Working parents have a lot to juggle, and this can create stress. But what we often overlook is that stress has real health consequences. Several weeks ago, I put together a survey* asking working parents about stress and its effects on their health. More than 600 people responded. I filtered out respondents who lived in […]
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I just stumbled across an interesting story about the term ‘nervous breakdown‘ that came out in The New York Times last year. It explains why the term fell out of favor decades ago with psychiatrists, who now prefer labels like ‘anxiety disorder,’ ‘depression,’ or ‘schizophrenia’ when diagnosing patients. But the term ‘nervous breakdown’ is still […]
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Do you compare your insides to other people’s outsides? Most of us do, even though we know better. We’re social creatures. It’s natural to make comparisons. But we rarely get to glimpse other people’s insides. When we make our comparisons, we inevitably wind up comparing how we feel to how other people seem. This may […]
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I recently got an email from a blog reader who said she had been obsessively reading and re-reading my first post, and all the comments that followed it. I wanted to include an excerpt of her email here, but wasn’t able to get in touch with her to get permission. (If you’re out there, my […]
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My first semester in grad school for journalism, more than a decade ago, was a shock. Boom! Right from the beginning we had daily story deadlines. Each of us desperately wanted to prove ourselves to be the next Edward R. Murrow. None of us knew what we were doing. We were awestruck by our professors, […]
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“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” –Mark Twain Most of the stuff on this blog explores the problem of work-life conflict. But I got a lot of compliments about an advice-oriented post I wrote in June, which had some tips for managing extreme stress. Thus encouraged, I’ve put together a sequel. Here are […]
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Several of my friends have been talking about a story that appeared earlier this month in New York Magazine called “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting.” Do parents hate parenting? According to the story, studies show that Parents are as happy or less happy than their non-parent counterparts everywhere except Denmark. Mothers […]
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I started working again this spring (the subject of a future blog post) and almost immediately found myself in a perfect storm of sick kids, tight deadlines, and lack of sleep. It was shockingly familiar. I did what I usually do when it feels like the world is ending. I called my baby sister, Holly. […]
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I have heard from dozens of women over the last year who had some version of a nervous breakdown while working and raising kids, or came very close to one. Some were already friends. Others I met through the blog. There are a lot of us out there. But so far, no one has written […]
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