Wellness is something that we hear doctors, therapists, the media, our parents, really everyone talk about. We know it is important, but we get conflicting advice constantly depending on the agenda of the giver of the advice. How do we really know what is important for us as far as wellness and what isn’t?

Here’s an answer that might drive you crazy. It depends. It depends on who you are as a person. It depends on your background, your body type, the work you do, the interests you have, and I could go on and on. What I can tell you about wellness is that it is important to find wellness in a way that speaks to you and really makes you feel better, rather than trying to follow the latest fad or feeling the pressure of your best friend telling you what is working so well for her.

Here are a few easy tips on how to find more wellness in your life:

1. If it doesn’t make you feel better, don’t do it. And I’m not giving you a free pass on not working out or eating healthy. I’m saying really pay attention to whether any given activity makes you feel better physically, emotionally, and mentally or not. This doesn’t mean we will enjoy every moment of our wellness activities, so it’s important to pay attention to the effects of the activity after it’s completed.
2. Ask yourself how important this activity is to you. Literally on a scale of 1-10, how important is it to you to do what you are doing? This can be a question to ask yourself before going out with friends, cleaning the bathroom, completing a work activity, going to the gym, watching TV, getting on Facebook. If you ask yourself how important is this to me and the answer is a 1 or a 2, don’t do it. The only exception to this is if you care about someone else and they are asking you to do something with them (like visit the in-laws) and it’s a 1 to you but a 10 to them, you might want to suck it up once in a while. Because that 10 to the person you care about makes it more than a 1 to you.
3. Prioritize. And then be flexible in what is a priority. It might be a priority to get that doctors appointment in today, but it might be a priority to work late tomorrow. It might be a priority to go to your kid’s sports event tonight, but maybe it is equally important to stay at home a cook a healthy meal tomorrow.
4. Don’t judge. Yourself or others. If your friends, siblings, parents or co-workers have a different priority, that is fine. Don’t compare yourself. Don’t judge them. And don’t judge yourself. If watching Netflicks is a 10 for you this particular Saturday night, but going out with friends is a 10 for your best friend, both of you should agree to do separate things. Then be happy for each other that you are both able to enjoy the thing you are needing to do.
5. Simplify. Do only what needs to be done, not what others are telling you needs to be done. It is easy to start picking up everyone else’s “shoulds”. Pick up only your own. And be well!

Author: Holly Jedlicka, MSW, LISW-S

I want to remind you that you do have the power to make many choices for yourself and in your own life.  I say this knowing that having control over our choices is the thing that we all desire the most.

In light of choices that are being made for us, I want to say that I’m sorry you feel like you don’t have the choice to safely send your kids to school. I’m sorry you feel like you don’t have the choice of which doctor to go to because your insurance won’t cover you. I’m sorry you don’t have the choice of what to do with your body if you’re a woman. I’m sorry if you are a nonbinary or trans person that has also had your choice about your body taken away. I’m sorry if you made one mistake and now you are sitting behind bars for years especially if you are a person of color. I’m sorry for the choices this country has made and for how it is impacting you. I’m sorry that you feel scared, alone, disempowered. I’m sorry that our answer is to give you more drugs and tell you to make better choices when you can’t even see what choices are in front of you. I’m sorry the world is so unfair to you and I’m sorry that there is so much pain in your life, and that the choices of the people who have the power are making your life even more painful. I’m sorry I can’t change this for you and all that I can do is hold space for you through your suffering, which I commit to continue doing every day.  I don’t always feel like I have the power either, even as a very empowered person.

All that I can do is offer you a safe space and a welcoming space and a space of support for you to make the choices that are right for you. I can offer you a space of no judgment regardless of your decisions, your religion, your race, your sexual orientation, your political beliefs, your gender. I commit to doing that for you for as long as I possibly can, and I commit to continue to give you access to the services that I know you need to the best of my ability, regardless of the decisions that are made by the people who have more power than either of us do. I will continue to be here for you. That is my promise.

Holly Jedlicka, MSW, LISW-S

Here’s what happens in our brain when we are afraid. We are no longer regulated and we are not processing in our thinking brain. We are just reacting, like horses when they get afraid and run away before they stop to see what the potential danger is.

Here’s the problem. Trauma creates neuropathways in our brain that run immediately back into that state even when it isn’t necessary. When anxiety and trauma happen over and over again, we cut deep neuropathways in our brain that becomes our default setting, even when there is nothing dangerous happening. Then this starts to feel normal and we no longer are able to make rational decisions. Be clear. We now have a society absolutely riddled with traumatized brains. This makes it very difficult to navigate safely with each other. We drive cars. We have lots of guns. We have drugs, both legal and illegal. And even those that seem to be thinking rationally, are often just “thinking” along a neuropathway that isn’t filled with truths, just reactions. Then we point fingers and vilify the people who are struggling to make good decisions.

Think of it this way. Think of the scariest event you’ve ever experienced, whether that is something like a car accident or whether you were in a war or whether you had a dangerous adult in your house growing up. Remember how scared you were, the inability to remember the details, the fog, the tunnel vision, the pounding heart. We have people in this state driving cars, carrying weapons, and making decisions in this state of mind every day, and they are the same people we are relying upon to make decisions for us as a whole.

It might be time to think again.

Holly Jedlicka, MSW, LISW-S

Mental health is like physical health. It takes practice to make yourself healthier. You can’t eat potato chips and chocolate all day and expect to have your body be physically healthy. You can’t sit on the couch all day and expect your body to be fit. Likewise you can’t just sit there and expect your anxiety or your sadness or your grief to go away. You have to actively work on it. Some people are predisposed to being depressed or to having anxiety. And it is true that trauma shapes who we are. So you  have to take an active role in helping yourself feel better or it doesn’t get better. We all know that a diet pill doesn’t really work. It’s a temporary fix if it fixes anything at all and it always has side effects. We all know it’s a way of life that makes us healthy. This is the same with our emotional well-being. We don’t get to just to take a pill and expect that we’re going to feel better. Medication is helpful in many circumstances, just like one needs medication for fighting cancer or managing diabetes. However there is no pill that is going to make you feel happy or fulfilled, which is at the root our emotional well-being struggles. We have to stand up and recognize what we really want to be doing with our time, with our energy, and with people that we care about. We can choose to spend our time comparing ourselves to others and we will always fail. Or we can choose to notice the moments in our days that remind us of the fulfilling life that we are leading. This takes effort. It is, I promise you, more fulfilling to cook a healthy meal, clean your house, make your bed, or walk your dog than it is to binge watch Netflix,  scroll on TikTok ,or watch YouTube videos endlessly. I promise you this is not fulfilling you. But it is addictive just like chocolate cake is addictive to me and cigarettes are addictive to many and alcohol effects so many. Don’t be fooled. The people creating these things know it is addictive and are working hard to sell that to us in bigger and bigger ways every day. So the choice about your fulfillment and how you spend your time really is in your hands. What choice are you making?\

Holly Jedlicka, MSW, LISW-S

There is a book called The Five Things We Cannot Change by David Richo. The author adeptly discusses five truths about being human, which are things we often struggle to accept. These five things are: (1) everything changes and ends, (2) things do not always go according to plan, (3) life is not always fair, (4) pain is a part of life, and (5) people are not loving and loyal all the time. 

Let’s spend a minute pondering that first one: everything changes and ends. We can’t have a new beginning without an ending. The end of a job, an era, a relationship, a life, a year, a pandemic. It is a given that things never stay the same. In fact, this is a staple principle for happiness; accepting that tomorrow, or next month, or next year things won’t be exactly as they are today. We will be older, in a different place, wiser, in more pain or less pain. We just don’t know. 

Think about it this way. We’ve all read a really good book or watched a really good series on Netflix that we just don’t want to have come to an end. There is that sense of loss and nostalgia as you close the back cover or watch the credits roll at the end of the last show. Then we have to remind ourselves that we wouldn’t love it so much if it just went on forever. It would lose its sense of novelty and would become mundane. Things are special precisely because they don’t last forever; they all come to some sort of an end.

Which also means there is always a new beginning. There is always the opportunity for something we can’t predict that might be better, or brilliantly different at least, than what we had before. If we are too busy staring at what ended, we fail to see the new beginning. 

Everything changes and ends. When we try to keep it the same, we only find an unsettled sense of desperately trying to hold on to something we cannot control. When we find acceptance of endings and beginning, we find a sense of peace and joy that only comes when we accept that change is a part of everything.

Author: Holly Jedlicka, MSW, LISW-S

The connection between love and pain is deep. In fact, you can’t have one without the other. They are the opposite sides of the same experience. When we love, we feel the pain of leaving, of betrayal, of loss, of death. If we aren’t willing to endure the pain, we don’t get to experience love, either. They come together.

This year has been a time of losses for so many. It causes a pain so deep that it feels “intolerable”. I keep saying that to myself today as we lost Rocky, after losing September just weeks ago. These icons touched the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people. They did this with trust. When we lose them, the pain is intolerable. But here’s the thing; that pit in your stomach, the ache in your heart, the emptiness, the vagus nerve crying out for something that is no longer in a form we can tangibly connect to; all of that is worth the love and the connection that was felt for the years and years before.

When we allow ourselves to feel that pain, and acknowledge that it will change over time, even moment by moment, we are acknowledging the love we felt, and still feel. We understand the incomprehensible concept that our world has fundamentally changed. Then as we move forward, we start to allow the life to take over the death. When a death, or any loss, is fresh we only see the death. When we allow ourselves the time to grieve and give ourselves permission to share our grief with others, we start to slowly remember the life. It is when the death overcomes the life that we get stuck. Unendurably stuck. And this pattern of stuck-ness does not serve us as it has us looking only at what we once had, not what we have in front of us.

The scary part, always, is that we don’t know-and can’t possibly know-what the life in front of us looks like. We have to stay curious about what might happen next. We serve ourselves by feeling the pain of losing one that we’ve loved, and then remembering the life we had with them, and staying curious about what comes after their time with us. It is the way forward.

I hope that everyone who sees this takes the time to actively think about what they loved about the ones they’ve lost. I hope they acknowledge the fear and pain of the loss. And then I hope they allow themselves to be curious about what comes next. For us, and for the ones that have left.

Author: Holly Jedlicka, MSW, LISW-S