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Best Web Posts on Depression and Anxiety

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WomanInBedScale

 

From psychology blogs to self help sites, depression and anxiety occupy a popular niche in mental health topics.  That’s both encouraging and sad; sad because with the rising number of shares on my Feedly, I know that people are passing the links on to people who need the information to deal with their own mental health issues.  On the other hand, it’s encouraging to know that there’s an open dialogue going about both conditions.  Here’s a list of the best posts on depression and anxiety.

8 Misconceptions About Mental Health and Mental Illness.

How Children Inherit Depression and Anxiety From Their Parents.

10 Tips for Supporting Your Spouse During Mental Illness.

Depression

Dear Friend: This is Depression.

The Key to Helping a Person Who is Depressed.

Depressed women found to have overabundance of specific receptor gene.

How to Be Gentle With Your Depression.

Depression: Lost and Found.

Project Semicolon Empowers People With Depression.

5 Ways to Know if Your Loved One is Suffering from Depression.

Major Depression Linked to Smaller Hippocampus.

The Ironic Effect Depression Has on Managing the Emotions.

Antidepressant Trials Exclude Most “Real World” People With Depression.

Anxiety

Idle Hands are Anxiety’s Playthings?

Study Reveals the Best Treatment for Panic Attacks.

Is Anxiety Always Bad?

Practicing Self-Compassion When Dealing With Anxiety.

Anxiety More than Depression Concerns College Students Today.

Increased Anxiety Linked to Simple Behavior You’re Probably Doing Right Now.

4 Powerful Mantras to Help You Deal With Fear and Anxiety.

Anxiety: The Reason it Can Socially Isolate You.

A Practical Way to Reduce Social Anxiety.

Tools to fight fear #7: Resilience

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ladysmileScale

 

Add all six of the previous tool together, and you get resilience. Resilience gets a bad rap as being the willingness to endure hardship, or the ability to keep going on after being a victim, but in reality resilience is neither of those things. Resilience gives you three things that you need to fight any fear.

The ability to recover quickly. Want to shake it off? If you’re resilient, you’ll be able to step out of the loop of rumination, self-blame and pity and move past a mistake. A business owner makes many of them on a daily basis, usually in their choice of lunch (No, potato chips or crisps do not qualify as a “healthy” or “nourishing” meal). You will underestimate how long it will take you to fill an order.

Anger and remorse keep you in the loop, but if you’re resilient, you’re able to make those two emotions temporary. Yes, you’ll experience them, but you can put them in perspective and limit the amount of time that you feel them. Mourning is healthy, self-indulgent pity parties are not. The difference between the two is how long that your allow them to last. If you’re utilizing poise, you admit that you’ve faced something like this before and survived it. If you’re summoning courage, you’ll push ahead even if the odds don’t look so good. If you’ve focused your energy, you have the fuel to push past this shitty [temporary] episode in your career. Here’s how to do it.

  1. Admit the fact that you made a mistake. It took a lot of work, but I finally trained myself to go into my boss’s office and say “I screwed up.” I followed it up by saying how I screwed up, apologizing, and then telling her how I planned to fix it. I then asked her if she was okay with my fix or if she had another plan she wanted to institute. I soon became the “You tell them the bad news” person in my office.

  2. Focus on the present. If you struggle with Depression, it will remind you of every similar time you’ve made a mistake and tell you that you’re nothing more than a screw up. Anxiety will tell you about the disaster that you just set in place. Bring your mind back to the present, because any problem solving can only be done in the present. Thank God you’ve been working on you meditation, so this should be easier than when you first started.

  3. Relax your muscles. If you’re working on meditation, you’ve started to notice which muscles instinctively clinch up when you’re upset. Mine are usually my shoulders and my hips. Sometimes it’s just my sphincter muscle.

  4. Ask your Left Brain to take a break. It’s the Left’s nature to criticize and point out problems, mistakes, and discrepancies. But Left is not designed to come up with solutions. Tell Left to sit for a while and you’ll let your Right Brain chime in this time. If Left is having trouble letting go, ask it to humor you just this time.

  5. Shoot for good, not great or perfect. The tendency when you make a mistake is to try to answer it with something incredible or stupendous. Don’t set your bar that high; just try to do something good to take the pressure off of yourself. If you aren’t pressuring your Right Brain with unreasonable standards, it can do its work better.

Learn how to fight back effectively. Remember earlier when I said that assertiveness does not equal aggressiveness? This is where the distinction between the two will be most apparent. Yes, you will need to learn how to fight back, but if you try to do it in an aggressive manner, your efforts will backfire. We also need to practice using our emotions effectively. Anger is helpful when a boundary has been violated, but we spin our wheels when we get angry at ourselves for making a mistake. In fact, the anger we direct at ourselves over making a mistake is the most common reason why we don’t learn from it or move on from it.

If your anger is making you an emotional wreck, and you feel as if your emotions are all out of order, you are misusing your anger. If, however, your anger helps you focus your emotions and makes you stronger, it can be a powerful ally. The key is to stop anger from mushrooming into violence. Used responsibly, anger is there to protect you, but if you use it to hurt someone else, you are abusing your own emotions.

Strengthen your mental toughness. I’ll tell you the most effective way to learn mental toughness: say goodbye to perfectionism. You will never get what you want or need out of life if you are striving towards perfection. Doing your best on a regular basis is tough, but doing everything perfect every time is impossible.

Striving towards perfection is the precursor to failure. Want to ensure you’ll fail? Then try to be perfect. Success is overcoming something, and if you’re perfect, there is nothing to overcome. Here’s a method for drop-kicking perfectionism.

  1. Make your self-talk positive. Self-recrimination and blame have to go. Now. Ditch the words “can’t” and “never” while you’re at it.

  2. Put together a highlight film of your high points. Don’t look for moments in your life when you were “perfect.” Look for moments that brought you the most job, sense of accomplishment and peace.

  3. Commit to a forward action. Or “pull the trigger” as someone once advised me. Even the smallest tap can move a large boulder.

  4. Make your imperfections your assets. Freddy Mercury was famous for his overbite. At one point in his career, he refused to get it fixed surgically altered because he was afraid that it was what made his voice so distinctive. I’m no plastic surgeon, but I’m willing to bet that wasn’t what made him sound so distinct, but he made an imperfection that caused him embarrassment for years into an asset.

 

Tools to fight fear #6: Poise

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WomanHappyScale

 

Poise is really for advanced adventurers, because it develops as a result of previously successfully confronting and defeating a fear. Poise is one of those really cool battle scars you get, and it’s what allows you to summon up more courage as you go further down the road.

For me, the definition of poise is “courage that is not controlled or dependent on emotion.” Poise tells me that I’ve seen something like this before and defeated it. Poise is the ability to remain focused and courageous under fire, because you know going in that you have the ability to face the fire. That’s why you’ll rarely hear younger people referred to has having poise, and when they do display it, people remark about it.

Some psychologist claim that poise allows you to multi-task, but I disagree; I think that poise is used for focusing on a single task because poise allows you to know what your true priority is. Poise utilizes your optimal energy and your confidence in a way that doesn’t lead to arrogance. If it were possible to be more “focused” than “focused” poise would be the reason.

In my experience, poise really does come with age, and when people tell me that they’re worried that they’re too old to start their own business, I tell them that they probably have poise in spades. Poise has been one the strongest weapons I have, and I’ve used it countless times to keep from devolving into an emotional wreck. When I’ve dealt with a nightmare client, poise kept me from falling into despair, and it made it possible for me to speak with her while resisting the temptation to reach down her throat and pull her lungs out. Where anger tells me that a boundary is being violated, poise helps me to take out any unhelpful emotions from the equation and see the larger picture.

Some research has suggested that poise comes from the Right Brain, the conceptual problem-solver that usually gets second billing to our more logical Left Brain. I’d agree with that because I think that poise allows me to see the bigger picture without judging it (Left Brain activity), and using my Right Brain as a crutch to solve everything. The Left Brain holds your “gut” that gives you information without relying on facts, and as far as I’m concerned, neither emotions nor facts are the end all for making decisions. You’ll need your gut to make intuitive decisions, like whether to work with that company that hasn’t bothered to Skype you back for days. You start to wonder if they’re flaky and if they’ll actually pay you on time (if ever). You don’t have solid proof that they’ll stiff you, but you can’t shake that feeling. That’s your gut, and your Right Brain will give you the ability to keep your poise and make the best decision for you.

Tools to fight fear #5: Focus

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You will have to work to harness your energy and focus, because without focus, you can go off on an ineffective tangent and squander all of your other tools. In a business, you need to conserve all of your reserves and get the biggest return on your efforts. Focus allow you to do just that.

Focus pulls you into the present, and if you’re dealing with the regrets of the past that leads to depression or the fears of the future that populate anxiety, it probably feels like staying in the present is damn near impossible. You do have the ability to harness and channel your thoughts and your actions, but in order to do so you’ll have to train your mind.

Think of your mind as a big muscle, one that you can build and strengthen over time. If you’re a wiry little thing like me, you may think that muscle training is beyond your abilities, but anyone can strengthen their muscles, and the same thing applies to your mind.

If you’re moonlighting right now, you’re learning firsthand the benefit of focus. After working a full eight hour shift, you have to make the best use of the precious few hours you have for your business that aren’t designated for loved ones, eating, sleeping and relaxing. If, on the other hand, you’re just getting started and have only worked as an employee, you may have trouble staying in the present. Email notifications and ringing phones, coworkers “dropping in” on you, and a boss who can’t find a priority to save his life have trained you to feel overwhelmed and unable to control your work day. If that’s the case, it’s time to break that horrible habit, if only when you’re working on your business, on your time.

You probably guessed this was coming: I’m going to tell you to take up meditation. Yes, it’s true—the best way to teach your brain to stay in the present is to practice meditation. Get rid of the idea that you have to be perfect or good at it when you start—everyone is horrible at it the first time, and thoughts are going to go off like popcorn when you start. When that happens, be glad that you’re normal and you’re experiencing what every Zen Master before you conquered.

There are thousands of books on meditation, and the one I recommend is Turning the Mind Into an Ally. I have a paperback copy of this book, and I keep it loaded on my Kindle so I’ll always have it for reference. Sakyong Mipham explains the discipline of meditation much better than I ever could, but I’ll give you the cheapskate’s version until you can read his words.

Start with a “meditation moment” that can be 5 seconds, 30 seconds or just a minute. At first, you’re just going to tell your subconscious that you’ll be doing something new, which will freak it out and it will tell you that you’ll fail miserably. Close your eyes and turn off all distractions and just observe the thoughts you have in your mind. Don’t comment on them, don’t fuss at yourself for having them, and don’t waste your time getting upset when you’re instantly distracted. You are getting a baseline idea of what your mind is doing, sort of like the programs that run in the background of your computer.

When you experience a chain of thoughts that go from “I’m meditating…this feels weird…I’m doing it wrong..I’m hungry…this sucks…I can’t do this right…this is a waste of time,” just go “Huh, so that’s what I’m thinking” and don’t get upset about it. Just take not that that is how your thoughts are flowing.

As you progress, you’ll begin to ask yourself why you have those thoughts, and you’ll start to get insight into why you think and feel the way you think and feel. You’ll be shocked at the thoughts you have, but once you’ve ID’ed them, you can work with them. Focusing your thoughts is the first step in focusing yourself since all of your actions and experiences start with your thoughts.

Tools to fight fear #4: Courage

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girl-is-jumping-in-a-cold-water

You might think that courage would come in at number one, but in order to have courage, you need to have a store of energy, a positive perspective and loads of determination to see things through.

I mentioned in the introduction that anxiety often substitutes itself for assertiveness, and if you are tired of running from the room in search of relief from your anxiety and you’re ready to stand up for yourself, courage will serve you in doing so. Courage is not the absence of fear (nothing short of brain damage will completely alleviate fear), but the guts to go after what you want despite the fact that you’re scared to death.

Fear comes out of an irrational thought that you are at risk, and the fear is based on no evidence whatsoever. Courage accepts the fact that you’re afraid and goes ahead anyway. Courage doesn’t demand that you’re assured of a positive outcome—it goes ahead and pushes forward without the comfort of favorable odds.

Courage allows you to take a risk, which is the currency of starting your own business. Everything that you do involves a risk, even the mundane risk that you’ll get rained on on your way to your new office. With courage at your side, you can become assertive, the balance between a passive victim and an aggressive jerk who is just out for confrontation. It allows you to truthfully act on your beliefs.

Need help with becoming assertive? Here’s a plan:

State what you see and how you see it in a factual manner. “I’ve noticed that each time I call your office your assistant says that you are out of the office. Yet I usually hear your voice I the background.”

Tell how that makes you feel in a single sentence. “This makes me feel as if our business partnership is not important to you if my calls are not a priority for you.”

Finish by saying exactly what you want to happen. “Want” is important, because you are expressing your needs and taking control of the situation. “Want” signals your subconscious that you are no longer going to feel like a victim, which will give you the courage to move on.

The further you go along, the more courage you will need. Things will get harder, and you’ll have to make more of it. Each roadblock you encounter will require more and more courage, which is how you’ll know if you’re growing. Stronger people face larger obstacles, those who fail earlier trials will keep encountering them until they pass the test before them.

The risks that you face are the risk of success and the risk of defeat. The odds may be dead even between them or one may have the advantage over the other. The great thing about courage is that you don’t always have to have it before you use it. You can “fake it till you make it.” You can create an alter ego, which is what many successful people have done. If Beyonce’s scared, she’ll let Sasha Fierce take care of it. All her subconscious knows is that one part of her is answering the challenge and standing up to her fear. The more you tell your subconscious that you’re facing your fear, the more it will learn that it’s capable of standing up to the fear.

Courage is a one-way street; once you start to display it, you can only go forward. There’s no place for second-guessing, or tentativeness. You cannot stop to analyze the situation or pause to reflect. Courage can only operate in forward. It can’t power your backwards.

Remember, risk moves only in forward position. You need courage to take risks and starting something from nothing involves little more than constant risk.

Tools to fight fear #3: Energy

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The third tool that you need to successfully fight fear is energy.  Along with determination and perspective, energy is a tool that you’ll need throughout your confrontation with fear.  And yes, you’ll have to confront your fear; no use trying to tiptoe past it, hoping it doesn’t see you.

Before we go any further, let’s look at what “energy” is not.  Being “energetic” is not always being in a heightened state of arousal.  If that were the case, you could call an anxiety attack “being energized.”  Energy is not always up or at the highest point that you can be without exploding.  Did you know that cellulite is untapped energy?  If you do enough exercise, your body eats up the excess fat as fuel, which take the pounds off of your body.

Do you work best when you are relaxed or invigorated?  You can be a powerful force while you are relaxing.  Relaxing often gets a bad rap for laziness, but relaxation is a great way to conserve or even utilize energy.  Relaxing can also be viewed as going back down to your optimized energy level, the level when you are at your best.  Zen masters are highly effective, but you don’t see them working themselves up into a frenzy just to be effective.

Introverts thrive on lower forms of energy, so if you have an introverted personality, you will be more effective by lowering your energy level to one that allows your to focus and concentrate on what you’re doing.  Too much energy can be distracting and cause your system to “short circuit” because you don’t have a a way to deal with the unnecessary thoughts, worries or   distractions.  You’ll need to center in order to get rid of that excess energy.

Centering involves shifting from your Left Brain (which unfairly gets stuck with most of the work regulating your mind and body- GIVE IT A BREAK!) towards your Right Brain.  The Right Brain is an expert at dealing with abstract concepts (like being afraid of public speaking or any other thing that does not involve a concrete threat like a bear with its fangs bared), so activating it gives part of your brain a much needed break and the other one the chance to chip in and make a helpful contribution.

If you’ve looked at mind/body literature, you’ve no doubt heard the word “meditate” until you’re sick of it.  Meditation, the centering of your brain is especially helpful in this situation because you’re using the organ that creates the fear to combat the fear directly.  Your brain knows how to reason with your brain, and instead of working against it (concentrating on the fear), you can use it as an ally to get rid of the fear.

Tools to fight fear #2: Perspective

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The stairway to success (in toy style)

The stairway to success (in toy style)

 

The second tool that you’ll need in your arsenal to tackle fear is perspective.  We looked earlier at how determination provides a powerful engine for keeping you going past fear.  Today, we’re giving the same treatment to your perspective.  While determination is the fuel that keeps you going, perspective determines how you see every aspect of your situation.

“Do I really have what it takes to go trough this?  Do I want to take this thing head on?  Is this really going to be as bad as I’m afraid it will be?”  all of those questions are answered by your perspective.  In the beginning, your perspective really is all that you have.  If it’s your first time giving birth, you don’t have any past pregnancies to draw data or conclusions from.  As you start dealing with what you fear, you can change your perspective according to what you experience, but when you start, you’ve really got what you tell yourself about yourself and the situation to go on.

That’s why it’s vitally important to watch what you say about yourself before you start to face a fear.  “Omigod- every time I go to the dentist it’s always a root canal!” really isn’t helping your fear about your upcoming visit.  Even if it is true, you still don’t know if you’ll be facing the drill this time.  You are, however, scaring yourself to death and getting yourself worked up over probably nothing.

The more times you face something similar, like a ride at an amusement park, the more likely you are to have a perspective that actually prepares you for something that makes you nervous.  “This one is just like the Flying Dutchman back at Six Flags” is a good way to put a ride into perspective and prepare yourself for the G forces as you wait in line.  Craning your neck around and watching the cars go by and comparing it to something somewhat similar that you’ve ridden before is also helpful.  Trying to do the calculations of the death rate for amusement park rides is, however, not helpful.

As you confront your fear, your perspective will change.  Like a hero in a story, you’ll realize that you need backup, or that the thing that you fear is not as bad as you initially feared.  Perspective will help you concentrate on something larger than the fear, which will keep it from mushrooming in your mind and taking up more of your mental energy than it deserves.  If you deal with anxiety, you know that anxiety likes nothing more than to blow a simple issue out into galactic proportions.  If it’s of “galactic proportions,” then anxiety will convince you that it was your bestest friend by “warning” you of the “danger.”  You’ll be so thankful of your “buddy” that you’ll invite him to stay around and ferret out some “new” fears for you to run from.

Keeping perspective keeps not only the thing that you fear but your anxiety about the object in check.  Perspective interrupts the whispers and lies that anxiety puts into your ear, and gives you more fact-based information.  Anxiety tells you that you’ll stand in the corner at the mixer and not make any business contacts.  Anxiety tells you that it’s a waste of time to do.  Anxiety tells you that everyone there will either point and laugh at you or feel so sorry for you that they’ll laugh at you behind their hands.

Perspective tells you that things aren’t as bad as anxiety lies and assures you they will be.  Perspective allows you to get your courage up and to endure.  It allows you to see things through until you face your fear.

 

 

 

Tools to fight fear #1: Determination

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snailLeaf

 

If you lack determination, don’t worry that it’s a moral issue. It means that currently you’re lacking in:

Intrinsic Motivation: This is an internal motivation, everything that lives amongst your deepest needs and desires. Without intrinsic motivation, there is no unmet goal or desire. You have nothing to move you forward towards something.   You may be in a situation where you’ve been so hurt in the past that you don’t want to get motivated about anything.  The thought of losing something else in some point of the future made you turn off your desire to want anything.  I’ve been there, but if you’re numb to wanting anything,  you’re about as close to a husk of a human being as you can possibly get without the state declaring you a vegetable.

Commitment: It’s not that you’re afraid of commitment, or that you can’t commit. The problem is that you are immobilized by options. You can’t prioritize your wants and needs because there are so many of them competing for your attention.  Many writers blame Writer’s Block on the fact that you have too many ideas coming at you to isolate one and go after it.  Or that you’re bombarded with so many “meh” ideas that you can’t search out a truly great one.

Will to Succeed: this originates from an outside force. Without a status quo to rebel against or a culture to respond to, nothing outside of your mind sparks the need to go forward.  If you’re totally okay with things the way that they are, why change it?  Chaos sometimes has to come in a stir up up, or take something away from you in order to get you going.

How do you get determination? Here’s a three-step plan:

1. Figure out your-long term goal. It should be a larger goal that this current desire is meant to contribute to. Maybe you’re starting your own business because you want to have extra money coming in to keep your family stable. Maybe there’s a math and science school that you want to earn tuition money for.

Start racking up small successes. Start with minuscule ones because even the smallest amount of momentum will get you going. You’ll be in the zone of accomplishment and your amygdala will start to crave more….more!  The amygdala loves to hunt for fear, but even more than fear, that puppy loves fun.  Distract it with fun and you can keep it from trying to stir up trouble by inventing things to worry about.

Honestly determine where you are right now. Make a list of every small asset that you have, and what you are lacking that you will need in order to succeed.

2. Give shape to the mission, with measurable goals and timelines. Say you want to write twelve e-books in one year. You can break the year down into what you will be doing each month, week, or day in order to get certain benchmarks met.

Write out the logistics of your plan. How will you find material for your books, find an editor, create a cover, etc…  You aren’t tied to a plan, but it gives you a skeleton to hang your ideas on.  I like to get the skeleton up and them improvise. If I get distracted later, I know where to go back for direction.

3. Prepare for contingencies. Personally, I think this is the most important part of the plan. A plan is not an instructional manual that has to be followed to the letter. It’s a skeleton the hang your plan on. Accept that you will have delays, obstacles, disappointments and reversals of fortune.  “Man makes plans and God laughs” and all…  My advice?  Make a plan and say out loud “This is probably not how it will go at all.”  Accept that it probably won’t go that way after all.  True strength means being okay with your carefully laid plans going totally to crap in a hand basket.

I totally get it- we’ve all been shitted on by fate in the past, and sometimes we convince ourselves that it’s “best not to try.”  I could spend hours telling you how many of my best-laid plans went to hell.  Did I tell you about the miserable semester I spent in law school?  But the truth is that the universe will shit on you whether you go after what you want or not.  And I think it’s better to have the courage to go after what you want.

 

Why you’ll always be second place [Video]

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It’s not a lack of know-how that keeps you in second place.  It’s the smell of desperation that holds you back from become the best at what you do.

The truth is that it’s your attitude (and your mistaken business practices) that keep you in second place.  In this video, I talk about how your own actions work to keep you number two (no pun intended).  The biggest factor in determining your place in your market has very little to do with the quality of your product, customer service, potential, or even something that your competition does.

It’s you, you YOU- all about you!