Modern Psych, PO Box 36006 London RPO Talbot Village, London, ON (2026)

04/13/2026

This pattern comes up in sessions quite often, and a lot of guilt tends to get attached to it.

People will describe feeling very controlled around food during the day, and then feeling frustrated with themselves for how different things feel by the evening.

What usually becomes clearer over time is that the evening isn’t where the pattern begins. It’s where the body finally responds to a day that involved a lot of restriction, management, and mental effort around food.

When the system has been under-fueled or tightly controlled for hours, it tends to push back in predictable ways. Hunger increases, decision fatigue sets in, and the body looks for quick sources of energy.

Understanding that pattern tends to shift the conversation. Instead of trying to fight the evening, the focus becomes understanding what the day has been asking your system to manage.

That’s the work we often do at Modern Psych. Looking at the pattern with curiosity rather than more rules.

Online therapy across Canada. Link in the bio.

04/12/2026

The closer you get to something that matters, the louder the voice that says you do not deserve it. Terrible timing. Very inconvenient. Completely predictable once you understand it.

Here is the thing about imposter syndrome that trips people up: it does not behave the way you would expect. You would think it would be loudest when things are going badly, when you are struggling, when the evidence is thin. But that is almost never when it is at its worst.

It peaks at the moments of highest visibility. When you are close to finishing something significant. When you are being recognized for something. When the stakes are high and other people are paying attention. That is when the internal critic goes absolutely feral.

And the infuriating part is that it does not respond to evidence. You can have years of proof that you are capable. The critic will find the one shaky assignment, the one meeting where you did not have the answer, the one time you felt completely out of your depth, and hold that up like it is more representative than everything else combined. It is not collecting data, it is building a case for a conclusion it already decided on.

Understanding the mechanism is more useful than trying to argue against it. New blog on this is up this week. Link in bio.

Blog link in bio: Why High Achievers Struggle With Imposter Syndrome.

Anxiety Awareness | Self Trust | Self Doubt

04/10/2026

Overworking isn’t just being busy. It’s when stopping feels worse than continuing.

I work with a lot of high achievers and one of the patterns that comes up consistently is this: they are not overworking because they love the grind. They are overworking because rest has started to feel genuinely uncomfortable.

Some signs this might be familiar. You take a day off and spend most of it feeling like you should be doing something. You get sick and feel guilty about it. You finish everything on your list and immediately start looking for the next thing. The moment things slow down, a low hum of anxiety shows up.

What is actually happening here is that the busyness has become a way of managing something. Staying in motion keeps certain thoughts and feelings at a distance. Over time though, it also keeps you from ever actually recovering, so the cycle just keeps going.
The first step is usually just noticing it. Not trying to immediately fix the schedule or force yourself to relax, but getting curious about what rest is actually bringing up for you. Guilt? Fear of falling behind? A sense that your value is tied to your output?

That question is usually where something starts to shift. And it is one of the more common places therapy can actually help, not by telling you to work less, but by helping you understand what the pace is doing in the first place.

These are the conversations we have at Modern Psych. Link in bio.

work life balance | stress awareness month | burnout prevention

04/08/2026

A relationship with food can become complicated in ways that are not always obvious from the outside.
For a long time it can look like being careful. Being disciplined. Paying attention to what you eat.

What people often describe, though, is how much attention it quietly requires behind the scenes. The calculations that happen automatically. The rules that feel obvious until you try to explain them to someone else. The running commentary in your mind that can follow a meal long after it’s finished.

Because many of these patterns begin early, they can feel so familiar that it is easy to assume this is simply how everyone thinks about food.

For some people the first moment of clarity is noticing how much space the whole thing takes up. Not just around meals, but throughout the day.

That kind of exhaustion is often where the work actually begins. Not with more rules, but with understanding the role these patterns have been playing.

If some of this felt familiar, it’s definitely worth being curious about. We’re here for you if you want to discuss this in a session!

Mental Health Canada | Online Therapy Canada | Therapy Canada

04/06/2026

A lot of people leave a holiday like Easter feeling like they need to “make up for it” the next day. Maybe you ate more chocolate than usual or maybe you feel uncomfortable or a little out of control. And the first instinct is often: “I’ll just eat less tomorrow, or I’ll skip breakfast.”

But here’s the part most people don’t realize 👇
Restriction is usually what keeps the binge cycle going.

When your brain senses food is being limited again, it increases focus on those foods and pushes stronger cravings. That’s why resisting chocolate all day often leads to eating much more of it later.

The most helpful thing you can do after a day of overeating is actually the opposite of what diet culture suggests:

Just return to normal eating.

One day of eating more chocolate doesn’t create the cycle. Trying to compensate for it usually does.

Save this for the next holiday weekend when your brain tells you to “make up for it.” 💛

eating disorder recovery | mental health and food

04/03/2026

This one is for everyone who has done the full mental inventory, looked at the day ahead, and still found themselves feeling anxious for reasons they cannot quite explain.

That experience tends to be confusing because the mind naturally wants to attach the feeling to a clear cause. When they can’t find one, people often assume they are missing something or that they should be able to control the feeling more easily.

What is often happening instead is that the brain is still operating on information it learned during a more stressful period of time. When your system has spent long stretches scanning for problems, it becomes very good at staying on watch.

The situation may have changed, but the system does not always update immediately.

What tends to help over time is not logic or trying to convince yourself to calm down. It is the brain gradually collecting enough evidence that the environment is different now than it was before.

That process takes longer than most people expect, but once you understand the pattern it usually becomes easier to relate to the experience in a different way.

Book a free consultation with the link in our bio.

04/01/2026

It is Stress Awareness Month, which for most people is not exactly new information. Most of the clients I work with are already very aware of their stress.

What is often less clear is what that stress is actually pointing to.

A lot of the way we talk about stress treats it like something has gone wrong. If you feel stressed, the assumption is that you are not managing things properly and that the goal should be to get it under control as quickly as possible.

What tends to shift things for people is understanding that stress is information. It often appears when something matters to you, when your capacity is being stretched beyond what it can comfortably hold, or when your system is responding to something that needs attention.

That does not necessarily mean there is a problem to eliminate. It means there is a signal worth understanding.

Where things become more complicated is when that signal gets ignored. People push through it, tell themselves they should be fine, or interpret the stress as evidence that something is wrong with them.

In both cases the message behind the stress tends to get missed.

This is part of the reason we created the Self Growth Guide at Modern Psych. It helps people step back and start recognizing the patterns that shape how they respond to pressure, responsibility, and expectations.
If you want to understand your own patterns a little more clearly, you can download it through the link in bio.

03/31/2026

Do you do an end of month check in? If not, you might consider adding one going forward! It doesn’t have to be a huge ritualistic experience, just ask yourself a couple of questions to start bringing in some awareness.

What actually helped this month?
What made you feel steadier?
What drained you?

Most people skip this reflection and just keep going. But remember, awareness is what breaks patterns. Not cramming more into the next month!

Do you have a practice you like to use at the end of the month? If you do, let me know by DM or in the comments! I’m always looking for new ideas 💡🧠

03/26/2026

Intuitive eating can be supportive, and it can also become a new way perfectionism runs the show. Listening to your body becomes a graded assignment. Hunger has to be the right level. Fullness has to be the right level. Cravings have to be acceptable. Eating has to look calm. That’s not intuition… that’s actually another rulebook. This is because your brain has learned to use food rules to create safety, and under stress it will reach for control every time. So what we want to do is rebuild trust through consistency and flexibility, practice neutrality with food choices, and work with the nervous system so eating stops feeling like a test you can fail.

If this feels familiar, book a free consult and we’ll talk through what support could look like.

03/25/2026

Imposter syndrome is when you’re doing the job and still waiting for someone to tell you you’re allowed to be there. High achievers don’t doubt because they’re incapable, they doubt because they care and their nervous system stays on alert. They scan for what they missed, what could go wrong, or what someone might judge, because being caught off guard feels unsafe. That internal surveillance can look like over preparing, over editing, over explaining, and never letting yourself feel done. The work isn’t to become more competent. It’s to reduce the constant monitoring, build the capacity to tolerate being seen and practice the “good enough” mentality on purpose (almost like exposure therapy!) Do the thing without triple checking, hit send and leave it as is! And then watch your nervous system learn that nothing catastrophic happens… and you survive it. 🧠

What if the goal isn’t more confidence, it’s less internal surveillance?

Grab Your 2026 Guide to Self-Growth! Link in the bio.

03/23/2026

If your brain feels fuller than your schedule actually justifies, I got to be on the podcast and we talked about exactly that. The mental load that does not come from your to-do list but from the part of your brain that never actually clocks out. The overthinking, the pressure to keep up, the way perfectionism and burnout tend to show up together in people who look like they have it together from the outside.

If any of that sounds familiar, this one is probably for you.

Episode 271, Quiet the Mental Noise with Katie McKeown. And if you want something to work through after listening, I also put together a free guide called Closing Your Mental Tabs. It walks you through a simple three-step process to get what is in your head onto paper and start closing the loops that keep running in the background.

Both links are in bio.

And if something lands, send me a message. I genuinely want to know what it was.

onlinetherapycanada highfunctioninganxiety

03/22/2026

ARFID can turn meals into negotiations and daily life into planning around food, and the hardest part for many families is that pressure usually makes it worse. When eating is tied to fear, sensory overwhelm, or a strong nervous system response, the body can treat food like a threat, which means logic and persuasion rarely work in the moment. We can help this by reducing power struggles, building predictability, keeping language neutral, and focusing on safety and consistency instead of forcing outcomes. Parents need support too, because carrying the anxiety of every meal is exhausting and it can start to take over family life. 🧠

Our Resource Centre has more on family and food support. Read the latest article linked in our bio or here: https://www.modernpsych.ca/post/march-break-isnt-a-break-parenting-capacity-and-arfid-at-home/

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