Need an energy boost, and don’t necessarily need to get it from a can? Try considering these energy drainers and boosters, for more sustained energy.

8 psychological energy drainers/boosters

Drainers:

1. Energy vampires: the people that suck energy from you, and don’t bother replacing it
2. Poor time management: contributes to stress, which drains your energy
3. Poor diet: lots of sugar, caffeine, refined carbohydrates and heavy foods can deplete you mentally. also, not eating periodically throughout the day, including breakfast.
4. Poor or not restful sleep
5. Sedentary lifestyle: not walking, running or engaging in another form of exercise can leave you feeling flat and low on energy.
6. Not taking time out of the day for yourself: even if it’s five or 10 minutes to meditate or to organize your thoughts, when we don’t attend ourselves, and are consumed with attending to others (family, work responsibilities), it can leave you feeling burned out.
7. The news: is usually filled with stories of suffering. Try a news fast, or limiting your time or exposure to TV or Internet news.
8. Anger: learning how to deal effectively with anger, and communicated in a way that it is non-toxic to others, will help to expel it and leave you more available to yourself and others.

Boosters:

1. Nature: taking a walk outside, or on your lunch break can revitalize and reinvigorate you for the rest the day
2. Hanging out with positive people, who can fill you up and rub off positivity on you.
3. Meditation: my preferred method of meditating is mindfulness meditation. There are a lot of good books, podcasts, and other resources on the subject. Try looking into Jon Kabat Zinn and mindfulness-based stress reduction to help.
4. Dumping your worrisome thoughts onto a to do list, into a journal, or onto some thing external from your brain that can help you expel the thoughts that are nagging at you and to help you organize them in a way that you can attend to them later.
5. Yoga: there are plenty of guys doing yoga, and it’s great way to crank up your energy in a short amount of time. Try a class in town, or go with someone you know.
6. Get in touch with your emotions: emotions, especially negative ones, have this way of freezing up and going nowhere when you don’t attend them. They suck up valuable psychic energy and physical energy, so if you can learn to get in touch with them in process then, you’ll free up needed energy for other things.
7. Eating small meals regularly through the day: when your blood sugar is consistent and not spiked, you’ll experience more stable energy through the day. Try eating five or six times throughout the day, drinking plenty of water as ago, and notice if your energy levels stay balanced.
8. Positive self talk: the way that we talk to ourselves is critical to how we deal with the world and with other people. Try validating yourself, talking positively to yourself or generally supporting yourself through your own self talk to improve your positivity in your energy.

There are plenty women in the world. Lots of other women. For a lot of committed guys, this is quite a struggle. Men want their committed relationships, yet their minds, or their behaviors, stray to seek out other people. Some guys troll around online on dating websites, or cheating websites for that matter. Some guys get massages with “happy endings” and justify that as “not cheating”, and other guys carry on full-fledged affairs with one or more women outside of their marriage. Cheating is definitely a spectrum of behaviors, and it can mean different things to different people.

For some guys, who starts to look outside of their relationship or marriage for female gratification, it’s a slippery slope from looking and fantasizing about other women to actually engaging with them and carrying on relationships. I talk with a lot of guys who absolutely thought “I never in a million years thought I’d be doing this.” A lot of guys who are not feeling like they’re getting their needs met in their current relationship, year after year, finally start to seek out gratifying their needs outside of the relationship, when they feel that it got too bad. Others start cheating from the get go.

Learning to deal with other women in the world is a reality. We are certainly sexual beings by nature, and there are plenty of outlets in our everyday lives. But, we are so much more than primitive beings. A lot of what drives us towards seeking out the comforts of other women is not just sex. Again, for many guys, it’s the feeling of not being appreciated or affirmed by their wives or their girlfriends, and they are unconsciously driven towards seeking out those things from other women. For the great majority of men that I speak with, especially the ones that aren’t tuned into their own emotions, it can be hard to verbalize the negative feelings or reasons that drive them into the arms of other women while they’re in a relationship or marriage. Their partners never know because these men don’t know what they need. We are driven just as much emotionally as we are physically, believe it or not.

Other women also serve as ego boosters. They can help you feel good about yourself when you were not feeling good about your own self. They can also help men create these fantasy worlds, kind of surrogate worlds that man can enter when they want to, and then leave when they want to. This “fantasy world” contrasts with the stark reality or unhappiness at home or in their current relationship. It’s easy to not deal with the problems at home when you can immerse yourself in a fantasy world, where you have another woman validating you, stroking your ego, and making you feel affirmed, special, and sexually satisfied. It’s hard to not be in touch with the reality, especially when you’re creating good cover for your indiscretions.

Really getting in touch with your values, and seeing how your behaviors are aligned with, or maligned with, your value system is one way to start to choose the kinds of behaviors that you really want to be engaging in. If seeking out other women is not aligned with your value system, and nurturing your marriage and your family are, you can see how the behaviors are then maligned with your value system. The more you can align your behaviors with your chosen values, the more in harmony you can live, and a greater amount of happiness you can experience. The behaviors may have short term gratification, but don’t meet the long-term needs, which are more aligned with one’s values.

Again, understanding the reasons that drive you to seek out simulation or affirmation from other women is totally important. For a lot of guys who don’t know what drives them, learning to understand the reasons and the mechanisms that drive them to meet other women are very important. Do you want to seek out sex solely? Do you want your ego to be stroked? Do you need affection, attention, or appreciation from another woman? Do you feel inferior with women, and are trying to attract the attention of women to compensate? Do you want to have your cake and eat it too?

Basically, learning to get in touch with these things is going to help sharpen your attention and start to help you clarify those things that are most important to you. For many guys, seeking out the simulation and satisfaction from other women is more of a way out, or a fantasy world, or a way to get their needs met somewhere else. Many times, it’s not quite how one could go about getting their needs met directly, and learning to appropriately communicate those things will make you a stronger man.

There’s no greater saboteur than ourselves. Others may make life difficult for us, but it’s often ourselves that hinder our own selves from getting what we want in life. From getting the right job, to improving the relationship we’ve got, we constantly undermine ourselves and impede our forward progress into getting our needs met.

1. Fear: often times, fear is a more powerful motivator than anything else. When we’re afraid, of either failure or of success, we devise strategies to get in our own way. For example, a lot of guys need affirmation or validation from their wives or girlfriends, yet are too afraid to speak up and get it. They turn to other women outside of the relationship where it’ll be safer to get affirmed or validated, thus eventually undermining their existing relationship when the other partner find out.
2. Stress: Stress management is a difficult thing to employ. We’re busy people living busy lives. Too often, getting the right sleep, eating right or just generally taking good care of ourselves get sidelined. When we’re stressed, our tolerance thresholds are lower, and we’re more immune to poor mental health, anger, interpersonal conflict and physical ailment. Maintaining your well being and keeping stress under control are essential to not undermining yourself. Keeping a positive outlook and good mental health are ways you can promote yourself, and not get in your own way.
3. Making the Wrong Choices: Either out of impulsivity, or just making decisions that aren’t in alignment with our long term goals and life vision, making poor choices undermines our forward progress. Taking a job because it pays better, but may not provide the kind of work you love, could eventually pan out to be a poor choice. Keeping friends who use you instead of give to you may be another. Making clear, solid decisions is based on what you value for your life: do you value your work to be personally meaningful? Do you value mutually giving and reciprocal relationships?
4. Not finding resources or support: The world is interconnected, and there are things you can’t do alone. If you’re impartial to asking for help from others, it may be hurting you. Everyone needs help. Whether you need to find better ways to network with others for professional purposes, need counseling for a personal problem, or want to start dating again and need some help, asking for help is
5. Worrying about what others think: I recently shot a two minute video about how to stop worrying about what others think. When we fall into this kind of thinking, we give other people power over our lives and decisions. I think when we worry about what others think, our mental energies are distracted, when they could be used to help us help ourselves instead. Worry a little less about what others think, and you might find you have available energy to improve your own life.
6. Falling into acts of anger: Anger in and of itself is not harmful – it’s what you do with it that creates problems. Usually, we fall into anger and end up reacting, whether it’s alienating friends or family, or getting angry on the job, anger is a force that, if left uncontrolled, can leave us undermining our own chances of success. It’s a huge impediment to good relationship building. Learning how to deal most effectively with anger, and learning how to harness it, communicate it and make it work for you is no easy task, but it’s something that could go go from a liability to an asset in your life if you know how to use anger effectively.

The traditional way to making decisions may be slightly outdated. For men, we’re used to making quick decisions based on fact, reason, and experience. We make decisions everyday, and when those decisions prove correct, it reinforces our sense of being smart and in control. But, what if there are decisions we just can’t make with our heads, like whether to stay or go in a bad relationship, or how to learn to connect emotionally with our partner?

No Guts, No Glory

Learning to “tune in” to that “gut feeling” is difficult, because what’s happening is that you’re tuning into emotions. Emotions are not logical, and men get hung up on logic to get out of difficult situations. When your gut (whether that’s your actual stomach, heart or some other place in your body), starts “glowing” and trying to communicate to you, do you listen, or tend to ignore it? Try listening to it, and try to suspend “rationality” for a minute or two. What would happen if you actually acted on what your gut was trying to tell you?

The Brain and the Gut

Researchers at the Centre for Organizational Strategy, Learning and Change at Leeds University Business School have the science to back it up. They conclude that intuition is the brain pulling on our previous experiences and external cues to make a decision, but the decision is largely unconscious and below our awareness.  What we’re left with, and what we then experience, is our awareness of a general feeling that something is right or wrong.

Missed Opportunities, or Not?

When you don’t tune into your gut, you may be making decisions you’ll later regret. Sometimes, we look back on decisions we should have made, “only if we’d have listened to our gut.” But sometimes, there are time you may not want to listen to your gut. In “High Fidelity”, John Cusack said “Should I bolt every time I get that feeling in my gut when I meet someone new? Well, I’ve been listening to my gut since I was 14 years old, and frankly speaking, I’ve come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains”.

Some decisions are better left to “gut feelings”; others, not so much. I think developing your gut intuition, and being able to reference it when it’s good for you, makes sense: you have both your rational mind and intuitive gut both working for you at the same time. You get the combined awareness of both.

The end of the year is a great time to step back from the whirlwind of work, home and life expectations, and take a keen look at how the year went.

What I like to do at the end of the year is sit down and reflect on 7 life domains, gauging what worked, and what needed improvement, in each area. I do this in December, and take an hour or so to type out my answers.

From year to year, I look back and find a record of my life from year to year, and see where I’ve challenged myself. It’s interesting to have a complete picture after several years of doing this.

Here are the life domains I traditionally use for self-assesment from year to year:

1. Relationships with Others
2. Relationship with Self
3. Money
4. Mental Health
5. Health + Wellness
6. Spirit
7. Hobbies and Interests

I find that I’m able to have an honest conversation with myself to see where I shined, and where I could have spent more time and energy focusing, as to improve on those things next year.

I invite you to try this exercise out. As to accurately gauge your level of progress, it might be helpful to get some feedback from those close to you, especially when it comes to the “Relationships with Others” section. Sometimes, we’re not able to fully appreciate how our relationships with others go, unless we know how they feel about them as well.

Personal Values and Happiness

What this self-assessment is designed to do is to close the gap between what we’re actually doing in our day-today lives, and where we want to be (our values). The more closely we can live our values, the more in synch we our with our life, and the happier we can report our lives to be.

Happiness is more than just a function of how well we’re living our values, of course, but it helps gets us there.Each person is different; therefore, each set of values is going to be completely unique from the next person.

Take an hour out one weekend morning in December, grab a cup of coffee, and write or type out your responses. Put some thought into your responses, and be honest to yourself.

Here are some possible suggestions to think about when you start your self-assessment, based on each category:

1. Relationships with Others

• Which relationships have you felt successful at this past year? Why?
• Which relationships do you think could use more of your attention and energy?
• Pick two people close to you. In what ways would they characterize your relationship with them, both good and bad?
• If you could choose, which is one relationship you would like to see improve? What is one thing that you could do in the next year, on a ongoing basis, to reinvest in that relationship?
• Do you have unfinished business with someone or more than one person? What would it take to help bring some closure to you? A phone conversation? An apology?

2. Relationship with Self

• How would you rate the relationship with yourself over the past year?
• In what ways do you find yourself critical of yourself, or not feeling good enough or inferior? Explain.
• How can you choose one way to help yourself feel better about yourself? Elaborate.
• How do you deal with your needs that go unmet? Do you get angry? Or do you withdraw? How can you make a commitment in 2012 to change that behavioral pattern and communicate your needs?
• Do you know what your needs are? Many guys don’t. Take 5 minutes and look at what you really need from others, and learn to make clear for yourself those needs.

3. Money

• What were some successes and areas of improvement in terms of your financial situation this year?
• Where did you feel most comfortable with money this year? Most uncomfortable? Explain.
• Were your successful in your money goals? Did you meet certain milestones for income, savings, retirement savings?
• How did you discuss money this year with your partner? What could change for you around the conversations you have with your significant other?
• What problems did money bring you this year?
• What would you like to change about your relationship with money in 2012?

4. Mental Health

• Overall, how would you rate your level of mental health from 1-10 in the past year (“1” being most unhappy; “10” being extremely happy)? What would need to change in the new year for that number to rise?
• What three things did you do this year to contribute to your positive mental health? Exercise? Be with friends? Converse?
• What two things consistently trigger a negative mood or negative emotions in you from others?
• What can you identify to work on in 2012 to contribute to a better overall mental health, including diet, relationships, lifestyle, exercise, counseling, hobbies, time with family, friends, etc.

5. Health + Wellness

• Overall, how would you rate your level of physical health from 1-10 in the past year (“1” being unhealthy; “10” being very healthy)? What would need to change in the new year for that number to rise?
• What stopped you from taking control of your health this year?
• List two excuses that prevented your activity towards greater health.
• What would 2012’s physical health outlook be like, as different from this year’s?
• What successes can you celebrate around your health and well being?
• What limited you physically (e.g. injury, illness, disease) from achieving your physical and health goals?

6. Spirit

• Did you engage in things to fill your spirit in the last year? What were they?
• How many opportunities did you “commune with nature” in 2011? What were those experiences like?
• Is spiritual engagement important to you? Why?
• What got in your way of filling your spiritual self?
• How can you make time for regular spiritual engagement in the new year (if this is important to you; e.g. yoga, meditation, chi gung, church, spiritual reading, nature, etc.)

7. Hobbies and Interests

• What did you do in 2011 for fun that brought you happiness and a sense of fulfillment?
• What have you been putting off that you’d like to engage in during the new year? Learning a new language? Playing guitar? Urban farming?
• What prevented you from engaging in your hobby this year – time? money? laziness?

These questions are intended to stoke the mental fires a bit, so please, come up with your own questions and ideas for your self-assessment. This is just for you, and honesty and self-disclosure will help you most here. Good luck, and I hope this exercise can help you change what’s not working in your life in 2012.

Depression, or the more common “blues”, affects men when they don’t even know they’re depressed. Dealing with loss of interest in the usual things, fatigue, hopelessness, despair, and other symptoms of depression can hinder your forward progress, and in some ways debilitate men.

The problem with men who are suffering from depression is that, often times, they don’t know they’re depressed and don’t know how to ask for help. The stigma of getting help sometimes prevents them from feeling better, and so they don’t seek out a doctor or a therapist.

There are immediate things that you can do to help feel less depressed, even if you’re on the fence about getting professional help.

1. Admit there’s a problem: unless you come to terms with the fact that you may be suffering from depression, nothing’s ever going to change. Talk with a loved one, like a family member or spouse, about the possibility that you’re depressed, and stay open to the process of seeking help.
2. Try mild to moderate exercise: a light, regular exercise is known to alleviate some symptoms of depression, and the vitamin D you’ll get from the sun’s rays can help stave off some of those depressed feelings.
3. Develop a meditation practice: there are lots of types of forms of meditation to choose from, but the one that I like best for you health and healing is mindfulness meditation. Developing a regular practice of five, 10, or even 20 min. of sitting meditation a day over the course of time can directly would rewire the brain in ways that promote happiness. Mindfulness meditation can help you deal with those irrational, stuck beliefs that drive depression, so if you haven’t meditating mindfully, considerate. There are a number of good books and CDs on the topic, so check Amazon.com or your local library.
4. Watch what you’re eating and drinking: stimulants such as caffeine or depressants such as alcohol can directly affect your mood, as well as your body. For some, too much sugar for refined carbohydrates (think white flour products, potatoes and white rice) can leave your blood sugar on a roller coaster ride, and when you crash, your mood plummets. Consider omega-3 fatty acids to promote better mood, and seek out unrefined carbohydrates, good fats and proteins, and lots of fruits and vegetables. Food is definitely mood, even for the most carnivorous man.
5. Talk it out: even if you’re not interested in coming through the counseling door to talk, there are plenty of people in your life that you care about you and want to help you get better. Take a risk, and reach out. You may be surprised that they’re willing to want help you or listen to you. Don’t fall into possible false thinking that you’re alone, or that nobody cares, or that you don’t want to burden anyone with your problems.
6. Sit with negative emotions: it may sound contrary to feeling better, but it works. When you can sit with and hold a negative emotion – the physical emotion in your body – it will often dull or diminish in size. Too much of depression is a swirling of negative thoughts with negative emotions, which leaves us frozen in the depression. When depression goes “cognitive,” or stays in your head, you disconnect from the felt sense of it in your boddy effectively disembodying yourself. You can work your way through the negative emotion if you sit with it. Try it for a minute or two when it comes up.
7. Seek out professional help: whether it’s your family doctor or a psychiatrist for depression medication and monitoring, or talk therapy with a professional counselor or therapist, seeking out professional help works where others close to you can’t. In the case of counseling, it’s often in a neutral, third party environment. Sometimes, your friends and family want the best for you, yet may be part of the problem. A trained counselor can help you sort out your feelings, and get to the root of your suffering.

Depression is not a life sentence. Sometimes, with the right help and attention, it’s effects can be greatly minimized. Do what you can for yourself, and get the support you need. When depression or the blues are dragging you down, it’s tough, but there is hope and help, and all it takes is for you to ask.

Making a decision is hard enough. Having the wrench of guilt thrown into your machinery while you’re making a decision is even worse. Many times, were not even aware of the guilt that we carry, and it operates beneath our consciousness and controls our thoughts, feelings and decision-making skills. When we indulge in our guilt, we are generally not making the right decisions for us, or what’s in our best interest as individuals.

When we try to adhere to other people’s desires of us, whether it’s family, friends, or our significant other, we sometimes get lost in trying to both please them and ourselves. The friction that’s created is where guilt lies. Guilt is more about “should” or “have to,” rather than “wanting to.”

Guilt is corrosive. When we let it fester, it eats us up inside. It stops our better judgment of how best to live our own lives. I think guilt is more related to people pleasing, and when we: the people pleasing, we lose our own voice.

What we call ‘guilt’ is usually representative of a blade within us, between pleasing some outside person or entity and ourselves. The more we can learn to tune into what we really want, the more will find happiness, contentment and confidence. We’re certainly not going to find those things if we endlessly tried to attend to or appease others, or try to do their agenda. Ultimately, will fail, and fall victim to addictive people pleasing.

Ask yourself: “what is it that I really want, if I can cut away trying to always please others?”. if you didn’t have to deal with guilt, what would your certain outcome or decision actually be? Would it looked different than how you’re used to doing it? Are you prepared for that outcome?

If we actually take the risk of listening to ourselves and what we truly want, and not others, what are the risks? usually, there is fear or panic about letting others down, or doing the opposite of what others want from us. When we grow up, we often develop guilt from interacting with our parents. They usually have a certain agenda for us, and we usually just learned to absorb it. As kids, we never really considered doing things our own way, or if we did, it was usually in a defiant or flippant way.

I think the first way to successfully deal with guilt is to start to recognize what it is that you actually want. What would your relationship look like if you really wanted it to be free of guilt? Would your friendships change? would you end up dropping friends who you didn’t feel guilty around?

On the other end, sometimes guilt is flared up by others manipulative tendencies. Manipulation and guilt are bedfellows. Where there is manipulation, there’s often guilt. if you’re feeling manipulated by someone close, it’s important to start to understand that dynamic in your relationship, and start to address it head-on. If you allow yourself to be manipulated, the end product will probably be guilt. And guilt is extremely corrosive to the soul.

New! Affordable Counseling Services in Phoenix – Starting Today! Now only $60 a session!

If you’ve been putting off counseling, and expenses have been an issue these days, we’ve got just the deal for you. And it’s gotten a little better.

Phoenix Men’s Counseling expands it’s service menu to include affordably priced counseling for individuals and couples.

Counseling services will be offered by Trent Leupp, a counseling student intern from Argosy University in Phoenix, under the direct supervision of a licensed professional counselor – yours truly. Sessions are now priced at $60 for a 50-minute counseling session with Trent.

Appointments are currently being set up, and there are a limited amount of bookings available.

New to counseling? Been hesitant to give it a try? This is your opportunity to start to make a real investment in your well-being and your relationships.

Contact Jason at 602.309.0568, or visit us at www.phoenixmenscounseling.com to book an online appointment.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what is takes to be a good man. I think there are plenty of answers out there: from media and culture, to our own preconceptions of what it means to be a man. But what if we truly listened to ourselves and came up with our own answers?

I’ve decided to put together a men’s self-assessment, and included five areas of life that I think are key to developing oneself as a man. Take a couples of minutes out on a break to consider your answers to these life areas.

• Living Your Values
• Do you live by what you believe in? How so?
• Is there a difference between what you believe in and how you practice your life? If yes,
• Being Genuine/Authentic
• Are you truly open and honest about your thoughts, feelings and behaviors to those close to you? If not, how do you prevent or inhibit yourself?
• Are you generally being true with yourself? If not, how are you untrue to yourself?
• Taking Responsibility
• Do you find yourself playing the ‘victim’ to others, or life in general? How?
• Is it hard to “own” your stuff, even if it’s negative, paints you in a negative light, or tarnishes your facade? Why?
• Practicing Self-Respect
• Do you practice regular self care, such as exercise, good nutrition, stress management? If not, what gets in your way?
• Can you keep healthy boundaries with others (i.e. be firm with others by saying ‘no’, not compromising your values, etc.). If not, how are you flexible on your boundaries with others?
• Do you criticize or judge yourself too harshly? What do you get out of this, if you do?
• Navigating Life Balance
• How does your life tip out of balance? What are your “traps” to fall out of balance (i.e. work, kids, etc.)
• Would others in your life consider you to be balanced in your life? What would they say?
• What is one area of your life that begs for your attention, in needing more balance? What is one thing you can do to feed that unattended part of your life?

What answers did you come up with? Were you surprised by any of your answers? It’s hard to take an honest look at ourselves, when life commands our attention, or when our perception of ourselves is filtered through other people.

If you came up with more questions, let those be the starting point to develop your next answers. How can you develop an action plan to be able to improve some of these life areas for yourself? Will it take time, money, energy, other people – what resources will you need to seek out to help you in developing these things?

Taking an honest look at ourselves takes some courage, especially if we’re not in the habit of doing so. Try to make small but incremental changes in developing your awareness. You can’t change what you’re not aware of, so stay open and get others feedback if you choose. All the luck and support to you.

So often, we catch ourselves lost in our thought stream – thinking about our long term plans, or just weekend plans, wondering about past regrets we have, or stressing about things that have yet to come true. But, how well do we live grounded in our own present reality?

It’s quite common to get lost in our memories, hopes, fears, goals and stressors. But, when we lose ourselves in those places, life end us passing us by.

Many men live in the regret of the past – whether that’s dwelling on professional opportunities lost or squandered, women that have gotten away or generally idealizing their pasts in a way that we can’t let go. Often times, when we hold onto the past, intrusive thoughts predominate our thinking, and it’s as if we’re living in a parallel world where we’re not quite available to ourselves and others in the present.

Learning to let go of regret, anger and shame is an important step to letting go of the past. Developing more of a compassionate relationship with yourself means not beating yourself up for not taking that dream job, not actualizing your potential as a star tennis player, or failing in previous relationships. Living in the present moment often entails working through grief as a way to let go of the past, even if the past is so easy to hold on to.

The problem most men face is that they avoid their emotions. In doing this, what happens is that we develop these mental fixations on things in the past or future, and the negative emotions stay stuck and frozen. If you create space to see just how much you’re ruminating on things, people, places, etc., you’ll probably find that you’re avoiding dealing with the emotions that have resulted. Dealing with emotions is hard, especially when they run so deep, but it’s imperative to do so to get unstuck and back into the present moment of your life.

Mindfulness meditation is one way to come to develop more presence and live in the present moment. There are many good books on the subject. Jon Kabat Zinn developed Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR; http://www.mindfullivingprograms.com/whatMBSR.php). Developing a mindfulness meditation practice is helpful to clarifying the mind and learning to detach from one’s thought stream, where suffering lies. It’s not about better avoidance – it’s about being present with everything that arises, including wishful thinking, negative emotions and the pain of our experience of being human.

I personally practice yoga and find it’s a great way to develop more presence and anchor myself in the present moment. There are a number of great yoga studios here in Phoenix, and probably close to your home. Find the yoga style that works best for you, check out different classes from different instructors, and develop a regular routine to experience the best benefits.

Having intimate conversations with those close to you also has the transformative power of change to anchor you back in your present reality. In taking the risk to share fears, hopes, sadness, pain and insecurities with your partner or spouse, a close friend, or a family member, you’ll develop more personal awareness and make contact with those negative emotions in order to expunge them and live more presently.

Lastly, I believe lifestyle has a lot to do with being present – how much sleep you get, if you get regular exercise, how you eat and take care of your body. Optimizing your lifestyle and learning what works best for your body will most definitely help you to get closer access to the present moment. Tune in and listen to your body to see how much sleep you’ll need, when too many stimulants or too much alcohol affects your body, or what foods and supplements will be most beneficial to you maximizing your energy and presence.