Create An Environment Where Speaking Up About Depression Isnt Taboo
According to Psychology Today, approximately 10 percent of Americans suffer from clinical depression each year, yet only 25% ever seek treatment for it. This means that many workers experience symptoms of depression and other mood disorders during their careers, but most never discuss how they feel with a trusted confidant. Instead, they try to maintain a cheerful façade while silently battling emotional distresswhich makes it even harder for employers to identify whats really going on behind closed doors. Management needs to encourage their teams to speak up before things get worse and performance slips.
Learn To Avoid Procrastination
Another way to take control of your stress is to stay on top of your priorities and stop procrastinating.
Procrastination can lead you to act reactively, leaving you scrambling to catch up. This can cause stress, which negatively affects your health and sleep quality .
Get in the habit of making a to-do list organized by priority. Give yourself realistic deadlines and work your way down the list.
Work on the things that need to get done today and give yourself chunks of uninterrupted time, as switching between tasks or multitasking can be stressful itself.
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Prioritize what needs to get done and make time for it. Staying on top of your to-do list can help ward off procrastination-related stress.
Yoga has become a popular method of stress relief and exercise among all age groups.
While yoga styles differ, most share a common goal to join your body and mind.
Yoga primarily does this by increasing body and breath awareness.
Some studies have examined yogas effect on mental health. Overall, research has found that yoga can enhance mood and may even be as effective as antidepressant drugs at treating depression and anxiety .
However, many of these studies are limited, and there are still questions about how yoga works to achieve stress reduction.
In general, the benefit of yoga for stress and anxiety seems to be related to its effect on your nervous system and stress response.
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When To Seek Advice Or Treatment From A Medical Professional
It’s recommended you speak to a health care provider about your anxiety should any of these situations occur:
- Your anxiety becomes an obstacle In any aspect of everyday living, often causing difficulties for six or more months
- Your anxiety becomes a negative influence in relationships Creating barriers in life
- Your anxiety leads to isolation Producing thoughts of hopelessness or helplessness
- Your anxiety controls your life When your emotional or physical response to excessive worry is controlling your life in some aspect or another
A person with anxiety can seek support from a therapist, medical provider, family member, friend, community support person, crisis line resource or a crisis center. Depending on the severity of your anxiety, a behavioral therapy plan, anti-anxiety medication and/or coping mechanisms may be directed to your personal situation.
Recognition of anxiety is a key factor in dealing with excessive worry and moving forward in life. If you have any of the above symptoms or have difficulty controlling worry in your life, ask yourself if it could be anxiety you’re experiencing. It’s important to share any concerns of excessive worry with your health care provider so we can help you identify ways to address your anxiety and move past the debilitation of excessive worry.
Jill Christensen is a Family Medicine nurse practitioner in Waterville, Minnesota.
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How To Reduce Stress Anxiety And Depression
Too much stress can result in chronic anxiety and depression. Yet, it does not mean that we cannot control them anymore. Of course, stress can be normal or destructive. So, we do not want stress to rule over your life. In this sense, we provide you with the top seven tips to reduce or relieve these disturbances.
Stick To A Sleep Schedule
Anxiety can make it difficult to sleep, and not being well-rested can contribute to more anxiety.
However, there are a few key ways to get better sleep with anxiety, such as having a sleep routine that includes going to bed and waking up at the same time each day.
Overall, trying to get near the recommended 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night can help keep anxiety at bay. “Inadequate sleep increases the production of stress hormones that can exacerbate anxiety,” Jonas says.
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Talking Is The First Step
No matter what industry or size of company you work in, mental health is a universal issue we all experience. Encouraging a culture where people feel safe enough to open up about their emotions leads to happier workplaces and employees. If nothing else comes from reading through these tips, hopefully it spurs more dialogue about mental health across offices everywhere. Theres no shame in opening up about what youre experiencing. Our goal should be healthy workplaces and happy people small steps make big differences over time!
Daily Habits That Can Reduce Your Anxiety
Anxiety is one of the most prominent mental health conditions in the world. It can range in severity from person to person: Some struggle with it consistently, while others experience flare-ups triggered by life events.
The good news is that you can learn to manage your anxiety more effectively, both in counseling and by implementing some simple coping strategies. Here are 10 daily habits that will help make your symptoms more manageable so you can feel in control of your life again.
1. Talk to SomeoneSeeing a therapist will help you overcome your anxiety, but sharing your issues with anxiety with people you trust every day can also help you manage your symptoms. You dont have to suffer in silence. It can be enormously helpful to tell someone youre close to that you suffer from anxiety, rather than trying to keep that a secret. When were less ashamed of having anxiety and can admit to it, it tends not to take center stage in the same way. We often find that others are similarly struggling as well!
2. Exercise DailyThere are so many physical benefits to getting enough exercise, but it can improve your mental health, too. Exercise regulates your brains response to stress and alleviates feelings of anxiety almost immediately.
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Causes And Risk Factors
Anxiety is a normal response to stress or a dangerous situation and its often referred to as the fight or flight response. Its also the most prevalent mental health condition. Anxiety becomes problematic when it is constant or in reaction to inappropriate circumstances, which over time can negatively affect your day-to-day life. In fact, there are a number of anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder and panic disorder.
Causes of anxiety include:
- inability to socialize
Think About Something Funny
Visualize your favorite humorous moments, says Sultanoff. One where you laughed so hard you fell down and peed your pants. These can be real situations, or they can be situations you saw on sitcoms, in stories, jokes, or cartoons.
If its difficult for you to come up with something in the moment, try picking a couple of memories ahead of time, so you can go to them as soon as you start experiencing anxiety.
Like most mindfulness training, humor visualization takes you out of worrying about things that might happen in the future and focuses you back in your present circumstances, in the now.
It does a few other things too. You experience mirth, which is the uplifting reaction to humor, explains Sultanoff. You feel emotions such as joy, pleasure, or delight all powerful emotions that can help you reduce anxiety quickly.
And if youre able to make yourself laugh by remembering that funny moment, he says, humor visualization is even more effective.
When you laugh, you contract and expand muscles, which reduces physical anxiety, stress, and tension, he says.
Laughter also combats the production of cortisol levels in the body, he adds.
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Boosting Your Overall Health
Look For Silver Linings And Be Kind To Yourself
If your social anxiety isnt going away as fast as youd like, thats perfectly normal. It might be that you moved too fast and need to spend more time practicing other social encounters before youre up for the one youre stuck on, or you need to work more on relaxation techniques and distraction techniques so you can tolerate that situation next time, says Dr. Potter.
Analyzing after the fact what triggered a reaction, whether a panic attack or something else, can also help. Try to break down, How can I think about that differently? or How can I change the situation next time? Dr. Potter suggests. Lets say you go to a concert and start to have a panic attack because youre enclosed in by a lot of people. Maybe next time, you might sit in the back or on an aisle, or stay somewhere where you feel like theres an exit route if you feel anxious or closed-in.Dr. Potter adds that other people are generally way more focused on themselves than they are on others. They are most likely not scrutinizing your behavior in social situations, because they are busy thinking about what they are going to say or do next, she says. Your anxiety usually magnifies the negative and minimizes the positive so the things youre acutely aware of about yourself may not be particularly noticeable to others.
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Achieving Better Mental Health Through Diet
Be sure to talk to your doctor if your anxiety symptoms are severe or last more than two weeks. But even if your doctor recommends medication or therapy for anxiety, it is still worth asking whether you might also have some success by adjusting your diet. While nutritional psychiatry is not a substitute for other treatments, the relationship between food, mood, and anxiety is garnering more and more attention. There is a growing body of evidence, and more research is needed to fully understand the role of nutritional psychiatry, or as I prefer to call it, Psycho-Nutrition.
Eat Healthy And Avoid Substances
Research has found that a diet high in fat, sugar, and refined carbohydrates can increase the risk of anxiety by 25%.
On the other hand, eating a diet rich in natural, wholesome foods like fruits, vegetables, and legumes, while avoiding sugary snacks, can help control anxiety.
Another study found that omega-3 fatty acids, commonly found in fish like salmon, reduced anxiety in medical students.
At the same time, you should avoid alcohol. Many people with anxiety get temporary relief from symptoms when they drink, but experience increased symptoms when they stop drinking.
That leads some people with anxiety to drink even more. For example, social anxiety disorder is closely linked to alcohol use disorder, according to a 2019 twin study.
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The Negative Effects Of Anxiety
Left unchecked, anxiety can negatively affect our lives in these ways:
- Interrupting daily life Causing issues at home, school, work and socially
- Isolating us Not wanting to participate in normal daily activities or take new steps in life due to fear
- Emotionally Increasing our risk for depression, suicide and failure to progress in life
- Physically Increasing our risk for physical distress, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, chest pain and tremors
- Mentally Increasing our risk for financial complications, poor decision-making and poor communication
Reduce Caffeine And Alcohol
Caffeine is a great stimulant, and many nonprofessionals believe that it is good for fighting depression. For this, you need to be careful, as Caffeine being a stimulant may worsen anxiety.
On the other hand, alcohol is a depressant. While you may seem to notice that alcohol is helpful in making you fall asleep during the night, it does not automatically mean that you get quality sleep. Instead, it can harm you even more, as alcohol and depression have a reciprocal need and interaction.
For instance, alcohol intake can worsen the symptoms of depression, and depression makes a person attracted to alcohol use.
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How To Reduce Anxiety
Feelings of anxiety â uneasiness, dread, fear, or an inexplicable sense of impending doom â can be deeply unpleasant. Whether anxiety presents itself as an upset stomach, heart palpitations, a nervous tension that colors everything, or even a panic attack, the discomfort and distress can be extremely challenging.
Weâre not talking about general, everyday anxiousness here, but clinical anxiety â the kind that can be all-consuming and, sometimes, debilitating. When classified as a disorder, anxiety is âpersistent and excessive worryâ where individuals can lose rational perspective and âexpect the worst, even when there is no apparent reason for concern,â according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
Chronic or severe symptoms may be a sign of generalized anxiety disorder , which affects close to 40 million adults in the US and, according to the World Health Organization , 1 in 13 globally. Thankfully, there are effective therapies and medications as doctors and healthcare professionals determine the best treatment options that are right for you.
With the right skills and lifestyle changes, we can better regulate our emotions and train our brain to view life with a more balanced, less fearful perspective. Hereâs how to relieve anxiety naturally, and with awareness.