Renewed Mind Therapy

05/11/2026

Morning light exposure—especially within the first hour of waking— does more than wake you up; it helps anchor your circadian rhythm
And
It helps regulate the timing of melatonin release for later that evening. 👏

In other words,
your brain uses 🧠morning light ☀️ as a cue to schedule nighttime sleep hormones about 12–14 hours later. 🤯

This is part of how your internal clock stays aligned across a 24-hour cycle.
Gratitude to Andrew Huberman 🙌 for his research in this.

A key detail:
this works best with direct outdoor light exposure 🌞
not
light filtered through windows or screens 📵
which significantly reduce the signal strength.

🚶🏻‍♀️‍➡️A simple morning walk outside can quietly influence how easily you fall asleep that night—and how stable that sleep feels.

☕️ Standing outside with your coffee

🧘🏻‍♀️ Sitting on your porch for a few minutes

Morning light is not just about energy for the day.

It’s also part of the setup for your sleep later that night. 😴

Now that you know, you can cope ahead for tomorrow. 😉

Because light intensity varies, timing can adjust:
🌞 Bright, clear mornings: shorter exposure may be enough (5 min.)

⛅️ Cloudy conditions: staying outside a bit longer is helpful (10 min.)

☁️ Very overcast days: longer exposure may be needed to get a similar effect (15-20 min.)

‼️ Importantly,
you do not need to look directly at the sun.

👉 Being outside with your eyes open, facing general daylight, is sufficient. ✅

This can improve:
✨ mood stability
✨ emotional regulation
✨ sleep quality
✨ stress resilience
✨ mental clarity

🙋🏻‍♀️Who here has tried this?
🙋🏼‍♀️Who is excited to plan ahead for tomorrow?

05/11/2026

05/10/2026

This is not a Holocaust memoir. It is a book about how to live after surviving the unsurvivable.

I have read a lot of Holocaust memoirs. I thought I knew what to expect. Suffering. Loss. Resilience. A story of survival that ends with liberation and a quiet, grateful epilogue.

The Choice is not that book.

Edith Eger was sixteen years old when she and her family were sent to Auschwitz. Her parents were murdered in the gas chambers within hours. She and her sister survived. They were forced to dance for Josef Mengele. They endured starvation, forced labor, death marches. When American soldiers finally liberated them, they found Edith lying in a pile of dead bodies. She was barely alive.

That is the first half of the book.

The second half is about what happened next. And that is where The Choice becomes something I have never read before.

After the war, Edith moved to America. She got married. She had children. She built a life. But she did not heal. She carried Auschwitz with her everywhere. She had nightmares. She had panic attacks. She could not talk about what happened. She could not touch her husband. She could not celebrate her children's birthdays because birthdays reminded her of the day her mother was taken to the gas chamber.

In her forties, she went back to school. She became a psychologist. She spent decades learning what she needed to know to save herself. And then she spent more decades helping other survivors of abuse, of trauma, of loss, find the same freedom.

The Choice is structured around the idea that we cannot choose what happens to us. But we can choose how we respond. We can choose to remain a victim, or we can choose to become a survivor. We can choose to be defined by our pain, or we can choose to be defined by what we do with it.

Eger calls this "the choice." And she tells her own story not as a litany of horrors but as evidence that healing is possible.

5 Lessons:

1. Victimhood is not the same as suffering. You can suffer without remaining a victim.
This is the most important distinction in the book. Suffering is what happens to you. Victimhood is the story you tell yourself about what happened. The story can keep you safe. It can also keep you stuck. The way out is not to deny your suffering. The way out is to stop letting it be the only thing about you.

2. Forgiveness is not about the other person. It is about your own freedom.
I used to think forgiveness meant letting someone off the hook. That felt like betrayal. Eger reframed it: forgiveness is eviction. The person who hurt you is living in your head, and you are paying the rent with your peace of mind. Forgiveness is not saying "what you did was okay." Forgiveness is saying "I am done carrying you around."

3. You cannot change the past. You can change what the past means.
Eger's clients often ask "why did this happen to me?" She tells them that question has no answer. The better question is "what do I do now?" The past is fixed. The meaning of the past is not. You can tell yourself "this broke me." Or you can tell yourself "this shaped me." Or "this taught me." Or "this made me who I am, and I am still here." The story is yours to write.

4. The opposite of depression is not happiness. It is vitality.
Eger says this in a chapter about her own struggles after the war. She was not sad. She was dead inside. She could not feel anything. Depression, for her, was the absence of feeling, not the presence of sadness. The goal was not to become happy. The goal was to become alive again. To feel anger and joy and boredom and desire. To stop being a ghost in her own life. That reframe changed how I think about my own numb days.

5. Healing is not linear. It is not a destination. It is a daily choice.
Eger is in her nineties. She still has nightmares. She still carries the memory of Auschwitz. The trauma did not disappear. But it no longer runs her life. She chooses, every day, to live in the present instead of the past. She chooses to celebrate birthdays even though they are hard. She chooses to love even though she has lost. The choice is not made once. It is made again and again. That is exhausting. It is also the only way.

I finished this book and sat in silence for a long time. Edith Eger survived Auschwitz. She watched her mother walk to the gas chamber. She was forced to dance for Mengele. She lay in a pile of dead bodies. And then she spent fifty years learning to live.

I have not survived anything remotely comparable. And yet I have spent years stuck in my own smaller prisons. Grudges. Regrets. Stories about who hurt me and why I am allowed to stay angry. Eger's message is not "your pain doesn't matter." It is "your pain is real. And you are bigger than it."

The Choice is not an easy book. It is not comfortable. It asks you to look at the places where you have chosen to remain a victim. It asks you to consider that you might be holding onto pain because it is familiar. It asks you to choose again. And again. And again.

I am trying. I am not there yet. But I am trying.

That is the choice. That is everything.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/3QQRAOL

Enjoy the audio book with FREE trial using the link above. Use the link to register on audible and start enjoying!

05/08/2026

Being interrupted every 3 minutes, totaling roughly 400 times a day, causes a mother’s cortisol levels to remain chronically elevated, leading to “maternal burnout” and a constant state of hyper-vigilance. This high-frequency disruption prevents mental recovery, acts like a constant stressor, and can impair emotional regulation, memory and focus.

The brain interprets constant interruptions as a continuous, high-priority emergency, which keeps cortisol—the primary stress hormone—elevated rather than allowing it to dip between stressors. The inability to focus deeply due to frequent interruptions causes mental burnout and sustained high cortisol.

Prolonged elevated cortisol from constant caretaking can lead to a state where mothers operate on “autopilot”, reducing their ability to experience joy. High cortisol levels often persist into the night, preventing restorative sleep, as the mother’s brain remains in a state of high alert.

Chronic elevated cortisol can lead to short term and long term issues including weight gain even with exercise, no s*x drive, overstimulation, anxiety, rage, depression, fatigue, insomnia and left unchecked for too long can even trigger an autoimmune condition.

I know this ALL TOO WELL because I personally spent over 8 years stuck in fight or flight and experiencing every single one of those symptoms daily. I felt hopeless. After being gaslit by multiple doctors I started studying herbalism and functional medicine and discovered the herb Rhodiola which is a stress reducing, hormone regulating herb that is so powerful it can reduce stress levels internally, even when you cannot make any changes externally (because most of us cannot change our circumstances 💔)!

I lost 60 pounds and healed ALL of those symptoms in myself by using the herb Rhodiola and it can do the same for you!

You can find the Rhodiola I used in the linktree in my bio and they are celebrating all moms with a BUY ONE GET ONE FREE SALE! Use code “MOM” at checkout for buy one get one free for a limited time❤️❤️

SEE PMID: 25970041, 27184670 & 35745023

05/01/2026

May is Mental Health Awareness Month
and
Military Appreciation Month.

Two truths can exist at the same time:

• Strength is not the absence of struggle.

• Being in treatment does not discount you from the next promotion or your dream 

At Renewed Mind Therapy,
we honor the minds
behind
their
mission.

The ones who learned to survive before they learned how to rest.

The ones who show up for everyone else and quietly wonder when it’s their turn to be supported.

The ones who react at the smell of smoke at BBQ while on deployment leave.

The ones that cannot turn it off at night.

Mental health treatment is not a weakness to fix—
it’s a human system that deserves care, regulation, and support.

This month is a reminder:

You do not have to earn rest.

You do not have to “push through”.

And you do not have to carry what was never meant to stay in your body forever.

To our military members, veterans, and military families— thank you for your service, your sacrifice, and your endurance.

To our clients past, current, and future—
Thank you for your courage to be seen and vulnerable in therapy.
It’s an honor to be told your story and the opportunity to support you.

Healing is not the opposite of strength.
It’s what makes strength sustainable.

📅 : “Request appointment”: www.renewedmindwi.com