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Category: Anxiety

EFFECTIVE TREATMENT FOR DEPRESSION

March 31, 2014
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| Categories: Aging, Anxiety, Depression, Life Stress, Personal Growth

Exercise! Wait, hold on, don’t stop reading yet. Why? Because in double blind studies, exercise has been shown to be an effective treatment for depression. It isn’t just a way for your therapist to insure you’re not spending the day in bed. It really works. If you’ve been to therapy for depression, your therapist has probably advised you to exercise, you’ve nodded your head in agreement and many of you have gone home and done nothing.   So, what’s the problem? Depressed people don’t want to exercise. They’re depressed! A depressed person might have trouble getting up, getting dressed, and putting one foot in front of the other. That often feels like all the exercise a depressed person can tolerate. But it really does work, so now what?. This is what: it’s that old putting one foot in front of the other routine. Don’t think you have to join a gym or work out for an hour every day or go swimming or ride your bike five miles. Think about it this way: 1.   If you have stairs, walk up and down them when you don’t have to, beginning once a day and then increasing to five times a day....

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CATASTROPHIZING

March 31, 2014
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| Categories: Anxiety, Life Stress, Personal Growth

Is a big word meaning making things big when they don't need to be. In other words, if your boss had something to say to you about a situation you need to change or a deadline you haven't met or something else, and you feel sick to your stomach and stay awake half the night, worrying that you're going to lose your job because of it, you're catastrophizing. You're predicting a catastrophe when there isn't one. You might not like that you've disappointed your boss but it's unlikely you're going to lose your job over it unless you've messed up in a lot of other ways as well. If you have a fight with your partner and you predict it's the end of the relationship, you're, yes, catastrophizing. If your child gets a bad report card grade and you punish that child because you fear that child will never get into college, you're.... Yes, you get the idea. It's kind of like what Jeff Foxworthy does with his, "You might be a redneck if..." scenarios. It goes like this: You're catastrophizing if: 1. You didn't get a pay raise so you see yourself as never being able to retire. 2....

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LEAVING THE DREAM

March 31, 2014
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| Categories: Anxiety, Depression, Life Stress, Personal Growth

When you wake up in the morning do you wish you didn't have to get out of bed, that you could just close your eyes and sleep because what's in front of you is less than pleasant, like getting ready for work, commuting, working, going home, eating, falling back into bed, to sleep and wake up to the same grind again? If so, it's important that you establish some kind of morning ritual that grounds you in the real world, nature, an animal, fresh air. Try leaving sweats and tennis shoes right next to your bed and taking a quick, fast walk around your block before you do anything else, roll out, throw on the sweats and go, it's fifteen minutes, or put a flower that has a scent, like a rose, in a vase in the room but away from the bed so you can stand up and put your nose into the alive aroma of nature, inhale deeply and exhale, thinking three positive thoughts to counteract the negative. Or make sure you have something you really like ready to eat and waiting for you in the kitchen so you'll be inspired to get up and move to the...

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INTUITION AND ABUSE

March 26, 2014
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| Categories: Anxiety, Depression, Personal Growth, Relationships

Most people experience times when they believe they know what another person is thinking or feeling. Sometimes, you're doing what is called, "projecting." That is you are projecting what you think or feel onto the other person. And sometimes your intuition about a situation is accurate. If what you're attributing to the other person is important, IE. "You're mad at me," it's important to find a way to inquire about it without sounding confrontational or defensive. You can't have good communication skills if you walk around in the world believing you know when, in fact, you might or you might not. An interesting thing about adults who were abused as children, whether emotional or physical, is that they tend to be more intuitive than the general population. That doesn't mean they shouldn't check it out with the other person because it could still be projection or just plain false. It does mean that very often an adult abused as a child can walk into a room and accurately report who is having a good time, who is pretending to have a good time, who is angry, sad, and so on. Adults abused as children are better at "reading" other people...

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GETTING UP OR NOT

March 26, 2014
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| Categories: Aging, Anxiety, Depression, Life Stress, Personal Growth, Relationships

O.K. It's Saturday morning. You wake up the sun is shining or not, it's raining or not, but you're warm, safe, and there isn't anything you have to do in the next two hours so you don't have to jump up and start hustling toward a work day like most of you do during the week. One would think it would be a time of relaxation, contemplation, or to make plans to do something enjoyable, and it is for some of you. For others, it's the time when depression, despair and confusion reign. To those people: If you're in a relationship, you wonder why you stay and if you're not, you're wondering if you ever will find that special person. If you work forty or more hours a week, you wonder if there's an end to this toiling away just to pay the rent, or maybe you don't have a job and haven't been able to find one. Maybe you have a job but your partner doesn't and you're tired of carrying the load, maybe it's reversed and your partner is tired of carrying the load. Maybe you're old and facing the unbearably sad truth that this culture doesn't value...

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POSITIVE EMOTIONS

March 26, 2014
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| Categories: Aging, Anxiety, Depression, Life Stress, Personal Growth, Seniors

Positive emotions in early life and longevity: findings from the nun study. Danner DD, Snowdon DA, Friesen WV. Source: Department of Preventive Medicine and Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, College of Medicine, University of Kentucky, Lexington 40536-0230, USA. [email protected] Abstract Handwritten autobiographies from 180 Catholic nuns, composed when participants were a mean age of 22 years, were scored for emotional content and related to survival during ages 75 to 95. A strong inverse association was found between positive emotional content in these writings and risk of mortality in late life (p < .001). As the quartile ranking of positive emotion in early life increased, there was a stepwise decrease in risk of mortality resulting in a 2.5-fold difference between the lowest and highest quartiles. Positive emotional content in early-life autobiographies was strongly associated with longevity 6 decades later. Underlying mechanisms of balanced emotional states are discussed. PMID: 11374751 OK, now that you've finished with all the nun jokes and/or Catholic jokes, think about this: It means you could live longer, literally, by having a positive attitude about your life. I've never ascribed to the "airy fairy" approach to living so I don't sweep negative energy out of my office by burning...

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