The Alexandria Papers Newsletter #63 | Dr. Alexandria Szeman 8 January 2023
My little Saschie. She doesn’t want me to take down the Christmas lights.
A Journaling Practice to Help You Let Go of Limiting Habits | Mindful
Instead of judging yourself for what you want or what you’re feeling, explore these writing prompts to help you turn toward your experience with greater understanding and self-compassion. Encountering the people, places, and things that activate us out in the real world can feel like too much…
Relief from Chronic Migraine: Medications and Other Treatments
Chronic migraine is defined as a migraine headache that occurs 15 or more days a month, for at least three months. Episodes often last four hours or more. Finding relief from chronic migraine symptoms can be difficult. Explore multiple treatment options here.
New longitudinal research highlights how grave the effects of childhood trauma can be for anxiety and depression | Psychology Post
Childhood trauma is well-known to have adverse effects on mental health into adulthood, but the nuances of these outcomes are not well understood. A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders explores how childhood trauma impacts specific aspects of depression and anxiety over time. …
RAINN Online Hotline
Do you need help dealing with sexual assault, rape, or incest? Call @RAINN ‘s Hotline 800.656.HOPE (4673) to talk to a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area. Don’t feel comfortable talking? Use chat/text instead.
How to Use Journaling to Cope With PTSD | VeryWellMind
Some psychotherapists are now recommending journaling, also called expressive writing, to help people cope with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). If you have PTSD, here’s how journaling can help, as well as how to do it. Journaling is one method of helping people cope…
Minimalism and Hygge: How to Make Your Home Cosy Without Adding Clutter | BalanceThroughSimplicity
Here are some ideas on minimalism and Hygge and how to embrace both whilst enjoying a simpler lifestyle. I’m sharing some tips on how to make your home cosy without adding clutter so you can enjoy feeling warm and safe at home and still stay clutter-free! Autumn is my favourite season.
The best of 2022: the new books I’ve loved this year | TolstoyTherapy
This website started out as a celebration of my love for classic literature. Tolstoy is even in the name! But that said, over the last decade, Tolstoy Therapy has evolved around…
16 Bread Baking Tips Your Grandma Forgot To Tell You | Joybilee Farm
Use these bread baking tips from Grandma and learn how to bake better bread with the perfect rise, chewy, golden crusts, and pillowy soft crumb.
Portrait of the Poet as a Woman
Your second wife calls to say that the children get ill after you bring them home Sunday night it must be something they eat what do I feed them something dreadful? She calls collect when she’s away. If I ask who’s calling she says, This is his wife.
Books by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman
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Filed under #CSA, Books, Cats, chronic pain, Chronic Pain Treatment, hemiplegic migraines, Meditation and MIndfulness, Mental Health, migraine, migraine self-care, Migraine Treatment, Migraine with Aura, Migraine Without Aura, migraines, Newsletters, PTSD, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Violence, The Alexandria Papers Newsletter, Trauma
Tagged as anxiety, baking, baking bread, chronic migraine, depression, journal writing, journaling, migraine, mindfulness, minimalism, poem, poetry, rainn, rainn online hotline
The Alexandria Papers Newsletter #62 | Dr. Alexandria Szeman 1 January 2023
Want to Eat Mindfully? Here are the BASICS | Mindful
Looking to bring mindfulness to the dinner table? Lynn Rossy shares six steps to prime your mind for savoring your next bite-whether it’s chicken nuggets or kale. BASICS is an acronym for a complete set of guidelines that walks you through the mindful eating process from beginning to end.
Migraines: Steps to head off the pain | Mayo Clinic
Migraines cause pain as real as the pain of injuries – with one difference: Healthy habits and simple remedies sometimes stop migraines before they start. By Mayo Clinic Staff Medicine is a proven way to both treat and prevent migraines. But medicine is only part of the story.
Being ‘Miss Independent’ May Not Be As Healthy As You Think | Shape
There’s a lot of cultural celebration around the concept of independence, particularly in the United States. People who can take care of themselves receive praise, and the terms “self-made” and “single-handedly” are markers of true, hard-won success.
Do you need help dealing with
sexual assault,
rape, or incest? Call
@RAINN ‘s Hotline 800.656.HOPE (4673) to talk to a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area. Don’t feel comfortable talking? Use chat/text instead.
7 Daily Habits That’ll Improve Your Mental Health in 2023 | CNET
Making goals for the new year is a ritual we all take part in right after the holidays pass. Maybe this year you’ve made a resolution to get out of debt or devote more time and energy to eating better.
Keeping on with the Reading Trend | Sixty and Me
Since reading is a great pastime for women our age – and for anyone, really – here’s another list that I was able to complete and review. Continuing my search for funny women authors over 50, I stumbled across Jenny by researching her agent for a client of mine.
No Knead Fig and Walnut Bread | Mangia Bedda
This easy no knead fig and walnut bread is fragrant with cinnamon and lightly sweetened with honey. All is you have to do is stir all the ingredients together and forget about it for 6-24 hours. Enjoy slathered with butter or cream cheese for breakfast, as a snack or any time of day!
26 Seriously Useful Baking Tips You’ll Wish You Knew About Sooner | Tasty
To help make your bakes the absolute best.
Holiday (a poem)
“Day followed day, and this and that Seemed to be happening As always, but through it all Already loneliness was seeping.”
Books by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman
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Filed under #CSA, Baking, Books, chronic pain, Chronic Pain Treatment, Cooking, Health and Wellness, hemiplegic migraines, Mental Health, migraine, migraine self-care, Migraine Treatment, Migraine with Aura, Migraine Without Aura, migraines, Newsletters, Trauma
Tagged as baking, baking tips, books, Childhood Sexual abuse, cooking, cooking tips, healing, mental health, migraine, migraines, mindfulness, poem, poetry, trauma
The Alexandria Papers Newsletter #60 | Dr. Alexandria Szeman 4 December 2022
Guided Meditation: Notice How Sadness, Loneliness, and Anger Show Up in Your Body – Mindful
Instead of trying to make difficult emotions change or go away, you can simply tune in to how they show up in your body, and see how they’re always changing on their own. When we’re caught in the throes of an emotion like sadness, loneliness, or anger, shifting our awareness into our body allows us…
Self-Care: The Struggle is Real | Migraine.com
A man with migraine shares how he put his loved ones and responsibilities ahead of his self care when he had episodic attacks.
7 Self-Care Practices Every Migraine Sufferer Should Know
A hangover headache is bad enough, but a full-on, out-of-nowhere migraine attack? What’s worse? If you are a migraine sufferer, no matter how long it lasted, you know what your brain and body can feel like after an episode. You’re tired AF, cranky, and probably feel like crying.
How to Actually, Finally, Truly Set Some Boundaries With Your Family This Holiday Season | WonderMind
If you’re dreading the holidays because they typically come with ~family drama~, I’d like to introduce you to the magical power of setting boundaries with family. You’ve probably scrolled past a TikTok or two about the importance of this powerful thing called a boundary…
Resources for Sexual Assault Survivors | Greatist
We include products we think are useful for our readers. If you buy through links on this page, we may earn a small commission. Here’s our process. Trauma is easier to cope with when you have support, just like a broken bone is easier to set with a cast.
Keeping a Journal Isn’t Lame, It’s Self-Care | YourTango
At one of my very first Scholastic Book Fairs, I begged and pleaded with my mother to get the “Dear America” package. It was one of my favorite book series growing up, and it even came with a hardcover journal so you could add pages when you ran out.
Exercise for Mental Health: 8 Keys to Get and Stay Moving | NAMI
Mental illness has deeply impacted my life. I have experienced the flooding of anxiety and the drowning of depression. I have waged, and won, several battles with postpartum depression and been through loss and grief.
What Can We Learn From A 1794 Novel About Turning Points In Crime Fiction? | CrimeReads
Turning points are incredibly important landmarks in crime fiction. They are the peak or series of peaks we climb to, where everything shifts inside the story. These moments are when we realize nothing is what it seems. Once we reach them, whether it is the climax of the book or an earlier point of…
A Guide to the Essential Regional American Pizza Styles | FoodAndWine
Before the 1950s, most Americans didn’t know what pizza was. Arriving to the U.S. in the late 1800s, it was considered a cheap “ethnic” food, eaten mostly by marginalized Italian Americans in hole-in-the-wall restaurants or on the street.
Top 20 Tips for Food Bloggers | Cookie+Kate
I wish I had some magic secrets or shortcuts to share, but the truth is that food blogging is hard work. I receive questions about the subject fairly often, so I sat down to compile my best tips for food bloggers and ended up with an even twenty.
Books by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman
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Filed under #CSA, Baking, Books, Childhood Sexual Abuse, chronic pain, Chronic Pain Treatment, Cooking, E-books, Health and Wellness, hemiplegic migraines, Mental Health, migraine, migraine self-care, Migraine Treatment, Migraine with Aura, Migraine Without Aura, migraines, PTSD, Rape, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Violence, Trauma
Tagged as baking, books, Childhood Sexual abuse, cooking, crime fiction, mental health, migraine, mindfulness, self-care, trauma
The Alexandria Papers Newsletter #59 | Dr. Alexandria Szeman | 20 November 2022
Oh, my, I’m so anxious for Thanksgiving — read: for all the yummy food — that I said there would be no newsletter this weekend. But it’s a week early. It’s “No newsletter next week” because it’s Thanksgiving in the US, and my kitties and I will be celebrating the holiday weekend by eating turkey and all the usual side dishes, including pumpkin pie with lots of whipped cream. So much whipped cream!
5 Steps to Wind Down and Fall Asleep – Mindful
A bedtime meditation to stop tossing and turning, and get some quality shut-eye. As someone who works every day with patients struggling with insomnia, the most common thing I hear is once the head hits the pillow, the brain doesn’t stop.
Dangerous Gifts for People with Chronic Illnesses (and Gift Ideas to Swap Them With)
I’m a big fan of samples, which makes Christmas gifts or other exchanges a pleasure. I love trying out new textures, sniffing new scents, and figuring out if the latest product on the block is a fad or of true value. Yet, samples might be dangerous gifts for some.
Nadine Burke Harris: How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime
Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain.
10 Ways Minimalism is More Than a Home Decor Trend – The Simplicity Habit
Inside: There are many ways that minimalism is more than a home decor trend. Read on for ten ways it can improve your home, life, and the planet. A guest post by Cora Gold The word “minimalist” is used to describe everything from watch and clothing designs to art and home decor.
10 of the best novels set in nature to escape into the wild – Tolstoy Therapy
A quick note that some of my posts contain Amazon affiliate links. When you buy through these links, I may earn a commission. “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.” Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac Over on Live Wildly, I recently shared my selection of the most…
Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday in the United States, and Thanksgiving 2022 occurs on Thursday, November 24. In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and
Books by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman
Get ebooks at Amazon now:
Filed under #CSA, Baking, Books, Chronic Illness, chronic pain, Cooking, Food, Health and Wellness, hemiplegic migraines, Insomnia, Meditation and MIndfulness, Mental Health, migraine, migraine self-care, Migraine Treatment, Migraine with Aura, Migraine Without Aura, migraines, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Violence, The Alexandria Papers Newsletter, Trauma
Tagged as baking, books, chronic illness, chronic insomnia, chronic migraine, chronic pain, chronic pain self care, cooking, insomnia, insomnia relief, migraine, mindfulness, minimalism, Nadine Burke Harris, newsletter, painsomnia, self-care, Thanksgiving, the alexandria papers newsletter, Tolstoy
The Alexandria Papers Newsletter #58 | Dr. Alexandria Szeman | 13 November 2022
For the past two years — ever since Twitter bought it — I’ve been using Revue to make my weekly newsletters. Unfortunately, Twitter has decided to shut Revue down. So if you think the newsletter looks different this week, you’re right. I’m using a new app to create it.
No newsletter next week. It’s Thanksgiving in the US, and my kitties and I will be celebrating the holiday weekend by eating turkey and all the usual side dishes, including pumpkin pie with lots of whipped cream.
The Transformative Effects of Mindful Self-Compassion – Mindful
Leading experts on mindful self-compassion Drs. Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer share how self-kindness, recognition of our humanity, and mindfulness give us the strength to thrive. An explosion of research into self-compassion over the last decade has shown its benefits for well-being.
Migraine: Symptoms, Causes, Treatment, Triggers, and More
More than just the cause of “really bad headaches,” migraine is a neurological condition that can cause multiple symptoms. While intense, debilitating headaches frequently characterize it, additional symptoms may include: The condition often runs in families and can affect all ages.
Can Epsom Salt Help Anxiety?
Magnesium sulfate bath crystals, more commonly known as Epsom salt, has been used medicinally to treat a wide range of conditions, including muscle aches and pain. In addition to these benefits, research has found that Epsom salt baths may be helpful for some individuals as a natural treatment for…
Grounding Techniques: Exercises for Anxiety, PTSD, & More
Grounding is a practice that can help you pull away from flashbacks, unwanted memories, and negative or challenging emotions. Grounding techniques are exercises that may help you refocus on the present moment to distract yourself from anxious feelings.
Recovering from Rape and Sexual Trauma – HelpGuide.org
Sexual violence is shockingly common in our society. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 1 in 5 women in the U.S. are raped or sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, often by someone they know and trust.
What Is an Existential Crisis?
An existential crisis is the feeling of unease people experience about meaning, choice, and freedom in life. This existential anxiety often causes people to feel that life is inherently pointless and that existence has no meaning. An existential crisis can also lead to feelings of confusion about…
Need Help Finding Mental Health Services? Start Here
We include products we think are useful for our readers. If you buy through links on this page, we may earn a small commission. Here’s our process. Despite the stigma that surrounds conversations on mental health, many people have experienced mental health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Five Magical Realist Novels with Murder Mysteries At Their Center
When I started writing my novel, The Storyteller’s Death, I didn’t plan on putting a murder mystery at its heart. In fact, if you had asked me when I’d first started in this craft if I’d ever write a murder mystery, I would have said, “Oh HELL no! They’re too hard.
Which Superfoods Are Worth It?
We’ve got news for you: technically, there is no such thing as a “superfood.” That’s a term created by the food industry. Many of the so-called superfoods do deliver significant nutritional benefits, but beyond that, there’s nothing magical about them. They certainly don’t have the power to cure or…
Create Your Own Spice Blends, Based on the World’s Cuisine
Each culture is known for its particular use of spices and herbs and learning to make your own version of these blends is a great way to deepen your knowledge of different cuisines, as well as cooking.
Books by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman
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Tagged as anxiety, baking, books, childhood trauma, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, cooking, cptsd, grounding techniques, help.org, magical realist novels, mental health, mental health services, migraine, migraine self-care, mindfulness, murder mysteries, mysteries, post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, rape and sexual abuse resources, self-care, spices, superfoods, trauma
