Hello fellow voyagers,
I’m Meredith and I created Beautiful Voyager so so long ago in 2015. When I first started it, there were people in my life who thought I was going to ruin my career by talking about my anxiety disorder publicly. Needless to say, there was no such thing as mental health Tik Tok (with its 95 billion views) at the time.
Over the past eight years I have learned so much, yet still feel I am barely scratching the surface of this subject. I write the newsletter to build community, and to affix new ideas into a deeper part of my brain. Thank you for reading, and welcome to new people!
Latest app I’m enjoying
I heard about this app called Mind Window from
on the newsletter and I’ve found it pretty interesting! As Claudia says in the post, “Every day I get six prompts at random times to reflect on what I just thinking about. The app generates a word cloud of my thoughts and tracks my mood and what I most commonly focus my attention on.”What I’ve discovered so far is that it takes a lot of effort for me to tune into what I am thinking about, but over time, it gets easier. The more I can see patterns to my thoughts — e.g. last week I thought about lexapro withdrawal symptoms a ton, but this week, it’s not hitting my radar — the more I can learn to guide my internal discourse in more productive, healthy ways.
As Mary Karr once said, “Your head’s a bad neighborhood: Don’t go there alone, even if you have to stop strangers to ask the way.”
Latest study to catch my eye
Published in the academic magazine Emotion, this study suggests that there is a close relationship between social connectedness and chronic pain due to what is described as a “mechanistic pathway of anxiety.” In other words, people with fewer social connections — or people who maintained their social connections less regularly — experienced higher rates of pain connected to anxiety. Seems counter-intuitive for people with social anxiety, but pushing past fear and building connections to others seems to actually help with chronic pain.
Latest Beautiful Voyager community post
From Living with OCD to Working With It: My journey as Therapist
Latest lighthouse on the Map of Overthinkers
Upcoming Linkedin Live Event with
Join Morra and me in a couple of weeks for a conversation around this juicy topic! Details here.
Final thought
Hope you’re having a good day and don’t forget to take a slow breath or two — your parasympathetic nervous system will thank you for it.
I've been using Mind Window for a few weeks now, and it's AMAZING how much more in control of my thoughts I am and how I'm able to direct them toward the NOW, versus past or future thinking. And when I'm aware of multiple streams of consciousness at the same time! It's magic.