Archives for 2016

When you slide into the driver’s seat after a long day on the job, it’s likely you’re still in “work mode” even if you had a good day. You’re thinking about long-term projects, mentally prioritizing tasks, and maybe even re-arguing the inevitable workplace conflicts. You may be making phone calls to tie up last-minute details while you’re on the highway. Facing bumper-to-bumper traffic doesn’t help your mood when you’ve already got so much on your mind.

How can anyone relax during the rush hour drive home?

Less Stress, More Sanity
Though commuters spend nearly an hour getting to and from their jobs, very few of them would call it a pleasant experience. The usual traffic congestion combined with the occasional road work, accidents, and bad weather make commuting an unpredictable and stressful grind.

Finding a way to relax on your commute isn’t just a question of calming down so that you’re not a growling bear when you walk into the office in the morning or into your home at night. Multiple studies have shown that driving to work more than 45 minutes a day can affect your health and happiness in a number of ways, including:

• An Increase In Weight
• Sleep Disturbances
• Elevated Stress Levels
• Shorter Life Span
• Increase Likelihood of Divorce

More Acceptance, Less Anger
Short of changing your commuting route or means of transportation–say, deciding to take a bus or train rather than drive, or vice-versa–there’s very little you can do about the frustrations of traffic, bad weather, or road blockages. Consciously accepting that you cannot control these factors can go a long way to reducing road-rage.

Managing your frustration is a process. You can help it along with these tips:

• Avoid Obsessively Checking Your Watch During The Commute
• Avoid Checking Your Speed And Odometer If You Drive
• Try Deep-Breathing Techniques When Frustrations Arise
• Build Extra Time Into Your Commute To Avoid Scheduling Worries
• Download Commuter Apps That Give You A Heads-Up On Traffic And Transportation Snafus So You Can Plan Accordingly
• Focus On Satisfying Ways To Fill Your Commuter Hours

Change Your Mindset, Change Your Mood
Many commuters feel that time spent on the road is wasted, unproductive time. You’re not checking off items on your to-do list, engaging in exercise, enjoying a passion, or spending quality time with your family and loved ones. Challenging this mindset is the first step to transforming your commuting experience.

Consider reframing your opinion of that “wasted” time. Think of it as a free period of the day when you are not under the demands of work or home. Even considering the limitations imposed by the need to drive or wait for public transportation, you can give yourself permission to enjoy those hours in any way you choose.

Consider these suggestions to fill the hours of your commute:

• Listen To Audiobooks To Read Classics Or Keep Up With Bestsellers
• Learn A New Language Using Apps On Your Phone
• Be Zen By Filling Your Car With Birdsong Or Meditation Tracks
• Call (Hands-Free) An Old Friend You’ve Fallen Out Of Touch With
• Listen To Your Favorite Talk Radio Show
• For Bus Or Train Commuters, Play Word Games, Puzzles, Or Social Games Like Words With Friends With Gusto And Without Guilt
• Be Mindful Of Your Surroundings, Take Stock Of Natural Beauty, Humor, Interest, To Share With Your Coworkers And Family

A twice-daily dose of commuter stress is never good for your health or happiness, but if stress and anxiety are seeping into all areas of your life, consider contacting a mental health professional whose mission is to offer up solid, practical ways to cope.

Stress is a natural, if unwelcome, part of a full and active life. No matter how well you balance the demands of work, health, and family, you will naturally experience the kind of difficult situations that engender emotional strain. In fact, over two-thirds of American adults report that they experience stress and anxiety on a daily basis, according to the Anxiety And Depression Association of America.

Since stress is inevitable, learning how to manage the condition is key. One important tool is vigorous physical exercise, like running.

Stress Symptoms
Unexpectedly bumping into your ex-spouse at a holiday party has the same physiological impact as if you just stumbled upon a hungry lion pride in the savannah.

In the short term, such an event can cause these reactions:

• The release of adrenaline and cortisol throughout your body
• A rise in pulse, heart rate, and blood pressure
• A tightening of your muscles as they are flooded with oxygen
• A surge in your immune system response
• A sharpening of your senses as you go into “fight-or-flight” mode

Note that the “fight-or-flight” response involves physicality: Battling or running. In an evolutionary sense, one action or the other was necessary for survival.

Fight Or Flight
In the modern world, it’s impolite—even criminal—to throw a punch when faced with a contentious ex-spouse, or when you’re dealing with a co-worker who refuses to do his job. Nor is it always feasible to flee a stressful situation, such as when you’re presenting an annual report in front of your boss’s boss. Yet bottling up the natural urges has real physiological consequences because it extends your body’s response to stress and doesn’t give your system time to return to normal.

Embracing daily exercise like running allows your body the release that comes when you engage the “flight” response.

The Zen Of Running
Running as a form of regular exercise has many well-known physical benefits, including:

• Increasing muscle mass and staving off age-related atrophy
• Increasing bone density and staving off osteoporosis
• Better weight management
• Lowering blood pressure

What is less known is that running is also a powerful tool in anxiety reduction. Not only does running twenty minutes or more a day reset your body’s physiological systems to a much healthier state, but the exercise affects your mindset as well. The runners’ “high” involves the release of endorphins in the brain, those opioid-like “happy” chemicals that just make you feel good.

Managing stress is an important life skill and daily exercise is only one tool of many. If you find that chronic stress is affecting your life and your health despite your best efforts, never hesitate to contact a mental health professional.

In an ideal world, you’d be leaping out of bed in the morning to get to a job that excites you, challenges you, pays well, offers a path upward, and is filled with interesting and wonderful people that you admire and enjoy working with. In the real world, you’d be thrilled with three out of five of those attributes. You may even settle for two and convince yourself that it’s enough.

But are you just settling for the status quo? Check out these three signs that you’re unhappy with your current job.

Monday Morning Anxiety
Living for the weekend is one thing, but if you spend the whole work week wondering if Friday will ever come, spend Sunday in an increasing state of dread, and wake up Monday morning anxious, you might want to update your resume. Whether your stress arises from being overworked, under-challenged, or feeling like a pariah in the office, there’s a big gap between craving a couple of days of rest, entertainment, and relaxation and viewing it as the only bright hours in your world.

Watching The Clock
If you’re constantly gauging the minutes before your next break, then you’re either bored with or unchallenged by the tasks assigned to you, or you don’t have enough to do. Perhaps you feel intimidated by your boss and are unwilling to ask for more work, or perhaps you sense that the company is struggling and you don’t want to draw attention to your empty in box. Whatever the case, you may want to be more proactive even it means facing a possible change of employment.

Lacking Focus, Energy, Attention
Unhappiness can manifest in many ways, but a general lack of energy is one good indicator. If you’re getting a full night’s sleep and yet multiple cups of strong coffee can’t keep you awake and on task, there may be a problem. If your days are spent in a haze of unfocused lethargy, you may want to reconsider why. Sure, many jobs are dull and repetitious, but the trade-off may be acceptable if the pay is good and you’re surrounded by lively, interesting co-workers and an effective boss. If it’s not, you may need to seek a position that offers more challenges.

The ideal job is as rare as a unicorn, which means that a certain level of job stress is inevitable no matter what your position. If unmanaged, stress can have debilitating physical and emotional effects. If you ever feel that you’re unable to cope with the amount of stress you’re experiencing, don’t hesitate to contact a mental health professional.

When you’re at work, you have assigned projects that need to be finished within a certain time with the help of colleagues geared toward the same goals, for which you are rewarded with pay.

When you’re at home, however, you have an infinite list of repetitive tasks and major projects divided unequally among often resistant family members for which your efforts are barely acknowledged and at best rewarded with a verbal “thanks.”

Framed like this, it’s no surprise that a recent study out of Penn State revealed that people are actually more stressed at home than at work—especially if you’re a woman. Since high levels of persistent stress can lead to serious physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms, learning ways to soothe your stress at home is vital. Check out these free or inexpensive ways to take a chill break.

Pound The Pavement
Removing yourself from the immediate source of stress is always a good first step to lowering your blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels. A long hike through the neighborhood, a nearby park, or a wooded trail may calm you down enough to move from an emotional state to one where you can think clearly enough to measure the value of various solutions to any stressful home situation. Integrating a half-hour to a forty-five-minute walk into your daily routine is also a healthy habit for the long term.

Play With Your Pet
For years, therapy pets have been used in nursing homes and in rehabilitation facilities as a way to lower stress levels and promote healing. Universities routinely bring in hordes of puppies during finals week to help students cope with high-stakes testing pressure. Spending a little one-on-one time with a purring cat on your lap or running around your backyard with the family dog may be just the therapy you need.

Soak In Some Sun
If the weather complies, spending a half-hour or more lying in the sun has multiple beneficial effects. First, closing your eyes and concentrating on a simple pleasure may help calm the swirling thoughts that are consuming your attention. Second, the extra vitamin D that is made while sunbathing helps boost an immune system that may be battered by stress. Third, studies show that sunbathing lowers your blood pressure which means you’ll be calmer when you’re done.

Pen Your Problems
One major source of home stress is the overwhelming multiplicity of tasks that must be done on a regular basis combined with larger projects that need to be done over time. Grappling with the immediate demands while trying to push forward a more long-term agenda can make you feel like you never get anything done, especially if the sharing of the load is uneven.

Consider setting aside a few hours on a weekend to make a list of these tasks as well as breaking down the larger ones into smaller parts. The act of writing itself may have a purgative effect on your stress. The list created can also be a baseline through which you can delegate discrete, specific, and non-overwhelming tasks to other family members, thus easing the workload on you.

Workplace stress is inevitable, even if you love your job. Tight deadlines, progress evaluations, sales presentations, and unexpected or harried work travel can raise your anxiety level. Add in a boss with anger management issues, a disorganized co-worker, or other office interpersonal drama, and it’s a wonder you don’t ditch it all and move the family into a tree-hut in the woods to live by hunting, fishing, and foraging wild berries.

If that thought has ever passed through your mind, clearly it’s time for a stress-break. Here are three exercises you can do at work to help bring inner peace.

Cardio Conditioning
Most office workers spend a lot of time sitting down and staring at a screen. The only time your heart rate goes up is when the boss is breathing down your neck. This jolt will definitely pump adrenaline through your body, but not necessarily the happy endorphins that flood your bloodstream when you do a little cardio exercising.

Cardio exercising doesn’t mean getting yourself so worked up that you’re dripping sweat. Even ten- or fifteen-minute bouts of exercise that elevate your heart rate will work, such as:
– Taking the stairs rather than the elevator to your office
– Taking the long, circuitous route from your cubicle to the bathroom and back
– Taking a walk outside the office during lunchtime
– Ten minutes of in-place exercises like jumping jacks, running in place, or push-ups

Stretch Test
Stress makes your muscles bunch up, no doubt about it. Long stretches of sitting in one place can make your legs fall asleep, your ankles and calves swell, and your bottom go numb. Your neck muscles will tighten up, as will your shoulders, the two areas that massage therapists recognize as the major muscle areas affected most easily by stress.

Stretching can include:
– Yoga positions, if you practice regularly
– Rolling your neck and shoulders gently, so you don’t pull any muscles
– Runner’s stretches to lengthen the calf muscles and quads
– Back stretches by gently lifting your arms above your head, stretching side-to-side, and touching your toes

Breathing Exercises
“Take a deep breath” may seem like a cliché, but studies have shown that slow, deep breathing exercises, such as occur during meditation, can lower your heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of stress hormones in your blood. Done correctly, breathing deeply can focus the “monkey mind,” a state of stress when your thoughts swirl with deadlines, details, and the detritus of daily office life. A clearer head means a calmer worker, so the ten or fifteen minutes spent focusing on your breathing might mean a far more productive, and slightly less stressful, afternoon.

Extended bouts of unrelenting stress can cause serious physical effects, such as headaches, insomnia and back pain as well as hypertension, heart disease, and depression. It’s worth taking the time to learn positive techniques to cope with daily stress so it doesn’t turn chronic.

As the lovely, warm days of summer wane into autumn, it’s natural that children come down with back-to-school fever. While some kids may be feverish with excitement at the start of the new academic year, others will show signs of very real distress, especially if it’s their first day in a new school.

Learning how to recognize stressful situations and deal with them is a vital coping skill, so consider the back-to-school jitters an opportunity to teach a valuable life lesson.

Address The Anxiety
Young children facing their first day at school may not be able to fully articulate what is bothering them, so it’s up to you as the parent to recognize the symptoms. Those symptoms may include:

Crankiness and mood swings
– Difficulties sleeping, or “avoidance” sleeping for teenagers
– Excessive nervousness about clothing, school supplies, and overall preparedness
– Seeking frequent assurance that all will be fine
– Withdrawal from social events and friends, especially for older students
– Complaints of headaches or stomachaches that are not related to any physical sickness
– Requests not to be taken to school, or asking to be picked up early or to take a day off

Although you may be tempted to bolster a child’s confidence by offering a quick-and-breezy comment like “You’ll be fine, you’ll see,” this tactic may backfire if he believes that his underlying issues are not being sufficiently addressed.

Facing The Fears
Pinpointing the concerns that are the source of your child’s anxiety is the first step toward allaying those fears. For instance, if your child is worried about where the bathroom is in her new classroom, or whether the new teacher will be kind, then planning a quick tour of the classroom in the weeks before school begins will go a long way toward easing your child’s anxiety.

For many children, back-to-school anxiety is multi-faceted or difficult for them to articulate. In these cases, consider these tips to help ease their fears:

– Emphasize the positive by making new clothing and school supply shopping an event, and reminding them of what they liked in previous academic years
– Put them in control by allowing them to wear their favorite outfit, choose their lunch, and bring a comfort item on the first day
– Practice the before-bed and early-morning routines a week or so before school begins
– Put power in their hands by giving them small erasers or glittery pencils to offer to potential friends
– Role play likely situations
– Be calm and listen closely to their concerns as you guide them in problem solving

Sending your children back-to-school can be anxiety-producing for you, too, so make sure you take a few deep breaths as you watch them climb into that school bus. More likely than not, they’ll come bounding home with smiles on their faces and lots of stories to tell.

The neighborhood playgroup should be a wonderful gathering for parents to share experiences, discuss preschools, and have a little adult interaction over a cup of coffee while the kids learn social skills. But if several of your child’s precocious friends are babbling away in two- and three-word sentences, while your child still hasn’t mastered mama, it’s difficult not to develop a pit in your stomach worrying about why your child hasn’t caught up.

Although speech and language difficulties are the most common early-in-life disabilities, not all delays are indications of a more generalized learning problem. Check out these three reasons why your child may be experiencing trouble mastering the art of chatter.

Oral Obstructions
Sometimes the problem is physical. Children born with cleft palates often have speech difficulties, especially in the early years before surgery. A less noticeable problem may exist under a child’s tongue. If the fold of skin under the tongue (called the frenulum) is too short, it will limit the tongue’s range of motion and perhaps inhibit your child’s ability to make some sounds. A quick trip to a pediatric ear, nose, and throat doctor (ENT) can diagnose such problems and offer ways to ameliorate it.

Hearing Hurdles
If an infant or toddler can’t hear a parent speaking, then she will understandably have difficulty developing language and speech. Any concern about a child’s ability to hear should be followed by a trip to an audiologist for expert screening. The sooner a hearing problem is diagnosed, the sooner steps can be taking to improve aural abilities and thus promote improved language and speech development.

It’s crucial to note that not all hearing difficulties may be related to biological impairments. Children who have a history of chronic ear infections may have had gaps in their language and speech development when they could not process sounds well. As long as the infections were properly treated, however, a toddler should easily catch up to her peers.

Mind Over Matter
Some speech and language delays are due to unusual wiring in the brain that short-circuits the facility of the oral-motor functioning. If feeding problems go along with the verbal and comprehension delays, this may be the root cause of your child’s difficulties.

It’s important to note that, in some cases, speech and language delays can be a single symptom of an overall developmental delay. Sometimes those “global” delays are difficult to diagnose until a child reaches preschool or grammar school age. Speech and language difficulties may be an indicator that points to a more systemic issue.

Every child learns at a different rate. Contact your pediatrician if you have any concerns about your infant, toddler, or preschooler’s language comprehension and/or speech development. Once oral and aural issues are ruled out, a speech pathologist can drill down to the specifics of any delay diagnosis and provide positive steps for the future.

Anxiety often gets a bad rap. Feelings of anxiety allow us to recognize difficult situations and gear up our bodies and minds to tackle them. Olympic athletes experience anxiety before competing. Teenagers experience anxiety before taking a college entrance exam. Toddlers experience anxiety when their bedrooms go dark. Anxiety, at its root, is a natural, evolutionary response to a perceived danger.

But sometimes feelings of anxiety arise even when they are disassociated from an immediate trigger. Distressing fears may become persistent, severe, and interfere with the ability to function in everyday life, for both children and adults.

Adult Anxiety
Anxiety disorders can be broken down into a number of different types depending on the symptoms or triggers, including:

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder
• Panic Disorder
• Social Anxiety Disorder
• Phobias
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Symptoms of these anxiety disorders can manifest in adults and older children in many similar ways, with teens being particularly susceptible to social anxiety disorder. But additional anxiety disorders are particular to younger children, such as:

• Separation Anxiety Disorder
• Selective Autism

Adults suffering from any of these anxiety disorders often know that their reactions, symptoms, and feelings are extreme. But children, because they lack the experience or cognitive ability, are often unaware that their behavior is out-of-the-ordinary.

Child Anxiety
Although the National Institutes of Health recognizes that the “core risk phase” for the development of many adult anxiety disorders are the childhood and adolescent years, diagnosing childhood anxiety orders can be tricky for several reasons.

First, depending on the age, young children may not have yet developed the cognitive or communicative ability to articulate the precise nature and depth of their fears or feelings.

Second, a natural part of a child’s development includes distinct periods of anxious behavior. A jittery, wailing toddler truly believes that her mother has disappeared when she shuts herself behind the bathroom door. A three-year-old may scream in panic and cower in a closet whenever he hears thunder. Mental health professionals are trained to separate normal developmental anxiety behavior from the potential of a more pernicious anxiety disorder.

Recognizing and diagnosing anxiety disorders in children is crucial, for studies have shown that early intervention and parental response training can make all the difference for a child’s future. If your child exhibits anxious behavior that seems particularly intense, or that you fear may lay outside the age frame of normal development, don’t hesitate to speak to your pediatrician or contact a pediatric mental health professional.

Few events are more distressing to a parent than when their child receives a diagnosis of a chronic, challenging mental condition like autism. Yet approximately one in seventy American children were diagnosed last year, according to the Center of Disease Control. Although the rates have been increasing over the past three decades, a portion of that increase is due to broadened diagnostic criteria.

Autism is not one single, fixed condition, but a term used to encompass a group of complex developmental disorders that vary in symptoms and severity. Two of the major types are autistic disorder and Asperger’s syndrome.

Autistic Disorder
A child diagnosed with autistic disorder is a child who shows symptoms involving language, communication, and social difficulties, as well as unusual and sometimes obsessive behaviors. For example, a child may speak infrequently or struggle to be understood. He may avoid making eye contact and fail to pick up on social cues. He also may display unusual behaviors like spinning wheels, flapping their hands, or rocking endlessly. They can be hypersensitive to outside stimuli and may overreact in response. There can also be some academic challenges due to intellectual disabilities.

Autistic disorder is often called “classic autism,” because it encompasses the behaviors most people associate with the word autism.

Asperger’s Syndrome
Asperger’s syndrome wasn’t an official diagnosis until the early 1990s, when it was first added to the World Health Organization’s diagnosis manual and a couple years later to the American Psychiatric Associations’ manual of mental disorders. Until then, many psychiatrists used the term “high functioning autistic” to describe children who met the later criteria of Asperger’s syndrome.

Like children with an autistic disorder, children with Asperger’s syndrome will also experience difficulty expressing their feelings as well as in interpreting other people’s expressions, body language, and subtle verbal clues. They may struggle to maintain eye contact and speak in rigid or unemotional cadences. They are often rigidly scheduled, highly sensitive to change, and have intense, specific, brilliantly developed interests.

The major difference between these two types of autism is in the intellectual capacity. Children with Asperger’s syndrome generally have normal to extremely high IQs. The character Dr. Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, played by actor Jim Parsons, portrays a TV-exaggerated example of the syndrome.

There is a third major type of autism spectrum disorder with the unwieldy name “pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified,” or PDD-NOS. This tends to be given to children who express some, but not all, autistic disorder symptoms, or express them more mildly. Knowing where your child falls on the autism spectrum is the first step in diagnosis and treatment. If you have any concerns, your pediatrician can guide you to a mental health professional for assessment.

Mental illness diagnosis, treatment, and classification have evolved considerably since the time of the ancient Greeks, when any kind of unusual mood or behavioral condition was thought to be due to an imbalance in the blood’s humors. Prior to 1980, when the term bipolar disorder became official, most professionals described the symptoms attributed to bipolar disorder using the more vivid but less specific term: Manic depression.

The latest fictional poster child for bipolar disorder is the brilliant but emotionally unstable character Carrie Mathison on the Showtime series Homeland played by the Emmy-winning actress Claire Danes. Her behavior highlights the two major poles that characterize the condition. One extreme includes extended, high-energy, frantic, sleepless, and sometimes hallucinogenic manic episodes while the other extreme involves extended, extremely low-energy, depressive and sometimes suicidal episodes.

Since about 4% of the American population has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it’s possible that the last house party you attended included at least one officially-diagnosed guest. As in any complex mental disorder, there are variations in level and frequency of manifestation.

Bipolar disorder is broken down into these five sub-types, depending on symptoms and severity:

• Bipolar I, where suffers experience extreme manic and sometimes mixed manic-depressive episodes.
• Bipolar II, where suffers have deep depressive episodes and manic ones of a lesser extreme.
• Cyclothymia, where suffers experience swings over years but of a milder extreme.
• Rapid Cycling, where suffers experience multiple cycles within a year’s time.
• Not Otherwise Specified (NOS), where suffers’ symptoms don’t follow any of the above patterns.

Because of the separate and diverse behaviors, diagnosis can be difficult. Suffers more commonly seek help during depressive episodes, which can easily lead to a misdiagnosis of depression or anxiety. Manic episodes that include hallucinations or psychotic symptoms may be misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, personality, or delusional disorders. If you suspect you or a loved one may be suffering from bipolar disorder or any other mental health disability, don’t hesitate to call a mental health professional to get tested. The sooner you get help, the sooner you can live better.