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Kids love it when their parents play with them. Playing with your kids can be a great bonding activity and can help improve your relationship with your child. I often hear from kids in my office that they want their parents to play games with them. It can be fun and connecting for kids to play games with their parents.
There are many board games to choose from and starting with what you already have at home is a great first step. Ask your child what games they want you to play with them. I know life is often busy and finding time to fit in more game or play time with your child may feel like a challenge. Having a regular family game night or setting aside an evening every once in a while can be a great way to schedule in time. If you are looking for new games, here are a few interactive games that are easy to play and have been popular with the kids I work with: Suspend Totika (Can be played with or without the question cards) Jenga Candy Land Feelings in the Wild Matching Game (You can play with as few or as many pairs as you want) You can start small and play with your child for short periods of time. Even 15-20 minutes can be enjoyable, quality time together. Thanks for reading! -Rondale Life can be hard, sometimes exceedingly difficult. It is often during these difficult times that you come to see me. You come in week after week and commit your time and effort to improving yourself, improving your life. I see you sitting across from me and you are working so hard, week after week, to get better, to feel better. Sometimes you feel better one week, sometimes you feel worse. We are not robots and progress is not linear. Yet overall you are making progress because you are learning about yourself, about your life, your loved ones.
You are taking the time to stop your busy life for an hour and check in with yourself, to ask the hard the questions and to look at the things that sometimes feel easier to avoid. Sometimes you can’t see how much progress you are making, but I do. I’m am so proud of you for trying, even when it’s hard, even when it hurts. I see the little things that change over time, I see the efforts that you make. I see you growing even more into the wonderful person you already are. I see you trying so hard and I want you to know: I am proud of you. The holiday season and Christmas can be a great time of year but it can also be an expensive time of year. In fact, on average Americans spent more than $900 on Christmas this year!
In this blog post I’m going to share some resources that can help you stay on track with your money goals. Financial health and education is very important to our mental health and emotional wellness. I have heard from numerous clients worries and stress about money. In fact, financial stress is huge contributor to stress in marriages and relationships. Most of us have heard about the importance of budgeting and tracking our money. But the idea of writing down each individual expense by hand in a notebook or Excel sounds incredibly tedious and time consuming for me. For those of you that do this, I admire your dedication! However, I know that I would not be able to sustain tracking my budget by hand and I would avoid looking at my finances. This would defeat my goal of having more financial awareness and less financial anxiety. A free resource that can help streamline budgeting and tracking expenses is Mint (https://www.mint.com/). It’s completely free and created by the same company that does Quickbooks so we can trust that it’s a reputable and secure program. You can have Mint automatically download your transactions from all of your credit cards and banking accounts and then you can create rules to automatically sort these into easily trackable expenses. For example, if I know that all of my Costco expenses are groceries, I can create a rule for Mint to automatically put all Costco transactions into the grocery category. If there are individual exceptions, I can easily go in and edit this. The program is very user friendly and easy to use and I have found it very helpful to see what my actual spending is each month versus what I think I have spent. How many times have we asked ourselves, Where did all my money go this month? Now you can easily see where it went! You can create budgets for yourself with numerous categories and adjust these budgets as needed. In sum, tracking your money and creating budgets is an important part of financial wellness and finding a program such as Mint that can save you time and energy doing this is key. Another important piece of financial health is education. There are numerous free resources online and a quick Google search can direct you to several sites. One of my favorite sites for financial education is https://www.moneyunder30.com/ . While their marketing is directed to people under age 30, I have found their material educational for all ages and very helpful. Another resource is your bank. Some banks have free educational videos and seminars for their members that can help with skills such as budgeting, money management, buying a home, saving for children's’ college education, investing, and planning for retirement. Some banks even provide free consultation services with a financial planner. For example, one of the local credit unions BECU offers financial education online at https://www.becu.org/members-matter/education. Next time you are at your bank ask them about what financial education services are available to you. I hope you found this information helpful, thanks for reading and Happy New Year! -Rondale One of my specialities is working with children, teens, and adults with anxiety. In this blog post I would like to share one of my favorite resources for helping kids with anxiety. A great book that you can use with your child at home is What to Do When You Worry Too Much: A Kid's Guide to Overcoming Anxiety (What to Do Guides for Kids). This book is recommended for children ages 8 to 12 years old. I often recommend to parents that they get this workbook as a supplement to their child’s therapy and work on it with their child at home in between sessions. The same author, Dr. Dawn Huebner, recently published another anxiety workbook geared towards older children called Outsmarting Worry: An Older Kid's Guide to Managing Anxiety. This is another great workbook to supplement therapy and may be more applicable if your child is older or at a higher reading level. What to Do When You Worry Too Much: A Kid's Guide to Overcoming Anxiety (What to Do Guides for Kids) can help teach your child skills to manage and deal with their anxiety. It is an interactive workbook that allows your child to write, draw, and color throughout the book. It uses relatable metaphors and stories that the kids in my office have found helpful for understanding and dealing with their anxiety. The skills in this book are based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which is an evidenced-based treatment. This means that it has a significant amount of research supporting its effectiveness for helping treat anxiety. To learn more about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for children, check out this article by the Child Mind Institute or this handout from the University of Washington Harborview Medical Center. I hope this was helpful, thanks for reading! In my previous blog post I started a discussion of sleep tips. Here are 6 more tips on improving your sleep quality:
1. Don’t stay in your bed for more than 30 minutes if you can’t sleep. The brain often makes associations between things and you don’t want your brain to start associating your bed with not sleeping. This is one of the reasons why it’s also important not to do other activities in your bed such as work or homework. If you lay in your bed for hours trying to go to sleep and thinking about how you can’t sleep you might start to feel stressed and anxious. Your brain might start associating your bed with stress and not sleeping. This can make the insomnia worse. Instead of laying there, I recommend that you get out of your bed if you still can’t fall asleep after 30 minutes. Try getting out of your bed and doing a light activity, such as reading, sitting or laying on the couch, or light housework such as putting clothes away. You could also try listening to a relaxation or meditation recording such as Insight Timer. When you start to feel sleepy again, try to lay down to go back to sleep. The goal is to teach the brain that bed=sleep. 2. Keep your room dark, minimize outside light coming in, and turn off TV and computer screens. 3. Keep your clock and phone screens turned down or faced away from you. Looking at a clock or phone multiple times a night can cause more stress and anxiety, particularly if you aren’t sleeping. Set an alarm before you go to sleep so you don’t have to worry about checking the time. 4. Keep your room at a cooler temperature for optimal sleep. 5. Minimize alcohol and caffeine use. Limit caffeine to the morning and stop caffeine intake during the afternoon. Consuming caffeine in the late afternoon can keep you up at night and caffeine can stay in your system for up to 12 hours. Limit the amount of alcohol you drink in the evening. Too much can interfere with the quality of your sleep and disrupt your sleep cycle. 6. Use a sleep diary to track sleeping habits and routines before bed. Thanks for reading! I hope this helps! -Rondale Insomnia and difficulty sleeping affect many people. As someone who has personally struggled with insomnia and difficulty sleeping, I know what it’s like to wake up wide awake at 3am and not be able to go back to sleep. It’s an awful feeling laying there awake knowing that I need to get back to sleep and function the next day. Yet getting back to sleep isn’t always as easy as we’d like. I’ve worked with a lot of people that have struggled with this issue and I would like to share my tips and tricks that may help.
1. It’s important to keep a consistent sleep schedule. Going to bed at 3am one night and then trying to sleep at 10pm another night the same week is going to be hard to do and will mess with your natural sleep cycle. Same thing with sleeping in- waking up super early one day and sleeping in several hours later the next is not good for your sleep. What about weekends? Still try to go to bed and wake up at times as close as possible to your normal sleep schedule. (I know life happens and we can’t keep things perfectly the same with our sleep schedules- just try your best and it can make a difference). 2. Use your bed only for sleep and intimacy. Don’t use your bed for eating, working, writing emails, doing work, homework, video games, or watching TV. Try to do these activities in another room. I also don’t recommend using a cell phone in bed, but if you do turn on a blue light filter on your phone. There are free apps for blue light filters. The blue light coming from electronic screens can keep people awake. If you have to do non-sleep activities in your room, sit on the floor, a chair, or a cushion that is not on your bed. This distinction is important for training your brain that your bed is for sleep only. This can help you fall asleep easier and help your brain ease into sleep because it knows its cue that bed=sleep, not bed=sleep+work+school+TV+video games, etc. 3. Practice relaxation. There are tons of free smartphone apps that have been really helpful for myself and for other people I’ve worked with. You can search key terms like “relaxation”, “sleep”, “meditation” or “nature sounds” in Google Play or your Apple store to find these apps. Some of my favorites are Insight Timer and Qi Gong Meditation Relaxation apps. You can listen to one of these apps before bed to help ease into sleep. Just make sure your phone is turned upside down or have the screen off so the light is not facing you and keeping you awake. Another option for those of you that wake up in the middle of the night is to have one of your relaxation recordings or meditations ready to go before you go to sleep. This way if you wake up in the middle of the night, you will just have to hit “play” on your phone and then roll over and try to relax back into sleep- you won’t have to search around on your phone and wake yourself up even more with the stimulation and light on your phone. 4. Use background or white noise. There are several options for this including soft music, nature sounds, white noise machines, and using a fan. I personally use the Sound+Sleep Machine and love it! The sound quality is excellent and it has several options for white noise, background noise, or nature sounds. My favorite is the ocean waves option and it sounds very authentic. The noises are soothing and relaxing and may help ease someone back to sleep if they wake up during the middle of the night. I also like the Sound+Sleep Machine because it can be used as a distress tolerance tool, meaning that someone can listen to it during non-sleep times when upset to help them calm down when anxious or upset. If you prefer just white noise with no nature sounds, the Marpac Dohm-DS All-Natural Sound Machine can be a good option. Another reason to have white or background noise during sleep is to reduce sensitivity to waking up to other noises- such as a housemate getting up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, or traffic noises outside. I hope some of these tips were helpful! Stay tuned for more tips in further blog posts. -Rondale I have been playing tennis on and off for several years and it has often been a significant part of my life. Lately I have been reflecting on how much the game of tennis is connected to mental focus and positive thinking. Tennis is unique in the sense that the game can change at any time. Players can completely reverse the game and comeback to win from a score of "0". There are typically no time-limits so games can last for hours, requiring stamina and mental focus when the player is exhausted mentally and physically. In fact, one of the longest professional tennis matches lasted over 11 hours!
When I play singles, the whole game is up to me. I cannot blame someone else for missing a shot or take a break to let a teammate play for me. I have to stay focused. This requires a lot of mental stamina and I find myself having to practice the same skills I teach my clients. There are times when I want to give up. There are times I want to yell and smash my tennis racket on the ground in frustration and anger. Sometimes I want to cry. Often I struggle with negative thoughts and wonder why I even play at all. I have to work through these negative thoughts and practice positive thinking. I remind myself to focus on one point at a time. One moment at a time. Don't go too far ahead and don't focus on the past. Stay present and play each point as a fresh start. Don't focus on the score, whether I'm ahead or behind because either way it can change. Focus on the current moment. This is one of the things I love about tennis. I am practicing mindfulness and working through my negative thoughts- two things I try to teach my clients. There are moments in everyday life where we can challenge ourselves and build resiliency and mental stamina. One of my ways is through tennis - ask yourself, what are yours? |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2023
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