Quick Tip for Therapists by Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of Eating the Moment,Present Perfect and The Lotus Effect .

To help with habit modification and problem-solving challenges, encourage your client to cultivate a baseline of choice awareness, which is a habit of noticing available options, through process-mindfulness.

excerpt from Stronger Day by Day by Susan Pease Gadoua, LCSW

The rate at which your divorce (and, for that matter, your divorce recovery) proceeds is an important factor that most people don’t consider until they are well into the process. But one day, you may begin to feel that matters are going too slowly or too quickly or you may notice that your spouse is trying to move faster or slower than what you are comfortable with. This is the pacing of the process, and each person has his or her own sense of timing.

Certain key factors determine your pace: whether or not the decision to divorce was mutual; whether the decision was sudden or well thought-out; and what your two personalities and temperaments are like.

by Susan Pease Gadoua, LCSW author of Stronger Day By Day and Contemplating Divorce

I have been amazed by the number of people who absolutely get the relationship that those of us who are animal lovers have with our pets. I've also been amazed by how many people really don't get it.

You may be wondering why I am writing about this and how this is pertinent to what I normally write about -- marriage & divorce.

What has been astounding to me is how many people have told me that they had a harder time when their dog died that when they split up with their spouse. One woman told me she thought something was seriously wrong with her because she wept uncontrollably when she had to sell her horse and shed nary a tear when her husband moved out.

How is it that we can have a much stronger connection with an animal? A being with whom we can't converse or share our worries with?

excerpt from Your Life on Purpose by Matthew McKay Ph.D., John P. Forsyth Ph.D., and Georg H. Eifert Ph.D.

We are living in difficult times. Many people are suffering right now. You may be one of them. People are out of work, losing their homes, struggling to get by, and wondering how they’ll make ends meet. And even if they still have a job and a home, they worry about their future and the well-being of their families, their children, and the planet. Many of these concerns are timeless and have been with us since the dawn of recorded history—and probably longer.

It’s so easy to lose sight of what matters in difficult times. In a way, it’s like living in a world filled with big, hungry lions. Evolution has prepared us to protect ourselves in such a world, and as a result we are quite good at focusing all of our attention and energies on the lions in our midst. As we go into self-preservation mode, we narrow and harden. This keeps us safe—at least when we’re actually in danger of being harmed or eaten.

But in the modern world most of us don’t have to face real lions. We do have to face our own pain and suffering and that of others. In a sense, this is the psychological equivalent of having a hungry lion or two following us wherever we go. And as those hungry lions pull for our attention and energy, our attention shifts to the suffering and away from doing what matters. In that shift, the rest of the world—full of so many other things to look at and do—washes away. We lose our bearings, and our lives become about avoiding and managing our lions—our pain and suffering.

Notice that this isn’t just about walking away. Heck, if the solution to suffering was like pulling your hand back from a hot stove, we’d say, “Do it. Just pull back and walk away.” (And if we were speaking about real lions, we’d say do the same—and do it fast!) But this isn’t the solution to human suffering. When we walk away from our suffering, we also tend to walk away from things that matter to us. So walking away has costs that can deeply diminish your life.

Maybe you feel as though your suffering has taken over your life. Or perhaps your experience is that pain and suffering have eclipsed any sense of what matters to you. The hurt has become central. You just don’t know what you care about anymore.

Or maybe you’re like millions of other people and do have a sense of what matters. Yet when you take a step forward, you find that the lions pop up out of nowhere and threaten to eat you alive. So, tired and frustrated, you retreat into the comfortable and safe. Maybe you’re looking for a way out of this cycle and back into your life.

All of us at New Harbinger Publications wish you a Happy Thanksgiving!

by Susan Albers, Psy.D., author of 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food

Already fretting about how many calories are in pecan pie? Anxious about weight gain this holiday season? If you struggle with post-Thanksgiving food guilt, let gratitude be your guide this year. It sounds deceptively simple, but it can be a difficult mindset to adopt if you worry about what you eat. Enter the day with a grateful spirit to help you end the holiday without food guilt.

Stop Thanksguilting and start Thanksgiving. Here are five tips:

by guest blogger Pavel Somov, Ph.D., author of Eating the Moment

The act of giving thanks is more than just a gesture of gratitude. It is a unique teaching moment. Indeed, by expressing appreciation for this or that we teach the world about what matters to us, about what is existentially significant for us. With this in mind, let me ask you this: what contributions to your well-being will you be reinforcing this year with your gratitude? Will you be showing gratitude for financial, material, logistical help you have received this year or will you be emphasizing the importance of the contributions of support, friendship and companionship?

by guest blogger Richard Blonna, Ed.D., author of Stress Less, Live More

Because our values are so important to us, stress commonly occurs when our values collide with each other.

This often happens over the holidays when family, friends, and other loved ones come together and visit. Many people value family yet struggle with family-related values conflicts that crop up over the holidays. For example, you might value small intimate dinners with just a few family members but your visiting parents want to bring the whole family together at your house. You might value sharing simple, meaningful yet inexpensive gifts but your siblings like to buy expensive, trendy gifts for you and your children. You value classical music and good conversation but your uncle wants to put the football game on and shut off the music.

To cope with holiday stress, try the following tips:

Pavel Somov, Ph.D. created a mindfulness eating tracker to help people with mindful eating. He says:

For years we've been asked to track what we eat and how much we eat. Mindfulness Tracker allows you to journal (twitter-style) about the how of your eating - about the mindfully-meaningful eating moments of your life. The idea is to track experiential calories. Share (with yourself and the world) a moment of eating presence. You don't have to eat mindfully all the time: just aim to have a mindful at each meal and flag it here: set a precedent of mindful eating! Also, feel free to journal about eating moments lost - i.e. about the effects of mindless eating.

Jumpstart your Thanksgiving holiday by using this Mindfulness Eating Tracker.

excerpt from Living Beyond Your Pain by JoAnne Dahl, Ph.D., and Tobias Lundgren, MS

There’s a kind of dividing line between where pain ends and the suffering your pain causes you begins. This same line marks the difference between the aspects of your pain experience that you have control over and the ones you don’t. ACT draws this line between the physical pain you feel and the way pain is interrupting or inhibiting your life, understanding them as two different kinds of pain. We call the first one “clean pain.” It’s a simple, immediate, physical sensation that tells us something’s wrong. An aching back, the sore wrists of carpal tunnel syndrome, tender spots, an old ankle injury that flares up regularly—these things are all clean pain.

What we call “dirty pain” is something quite different. Dirty pain is all the reactions you have to your physical pain. Dirty pain is the things your mind tells you about your physical pain. It’s the epithets that run through your head when you do something that puts you in pain. It’s the avoidance behaviors you engage to keep yourself from feeling pain. Dirty pain is your attempts to relieve yourself of pain where relief may not be possible.