This short guide is meant to help people who, like me at the time, are just beginning their journey with GAD. If you find yourself googling like crazy and not being able to find answers to your questions: Welcome, kindred soul.

According to these government statistics , 30 percent of Americans and 12 percent of Canadians and are affected by test anxiety, and research suggests that if left uncontrolled, it can decrease student performance by at least 10 percent. Here’s a helpful guide to working through test anxiety.

Emotional eating is the tendency to respond to stressful, difficult feelings by eating, even when not experiencing physical hunger. Emotional eating (or emotional hunger) is often a craving for high-calorie or high-carbohydrate foods that have minimal nutritional value. 

Aaron Beck, one of the founders of cognitive therapy, concluded that automatic negative thinking sabotages our best self and lead to a vicious circle of misery. How it feels: We get stuck in the same negative thoughts over and over.  Because of our brain’s plasticity, we can create new pathways for our new and changed thoughts to travel.