Many people dread the idea of shopping for Christmas gifts, decorating their house for the holidays, and having dinner gatherings with family members. If you are worried you might be the Grinch, don’t be. More people than you know also dread the holidays.

Festive holidays are meant to be joyful. However, studies has shown that stress and anxiety will be heightened especially during the holiday season. Reasons might be due to routines being interrupted – by travel, guests, parties and the holidays themselves. Hence, this can agitate and easily cause distress. Without any intervention, our discomfort for the holiday period may even grow with each passing year. This can have an effect on our overall ability to enjoy ourselves and our impact out sense of happiness. Read more

The holiday seasons are time for festivities, family get-togethers, meeting friends, and just having a good time. With such merry mood and holiday spirits everywhere, some may not realise that there is such a thing as the holiday blues. It’s not an urban legend or a tall tale, it is a real problem that people go through during the holidays, and it can be very serious. It even has a name: seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Read more

Perhaps you’ve heard the term, or you might know someone in a predicament where they made drastic changes to their life and lifestyles. It can be a sudden complete makeover to your appearance, splurging on unnecessary items or self-critical of your life decisions. These might just be one of the many signs of the dreaded midlife crisis. Read more

It is inevitable that most of us will experience loneliness at some point or another. Many may experience it many times in their lives, and many may experience different types of loneliness. Loneliness is usually attributed to the elderly but it also affects young people from the 16 – 24 age group. Read more

It is very likely that what makes you happy is not what makes someone else happy. However, many people assume the habits and desires of other people while looking for their own happiness. This means that despite the things that make us unique as individuals, we tend to follow the trends and take these up as if it could make us as happy as it makes someone else. Read more

Often when asked “Does more money make you happier?”, many people agree that it does. In a metropolitan city of Singapore where cost of living is rising, it is hard to disagree why. We will tend to focus on building up our wealth to achieve that desired standard of living.
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When we are guilty of having done or said something that hurt or inconvenienced people around us, an apology is often offered. However, many people do have problems apologising even when they know they need to. An apology is meant to take responsibility for our actions and ask for forgiveness. In most cases, people are quick to forgive when the apology is sincere. Read more

An apology is an acknowledgement that we caused harm, discomfort, or inconvenience to someone. It is an opportunity to resolve our interpersonal conflicts and interactions. A genuine apology can almost immediately clear anger, ill-feelings, and even solve some measure of distrust. Saying “sorry” is something most children are taught and learn, and should be easy enough for adults to do; but apologising seems to be incredibly difficult for some people. Read more

Guilt is the feeling of having caused harm or inconvenience to someone in some way. Guilt is actually quite important to regulating our social behaviour but some people can suffer from chronic guilt and in some cases, some suffer from unearned guilt.

Unearned guilt is a type of self-inflicted harm that takes responsibility for things that may be completely out of the person’s control. It is a burden that will eventually weigh on the shoulders and eventually will consume the person to such an extent they no longer have any room left to care for themselves.

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Some people may describe guilt as the feeling of having done something wrong, illegal, unethical, criminal or immoral. While guilt may have different explanations and descriptions, it is best described as the feeling of having caused harm or inconvenience to someone in some way. Read more