What would personal freedom look like for you?

I do a formal, 5-minute mindfulness exercise most mornings (focusing on my breathing). I do informal mindfulness at various times during the day, for example, when eating, brushing my teeth, or taking a break at work. Looking at nature and experiencing it through my senses helps me let go of anything on my mind, like work or current stressors in my life and appreciate my surroundings. When my mind wanders, I bring it back to my immediate experience. You can be mindful of almost any experience, such as walking, driving, doing tasks or chores, or engaging in self-care activities. I also do formal (if it's feasible to meditate for 5 minutes at the time) or informal mindfulness when I find that I'm caught up in a cycle of unhelpful thinking. I would advise you to take up the practice of mindfulness yourself too for three reasons: It can help reduce stress and enhance your sense of well-being. Issues won't go away until they're dealt with. Unless you manage your stressors or ask for help, your problems will continue to cause tension and unhappiness, especially if you engage in the above behaviors. Staying Motivated Staying motivated to keep to your stress management plan might seem like a tall order when you're struggling to cope with life's pressures, and managing stress isn't always a piece of cake. Trying to stay motivated when it feels like nothing works and nothing can be changed can be difficult; When you first start applying stress management methods to your daily life, many of the techniques may be exciting and new, and because they work so effectively, you plan to use them every day, come hell or high water. It's only natural that the novelty of new things tends to wear off. When this becomes the case with managing stress, don't panic. Take a few moments to quietly sit and think about your stress management journey from when you first started to this moment in time. Try and remember what it felt like the first few times you practiced your techniques. Talk to your child and don't hesitate to ask plenty of questions. LOSS OF PRIVACY

Children are impulsive and spontaneous and that can work against them to when it comes to preserving their privacy online. It's not unusual for kids to share information or photos that are embarrassing to themselves or the family without thinking Is this TMI? In addition, they freely give out all sorts of private information--name, birth date, or your credit card number--every time they open a social media account, download an app, or shop online. Start a conversation about keeping private information private and the risks like online identity theft, behavioral marketing, and fraud. Instruct your child to avoid contests, giveaways and questionnaires as these are created to collect personal information. Be sure to turn off the GPS settings on all devices that give away your child's location. Some mobile apps collect personal information, including location, calendar and contacts. To find out what information is collected and how it's shared, scan the app permissions and decide if it's right for your child before he downloads it. We're here for you all day, every day. If this sounds a bit like your mind, good! That's a sign that you have a normal human mind. Of course, it doesn't always broadcast doom and gloom. At times it can be very helpful, and later in the article we'll look at how to use it to our advantage - not with `positive' thinking but with `effective' thinking. But for now, let's face reality: our minds evolved to think negatively! And the bigger and more immediate the challenges we face, the more likely we are to hear `Radio Triple F'. So how can we unhook ourselves? The first step is simply to notice we've been hooked. The second step is to name what's going on. It can help you understand and describe the technique to clients. It can help motivate clients to practice it when you use self-disclosure about the benefits you've experienced.

TECHNIQUES BEFORE INTRODUCING MINDFULNESS Some CBT therapists teach mindfulness as a standalone skill. But we've found that integrating it into CBT treatment is much more effective for clients. Here are important strategies to use with clients before you introduce mindfulness, using depressive rumination as the example: Educate clients about the cognitive model. Examine advantages and disadvantages of rumination versus the advantages and disadvantages of focusing on the present moment (and using alternative skills like problem solving and mindfulness, when needed). Use Socratic questioning to test the accuracy of what they see as the advantages of rumination. Discuss how rumination interferes with their ability to live life according to their values. Were you excited, relieved, or over the moon with joy? How did your life change during that time? How were you coping with your stressors? How did you feel? Keeping in mind what it was like in the beginning, let your memory take you back to the time when the methods started losing their appeal. What was going on in your life at the time? What particular technique became a burden? What was the straw that broke the camel's back? How were you dealing with your tension? Bring your attention back to the present and think about the challenges you're facing. If your son or daughter is active on social networks, set the privacy settings on the accounts yourself and occasionally check to make sure your child hasn't changed them. Educate your child about the consequences of clicking links in emails from unknown senders, opening up web articles that contain viruses, and phishing scams that try to trick people into giving personal information or money.

Also teach your child how to create a strong password. No pets' names or birthdates, please! For the best protection, use a different password on each account. Make sure your child understands that passwords are not to be shared with anyone--not boyfriends, girlfriends and even best friends--for any reason, period. Think back to your teen years and you'll probably be grateful Facearticle didn't exist. We all have at least one thing in our past we'd just as soon erase from our memory. Now, imagine if that memory is forever archived online and someone can pull it up and share it on social media! If your thinking privacy settings will protect your son or daughter, think again. A sense of humour can really help here. For example, we could say: `Aha! Here's Radio Triple F broadcasting again. Or simply `Oops. Hooked again. Often these two steps give us enough defusion from our thoughts for us to re-engage in the world and do what matters. However, we can defuse even further if desired. A third step is to imagine that your mind is a radio, and your thoughts are like a voice coming out through the speakers. You could even hear the thoughts in the voice of your favourite newsreader or sports commentator. Why not try this out right now? Educate clients about how mindfulness can be helpful for their thought process. Have them start the thought process right in session.

Ask them to rate the intensity of their negative emotion. Then guide clients through the mindfulness exercise, for about 5 minutes, while recording it (so they can practice at home). After the mindfulness exercise, use the following strategies: Ask clients to re-rate the intensity of their negative emotion. Guide them in drawing conclusions about the experience (to further modify their dysfunctional beliefs about the thought process). Collaboratively set an Action Plan item, typically practicing the formal mindfulness for about 5 minutes every morning, and then briefly using the strategy as informal mindfulness to disengage from rumination during the day. There are two reasons we want clients to engage in the unhelpful thought process before starting an exercise such as mindfulness of the breath: The exercise can serve as a behavioral experiment to test dysfunctional beliefs--for example: Rumination is uncontrollable. How do you feel? Do you acknowledge that you felt better when you were using certain techniques? What's holding you back now? Would you like to try again? Ask yourself these questions and have an honest conversation with yourself. Tell yourself you can do this and encourage and motivate yourself to get back on track. It's incredible how resilient human beings are, how much we can bear before a load is too heavy, how far we can go before we're too weak, and how much we can give before we're empty and done. We can handle a lot, but we all have our limits. It's important to know what your limits are so that you can push yourself to be the best but never push yourself over the edge. Stress is the most powerful push factor in your life. Nothing on the Internet is ever really private. The reality is they've lost control the moment they clicked share.