Seasonal transitions can be difficult for many reasons and can have an impact on your mind and body, often referred to as stress. If you live in a cold climate, the shift from fall to winter means fewer daylight hours and more cold days. It also means shifting into the holidays, a brand-new year, and flu season. The following tips can help you focus on your mind and body during stressful seasonal transitions.

Things that go bump in the night. Seeing something out of the corner of your eye. Feeling as if something is behind you. Having a feeling that something is not quite right.

These are things that countless people around the world have experienced. Some attribute these experiences to a sixth sense while others believe that there are sound, scientific explanations for them. However, for clinicians the question remains: What is the proper approach of a counselor with a client reporting paranormal issues? 

Fall is in the air, and that means football season is here. Along with the tailgates and touchdowns come concussions. A form of a traumatic brain injury (TBI), concussions are common in many sports and have received more attention lately as former professional athletes have come forward with their stories about long-term struggles that resulted from multiple concussions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention External link  estimates that between 1.6 million and 3.8 million sports- and recreation-related concussions happen annually in the United States. People who have concussions can experience headaches, personality changes, motor control problems, depression, and insomnia, to name a few symptoms.

The pressure to look good and show off our bodies is high during summer. Developing a healthy body image and being confident from the inside out takes concentrated effort and practice. Rejecting the body-shaming trend and speaking positively to yourself are ways you can practice developing a healthy body image. External factors, such as properly fitting clothing, eating well, and exercise, can bolster your body-to-mind confidence and include benefits like feeling healthier and lowering risk for disease.

Chicago is known as a center of creativity, and we are lucky to have fantastic, original authors who write about real issues and raw emotions. I had the pleasure of talking with one such author, David Jay Collins, program manager at Kellogg Executive Education at Northwestern University. We discussed the process of writing his first novel, Gaybash, and the social implications of searching for one’s self in an uncertain world.

The death of the date and the hook-up culture have shifted the way heterosexual couples connect, whether it’s for a random or regular hook-up or when two people are looking for a relationship. Whatever the case, the following tips can be applied as a reminder about how to be open about your intentions during, between, and after dates. These tips include gender roles that some people find important in relationships, and they also carry ideas about how to be romantic in an age of impersonal assumptions crafted through dating websites and apps.