Thank you very much. Thank you for having me so I really like the talk that Stephanie gave talking about the niche because this is something that that we do we have our own niche and Let me just start by talking a little bit about myself so you can actually know who I am what I do So you can just call me Eric my Polish name is Arkadiusz don't even attempt that that's why I've been Eric for the past decade or so Certain name is the same. So just Eric good enough So don't follow whatever I say just blindly or anyone else for that matter Do your own research be very critical and thinking whatever it's being presented just because someone is on stage like me doesn't mean I know shit sometimes I don't which is going to be probably proven later so We are a small team of around 10 people and we come from all of these countries on and or work with people from these countries This is a picture from World Camp Jakarta this year and was great So we were able to actually bring some of our team and those are the foreign Indonesian guys who work with us We we were able to bring them to the word camp to actually sponsor it and we're very happy That was I believe our first the first work comes We actually were able to sponsor because for the first couple of years of our niche It was hard man Like that hard Sometimes it was a printed photo because we didn't have phones I know that buddy, but yeah, it was bad. So um Our product peep. So you can you can Google that it's a social networking plugin for WordPress and we do that But I'm not gonna go into details of that just want to talk about the business in general so this actually started as a side project we came from Joomla world and Peep so we were kind of forced to go into WordPress So one time at the point at one time my boss came to me On Monday, it's like, um, hi Eric. So you've been working with Joomla for like five years now So today you start on WordPress. I don't know WordPress figure it out That was it. So there was a there still is an extension for Joomla called Joom social Some of you may know it or may have heard about it. So peep so pretty much does the same thing But it's for WordPress. It's a bigger market share. It's a bigger community It's a better community if I dare say so myself But the first couple of years were really hard to break into that WordPress Niche to be able to find clients to be able to market it properly the big competitors like body press I think ultimate member although they're not hundred percent covered in the same features we did have very hard time breaking breaking into the market and the previous owner of the company treated peep so kind of like a side project again and Finally she decided to kind of drop everything retire So me and Matt we actually took over the company We took over the project and when we took it over this was our state We were losing money, but we cut down costs. We actually were forced to To have people work part-time for us for like a better part of a year Just to kind of break even on everything, but it actually did work out pretty well So I'm here. I can talk to you guys and right now we're thinking about the verse fine and actually trying to do So so just talking about general business Building so what do you need you need the website?  Sometimes you're using your own software, but whenever you're using Third-party software very rarely. It's a hundred percent matching features. Sometimes you want to sell plugins online or sell your software online, but The features are just not there not the ones that you need specifically for your business so what you end up with is Well, you have a problem This is what happens you have a problem But problems are great because you can solve them if you have a problem You know that you can solve it like for example We are using Edd on our website to sell our software and our one of our biggest problems was that we were selling licenses and People can do upgrades on those licenses, but this is what Edd offers for you So you have one button like a link hidden somewhere in the account and it's just there and people don't see it They have no idea that they can actually upgrade their license after made the purchase, right? So they don't know how should they know so our problem was you know Do that? So possible solutions I kind of had fun with this So let's start with the first one so we can have in-house crap So code it rapidly and poorly That kind of development I think everyone has been there at some point in there like business development Just get it done get it kind of stitched together so it works So it's quick to develop it's relatively cheap because all you need to do is kind of like donate your time To make it work, but it's very hard to maintain. It's impossible to package to sell to anyone It'll get you there, but you know, you may not really survive You will sleep every night and if you hack the code directly of any plug-in theme or whatever You know, you cannot do updates because it will override whatever you did So you kind of stuck with it and you have to reapply the hack after every update and then you like run down So you keep ending up doing the same crap all over over again The other thing is so you can have the third party development probably already rebranding that yo So you can have a budget from ranging from one dollar to one million dollars per hour there's really like no limit for third-party developers and You can pay you have to pay to maintain it because if I come to a third-party developer. Hey, so I have this problem Can you fix it for me? He's gonna be like, yeah, sure. Here's the quote. Yeah, okay So let's do that and after a month I need to do some updates or whatever, but you have to pay again And you have to pay again and you have no control or very little control over the quality of the code Over the extensibility of the code you have like pretty much Nothing and whatever you want to do you have to end up, you know Paying for it sometimes more than it's actually worth it and just you know, say it's very risky because there was a mark guy Who also was a third-party developer at some point? So, you know, you might end up kind of having a great idea for your solution Higher developer and it doesn't matter if the guys from the US Some people say that Indian developers turn out great Some people say people from Bangladesh are not the best some people say Poland, whatever it doesn't matter Third-party developer, you will always have these kind of risks So then you can do the good In-house development which is gloriously outstanding opportunity dude. It will not be fast It just just won't it's gonna you have to treat it as I would say regular product development because It's gonna be more expensive you will need more than kind of one guy stitching everything together to make it work It's gonna, but it's gonna be worth it because when you have a very Nicely written piece of code you can package it easily You don't have to be worried that it's gonna explode. You don't have to worry about Supporting it that much. You don't have to worry about Third-party incompatibilities or something else breaking your stuff or your stuff breaking something else and When you apply it on your own website, you can actually sleep better because you know That no automatic update is gonna break your stuff and then in the middle of the night Your whole business kind of crashes for a couple of hours and some of us cannot really afford that So it but this kind of development is suitable only for when your company can actually afford it I can tell you that from experience when you're comfortable with it because when you're kind of starting and you have the Bowl of rice with a picture of a chicken next to it, then you're kind of just want to make it work You're not really worried about a third-party Or extra development needs that you know to package someone you're just trying to focus on the niche that Stephanie described so well to actually make some money And the other way to go is to go open source So sometimes other users really can excite so it's either cheap or free You can open up your software if you have an idea for something put it on github put it on githlab you can build a community behind it and Have people have fun with the idea the code contribute It's not gonna cost you pretty much anything except for your time again And if you open it, you know sharing is caring but the other risk of this approach is kind of abandon where because We've all seen plugins which we're doing very well at some point But they were free everyone's using them 80,000 50,000 100,000 stalls, but then they were not updated for two years It's a liability So you need to also keep that kind of approach in mind and that's why we Believe like as a company and everything you should be actually paid for your work Because when you are paid for your work You do that work when you treat it as a side project you're gonna have a baby change something in your life You're just gonna leave it.  So we made We made the custom software and we actually hacked EDD and everything to make it look good to actually push People into upgrading their licenses. They're already clients. They're all this spending money They already know you're doing good job You know, they have money so they might as well pay you more. Why not? But we really do need that proof of concept. So this is this is what we created So right now as you remember the little link that you had in EDD right now we can do this so you have a pop-up And so in that plug-in I'm not gonna share the details of it if you want you're gonna do it after the presentation Just so we have a pop-up. So when you visit a website, let's say you purchased a license on Monday We can configure it so that when you see when you enter the website like after a week You can see the pop-up showing once twice three times You can decide to show it after a week after eight days 180 days wherever number of days the pop-up is gonna show of course since it's WordPress and it's very well coded you can actually Style it however you want as well. It's very easy templating. We do have the Widgets the blocks this is a widget So you can have You know, did you know you can custom you can customize the message you can customize the look and feel of it You can template however you want and it's one click to upgrade the license So you click on the upgrade takes you to the cart applies everything and it's just a checkout process And you already have that on your websites Ah We also added the Blocks and the shortcuts so that you can put those messages into your regular blog posts So you have a blog post announcing. Oh, there's a new update to peep sale coming out But did you know that you can upgrade your license? You send we send out emails to people. Hey, there's a new version. The email is very simple There's a new version. You should see the change look you should upgrade today They go to the website they read the change look and all the announcements and then they get this but you can upgrade your license It's kind of in line all in their face, but it's very subtle in the sense of it flows very well and Clients do upgrade way more way more than they used to because they didn't in the past to be honest But with this approach we can actually we can actually make money from from that From that product So why and when to do it You really don't have much to lose because you really don't if you have a proof proof of concept like I said if you have a Your own need like it started for us with that little link But we hacked and stitched everything together. We saw that the leads are coming to us People are upgrading their licenses people are coming to us and not saying in support Like how can I upgrade the license or something? They just they just do it. It's in their face they don't have a problem with it and That works for us. We thought okay We don't want to spend more time and money and work hours on Like keeping Edd hacked enough so that's kind of works for us So we decided to do it well the good approach so you can package it and you can if there's a problem Just install it update the plugin. It's good plus It's very easy to maintain and if you already have a client base like we do with peep. So we have our clients who are willing to pay money most of them are also Businesses so they have their own communities. They're using our software. They're using Edd Some of them are using work commerce, but those who are using Edd we can target them. They already know us So it's like hey, would you like to grow your business more is it like licensing related? This is a very very niche market. Don't get me wrong. It's very niche, but people will buy it and they do So this for us which started peep so itself started as a side project that grew and then from that side project We have another one and this is being marketed not on the peep. So website. It's totally separate project speaking and kind of relating to Stephanie's presentation so Do a different website? Make it branded differently. You can say that this website is a part of peep. So dot-com or peep. So corporation Whatever however you want to phrase that so that people know that okay It's not like randomly so it's linked to your project, but it's linked to your project. It's not the main Kind of target so you don't want to end up as the website that she actually showed in the beginning right in her presentation And of course you need to have a proof of concept because if you don't if you just have an idea It's in my opinion It's a bad choice to step out of that niche and kind of diversify too much because if you lose your focus you're gonna end up doing the 50 different things at the same time and You're not gonna go anywhere with it. So you need to be very comfortable with the idea that you have and These are some of the very famous Side projects like Twitter. It was a side project for the guys They just needed I mean to express themselves And it ended up being one of the biggest social networking platforms on the planet everyone's heard of it I'm pretty sure like 99% of you guys have a Twitter account Absumo this guy he was working for men.com. He saw the need for it and he just created it and was a side project of his Same with github. These are all the side projects buffer, Slack, Twitch All side projects and these are one of the biggest companies right now in the IT industry they just start from people who have a problem and People who want to fill in a small niche But they don't really want to you know, break their focus And the final thought for us that this is something that we really want to stick with when it comes to our company Yeah But you know if you do it like that you kind of sleep well don't you and Consider this in IT and the IT industry you have a big turnover in some of the companies developers come and go Designers come and go it's easier for them when the code is Documented when the code is tested when the code is actually written well with some standards That's why we do pay attention to standards and Matt has for lack of a better term such an OCD when it comes to code That that yeah, it's actually drives me not sometimes But he does keep everything in check and it's very easy for a new people because we did Start hiring new people. It's very easy for them to just like kind of jump on board to see what's going on Okay, everything is well documented. Just move on work. You don't have to spend months of research trying to kind of Break everything down and reverse engineer. What's going on? What's this function doing? So doing it like that kind of kind of works for us And I suggest that you all kind of consider doing the same or a similar approach That's a thank you. And if you guys have any questions I welcome them I'd like to ask how do you carry out support for your customers for example We don't really do custom work Because we believe that that we would rather focus on a product that we have and If we did so do some custom work But it's always in line of clients need a feature and they're willing to pay for it a feature that we could add to the code Base and kind of like, you know, it goes to the mainstream product That's what we can do if they want to speed up a development of a certain feature then yeah That's that's something that we would do and prioritize for money but The whole client base ended up ends up Profitane from it and the same the same way just to kind of add on top we did Like like with peep so we did like a lot of plugins for it But we started we feel like we want to give back to the community because like a free plugin You can buy add-ons on top of it, but after some time like we already managed to kind of Take the paid plugins and put them into the free peep so base So that people more people and the free the free product can benefit from it more So that after some time we kind of like decide, okay This is a great feature to just add to the free product give back to the community to people to just have yeah, but Custom code we don't really do in that sense of like random projects It's not sustainable in our way, and it's not what we do We okay, so if there's a conflict with our plug-in right Yeah, so You come to us you have a website There's a conflict if it we investigate it hundred percent if it's a problem of our plug-in we fix it If it's a problem problem the third party plug-in our solution Then we tell do you'd like you know you gotta go to those guys because we cannot really fix third-party stuff That's not really what we do and this is not the software that we're responsible for Welcome So I have a question so what kind of site projects that actually work for you you guys Love site projects are some of the site projects Just like you build it along the lineup. What do you do or you build it? It's so peep. So is our flagship kind of main product and way to profit and just recently like in there Few two three months, but we're not pushing it too much We created a side project and a site different website different everything with different accounts Everything it's totally separate, but it's kind of like made by by our in-house guys, right? But it's marketed completely completely separately. We don't put everything on one website It's just it doesn't work like that. Of course when like email goes to the clients Hey, but you know we also have this project. So it's kind of marketed in that way, but it's not being like all put together Right now to be honest we don't do too much marketing for the site project because we think that it's a great solution But it's too nishi and we don't feel comfortable enough yet to kind of step out from the very comfortable peep. So peep so let's call it bad But we are getting to the point like I mentioned we're hiring more people when we get to the point we can actually Spare like one two three people to actually work exclusively on that and the site project Then yeah, then we'll do more marketing and everything else, but it needs to mature more for us You know doing a separate marketing for both or No, it's it's separate. It's separate Yeah, it would be completely separate because there's you cannot really put those are to the two different products Even though the platform is the same. I wouldn't put them, you know together Okay, we have questions Hi Yeah So so Matt since we are co-owners 50-50 he was working full-time You know 16 hours a day kind of thing And we had four developers in Indonesia So we kind of took over everything with the team. So we had four developers in Indonesia one developer in Poland at the time one admin in Argentina But we had to cut them to like part-time they were all working four hours a day So so it was like the bare minimum so that they didn't have to look for our job because we know that it was growing But it wasn't growing fast enough To support that but once we we got to the point like everyone got raises full-time and whatnot. So but it needed to be Yeah, we didn't have any extra funding or nothing. We're actually bleeding money And Everyone was back full-time well for after a year I would say Yeah, and but just to just to kind of finish up when we were taking over the company There was a problem of Edd on the website and that was probably the result of some some hacking a very dirty one and some of the reporting Because of the previous owner had few different businesses online. So the reporting for Edd for Pipsa was showing numbers But those numbers were fake. There was like one-third too much of what actually ended up in the bank account So we took over the company thinking oh, it's profitable. We're actually like breaking even and now not so much And then the rise in chicken pictures, you know In the next room there's gonna be a talk on


This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation. We're going to return to talking about vulnerabilities. And this is a topic we've covered before, but, you know, I don't seem to be able to say enough about it, so we're going to talk some more about it. We're going to define what vulnerabilities are. And, you know, I expand the definition more than what Linehan did in dialectical behavior therapy, because I think there are a lot of other resources or vulnerabilities out there. Sorry, I'm trying to read two things at once. Anyhow, we're going to identify some of the most common vulnerabilities as I define them. So we're going to go beyond sleep and nutrition, and we're going to look at environmental vulnerabilities, et cetera. There are effects and ways to present them. So why do we care? Vulnerabilities are situations or things that make it more difficult to deal with life on life's terms, leading to depression, anxiety, stress, anger, dysphoric moods. You know, we'll just kind of put it under that big ol' umbrella. And make it easier for you to either overreact or get stuck. And when I say overreact, you know, I don't want people to take that as negatively as it sounds. It emotionally dysregulate might be a more clinical term to use, but it takes people and instead of getting upset about it at a level of a one or a two, it puts them at a six.  So vulnerabilities are things we want to look at because most of them are really mitigatable. If not preventable, we can mitigate a lot of them. I mean, if you've got an infinite home, for example, you may not be able to prevent lack of sleep because that's just the way it works. But you can mitigate it. So when, you know, sleep when the baby sleeps or whatever the case may be, it works differently for different people. So we can look at ways to help people minimize their sleep deprivation until the child is sleeping through the night and then they can, you know, not worry about it as much anymore. Depression occurs if people feel hopeless and helpless. So think about it, you know, if you have a loss, of course you may feel hopeless and helpless and you go through the grieving process, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Okay, we can't prevent all losses. So we know that we're going to feel depression occasionally, but people who feel anxious all the time, imagine just always waiting for that other shoe to drop. Imagine being in a position where you just couldn't relax, you couldn't rest or you were angry all the time and everywhere you looked, somebody ticked you off and you just didn't feel like there was any hope for things getting better. You didn't have any faith in other people or the world anymore. This is where depression starts setting in. So if you think about it that way, you can see how anxiety and depression and anger and depression kind of shake hands a lot. You know, it's not uncommon to see the two of them together. Anxiety and anger, as I've said before, are representative of the fight or fight or fight reaction. So when people feel threatened, then they're either going to react with fight or flee depending on their temperament and whether they believe that it's something that they can take to fight and they'd win or they need to get out of there. So anxiety and anger happen when people feel powerless or out of control because generally that's what a threat means.  Why am I going through all these definitions in such great detail? Because it's important for clients to understand that mood disorders and vulnerabilities kind of go hand in hand. And I want them to see how being vulnerable can lead to emotional dysphoria or dysregulation. Addictive behaviors often increase when people feel a need to escape because of stress, anxiety, depression, or physical pain. So we want to look at that. And I'm not saying everybody who uses alcohol or opiates or whatever when they're in pain, you know, emotional pain or physical pain are going to become addicted. No, you know, there are lots of people who drink socially and don't have a problem with it. There are lots of people who take opiates and, you know, three days or whatever. And then they have pills left over and they're like, I don't know what to do with these things. So it's important to recognize that use does not translate to addiction. Addiction happens when the brain starts getting tolerant and the body starts developing a dependence on that drug. And then when the person's not using, they have difficulty feeling okay. So then they want to use again. And that's the beginning of addiction. So individual vulnerabilities, we're going to start out with the physical ones because these are the most obvious and sometimes the easiest to address. And please feel free to, you know, chime in your two cents about interventions that you've used to help patients deal with any of these things. Some of them are out of our scope of practice. So we refer out, but there are also times like with nutrition and exercise that we can educate patients and point them in the right direction. So let's start with pain. When people are in pain, they don't sleep well generally. Even if they're taking opiate medication, they're probably not getting quality sleep. They may be sleeping through the night with if they take a painkiller before they go to bed. But it's probably not quality sleep. And without quality sleep, the brain and the neurotransmitters can't rest and rebalance and do everything they need to do. So sleep problems are going to predispose people to being more vulnerable. Think about a time when maybe you had a really bad cold and you couldn't breathe and you didn't sleep most of the night. And you started getting run down. Even when you started feeling better, if you were still exhausted, how did that affect your mood? Were you irritable? Were you more likely to be impatient with people? Were you depressed, unmotivated? I'm describing me, I know. So I don't deal well with sleep deprivation at all. So knowing that, I know that during holidays when I'm sick, you know, I have a reason all the time. Sleep is really crucial to me in order to make sure that I'm kind of at my best. Difficulty concentrating happens when people are in pain.  Now think about the symptoms for depression. Problems, difficulty concentrating, irritable mood. Yeah. Well, pain can cause all these things. So we're wanting to look at that. If people are having difficulty concentrating, how can we help them do that? How can we help them deal with it while they're in pain? Pain is so important, you know, sleep is really important, but it's important to address pain because it impacts sleep. It impacts concentration and productivity, which can make people feel frustrated, which increases their anxiety, which can increase their sense of helplessness. You see where we're going with this. Pain tends to make a lot of people irritable, especially if you've been in pain for a long time. You know, I can deal with most types of pain for a short period of time, but if it's ongoing and, you know, I had a neck injury at one point. And like six weeks and I was going to physical therapy and PT seemed to make the pain worse and it was just frustrating as I'll get out. And it was keeping me from sleeping, which is never a good thing. So all of those things you want to kind of take into consideration when you're talking to clients. Why is it important to do a pain assessment? If you're in a Jaco accredited facility, then you're familiar with doing pain assessments. When does the pain occur? Quality of the pain? Is it stabbing, shooting, burning, yada, yada? You know, we do all these things. Initially, well, we're not going to go into that right now. The important thing to remember is it's not just about getting medication. It's about identifying if patients have pain and helping them draw the connection between their pain, the effects of their pain and their mood. Now, what can clients do for pain? They can talk to their doctor. They may, if they're on opiate medications or even some like Gabapentin, it may be making them so tired that they're having difficulty functioning and they're feeling more depressed. If their pain medications not working, their doctor may need to switch them up, but may not be a matter of increasing dose, which is not really what we typically hope is going to happen. We hope that they'll find complementary interventions. There are a lot of things, I was doing that research today, acupuncture, massage, physical therapy. There's a lot of things that physical therapy works for. Let's think about what causes pain. You know, there are things like hepatitis that cause pain, and yeah, physical therapy is not going to help with that. Neither is, are a lot of other things. So, that may need medication, but if you have back pain, neck pain, migraines, what's causing that? Sometimes it's a muscle imbalance. If a patient has scoliosis, then the muscles on one side of the back are going to be tighter than the muscles on the other side, so they may spasm if they carry their tension in their back and neck. That can cause pain and cramping, especially if they're under a lot of stress, which can contribute to migraines. So, we want to find out what's causing this pain and where can we intervene? Yoga has been shown to be really helpful, especially for musculoskeletal things that are due to muscle imbalances and muscle tension. So, there are ways, things you can do, hot and cold packs are also really helpful. TENS units, transcutaneous electronic nerve stimulation sounds really scary, but you put little electrode patches on, and it just bombards the nerve with little impulses, which kind of busies it, if you will, so it's quit sending the pain signals. So, there are a lot of non-pharmacological interventions that patients can use. Remembering that sometimes when patients are in pain, their mood is really bad, so we need to address it that way, but sometimes the side effects of the pain medications make the patient depressed, anxious, whatever. So, we may need to deal with medication side effects.  Poor nutrition, and I always say, we don't want clients to necessarily feel like they've got to become nutrition nuts, and if they do great, but if they don't, it's not the end of the world. What we want to make sure is that they're getting a reasonable diet, which if they have three colors on every plate at every meal, probably going to get pretty close to having a reasonable diet, and that doesn't mean three shades of white and brown. So, that's what I encourage them to do instead of getting hung up on counting number of vegetable servings and number of fruit servings, that whole food pyramid thing, because that gets tedious for a lot of people. If they can look at their plate and go, yep, there's three colors, then it's a little bit easier. Obviously, we're not going to make nutrition prescriptions for clients, but we do want to educate them about why good nutrition is important. Good nutrition gives the body the building blocks to recover from injury, keep them from getting sick, and make their happy chemicals. Make those neurotransmitters. Some of your essential amino acids, essential amino acids you have to get from your food. So, some of those essential amino amino acids you need in order to make neurotransmitters, which means you've got to have a good diet. Serotonin, we know is implicated with stress and anxiety management, is made from tryptophan, which is an amino acid. You have to get tryptophan in your diet. Now, the good thing is it's easy to get it. You know, it's in just about every protein out there, but if clients are on like a really high fat, low protein, low carb diet, they may not be getting enough. Chances are they are, but it's important to make sure they're getting good sources of nutrition. Water. Dehydration, 1% of dehydration tends to leave people feeling a little bit foggy. 2% dehydration actually starts to impact memory. So, if you have somebody, again, thinking about the symptoms of depression and even anxiety, irritability, confusion, difficulty concentrating, apathy, it can happen just with significant dehydration. So, encourage clients to drink water. Help them understand that just because you drink 60 ounces of water a day or 64 ounces of water a day, doesn't necessarily mean you're getting enough. Because if you're also drinking a whole pot of coffee, you know, coffee has caffeine, which is a diuretic, then you need more water in your system. And so they need to talk with their doctor and be aware of how much water they actually need. You can drink too much. That's the other thing I tell them, you can drink too much and then wash out all the vitamins and stuff that your body needs. So it's a balancing act, but it's common sense, you know. A nutritionist friend of mine said that you drink your 64 ounces of water, that's great. And then for every eight ounces of caffeinated beverage you drink, drink another eight ounces of water. Which, when I started doing that, I felt like I was going to float away, but she was right. That was a good, you know, rule to kind of think about. Oh, and with three colors on your plate at each meal, much my father's chagrin, condiments don't count. He thought ketchup was a vegetable.  Depending on the person, any medical conditions they have, that might not work for them. But what we just want to do is make sure they're getting a variety of foods. Encourage them to keep a food diary so they can show their physician or they can bring it in. If they keep a food diary, even though we're not making prescriptions about what to eat, they're going to be more cognizant of what they're eating. Sufficient quality sleep. We want to make sure that people realize, you know, we talked about pain on the first slide. Well, let's talk about sleep in general because there's lots of things that cause bad sleep. Drug and alcohol induced sleep is rarely good quality. And this includes antihistamines, which if you look at most of the over-the-counter sleep aids, diphenhydramine, which is benadryl, is the ingredient in an over-the-counter sleep aid. Well, that helps you get to sleep faster. But when you look at or when scientists look at the actual brain waves and the deep sleep, there's less deep sleep. You stay in lighter sleep when that antihistamine is in your system. They've also started to link antihistamine with the development of Alzheimer's late and dementia later in life. So that's another cause for concern if somebody's taking antihistamines on a regular basis, especially like diphenhydramine and the sedating antihistamines. But anyhow, back to sleep. Lack of sleep can produce fogginess, difficulty concentrating, irritability, and overeating. When circadian rhythms are in whack and when we sleep, we help our circadian rhythms get set, that also sets those hormones in our brain that are responsible for hunger and satiation. So if we're not getting enough sleep, if our circadian rhythms are not in balance or in rhythm, then we may tend to overeat. My husband was on patrol for, oh golly, 10, 12 years of his career. And for a lot of it, he was on midnight shift because that's what he loved. But he would get home and he'd work 7P to 7A. He'd get home and on his days off, he wouldn't go to sleep. He'd stay up so he could be with the family on his two days off and then he'd go back to work. So his body never knew, do we sleep when it's dark? Do we sleep when it's light? And he always had just kind of this permanent stage of jet lag. And he never really knew if he was hungry or not. The body can't figure out when it's hungry, when it's sleepy at a certain point. So helping people understand that, that it's really important for maintaining your weight, for maintaining your immunity, as well as maintaining your mood to get good sleep. So encourage people to develop a sleep routine. And any suggestions you want to throw in here, they have blue light filters that you can get for your digital devices.   So anytime you can, if you can go into the color settings in the TV in my bedroom, I have the red color settings turned way up and the blue color settings turned way down to help a little bit because I'm bad about watching TV until late at night. But that can help. Don't take a hot shower right before bath. Most people think hot shower relaxation, that'll help me get sleepy. The body needs to cool down in order to get sleepy. Now, my house tends to be really cool. So if I take a hot shower and I get out, I get cold really fast. So maybe I kind of undo that. But encourage people to sleep when it's cool. Make sure they've got a good sleep environment. Kick the dogs out, kick the cat out. Get rid of any allergens that you can. Have a comfortable mattress and a comfortable pillow. And there are lots of articles people can find online on how to develop an ergonomic sleep situation. So your neck is not all cranked up and you can actually rest more peacefully. Those things can be important. Cut back on caffeine 12 hours before bed. Caffeine stays in your body. What you drink at noon is still going to impact your sleep quality at midnight. Now after I drink caffeine, well, I don't drink it anymore. But when I used to, an hour or two later, you know, I was starting to feel groggy again. So it was time for another hit. But that was just building up more and more in my body. So it was harder for it to get rid of all the stimulant effects so I could get to sleep.  So when I went to bed at eight, the stuff, the caffeine that I had had at three was still full bore in my system. So try to cut back on caffeine 12 hours before your bedtime, but definitely six hours before bedtime. Cutting back on caffeine can cause headaches, irritability, a whole bunch of other stuff. Again, advise clients to do it mindfully, talk with their doctor, yada, yada. But you know, wean down is generally if it's not clinically contraindicated what a lot of clients prefer to do. So they go to three quarters caffeine for a month and then half calf for a month and then, you know, so on and so forth. I drink decaf like it's going out of style, but I don't drink caffeine anymore. So I still have that, you know, drink that I like, but I'm not suffering. Develop a sleep routine, same three things each night.   They'd come home from school, play, eat dinner, take a bath, read a story, go to bed. Their brain kind of knew what to expect. And as soon as they came home and ate dinner, the brain would start going, okay, we're going to be going into that melatonin zone pretty soon. It helps us, even if you don't go to sleep at exactly the same time each night, if you can go to sleep close to the same time and definitely do those three things. So don't make them super involved. For me, I come home, I make dinner. We put all the animals up, I live on a farm, so we got to put everybody to bed. I come home, I play Scrabble, and then I go to sleep. And as soon as I start playing Scrabble, I can feel myself kind of nod and off. So those are things to be aware of and help clients figure out what can they do. That fits in with their lifestyle. I don't want to try to have them upset the apple cart. What can you do that's easy to integrate into your lifestyle? With sleep, you can also have them keep a sleep journal and note how they feel in the morning when they wake up and then throughout the day on days they think they slept well versus not well. With the new sleep trackers on a lot of our fitness devices, they are not really accurate. Basically, they measure tossing and turning versus not tossing and turning, not so much deep and light sleep. But it does give you an idea about how much you tossed and turned all night long when you look at the sleep trackers to figure out, you know, I was asleep for nine hours, but was it restful sleep? And have them compare how they feel on days when they had restful sleep versus days that they didn't have restful sleep. Okay, illness is another vulnerability. I'm not pleasant to be around when I'm sick. My son is even more unpleasant.  So we're back to that whole sleep thing again. You feel exhausted. Your body is trying to help you recoup.  You may have a foggy head difficulty concentrating either from like a sinus infection from lack of sleep or side effects of the medication. I know for me, whenever I take Sudafed, I'm loopy as can be. So knowing how medication affects you, you can't necessarily prevent getting sick, but make sure that you have, you know, do your best to prevent it. None of us wants to get sick, but make sure clients have ways to mitigate this stuff so they don't get as frustrated when they are experiencing illness.  This is how I tend to feel. And you know, I'm not on my A game or I tend to be more irritable and impatient with people. So maybe that's not the time to be volunteering for the PTA or whatever. So helping them make those connections is the big thing with vulnerabilities and then figuring out ways that you can minimize the time you're sick. And when you are sick, how can you make the best out of it? You know, interventions, compassion, have compassion for yourself instead of saying, I need to get up and push through it.  Let your body have a chance to recoup. You also want to have compassion for other people. When you're sick, number one, if you tend to be irritable, it's not going to do well for your relationships.  But you also don't want to get them sick. So be kind to others. And, you know, part of being kind to others not only is not getting them sick, but also not being around them or forcing them to be around you when you're in a really crappy mood. Good nutrition can help keep illness away. We know if we keep our body, you know, charged with the vitamins it needs, the B vitamins and the D vitamins and all that stuff. It does help stave off illnesses, wash hands a lot, helping people, especially during this flu season, making sure my kids understand how viruses and stuff are transmitted and all that sort of stuff has been really important. But help people realize where do you get some of these things from? And there are articles that show that our cell phones are actually have more germs on them for a lot of people than toilet seats.  So I'm like disinfecting my phone constantly now. But those are things that they can think about in order to prevent vulnerabilities. Some people have a lower immune system than other people. I tend to have a really strong one because I've got kids at home and, you know, kids are little germ factories. But, you know, my mother, for example, is not nearly as immune to the stuff as to stuff as she used to be because she's not around children and she's around other people who aren't around a lot of children and mutant bugabugas as we call them in our household. So I'm aware of that and I am cognizant of that fact. And she is too, so she doesn't put herself in situations like if we're getting over a cold, she doesn't like say, oh, hey, I'll come down and help. She's like, oh, give me a call when you get better. Okay, so brain changes. Brain changes can be hereditary. They can be from an accident or they can be the result of addictive behaviors. But anything that makes your brain not optimally functioning, if you will, can predispose you to depression, anxiety, addiction. You know, we know that for a lot of people with mood disorders and other disorders, there's a organic component to it. There is a brain change. There's a brain issue in there. So we want to make sure that people are aware of this. Changes in the structure of the brain have all kinds of effects, including memory, concentration and mood. Helping people recognize what causes these brain changes. If they've had an accident or if they've, you know, even if they've had some sort of trauma, that is going to cause some at least temporary changes in their brain structure. They've shown in soldiers that sometimes trauma can cause permanent changes in brain structure similar to concussive brain injury. Being aware of this, being aware that brain changes can happen. We want to prevent it when at all possible. So preventing addiction, preventing accidents. But if people do have that, helping them understand that, okay, you know, you entered this part of your brain, so your impulse control may not be where it used to be. So let's talk about how to deal with that so it doesn't cause you further problems. For a lot of people, brain changes is a matter of keeping their neurochemicals at optimal levels, which also means taking good care of themselves, getting a good diet, getting enough sleep. And taking medication as they need to to help stabilize those neurochemical levels.  So think about that. How is that going to impact the rest of your day? Especially if you don't get it in check. But when people are angry, then if they're already starting at like level three on anger and something happens that normally would have only mildly irritated them. They're already at a level three. So whatever that is, is going to take them up to a level four or a level five. So they're going to be more likely to be overly angry. They're more going to be more likely to act more react more strongly to something than they probably normally would have. If they're already starting out angry. Same thing with anxiety. When people have a lot of anxiety, they tend to be more irritable. Think fight or flight. You have a person who is already feeling threatened for whatever reason, who is already feeling anxious for whatever reason. And then something else comes along and it's going to intensify that fight or flight reaction. So they may be irritable. They may push other stuff away. I can't deal with one more thing. Depression. People who are depressed have more difficulty dealing with life on life's terms. So again, we want to ask clients when you are feeling this way. What can you do to help yourself improve the next moment and prevent yourself from encountering things that are going to make it worse. When I am under stress at work for some reason. Normally I have my door open unless I'm recording and people can come in and you know whatever I'm happy for people to stop by and say hi. Same thing when I worked at the treatment center. But on days where I was feeling irritable or stressed out for some reason. I knew that my patients fuse was about this long. So I would close the door and everybody was respectful of the fact that when my door was closed. You're really probably only wanted to knock on it if you absolutely needed something because there was probably a reason my door was closed, which there was. So that's one of the ways I mitigated my vulnerabilities when I'm anxious when I'm stressed. In order to prevent me from being rude to somebody or making a rash decision. I keep my door closed so then you know I'm not getting interrupted and it doesn't bother me as much. When you're grieving when you're feeling guilty when you're feeling jealous resentful. Any of these things can make you more likely to react more strongly to adversity that happens and adversity we want to really think about. There's adversity like your boss comes in and writes you up for something that's unpleasant. But then there's also adversity in terms of being in a situation that is counter to your temperament. And thinking about the Kiersey temperament sorter or the Myers Briggs. I tend to be like pegged out on the J. I love my structure. And I don't deal well with interruptions or alterations to my day. I can handle interruptions if I'm planning for them. But if I'm in a situation where I am stressed and I have a lot of interruptions or things get changed at the last minute. It's much harder for me to deal with it than times when I have more energy and I've got I'm not trying to deal with six other things. So helping clients recognize that when they are feeling less than on their A game trying to keep their environment and trying to keep their day flowing in a way that is conducive to their personality and temperament is going to be really important. You know, extroverts tend to talk things out while they're thinking and draw energy from being around other people. So extroverts may want to go out to lunch with a friend, whereas an introvert is going to be even more exhausted by having to be on socially when they're already dealing with whatever is bothering them. So they may need some time to just sit out in the park and feed the pigeons or whatever they do. Encouraging people to know what it is that they need when they're feeling dysphoric to at least not make it worse. When people are having negative motions, it keeps the brain in that fight or flight phase, which takes energy. I mean, your brain is constantly surveilling for anything that might happen that could potentially be another threat. You know, you're already dealing with this threat here. So it's saying, all right, you deal with that and I'll keep a lookout for all the rest of the stuff. Well, that's exhausting. And it also keeps you from being able to wind down. It keeps you from being able to get that quality sleep if you're constantly stressed or amped up. It prevents your calming neurotransmitters, your GABA and your serotonin from being excreted. If you're on alert, then your body's not going to say, Hey, let's give you some chillax kind of neurotransmitters. It's going to say we need to keep the norepinephrine going so we have more focus and more alertness and we can keep an eye on everything that's going on. The glutamate, all those things are going to be up your excitatory neurotransmitters. So when people are having negative emotions, have them develop a list that they keep with them of five things they can do to deal with those negative emotions. Sometimes you can't fix them, you know, when you're angry, sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. So what distress tolerance skills can the person use? Insert positive and rewarding experiences. I'm working with a client right now who's just going through some devastating stuff. And I asked her, When was the last time that you can remember laughing? And she couldn't. And I was like, Okay, so here's what we're going to do this week. You know, you're going to start trying to find something that you can do that can help you feel a little bit happier, at least for an hour. And I gave her some movie recommendations that she might be able to watch with her family. That may not do it for her, but encouraging people to do things that make them happy because if they're happy, you know, if they start laughing, if that's triggered, their body is going to be releasing endorphins, dopamine and more of the relaxing, gaba or serotonin. So that's what we want. So we can artificially kind of force it to happen, just like you can artificially force somebody to excrete stress hormones by scaring them. You can artificially cause yourself to start secreting some happy hormones by doing things that typically make you happy. And, you know, what you would normally feel is probably like a 10. And what you're going to feel when you're kind of forcing yourself to do it may only raise to the level of a six. But that's still a whole lot better than feeling like you're at a one. Encourage people to get plenty of rest, eat a healthy diet and exercise. Exercise helps get rid of, well, it helps increase serotonin levels, which reduces anxiety and reduces depression. Both of those are really awesome. Exercise also helps people take some of that pent up nervous energy, anxiety, anger, and move that energy out. So the body has adrenaline circulating and cortisol circulating in it. And it's going, well, what do I do with all this energy? Well, exercise can help them sort of diffuse some of that, which can help them relax. It can also help release muscle tension that may be keeping them from sleeping. So there's a lot of benefits to exercise. It doesn't have to be super intense, you know, dripping sweat exercise. It can be walking or walking the dog around the block. But any exercise for about 30 minutes is going to help raise serotonin levels and help people feel a little bit better. Attributional styles can also be vulnerabilities. And sometimes, I mean, we have our typical attributional style, and hopefully it's a positive one. But sometimes something can happen or you can get up on the wrong side of the bed and you can be in that mood. We all know what that mood is.  And you're seeing it as a partly cloudy day instead of partly sunny.  All right. Well, when everything is always it adds stress. And when you're looking through the day and all you're seeing is negative stuff that day is probably going to be impactful on your mood and how you react and how you interact with other people and your desire to interact with other people. When you have an internal attributional style, when you're assuming that anything that happens is a reflection on me as a person, then that's also going to add extra stress. So helping people recognize, you know, sometimes when we are in a bad mood, we can be more sensitive and to other people's moods and stuff and sometimes take things a little bit more personally. And you can speculate about all the reasons that people do that. And, you know, there are a lot of theories that, and it depends on the person, but regardless, if somebody is taking everything personally and carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, it's going to carry extra stress. So encourage clients to focus on things as being specific and alterable. You know, looking outside today, it's raining again. And I could be negative about that feeling like it's been raining forever and it's never going to stop. Well, that's kind of doom saying might as well build an arc. But in reality, it's been raining for a couple of days and supposed to stop tomorrow. So focusing on it as being, this has been a really bad week for the weather. Or this has been a really bad week at work instead of my job really sucks. All right, maybe it was a bad week. So let's let's look at the big picture and try to make whatever is bad specific. And so you can figure out number one how to avoid it in the future. But number two, how to fix it because specific and alterable. What parts of this can you fix? Normally, I don't turn all the lights on in the office. I mean, like in the hallway and everything else because it was electricity. But on days when it's this dark outside. Oh, yeah, I turn on all the lights to make it as bright and cheery as possible. So that's how I alter. You know, I can't control the weather, but that's how I alter my environment to be more cheerful. And explore the difference between what makes you a good person versus your skills. So if somebody's in a bad mood and, you know, something bad happens. They get written up at work and they say, I'm a failure. All right.  That is unfortunate. That stinks.  Or does that mean you failed at accomplishing this particular task? So encouraging clients again to take negative stuff and make it specific, identify what they can change. And of the stuff they can't change, how are they going to deal with it? Extremely internal or external locus of control can add extra distress. If you think that destiny controls everything and you've got no chance of changing anything, that's stressful, especially when bad things are happening.  Very disempowering. On the other hand, if you have an extremely internal locus of control, then you think you should be able to change absolutely everything. That means you can control other people. You can control the weather.  Well, neither one is really healthy or realistic. So helping clients look at the middle, helping them recognize when they're in that mindset that they're feeling extremely powerless or they're in that mindset that they're trying to control everything can help them recognize, all right, I need to change my way of thinking or I'm going to set myself up for increasing my own distress. Low self-esteem is another vulnerability. And again, this isn't necessarily perpetual. People don't necessarily have low self-esteem from the time they're born. Sometimes something happens and somebody's self-esteem takes a nosedive. They lose a job, they get divorced, something happens. But when your self-esteem is low, it can predispose you to being more vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and stress. Low self-esteem can cause people to feel helpless or not deserving of love or success. So those are things we can work on with people in counseling, but we do want to help them see the connection between how they feel about themselves and how they feel. Explore what characteristics the client thinks he or she should have but don't and decide if they're important. I would love to be much better at math, but it's not important enough for me to really work at it.  And that's okay. So it's not important to me to work on that thing.  Yeah, I struggle with math. I can muddle my way through and that's about it. But that's okay. I don't feel like I'm, you know, any less good of a person because that's not a good, a strong skill for me. And if you decide that it's important, you know, it's something that you really need, like I would like to be compassionate, but I'm not. Well, how can you work on developing compassion then. So encouraging people to look at their self-esteem, identify who it is they really want to be and start making steps towards that. Negative perceptions and cognitive style. If they see the world as a negative depressing out of control or scary place. It makes everything seem negative and makes people not want to take chances. People who've been through trauma can sometimes get stuck in this area where they're experiencing life in terms of avoidance of threat instead of, you know, life is good and threats going to happen. I'll have to deal with it. They live their life each day just trying to protect themselves. When people see everything as negative and not rewarding, they don't want to do anything. So if they get a promotion and instead of seeing it as, Oh, that's wonderful. I'm going to get so much more money every month and I've got a little more responsibility and that shows people's confidence in me. Instead, they see it as Lord, now I've got more responsibility and I'm going to end up, you know, having to deal with more headaches and I'm, you know, where we go from this. I have a difficult time being negative. But you can see where people might not want to get a promotion if they see all the negatives to something. Using decisional balance exercises can always help people see the positive. But helping them see a balanced view. Encourage them to look for the silver lining when they start to see something as negative. Find the positive. You know, maybe somebody broke up from a relationship. Well, yeah, that's devastating. However, it gives them the opportunity to find somebody who's a better fit. That's not what they're going to want to hear right then, but hopefully we can help nudge them in that direction. And encourage them to look for exceptions.  You know, what in your life is going good right now? This one thing work or your relationship or your health, you know, there may be this one thing that's going really poorly. But are there other things in your life that are going pretty positively? Poor organization and time management can also make people vulnerable. We've all been there where we've had too many things to do. Hopefully we haven't double booked ourselves, but we feel like we're being pulled in 16 different directions. I don't know about you, but I know for me when I feel that way, I tend to again be more irritable, impatient, react more strongly. And when bad things happen, I tend to feel more powerless because I'm just like, I can't do one more thing. I give up. So we want to help people work on organization and time management. Poor time management can lead to people feeling over committed, feeling rushed or harried, or cause them to forget to do things which leads to conflict, which also increases negative moods. Preventing vulnerabilities. I mean, if we're helping people create a recovery lifestyle that manages to set the groundwork for giving them as much energy and happiness as possible. Yeah, stuff's going to happen, but we want them to be as well prepared and have as much reserve energy and extra that they can use in a crisis as possible. So this is why we're talking about pain management, sleep, nutrition, time management, all those things in order to help people be at their very best. Poor communication skills can be a vulnerability. It can impede you from stating your needs, may cause misunderstandings, or can hurt your relationships. And you may have really good communication skills with some people, but then not be able to communicate effectively with your boss or your spouse. And that can make you more vulnerable to feeling like nobody's hearing you. It can make you more vulnerable to getting impatient and angry, because you're not getting your point across. So helping clients develop communication skills. Weak emotional boundaries may leave people feeling overburdened because they're taking on everybody else's bad mood if they walk in. And a lot of times this happens in addicted families, but sometimes in families where they've got someone with a severe and persistent mental illness, the person, it may not have been safe to be happy if they were happy. They had to check in with the identified patient, so to speak, to see how are they doing today, because that tells me what I can do. And they're walking around on eggshells. So we want to help people examine times when it's safe for them to feel how they feel. And when they don't feel safe, what's going on? Because we want them to be able to develop emotional boundaries so they can be in situations and always feel safe to get their needs met. We want them to start paying attention to their wants, needs and feelings instead of just deferring and going, whatever makes the least waves, I'll do it. Because then they're not getting their needs met and eventually they're going to feel, potentially feel resentful, hopeless and helpless. When people need external validation and sometimes we need it. You know, sometimes you're having a really bad moment and you need somebody to go, you know what, you're awesome. And you're just like, oh, thank you. I needed to hear that today. But that need for external validation can make people feel more vulnerable if they're feeling down if they're feeling bad about themselves or maybe they turned in a project and their boss didn't like it. And sent it back and said, this is awful, redo it. And they're feeling down. A word of encouragement can help, but it can also mean that they're feeling helpless. They're feeling inadequate and they're feeling may feel a little bit depressed. So this is when they may need a little external validation. So help clients, number one, be able to give it to themself and take a time out and go, all right, why am I okay? I'm okay as a person. This other thing over here, I didn't do so well, but I'll get better at it. And look at why you need other people to validate you and kind of work on that.  If you feel anxious, then you're going to be more likely to emotionally dysregulate. So encouraging people to look for that and to have people in their circle who do provide emotional support.  But, and that comes from Saturday Night Live for those of you who are way too young to remember it. But anyway, we do want to have those people in our life. We don't want to have to have them telling us that all the time. But you know, every once in a blue moon, it doesn't hurt to let them know. So these are all things that we need to consider when we're helping patients gather their resources and think about getting ready to go out for battle, if you will. You know, the military trains and they do practice drills. Well, in counseling, we do role playing, which is kind of like practice drills. The military identifies any potential obstacles, barriers or things that they may encounter. Well, we try to do that in counseling to we say, what is it that you may encounter that you're going to have to overcome. And let's work on some coping skills and strategies to deal with that. But the military also wants their, their troops to be healthy, well fed, if you can consider an MRE well fed. But they want their troops to be at 100% in order to be able to go out there and be effective. And that's what vulnerability prevention is all about. We want our clients to be able to figure out how to make themselves 100%. So they're ready to go out and take on the battlefield of life, and they've got the energy, the resources, the concentration, everything they need. And so if something happens, not saying it will, but if something happens, they have the resources to deal with it. So think about just for you. And we've talked, we talk a lot about clients. And, but think about for you. What vulnerabilities did you have in the last week? And what impact did that have on you? Because clients aren't going to be motivated to work on this stuff, work on sleep or nutrition, unless they can see a direct benefit to them. You know, why is it that I keep harping on good nutrition or getting enough sunlight? Well, this is why this is how it connects to your mood. This is how it connects, you know, you said to have a rich and meaningful life. You wanted to have a good relationship with your spouse. You wanted to have a good relationship with your kids. You wanted to have a good job and good relationships with your peers and whatever else. And that would help you have a rich and meaningful life, which would help you be happy. Okay, that's great.  So what do we need to do to help you not have that emotional dysphoria? Well, let's look at some of the things that might cause it. And let's, let's, let's look at some of the things that might make it worse and figure out how we can eliminate those things. So you can have those healthy fulfilling relationships and that awesome career and whatever else. So encouraging clients to buy into it. Asking them, you know, if you would have had this new information, what could you have done differently? So if they look back and go, you know what, I did get up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. And if I would have really thought about it, I could have done something to help myself get into a better headspace before I went into my meeting with my boss. Okay, cool. Well, you didn't do it then, but you can do it the next time. So encouraging them to look at how does mindfulness and self awareness of their own vulnerabilities, how can that be used to help them again, not get depressed or anxious. But if they are in a bad mind space, not make things worse. And if they would have, you know, checked their mind space before they went into the meeting with their boss, how would that have changed the outcome? You know, would it have gone a little bit more smoothly or not. And then encourage clients to think about how they can start integrating this knowledge into their routine. And I typically break the vulnerabilities group up into four different groups. We do nutrition one, one day sleep one day. You know, and specific things so it's easier to kind of chunk. And then we talk about small changes. For example, with nutrition, encouraging them to start trying to get three colors on their plate every day. That's one thing that they may be able to consider doing when we talk about sleep, you know, I don't give them that whole litany of stuff and go, okay, now go home and change everything. You know, I say, start out by developing a sleep routine. Let's talk about what that's going to look like for you. Try it for a week. And then let's talk about it. After they have a sleep routine, then we talk about maybe putting on the, the blue light filters on their electronic devices if they need a little bit more help. So gradual changes, they're going to be a lot more enduring than trying to change everything all at once. And it's also a lot easier for clients to integrate stuff into their routine. So think about when you do counseling, if you've done counseling this way for 20 years, or even for two years, you have a rhythm, you know what your responses are.   And for a lot of us, we don't use those new tools, because we have all these new tools, but we haven't got how to integrate them into our practice. So what I suggest, and what works for me, at least, is when I go to a conference or something, and I learn a new tool, I pick one tool that I learned. And I try to focus on using that with clients and, you know, with my family and any other way I can use it for two weeks. And then once I've in the habit of using that, once it actually comes to mind when there's an opportunity to use it, then I add another skill, and then another skill. So I'm not trying to go, Well, I need to use some sort of motivational interviewing skill each each client session. No, I would say I need to use decisional balance exercises, at least once every single day for the next two weeks. And that helps integrate the knowledge into the routine slowly and incrementally addressing vulnerabilities freeze up energy so clients can deal with other stuff that comes their way. Eliminating vulnerabilities like making sure you get plenty of sleep to begin with can help people feel less stressed, exhausted and overwhelmed, because they're fully recharged. Instant vulnerabilities can be the first relapse warning sign. So if people are persistently not getting enough sleep, not eating well, and in a negative frame of mind, for example, those can all be very early warning signs of a depression relapse. Encourage clients to look back over, you know, when they've had episodes before they've had a episode of clinical depression. And three months before that, you know, what was going on, were there any signs that you might be starting to get depressed. They'll probably be able to identify some vulnerabilities and you can say, Okay, that's where we're going to start, you know, let's try to prevent those. But then if you do see those creeping in you see yourself waking up in a negative mood more often than not, you know that you're potentially headed down the road for a depression relapse. And then they can take steps early on to keep it from getting to a full blown clinical depressive episode. Be mindful and encourage clients to be mindful of when they're vulnerable and take positive steps to address it in order to ensure recovery success. It may happen in the middle of the day that they get some bad news or they start getting sleepy and they tend to start getting impatient or whatever. It's important for them to be aware of that and know that, All right, I'm feeling tired or I'm hungry, hungry is another one. My husband has hypoglycemia. And when his blood sugar gets really low, the only time he ever drew a complaint when he was on patrol was when his blood sugar was low. And he's the same way around the house. If his blood sugar is fine, he tends to be really, you know, scary level sometimes. But if his blood sugar is low, he can be a little bit more irritable, which is notable because he's so level most of the time. But he became aware of that and he started carrying stuff in his car. So if he wasn't able to go on his meal break, he could keep his blood sugar up and that kind of solved the problem. So we need to help clients brainstorm solutions like that and be aware of how other things, not just their mood impacts their mood. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe, either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceuse.com slash counselor toolbox. This episode has been brought to you in part by allceuse.com, providing 24-7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006.


What's going on everybody got Kyle and Sean here relating sports cars have been 2023 Bowman Chrome University. This is basketball Say new release yesterday for Chiakai Good luck Chiakai. Let's see. We got let's see some low numbers super Little brawny action really Kate Otten today, huh? I don't hate it. I don't hate it. I saw Laporta was questionable, but I'm sure he'll be playing I'm sure he'll be playing the Franklin super which Franklin super we talking about First our factor is mirror little kind of remember Franklin Benjamin Think so there's Cody Williams Cody Williams insert for Colorado There's a few J. There's a few good guys in here, man. There's not a quality Oh nice one there Freddie Daly owned for volunteers Tennessee on the throwback auto there the prodigal playmakers Insert auto nice one there Tennessee. That's fair. They're moving, but go Bob There's there's a few nice teams still in there. I got chance to 99 got haley van lith Green wave first for LSU. Oh Troy Franklin Troy Franklin. Yeah. Yeah, I got you got you got you Riley Cougal on the sharpshooters and not bad not bad That's okay. I got you trying to remember Franklin. I was thinking first name Franklin I couldn't think anybody Troy Franklin. That's right Benjamin Justin Edwards there Benjamin was the only one that came Mine is true There's a RJ Jones on the first Lighting fast. Yeah, there's a Santiago Vesco V Another insert there for the Vols and first auto is gonna be Tyler Kolek point card for Marquette. I like it shite Swing in that way shite swing in towards the cannons And it's 25 there's for Memphis it's gonna be Javante Taylor Power forward for Memphis on the orange wave 10 to 25 It's one there there's page buckets for Yukon sharp shooter There's a brawny James there's a brawny James You got both you guys you like in this one. You got your team and then you got Josh Allen. So You got a big day today, Jace.  I suppose. There's a Cody Williams Cody Williams for Colorado to 150 on the aqua Refractor Filipowski and RJ Jones He is a lion's man. There's a for the ignite. It's gonna be Ron Holland insert their G leak Ron Holland. Hey, let's go Go shite first Exfractor Trey Norman might give it a watch give it a watch on eBay golf 250 I'm in raw 80 and touchdown the Mahomes and rice rice and touchdown. I don't hate that Shite for the nose. That'll be a 399 Bob a Miller. Go nose green wave is Angel Reese Or sorry purple way of cheese purple Not green purple way Angel Reese a dusty Stromer auto or base for Gonzaga Holy sinning was that a good thing or a bad Zachary? Zachary personal Refractor first Justin Kentucky Not good. Oh man and Justin Edwards for Kentucky. Yeah, seems like not too many of That I've noticed have been really off-centered or anything. Exfractor first Freddy Dalio kind of stinks if a One-to-five is all the base looks pretty good And that'll be Joe on Roberts to 151st for Houston The last pack And Exfractor 80 join the club how to Purdue Easy all righty there that'll do it for you Chiakai one box of Bowman chrome you basketball get that right out to you sir Thank you. Thank you


What's up everybody, Jay-Z over at jacobyscasebricks.com 2019, 20, Panini, Mosaic, Glastor, 1 box break, number 13 random teams just sold out And this is for a chance to win a spot in Pikachu number six of NT basketball chance at the team random for the pelicans and grizzlies So again, the way this break works is First 30 spots will randomize the customer names and teams for the break only And again, no veteran based common ship and then we will randomize only the customer names and And top two names each will win a spot in the pelicans grizzlies team random number six Where you have a one-in-six shot at the pelicans or grizzlies So guys in the last break you guys will see that round of the org. I guess we haven't paid for the quota I guess we've been doing a lot of randomizes here. So our quota pretty much ran out It's gonna refresh in about 40 minutes or 30 minutes. I've already replenished it So that way tomorrow is not bothered with a bit of refresh in about like 40 minutes So in the meantime, I'm just going to use a physical dice roller right here And then we're going to use psychic science. This is our backup website we use So pretty much the same honestly The only thing is that it doesn't tell you how many times I've randomized this You kind of just have to listen to the sound of my voice and the clicks And I'll double check and make sure it's all accurate And then again, we'll do that for the teams and names and the same thing again at the end of the break We'll do it for the customer names here that we will copy and paste in here as well actually Let's do that really quick So again in about 30 minutes we'll be back to normal using round of the org but in the meantime I just got to use this really quick So here you go four five For nine times four to five nine times So here you go nine times here on the customer names five and a four one two three four five six seven eight and nine There you go nine times so Eric Young Andrew And again that was nine times again tells you this time stamp and everything Um, so again nine times down here on the teams five and a four one two three four five six seven eight and nine So Memphis Grizzlies at number one down to the Golden State Warriors and down to 30 So Eric you got the Grizzlies Douglas with the Pacers Ronnie of the Lakers journey with the Pistons Eric with the Nets Ryan with the Kings as well as the Bulls Bucks Matthew with the Magic as well as the Suns Eric with the Spurs Zach with 76ers Eric with the Nix uh journey with the Hawks Kevin with the Rockets John with the Clippers Aaron with the Jess Eric with the Dallas Mavericks Matthew with the Thunder Marco with the T-Wills Matthew with the Cavs Ryan with the Nuggets Douglas with the Celtics John you have the Pelicans Matthew with the Heat Eric with the Blazers Gavin with the Raptors Scott with the Wizards Aaron Billingsley with the Hornets and Andrew with the Golden State Warriors So again, uh, we're just gonna keep it as is no one's in a trader really So we're closing the trader window And let's print and rip this and again Same thing for the next one. We'll use the physical dice again We'll re-roll it randomize customer names and then of course top two names get a spot in Random teams break Or the team random break. Good luck guys. I drew Holiday Nets or R.J. Barrett's Wow, look at that a green rookie Zion Williamson. There you go Heligins with that one that may cover the spot and then right behind a little John Moran base Jimmy Butler Landry Cimet Cream R.J. Yannis Tyler Hero Regan's Bowl Bowl very nice. Not a bad box A lot of big rookies in here Got R.J. Jaws, Ion Hero Little Yannis inserts I'll be top loaded. These are shipping as well. Sweet Now again At least for this break and maybe another one. I got to use physical dice again So this will be for the customer names again. Top two get a spot each in the team random six For 11 times 11 times. Good luck. There you go Good luck. Top two get in 11 times one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 And there you go after 11 times Jernigan at number one and Ryan Shackleton at number two And again top two Names win a spot each In the Pelicans Grizzlies team round of number six one in six shots At the Pelicans or Grizzlies. So congratulations guys you guys are now in jaskiescasebreaks.com


The Forum is a great organization to be a part of because I'm not aware of any young professionals group in Austin that puts together as many meaningful events to talk about the future direction of our city and to interact with, network with, and make plans for the future with Van the Future Forum. I'm involved with the Future Forum because of programming. It's phenomenal. They talk about community events, and by community I mean things at the local level, the city-wide level, the state level, nationwide politics, and then sometimes what's going on in the world. Anytime you can initiate a dialogue amongst a diverse group of people, that's valuable, and so obviously that's how you learn things that you don't know from people who you wouldn't have necessarily interacted with. And I think the events are really designed to do that in many ways. I think every solution has to start with the conversation, and the conversations that happen at the Future Forum are an important part of that, and really frequently between the conversations and the connections that you make at the Future Forum, you leave with an idea of the sorts of actions you can take to make the city a better place. The LBJ Library is here at the University of Texas.  You know, it's a Texas-born president, and he's got Austin roots, and so it's a great asset that way. It's an enriching and educational experience, so yeah, join the Future Forum. If you want to participate in meaningful conversations about Austin's future with wonderful people, then the Future Forum is the perfect place to do that. Definitely join. It's the most phenomenal programming that I know of. The topics are interesting. The speakers are engaging. The camaraderie and the socialization and the networking that goes on afterward is a great benefit. You'll meet all kinds of people in the community, and the food is good too.