Sounding Off at Work
If you sit near enough to you co-workers to hear them typing, you'll probably need a few extra sick days.
In a study conducted at Cornell University, design and environmental analysis professor Gary W. Evans, Ph.D., aimed to figure out how low-intensity noise affects people working in open spaces without separate offices or cubicles. Evans recruited 80 female clerical workers and piped in typical office background noises--conversations, typing sounds and ringing phones--to half of their offices as they worked.
Workers toiling in noisy environments showed increased levels of the stress hormone epinephrine, but few of the participants reported feeling particularly stressed. Surprised at his findings, which appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Evans suspects that workers tend to...
Create Your Dreamscape
Dreams are a risk free way to learn new skills, explore new behaviors and make changes in your life. Material flows freely between the dream realm and waking reality. You've probably noticed that what concerns your waking mind often appears in your dreams. The opposite is also true.
By focusing your mind on specific areas that intersest you, you can intentionally create dreams to promote growth and healing. For example, you can develop assertiveness or become more comfortable making friends, or presenting, etc. by practicing in your dreams. Over time, you can...
The ultimate spiritual challenge may be to forgive. But years of talking with struggling souls has convinced me that there is one person whom many of us have particularly great difficulty forgiving. That person is oneself.
You may have had the experience of making a major mistake, perhaps deeply hurting someone you love, then replaying the event over and over again with an accompanying negative narration. "You terrible bum, you sinner, you worthless piece of ----. How could you do that? What is wrong with you?" People of a religious bent will even feel condemned to the fires of hell with themselves being judge and jury. In essence, we sometimes view our own failings to be...
It has been estimated that we have anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 thoughts a day. If your cast of mind is predominantly negative, imagine how many negative thoughts you are generating daily--thousands upon thousands. That is precisely the case with depression.
One of the features of depression is pessimistic thinking. The negative thinking is actually the depression speaking. It's what depression sounds like. Depression in fact manifests in negative thinking before it creates negative affect.
Most depressed people are not aware that the despair and hopelessness they feel are flowing from their negative thoughts. Thoughts are mistakenly seen as...
Maybe it's the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruising along the dirt path...at three miles an hour. On his tricycle.
Or perhaps it's today's playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And...wait a minute...those aren't little kids playing. Their mommies--and especially their daddies--are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves.
Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their kids to school, according to a recent survey. Presumably, parents now worry that school bathrooms are not good enough for their children.
Consider the teacher new to an upscale suburban town. Shuffling through the sheaf of reports certifying the educational "accommodations" he was required to make for many of his history students, he was struck by the exhaustive, well-written--and obviously costly--one on behalf of a girl who was already proving among the most competent of his ninth-graders. "She's somewhat neurotic," he confides, "but she is bright, organized and conscientious--the type who'd get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu." He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for:
A confession: I was a network situation comedy writer who decided to get mymasters in psychology. I was making retribution for my sins.
It was a startling contrast going from studio lots where people worked at finding laughs to a profession where the mandatory operating equipment includes a box of Kleenex.
Since one of my key survival mechanisms in life is laughing, I asked my teachers if I could use humor with my clients. Their response: "Be very cautious." Only last year, the American Psychoanalytic Association held that humor was "inappropriate" to their mission, but lately, cracks in the wall have begun to appear. A recent article in the American Psychological Association Monitor described a "mirthful consultant" who helped psychologists brighten patients' lives using stuffed bears and scarf juggling. Other articles in magazines such as Humor and Health have shown that mirth can lower stress and help strengthen the immune system.
The diagnosis is that mirth is good...
A brief questionnaire can identify people at highest risk for experiencing panic attacks, psychologists at Harvard and elsewhere have found. Called the Anxiety Sensitivity Index, this questionnaire asks people to rate their fear of such anxiety symptoms as rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, nervousness, and even stomach growling.
The index measures not anxiety, but a person's fear of these anxiety-related symptoms. Just as people vary in their proneness to feel anxious, so they differ in their fear of feeling anxious -- their anxiety sensitivity.
"People with low sensitivity regard symptoms like a rapid heart rate as unpleasant but not much to worry about," says Richard McNally, professor of psychology. "But those with high anxiety sensitivity respond with alarm, often fearing they may be having a heart attack."
People who worry about what they think will happen -- fear of fear -- aren't mentally ill but they are at increased risk for panic attacks.
These attacks are sudden, unpredictable bursts of fear. Victims experience...
The Agoraphobic's Checkout
by Newf
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What trials a phobic goes through just to get through one more day
To function in the outside world with so many obstacles in their way.
They have to know where the exits are while shopping at the stores
The first thing that a phobic does is check out all the doors.
A 'Fire Exit Only' sign can...
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You are, as the expression goes, what you eat. After all, the very tissues of your body, the fuels that power every cell, the hormones that keep you humming, all must ultimately be furnished by the foods you eat. No surprise, then, that over the past 15 years, perhaps spurred most intensely by health concerns and the performance demands of elite athletes, a burgeoning body of literature has documented the intimate connections between food and health. At the same time, an interest in nutrition has moved from the fringes of cultural life squarely into the mainstream.
But that turns out to be a very neck-down view of things. For while the foods we eat have measurable effects on the body's performance, they may prove to have an even more critical influence on how the brain handles its tasks. The brain is an extremely metabolically active organ, making it a very hungry one, and a picky eater at that. The idea that the right foods, or the natural neurochemicals they contain, can enhance mental capabilities--help you concentrate, tune sensorimotor skills, keep you motivated, magnify memory, speed reaction times, defuse stress, perhaps even prevent brain aging--is not idle speculation.
Nutritional neuroscience, as it's called, is barely in its infancy. But it's already turning up some very heady findings. Among them:
* A diet that draws heavily on fatty foods and only lightly on fruits and vegetables isn't just bad for your heart and linked to certain cancers--it may also be a major cause of depression and...
If that Snickers bar you're eating seems a bit less sweet this time of year,you might be experiencing a newly discovered symptom of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), the so-called winter depression that strikes as many as 15 million people during these sunlight-scarce months. It turns out that SAD dampens not only your mood but also your taste buds.
The finding comes courtesy of Paul Arbisi, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center. SAD sufferers often...
One in four of us will suffer from an anxiety disorder in our lifetime. And the rest of us will worry, fuss, and fret far more than we need to. Now, in this excerpt from his book, "Worry," the psychiatrist who helped put attention deficit disorder on the map offers his treatment program for brooders.
Worry gives a small thing a big shadow.
--Swedish Proverb.
WORRY IS LIKE blood pressure: you need a certain level to live, but too much can kill you. At its worst, worry is insidious, invisible, a relentless scavenger, roaming the corners of your mind, feeding on anything it finds. It sets upon you unwanted and unbidden, feasting on the infinite array of negative possibilities in life, diminishing your enjoyment of friends, family, achievements, and physical being -- all because you live in fear of what might go wrong. People who worry too much suffer. For all their hard work, for all their humor and willingness to laugh at themselves, for all their self-awareness, worriers just cannot achieve peace of mind.
Worry is amazingly common. At least one in four of us...
LOS ANGELES, Dec 17, 2004 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Scientists studying depression say they have found a link between how well someone handles stress and how much good antidepressants do.
Psychiatrists have long known that about half the people found to be suffering from depression also show signs of elevated anxiety and researchers have been trying to explain the correlation.
In the new study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, doctors from Harvard and UCLA treated with drugs a group of 54 Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles who were both depressed and highly anxious.
It's already everybody's favorite nutritional supplement, linked, however controversially, to preventing the common cold and fighting cancer. But vitamin C recently added a new notch on its belt. The vitamin helps reduce both the physical and psychological effects of stress on people.
People who have high levels of vitamin C do not show the expected mental and physical signs of stress when subjected to acute psychological challenges. What's more, they bounce back from stressful situations faster than people with low levels of vitamin C in their blood.
In one recent study German researchers subjected 120 people to a sure-fire stressor�a public speaking task combined with mental math problems. Half of those studied were given 1,000 mg of vitamin C.
Such signs of stress as elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol and high blood pressure were significantly greater in those who did not get the vitamin supplement. Those who got vitamin C reported that they felt less stressed when they got the vitamin.
The researchers believe that vitamin C should be considered an essential part of stress management.
Earlier studies showed that vitamin C abolished secretion of cortisol in animals that had been subjected to repeated stress. Cortisol is a hormone released by the adrenal glands in response to stress. Once it gets into the bloodstream...
It�s not the one on the wall that counts, but the one inside you.
Whether you're at your best first thing or late at night depends on a natural phenomenon known as circadian rhythms. These are governed by an internal �body clock' that is built into humans and most other living organisms and runs on a 24-hour cycle.
Circadian rhythms were discovered in the late 70s by a team of scientists at Manchester University, led by Dr Jim Waterhouse. They were found to control many of the body's functions, raising body temperature and releasing hormones according to their own internal pattern, regardless of external �time cues' such as changing light or regular mealtimes.
During the experiments, volunteers were kept in an isolation unit for a day and a night with no clocks, and constant light. The volunteers were fed simple snacks every hour and made to sit upright without any sleep for the whole time.
In all cases, the volunteers' bodies functioned as if...
MEXICO CITY, Dec. 17, 2004 (IPS/GIN) -- Officially there are no more "lunatic asylums" in Latin America - a term that brings to mind dark, foul-smelling institutions where those who have gone "mad" were locked away, sometimes for life, and frequently mistreated.
But although mental hospitals in the region have been given modern names and a whitewash, the transformation has not always put an end to the abuse.
Testimony and documents studied by IPS indicate that significant changes have occurred in Latin America in favour of the mentally ill over the past few years, including a gradual departure from the old model of locking up patients and a move towards out-patient treatment that allows them to stay in close contact with their families and communities.
However, not everything is rosy.