by Gabrielle Abelard | Feb 16, 2015 | Better Sleep |
As a nation littered with coffee shop chain restaurants and energy drink-lined store shelves, Americans’ obsession with caffeine and a host of trendy supplements promoting increased energy, indicates a deeper issue: a widespread lack of restful sleep. Maintaining a regular sleep schedule promotes physical and emotional health by providing our minds and bodies the time to process the past day and prepare for the next. Like anything, humans require a period of “recharging” – a restful sleep promotes mental clarity, stable metabolism, hormonal balance, and cell restoration throughout the body. These things affect the whole person; they allow for clear decision-making, emotional regularity, healthy organ functioning, resistant immune system, capable learning and memory making, among numerous other crucial functions in our day-to-day lives. When you consider this, it seems ludicrous the disregard our society has for sleep’s importance in leading happy, fulfilling lives. While everyone experiences occasional bouts of insomnia, perhaps the most concerning sleep disorder is chronic sleep loss: a disorder which overtime can cause learning/memory difficulty, weight gain, cardiovascular problems, weakened immune system, and overall amotivation and stagnation. The lowered functioning caused by sleeplessness results not only in personal health and emotional difficulties, but also causes a surprising amount of motor vehicle and other heavy machinery accidents. However dismal your struggle to sleep may be, there are a plethora of things you can do to combat insomnia. These include: cutting down on caffeine consumption (4-6 hours before bedtime at least), maintaining a regular sleep schedule, avoiding heavy meals or alcohol before bedtime, limiting smoking near bedtime (or during the night), get regular exercise, and try to keep...
by Gabrielle Abelard | Feb 16, 2015 | Seeking Help |
Psychotherapy describes a collaborative relationship between a therapist and their patient where the goal is to provide support and coping skills to patients feeling overwhelmed by a range of different issues. These patients may be experiencing anything from chronic mental illness, to weight loss difficulties, to overcoming substance abuse. Psychotherapy counseling can be provided by various mental health professionals: licensed social workers, licensed mental health counselors, psychologists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, amongst a variety of other specialized counselors and psychiatric professionals. The techniques used by these psychotherapists is nearly as varied as the issues they are designed to treat, some of the most common include: cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, gentle reprocessing (trauma), solution-focused brief therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy, shortened as CBT, is perhaps the most well-known, and most often used standard therapeutic technique. CBT treatment includes identifying the initial cognition experienced by the patient when exposed to any situation causing distressful feelings. The patient and clinician then attempt to expose and alter these reactions to create insight into our minds’ often over the top interpretation of stimuli, whether it be from other people or random life incidences, to become more aware, and mindful, to how our minds work and how to cope with it. As previously mentioned, psychotherapy can be used to treat short term difficulties, such as divorce, grieving a death, school/work pressure, weight loss, etc. and long term afflictions, like depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, chronic physical illness, insomnia, attention deficit disorders, and more. Because psychotherapy is a relatively new form of treatment, due to mental health being a fairly new concern in the...
by Gabrielle Abelard | Feb 16, 2015 | Anxiety |
Anxiety is a normal, evolutionarily beneficial, reaction to stress. It provides the “fight or flight” response to danger, increases self-awareness, motivates and keeps us alert, however these benefits often get skewed and end up mutating into a condition that ends up hindering our function. Symptoms of an anxiety disorder include: anxious feelings with seemingly no precipitating event, jittery/nervous feelings, difficulty breathing, difficulty calming down, overall feeling of hesitation and restrictedness. Generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, is the most common anxiety disorder where typical anxiety is aggravated to the point of making normal situations nearly impossible to deal with. Posttraumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive disorder, social anxiety and more also fall under the “anxiety umbrella” and refer to more acute problems stemming from an abnormal reaction to stress. Anyone can potentially suffer from one or more of these ailments, however those who have been exposed to high stress situations, trauma, or have a family history of mental disorders (particularly anxiety) are at a higher risk. The treatment for anxiety disorders comes in both therapeutic discourse (for example, psychotherapy) and in medication treatment, through some antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and others. SOURCES:...
