I have decided to dedicate a post on Thursday to therapy, and offer you the many tips I have learned on the couch. They will be a good reminder for me, as well, of something small I can concentrate on. Many of them are published in my book, “The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Kit.”
As a runner, I know how important it is to pick a pace and stay consistent. I used to run with a group of 8-minute milers, hoping that their speed would somehow rub off on me. The result? I rarely finished the course because I was out of breath, not to mention the harm I did to my body: tearing muscles and damaging tissue.
The same is true about the work place … and life in general. For three years I’ve been trying to keep up with other bloggers who have profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, who know how to gracefully navigate the social networking world, who scan two dozen RSS feeds a day, and therefore can link back to the major health news stories of the day, who belong to the right professional organizations, and are abreast of appropriate search engine optimization tools that can grow traffic.
But after a few bad reports from my endocrinologist, cardiologist, and psychiatrist … which are just a few of my doctors, I realized that I’m simply not made of the stuff that they are. As a highly sensitive person–the kind of creature who gets a nervous tick every time she hears the word “Twitter”–I require maybe three times the downtime of an average non-highly sensitive person. Too much online chatter is toxic for me.
So I scaled back to my 10-minute mile, to my sometimes embarrassingly poky pace.
It might not win me a Webby Award, but it will keep me from pulling too many muscles.

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