind what we do—or don’t do. And it’s shaped by everything: our values, our nervous systems, our relationships, our histories. It’s not fixed. It’s not moral. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a signal. And like any signal, it can be distorted, drowned out, or misinterpreted.

Lasting change requires more than a myth.

Humans love the idea of a silver bullet—a single, perfect solution that will fix everything. It’s a comforting thought: if we just find the right product, the right habit, the right tweak, life will fall into place. Psychology has some fun names for this mindset: panacea thinking, magical thinking, the quick-fix mentality. Sometimes it shows up as all-or-nothing thinking, where success means total transformation and anything less feels like failure. Other times it’s the illusion of control, the belief that if we micromanage every detail, we can engineer happiness.

These patterns are seductive because they promise certainty and speed. But they ignore complexity—and they set us up for disappointment.

Because ignoring it always works.

Avoidance is one of the most common—and most misunderstood—coping strategies we use to navigate discomfort. It’s not just procrastination or denial. It’s a protective mechanism, often rooted in fear, trauma, or overwhelm. And while it can offer short-term relief, it often comes at the cost of long-term growth, connection, and healing.

In psychological terms, avoidance refers to any behavior we use to escape, delay, or minimize contact with uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, memories, or situations. It’s a central feature of anxiety, trauma responses, and many forms of maladaptive coping. It’s also what I experience every time I think about mourning the loss of my mother. My therapist has actually told me to schedule time to mourn. I think I’ll put it off a little longer.

I get it. I've been there. I'm there again.

When I was laid off in September, I was at home in my office. My one-to-one had started via Microsoft Teams and I saw two heads on the screen—one was my supervisor, the other was our HR partner. I said five words out loud the whole meeting: “Oh, shit. This is it.” Then I went on mute and typed what I needed to say as I volumelessly cried. I even attached the report I was going to go through with my supervisor, because I really just wanted them to have it and I’d crammed to get it done. But then I kind of lost the plot of the meeting. Things went a little fuzzy.

This again. The same spiral I’d experienced before of abject terror coupled with relief and sadness. My ego wasn’t as tied to it this time, because I’d already worked a lot on separating myself from my job after our last fairly devastating reorg. But I was still floored.

When martyrdom doesn't even come with a participation trophy.

The Heaven’s Reward Fallacy is a cognitive distortion where someone believes that self-sacrifice and hard work will inevitably be rewarded—whether through recognition, relief, or cosmic justice. It’s the mental script that says, “If I just keep doing the right thing, something good will come of it.”

It might sound similar to other cognitive distortions we’ve mentioned—there is a number related cognitive distortions that share similar themes of unrealistic expectations, misplaced fairness, or distorted cause-and-effect thinking. We’ve already talked about personalization, but here are some others to look into:

Learning to be wise at any age.

When I first started treatment for my eating disorder, I cried in a way I can only describe as machine-gun crying. Loud. Percussive. Relentless. It was like my body had been holding in decades of emotion and finally found the release valve. I wasn’t raised to be emotional. I didn’t even know what emotions were, really. I had to use an emotions wheel in therapy just to point to what I might be feeling. Turns out, someone who’s been overweight her whole life feels a lot of anger. And a lot of sadness. So much sadness.

That’s when I was introduced to the concept of Wise Mind in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). It was a revelation.

I guess this is my life now.

One of the most common cognitive distortions is all-or-nothing thinking—the belief that things are either entirely good or entirely bad, success or failure, worthy or worthless. It’s the mental habit of seeing life in extremes, without room for nuance, complexity, or growth.

Understanding the fear of not enough.

Scarcity is more than a lack of resources—it’s a psychological experience that can shape how we think, feel, and behave. Whether it’s time, money, love, or opportunity, the perception that something essential is missing can narrow our focus, heighten stress, and drive us toward survival-based behaviors that may not serve us in the long run.

I'm getting good at being laid off.

Building mastery is a therapeutic concept rooted in dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), where it serves as a key emotion regulation skill. It involves engaging in activities—big or small—that foster a sense of competence and control, especially during times of emotional distress or uncertainty. The goal isn’t perfection or productivity for its own sake, but rather intentional action that reinforces personal capability.

What might be the most important skill. Ever.

As a foundation for much of what we talk about when remapping our neural pathways, I want to dive into the concepts of cognitive biases, distortions, and fact-checking. A cognitive bias is a subconscious, systematic tendency in thinking that skews how we interpret information and make judgments, while a cognitive distortion is a habitual, inaccurate thought pattern that reinforces negative emotions or beliefs. For our purposes, I’m going to lump them together quite a bit, because we’re making broad strokes here.

When everything feels like it's about you--or, me, really.

One of the most common cognitive distortions is personalization—the belief that we are the cause of external events, especially negative ones. It’s the mental habit of assuming responsibility or blame for things outside our control.