feeling Tag

Posts tagged 'feeling'

How Silence Improves Mental Health and Clarity

Quiet reflection showing how silence improves mental health

We live in a world that rarely pauses. Notifications, conversations, responsibilities, and expectations follow us everywhere. In this constant noise, our mental health is often the first thing to suffer.

What many people don’t realize is that one of the most powerful and accessible tools for emotional wellbeing is silence. Research, psychology, and lived experience all point to the same conclusion: silence improves mental health.

Silence is not emptiness. It is a state where the nervous system can settle, emotions can be processed, and clarity can emerge. When external noise fades, the internal world becomes more visible. This is why silence improves mental health not only by reducing stress, but by increasing self-awareness, emotional regulation, and inner stability.

As the final chapter in The Power of Silence series, this article brings everything together. We explore how silence improves mental health, strengthens emotional intelligence, supports decision-making, and helps us reconnect with ourselves in a sustainable, realistic way.

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Mindfulness for Kids: Teaching Children the Gift of Silence

Child practicing mindfulness for kids during a quiet moment by the window

Silence is one of the greatest gifts we can offer our kids, yet it’s also one of the rarest. In a world full of notifications, background chatter, rushing, and constant stimulation, children rarely have the space to hear their own thoughts — or their own hearts. That’s why mindfulness for kids has become such an important tool.

And at the centre of that mindfulness, sits silence.

Silence is more than the absence of noise. It’s a gentle teacher. It teaches kids to slow down, pay attention, and understand themselves. It builds self-regulation, confidence, emotional maturity, and resilience — skills that stay with them for life.

In the silence series, I covered many aspects of the importance of silence in life. In this chapter, we’ll explore mindfulness for kids, why silence is essential for children’s emotional growth, how to introduce it without force, playful ways to help kids enjoy stillness, and simple quiet rituals you can bring into your home.

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It’s Hard to Say “I’m Sorry” When You’re Not

Kids sometimes do things that others don’t like. Sometimes, they break things and even hurt others. It’s important to help them understand what happened, but parents should never force them to say, “I’m sorry”.

I think the idea of saying “sorry” is distorted because of social “expectations” that if someone is hurt, we must have done something to cause it. This makes parents “teach” their kids to say “sorry” even if it comes without actual “sorrow”.

It’s very easy to see it with young children. They take a game away from another kid (sibling), the other kid cries. Immediately, the parents scold them and force them to go to the other kid and say they’re sorry.

This is humiliating. It plants in those kids the idea that saying “sorry” is admitting guilt, even if they don’t think they’re guilty. And it builds up and stays with the kids.

Read It’s Hard to Say “I’m Sorry” When You’re Not »

Negative Emotions: How to Really Help Your Kids Manage Them

As parents, it’s natural for us to want to keep our children from feeling what we perceive as negative emotions. We want to keep them from suffering. But as hard as it is to admit, by doing so, we often do more harm than good.

Most people grow up thinking that our purpose in life is to avoid suffering. But it isn’t!

We aren’t supposed to avoid suffering, we’re supposed to manage it. We should never fight it, or even try to control it. We must live with it and find ways to use it to our advantage.

Read Negative Emotions: How to Really Help Your Kids Manage Them »

How to Vaporize Psychological Pain with Psychological Painkillers

Bronze sculpture of man holding his head

Everyone understands what physical pain is. And the medical world is full of treatments and painkillers to eliminate this pain. But psychological pain is not that well-known and treating it is a bit more challenging.

Physical pain comes from damage to the tissues of the body. Psychological pain is a suffering with no apparent physical origin. You can even say that all the feelings we don’t like – sadness, grief, anger, contempt, frustration, rage, depression, etc. – are forms psychological pain.

Physical pain is often localized, temporary and associated with some harmful or damaging physical trigger. Psychological pain is a more generalized, lasting, unpleasant feeling resulting from an inability of to cope with emotional challenges. But sometimes, it manifests just like physical pain does.

Read How to Vaporize Psychological Pain with Psychological Painkillers »

Turn Your Unhappiness into Personal Growth

I often discuss happiness with my clients. They find it very awkward when I tell them it is possible to find happiness everywhere, including times of unhappiness.

Most people try to avoid unhappiness like the plague. They divide life into happy and unhappy and think they should move towards happy and avoid unhappy. This is good if you think of it as a process and direction, but not if you think of it as something that shrinks you. You see, we can grow from happiness and we can grow from unhappiness.

Trent was a 28-year-old man who worked at a petrol station. He was healthy, made good money, could pick shifts if he wanted to do something in the evening, had time for computer games and had some good friends.

On the surface, you’d think Trent had a very good life, but he didn’t. His friends were all professionals with university degrees, and he still didn’t know what he wanted to do in his life. He told me he’d never known what he wanted to do in his life.

One day, Trent had a weekend away with his friends, and although the time spent together was fantastic, Trent came back very unhappy. This was when he looked for a life coach and found me.

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Men vs. Women: 6 Stereotypical Differences

For many years, I stayed out of the “men vs. women” debate, mainly because of my dad. He is an old man who grew up in a very patriarchal and chauvinistic society, yet is the most admirable example of gender equality.

My dad cooked, took care of the kids, helped us with our did homework, cleaned the house (inside and outside), brushed our hair, did arts and craft and was never ashamed of any of it. He had four daughters and one son and I thought he was fair and equal in his attitude to boys and girls.

In fact, my dad’s behavior cluttered my outlook on life in a way, because whenever I heard someone talking about the stereotypical man, I said, “This is not true, because my dad is different”. Now, I have to admit that I was wrong. There is something true about the stereotypes about men and my dad was the odd one out.

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Stop Verbalizing and Justifying Your Negative Feelings

As a life coach, I teach mindfulness. To me, mindfulness is observation of sensations, thoughts and emotions without judgment. Our conscious mind is in charge of 10% of our actions and our subconscious mind is in charge of 90%. Therefore, mindfulness is a simple and highly effective way to increase our awareness, overcome negative feelings and gain more control over our actions.

One basic tools used to reach high EQ is “Name the feeling”. Researchers have found that when people give a name to a hard feeling they have, their brain decreases the intensity of the feeling. Matthew D. Lieberman, professor of psychology and director of the UCLA Social Cognitive Neuroscience lab, has shown that simply labeling emotions reduced the activity of the amygdala, the brain’s center of emotional responses, which reduced fear. Naming emotions also increased activity in the pre-frontal cortex, the mind’s regulator.

Many people know this concept, but some of them take it too far, because not all verbalizing is healthy for us. Many people believe that if we name the “problem”, we are half-way into solving it. After working with many clients, I can tell you that almost 90% of them know what their problems are, but they are far from solving them.

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How to Keep Negativity Away from You

Girl looking worried while giving the thumbs up

Last week, in Toxic People and Why You Should Stay Away from Them, I wrote about the kinds of people we should stay away from when we feel they are damaging our self-esteem. In this post, I will cover some ways to keep those people away from your heart and minimize their influence on your mind.

The main difficulty we have with energy consumers is that we take their negative influence with us, even when they are not present physically. By taking it with us, we spread the bad vibes to other areas of our life and affect other people in our lives negatively.

Think of this negativity, as a virus that spreads and damages people’s self-esteem. To overcome the virus, you need to find its source and then, make sure it will not spread.

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Toxic People and Why You Should Stay Away from Them

Ronit, Tsoof and Noff on the Great Ocean Road

I think that the people in our life have the potential to help us evolve into better versions of ourselves. On the other hand, toxic people drain us from energy and do not help us move forward. In some ways, they even take us backwards.

When my youngest sister traveled, I made her a journal to capture her experiences and added quotes. One of them was this:

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

– Mark Twain

This quote now hangs on my fridge too.

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