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Taking care of your mental health is as important as looking after your physical well-being.

While nervousness or worry is a natural response to a perceived threat, some people may experience chronic levels that can lead to anxiety when coping with life-changing events. If your anxiety level becomes consistent, overwhelming, and disruptive, it may develop into a mental health difficulty. When this happens, it is best to visit a mental health therapist.

Medication is not enough as a treatment to address anxiety and depression, and although psychotherapy has shown to be effective on its own. Studies have proven that clients suffering from severe and complex depression or anxiety that receive a combination of medication and psychotherapy have higher rates of improvement.

There are several ways psychology can be applied in the workplace, from assisting employees who are suffering from stress anxiety to providing mental health counseling services that can help keep the workplace safe.

Leading a team towards success may look easy when you are viewing it externally, with leaders doing the thinking and their members engaging in the grunt work. However, it is not that simple.

Expatriate couples residing in the UAE who wish to adopt children will need to consider adopting from either their home country or another country. The adoption process for expats can still be conducted from the UAE, however, they cannot adopt Emirati children.

Anxiety is one of the most common mental health conditions experienced by adults nowadays. It affects one’s physical, emotional, and mental health in various ways.

Studies have shown that among the most popular leadership styles, transformational leadership is the style that helps increase employee retention.

Feeling housebound and the effects of ‘cabin fever’?

Loneliness is a universal human emotion that is both complex and unique to each individual. While it is commonly misconceived as the act of being in solitude and not having people around, in reality, loneliness is more of a state of mind.

When we are having a difficult time, when we make mistakes, or when things go wrong, it’s familiar for most of us to fall into harsh self-talk and judgment. Statements like “I hate myself” or “Why can’t I ever get things right!” pop in our head, leaving us feeling worse than we already do, right?

Healthy boundaries are an important part of forming one’s identity and are a vital part of maintaining positive mental health and well-being. Common misconceptions, when it comes to setting healthy boundaries, revolve around the idea of being rude, disrespectful, and stubborn.

How does your body respond when you perceive danger or a threat? Often known as a trauma response, it is an initial reaction that is triggered when there is a perception of or an actual threat, like an oncoming car or a growling dog.

With bullying, the idea that usually comes to mind may involve children or teenagers misbehaving, discriminating, and/or harassing one another. Bullying commonly involves a power imbalance and includes behaviors that are unwanted, threatening, humiliating, harmful, aggressive, offensive, and/or intimidating. These can be both verbal and physical. Bullying can be thought of as a mechanism used to re-take control and proclaim dominance that an individual may have felt they lost at some point in their lives. Bullies usually target those who may seem smaller, weaker, younger, or more vulnerable than themselves.

The concept of leadership is quite simple: a leader is one that aims to motivate and guide others to achieve an agreed objective. However, when we consider the diversity of leaders, it starts to become a little more complicated. Immediately we start to notice vast differences in how each person leads.

The term ‘self-care’ is something many of us have heard time and time again, and with the widespread of pop-psychology, it is usually accompanied by bubble baths, spa days, and massages. While all these are very enjoyable activities, authentic self-care spans far beyond just enjoyment.

Have you noticed the culture of overworking? Some people think that working overtime equates to being hardworking. That those sending out reports or making calls out of working hours are sacrificing their personal time and seem to be dedicated employees. But when has this become true? Does overworking actually achieve what we think it does?

While it may be well known that aspects of work can cause stress, less is known about ways to effectively relieve it. Whether it’s a new job, a promotion, tight deadlines, or uncooperative colleagues, everyone has aspects of their worklife that stress them out. In such times, it is important to manage thoughts and feelings in a way that helps rejuvenate, rather than compound what we are already experiencing.

A common recurring question within the work environment is ‘why do some people thrive and succeed in times of difficulty and others do not?’. Although there is no one right answer or characteristic of a person that guarantees organizational success, a skill that seems to significantly contribute is resilience.

Similar to one’s personal life, an individual’s work-life exposes them to people with different personalities, dispositions, and temperaments. However, in a work setting, the option to disengage with someone with opposing values and/or opinions may not be available.

Assertiveness is a concept often associated with misconceptions involving aggression and arguing. Factually, assertiveness entails the effective and honest communication of one’s needs, wants, feelings, beliefs, and opinions without disrespecting those of the other person.

The question that seems to persist when it comes to intelligence is which aspect of it is more important in terms of predicting life success – emotional intelligence (EI) or intelligence quotient (IQ).

With understanding stress, a good place to start is to ask what purpose it serves. Stress is our body’s natural protective instinct in response to a perceived threat. It activates our fight, flight, freeze or fawn system, getting us ready to either evade or encounter danger. Stress can be defined as the degree to which we feel overwhelmed or unable to cope as a result of pressures that are unmanageable.

Last week on the HRIC Blog, we looked at the best way to communicate with those who struggle with mental illnesses. From reflective listening to compassionate expressing, we looked at best practices and practicing empathy.

Throughout this month we’ve talked about how myths about mental health feed into the formation of stereotypes. Last week, we discussed the most common stereotypes about depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder.

In this week’s post, we’ll be looking the stigmas specific to the most common mental illnesses. This includes depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder. Many of the stigmas associated with these mental illnesses work to dismiss the legitimacy and severity of the conditions

Last week, we looked at some of the major social stigmas surrounding mental illnesses and the stigmatic behavior that accompanies them. This week, we’ll dive deeper into two of the specific types of social stigmas: religious stigmas and cultural stigmas.

This month on the HRIC Blog, we’ll be looking at the various types of stigmas that have long been associated with mental illnesses, treatments. In the first two weeks

Our interactions on social media platforms, particularly with ill-informed mental health-related posts, are direct endorsements of the content of those posts.

Social media websites such as Tumblr and Instagram are very beneficial to users as one of their primary functions is to allow users to curate, collect, and share creative work

In last week’s blog post, we discussed the negative effects of social media on teenagers, and while most research is devoted to the negative outcomes, there are a number of ways in which social media can be beneficial to teenagers

With the rise of access to smartphones and social media, a significant amount of research has been devoted to the impact of social media usage on teenagers.

One of the most important first steps when seeking therapy is to become aware of the rights you have as a patient. The therapist you decide to work with will always provide you with a copy of your rights along with a confidentiality agreement

Last week, we looked at how fasting for long periods of time could potentially be a trigger for people who are at risk of developing an eating disorder.

There are many theories that connect positive mental and physical well being to exercise since exercise is a mood booster. Exercise may provide individuals with a sense of accomplishment and usefulness

The food we eat helps us keep going throughout the day and affects the functioning of our brain, our mood, and our emotions. It impacts our physical and mental health.

This month we will be discussing the different forms of abuse that affect millions of people from all corners of the world. Abuse affects people of all religious, cultural, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.

This week’s blog entry is focusing on domestic abuse and some of the major signs and symptoms of on-going domestic abuse.

Child abuse can take shape in the form of physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and abandonment, and emotional and psychological abuse.

This week we are going to discuss emotional abuse. While many forms of abuse are shown through visible scarring, emotional abuse often leaves scars on your self-worth, confidence, and dignity.

In this post, we will be discussing sexual abuse and the lasting, painful effects on victims, as well as tips on effective recovery methods.

Anyone who has fasted before, be it for a day or a month, can understand the physical and mental struggle that accompanies it. However, individuals who have eating disorders have to face an additional struggle of their own.

It’s August and many of us have had to force ourselves to return to Dubai after a refreshing and detoxing holiday. If you, like us, travelled over 6 hours to return home

If you’ve been caught sneaking a nap at your desk, been petitioning for the addition of nap-pods at the workplace, or just been grumpy at work after a sleepless night

Nightmares occur during the REM (rapid eye movement) cycle of sleep and often result in intense feelings of anxiety, distress, fear, and/or terror. Nightmares typically end up awakening the sleeper and occur towards the end of the night.

The first question to address while talking about lucid dreaming is the obvious: what exactly is it?

The founding members of some of the most prominent psychotherapeutic theories (e.g. Psychoanalytic/dynamic, Adlerian etc.) have formed a general consensus that the style of parenting adults take on has a profound impact on the development of children as well as into adulthood.

The parenting style and relational experiences a child is exposed to impact the attachment style that the child develops. In this post, we’ll be highlighting the four main attachment styles and the effect of those on children as they grow up.

In some parts of the world, certain disciplining techniques are severely frowned upon whereas in other parts, those same techniques are the go-tos. It goes without saying that physical disciplining techniques are the culprit here.

Here at the Human Relations Institute & Clinics, we get a lot of clients who come in to see a psychology practitioner with the expectation that year-long

Most of us feel stressed and nervous about taking a test. A little nervousness can push us to be attentive and ready for the challenge.

Men’s health, more specifically men’s mental health, is very important. Unlike women, men don’t seek help for life’s challenges – instead believe that they can handle it alone. It’s a silent crisis.

They say our life’s true treasures are the memories we make- the ones where we give others and others give us joy. Our time has become the most valuable resource today, and giving time to children, parents or spouse is often overlooked.

After working hard for long months, who wouldn’t wait impatiently for the holidays? The temptation is big to make our home country our first destination.

The reason resolutions don’t work because we speak of them on New Year’s Eve and we forget them. The following top 8 tips on achieving your goals methof method allows you to be reminded and constantly involved in them.

It’s unusual in that the start of a new year can mean hope and promise and a “restart” for some, and for others it can trigger feelings of sadness, emptiness or anxiety at the perception of a lack of progress or being in an inferior position to the year before. In either of those scenarios, and so many more in between, what is important to understand is that these are perceptions.