Carolyn Thomas 
Heart Sisters (on Blue Sky)
This week, a fascinating guest post about what we know as Old Wives’ Tales – those superstitious traditions believed to be passed down by older women to younger women. Dr. Scott Lear, a professor in the Health Sciences faculty at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, fact-checks four traditional Tales for us today. Do you have a favourite old wives’ (or young wives’) Tale that you grew up with? Continue reading “Old Wives’ Tales: Fact or Fiction”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
There’s anxiety, and then there’s ANXIETY. When Dr. Wendy Suzuki wrote about anxiety recently in her Globe and Mail essay, she wasn’t talking about clinical levels of anxiety requiring medical treatment, but what she calls our everyday anxiety:
You would think that, after 18 months, we might feel better prepared to manage the continuing effects of the pandemic, but instead, our recent history seems to have simply added to our collective anxiety.”
She views this “everyday anxiety” as a new approach to understanding anxiety. . Continue reading “Good anxiety: is that even possible?”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Welcome to Lotus Land, where, alas, it’s been stinkin’ hot lately. This is tragically unfair, I think. I moved here to Canada’s beautiful West Coast decades ago in order to escape the kind of soul-sucking sauna that passes for summer back east.
And because uncomfortably hot weather is so deliciously rare here, few of us even have air conditioning, although I do have a little electric fan that I’ve started carrying around the apartment with me from room to room this past week.
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
The freshly-diagnosed heart patient has plenty of opportunity to start thinking thoughts that are new, bizarre and sometimes even frightening. Any life-altering diagnosis can throw us off-balance emotionally, but with heart disease, even the tiniest twinge of new chest pain can paralyze us. Is this something? Is it nothing? Should I call 911 again? As Australian cardiac psychologist (and more importantly, a heart patient) Len Gould likes to say: “Before a heart attack, every twinge is just indigestion. After a heart attack, every twinge is another heart attack!”
And our worried thoughts can stick around far longer than they should, as we play them over and over and over like our first Beatles album. Mental health professionals call this kind of twisted thinking cognitive distortion. Continue reading “How heart patients can untwist that twisted thinking”
Heart Sisters 