Nobody wants to be, or be around, a “Negative Nancy” or “Davy Downer.” The benefits of having an optimistic outlook improve our overall well-being as they boost longevity, help us bounce back from stress, and help regulate emotions. We are often instructed by society to be optimistic and stay positive, especially in American culture. But there’s a fine line between having positive attitude and toxic positivity. It becomes toxic when we ignore reality, suppress negative emotions, and try to be overly positive in every situation, regardless of what is really happening. In this podcast, LA Psychotherapist, John Tsilimparis, joins Cecile, Juan, and Shawn for a deep dive into this topic. We discuss what toxic positivity is, how to recognize it, and why we display it to others, and even to ourselves. John gives us tools we can use to give ourselves the space we need to feel our emotions and acknowledge reality, and have a watchful awareness to build resilience and be supportive.

If you feel like you have been holding and hiding out just to get through the long winter days, it’s time to get up, get out, and start to let go. Spring is here! We jump start this new season of Ends With Z by setting and resetting intentions to embrace nature’s power of rebirth and awakening new energy within us. Spring invites us to be in flow with this season’s transformational power. The signs of change are happening around us. Embracing these shifts gives us the energy to step outside of our comfort zones, to transform our own lives, and to connect more deeply with nature, ourselves, our intention, and our community.

Why does this Fall feel harder for so many of us? We know the end of the year is always challenging with the upcoming holidays and family obligations, but this year the elections added to our stressor – no matter who you are. We either view change as a threat, where we either go in to fight-or-flight mode or we accept change as a part of life and learn to adapt to survive and build resilience. How do we get from “I just can’t” to “I can handle this.” Los Angeles Psychotherapist, John Tsilimparis, joins the podcast to help us better understand our personal relationship with change and gives us ways we can learn to accept and make change work for us, to find our new footing, to recognize our own blind spots, and to not worry about the things that we cannot control. John gives us useful tools to keep our boundaries, manage difficult conversations and not sound weak, judgmental, dismissive, or harsh.

Social connection is a basic human need that is essential to our overall health and wellbeing. But as the world evolves from technological advances and person-to-person contact becomes more limited, those feel-good hormones that we get from simply being together are being replaced by shorter attention spans, irritability, more isolation, and a greater sense of loneliness. It is up to each of us to find our ikigai, a Japanese word for what we call “a reason to live/to get you out of bed” every single day to create flow in your life. Flow is the place where your needs, desires, ambitions, and satisfaction meet. Psychotherapist, John Tsilimparis, is back as we continue our discussion on loneliness and what we can do to stop the actions that leads us down a path to a very sad and unhealthy life. John shares his professional wisdom and understanding, and leaves us with nuggets of information we can all use every day to help us find a path back to ourselves so we can find our flow.

We all need healthy alone time or “me” time for self-care and quiet, down time. It’s a good thing, right? The fact is that too much time alone can lead to loneliness, isolation, and experiencing a lack of connection with others. The U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, in 2018 declared loneliness a global health threat and it has only worsened because of the isolation mandated by the pandemic. But COVID-19 is not the biggest culprit for why people chose more and more want to be alone and not engage with each other in person. Technology has revolutionized everything including how we see, experience, value, and prioritize being together – in real life. When we were asked to isolate for health reasons, the safety and protection that we felt from cocooning at home, withdrawing from others, and living life online for the convenience to communicate, order food/groceries, educate students, and work all have contributed to the massive increase in loneliness. Psychotherapist, John Tsilimparis, helps us connect the dots between our day-to-day activities, life/situational circumstances, emotions, technology/social media, culture, the environment and the loneliness that we are feeling today. For many of us, we are not even aware that the heaviness we feel, the insomnia, and “just not feeling the need to go out” is, in fact, loneliness. Join the conversation where John helps us find ways to decrease our loneliness by incorporating incremental behavioral steps like using good social media hygiene and prioritizing togetherness.

With less than 95 days until the election and all that has happened recently, the race for the presidency has shifted into high gear, already full of monumental, historic events and eliciting heightened negative emotions. Regardless of your political affiliation, all of it is making us unhappy on top of everything that we are dealing with in our everyday lives. According to Arthur Brooks, Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School where he teaches course on leadership, happiness, and social entrepreneurship, happiness isn’t a feeling or conditional, it’s a direction anchored in faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Now more than ever, it is so important take into account your mental and physical well-being with everything we do, with every decision we make, with every action we take, and who we support in the voting booth. Your personal happiness depends on it.

For many of us, the holidays are all about spending time with family. Whether merry, or just plain scary, the emotions and feelings we experience during the holiday season linger far after the decorations are down and resolutions are made. In this episode, Juan shares the almost “life changing moment” he had in how he handles the stress of going back home, his identity, and relationship with his family. Was it a Christmas miracle or the result of the awareness that parents are just people too? Above all, what is important to you is what matters most.

The doctor is in! But what if the doctor isn't human? Our favorite psychotherapist, John Tsilimparis, joins the podcast as we discuss the growing impact of AI, and specifically AE (artificial empathy), in the medical field and in the most important aspects of our daily life. What is Chatbot Therapy? Can AE make us better humans or is it merely manipulating us? This technology can be a game changer for providing support for human doctors in assessing actionable treatment and dramatically increasing access to mental healthcare services. But with all of the progressive promise also comes the potential perils. The father of AI has sounded the alarm warning us that AI is growing faster than we can control or regulate it. Global security agreements and regulation must be established and implemented before it's too late to prevent artificial intelligence from outsmarting us all.