A Short Inpirational Film

A short inspirational story of how we should appreciate life:

The Strangest Phobias Round the World

According to the dictionary phobia is an irrational and excessive fear of object or situation. Phobia symptoms can occur while being exposed to that particular object or situation or sometimes even thinking of the feared object can lead to response. The most common symptoms of phobia are:

• Dizziness
• Breathlessness
• Nausea
• A sense of unreality
• Fear of dying

Phobias are actually quite common and according to the latest research it affects round 10% of population in USA. In most cases people are able to recognize that their fear is irrational and overcome it before it becomes phobia. According to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, only 10% of reported cases become life long illnesses.

There are different ways on treating phobias and the treatment mainly depends on how strong the phobia is and the way it occurs to the person. One of the treatments is exposure to the fear. A person is forced o face his/her fear without having a chance to escape. This aims to prove the person that his/her fear is harmless and irrational and helps to overcome it. If the person is unable to handle exposure treatment than the other way of treating phobia which is often used is counter-conditioning. In this treatment the person learns how to react to phobia: various stress revealing and relaxation techniques to replace anxiety and fear. This new behavior is incompatible with the previous panicked response, so the phobic response gradually fades. Here are some of the strangest and most uncommon phobias:

Caligynephobia- abnormal fear of beautiful women.

Bibliophobia – is a common phobia that most people don’t even know that they have.  Bibliophobia is commonly known as the fear of books (but that’s not the whole story!).  Some of us think we have it when we try to do our homework.   The symptoms of this phobia include breathlessness, dizziness, dry mouth, excessive sweating, nausea, feeling sick, heart palpitations, inability to speak of think clearly, a fear of dying, becoming mad or losing control, a sensation of detachment from reality of a full blown anxiety attack.

Avi0phobia – 9% of Americans has this phobia which is an extreme fear of flying in an airplane.

Agateophobia – fair of insanity. Agateophobia is created by the unconscious mind as a protective mechanism. Agateophobia develops at some point in your past, where there was likely an event linking insanity or becoming insane and emotional trauma.

Enetophobia- fear of pins or needles.

Hellenologophobia – fear of Greek terms or complex scientific terminology. It is usually caused by an intense negative experience from your past. But your mind can also create that fear seemingly without basis you know your hellenologophobia is illogical. But it has persisted because your subconscious has attached the idea of greek terms or complex scientific terminology to all those negative emotions

Chrometophobia – fear of money.

Alliumphobia – fear of garlic.

Ephebiphobia- fear of teenagers. The fear of youth affects the entire Western world. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg has attributed the generation gap and the “increasing segregation of youth from adults in American society” to “adult estrangement and fear of youth.

Androphobia – is an abnormal fear of men. Androphobia is often related to traumatic events in the sufferer’s past.

HIV phobia – hundreds of people in China believe they might have a new disease with HIV-like symptoms and fear they are being lied to when their diagnostic tests come back negative.

Hierophobia- Fear of priests or sacred things.

Hypnophobia- Fear of sleep or of being hypnotized.

Cibophobia – fear of food, is a relatively complicated phobia that can rapidly spiral into an obsession. People with this phobia are sometimes mistakenly thought to suffer from anorexia, a dangerous eating disorder. The main difference is that those with anorexia fear the effects of food on body image, while those with cibophobia are actually afraid of the food itself.

Macrophobia – overwhelming, persistent fear of long waits. The macrophobic person may experience intense fear and discomfort when confronted with any situation that involves having to wait.

Leukophobia- Fear of the color white, it could be white anything from shoes, white house, white car, white hat, and even white people.

Kosmikophobia- Fear of cosmic phenomenon.

Heliophobia – fear of sun. It is a problem that afflicts hundreds of people, but one that suffers from a lack of true research. The Pacific Health Center suggested that many people have been staying away from the sun because of growing fears about skin cancer. This is not technically heliophobia, simply an unfounded and illogical solution. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (if it includes an intense fear of getting skin cancer) can also cause Heliophobia.

Geumaphobia – fear of taste.

Xenoglossophobia- Fear of foreign languages.

Uranophobia or Ouranophobia- Fear of heaven.

Peladophobia- Fear of bald people.

Euphobia -  fear of hearing good news.

Mnemophobia – fear of memories. People with this fear tend to worry about having memories (especially bad ones) or losing memories. This phobia is becoming more popular with the increase of Alzheimers in the elder.

Dextrophobia – an abnormal fear of objects on the right side of the body.

Onomatophobia/nomatophobia – an irrational fear of a certain name or hearing a certain word or words because they may have special significance.

Optophobia- Fear of opening one’s eyes.

Dutchphobia- fear of the Dutch people and culture. Mostly people afraid of Dutch fair Dutch customs and traditional clothing.

Octophobia – Fear of the figure 8. Like all fears and phobias, octophobia is created by the unconscious mind as a protective mechanism. At some point in your past, there was likely an event linking the figure 8 and emotional trauma. Whilst the original catalyst may have been a real-life scare of some kind, the condition can also be triggered by myriad, benign events like movies, TV, or perhaps seeing someone else experience trauma.

Acousticophobia – intense fear of sound or noise, sometimes even your own voice.

Coprastasophobia- Fear of constipation.

Dentophobia- Fear of dentists.

Omphalophobia- Fear of belly buttons.

Beautiful story of being stubborn

This short movie shows the efforts we can put in something when we are sure we want it.  Beautiful story of being stubborn.

Is there really epidemic depression? Than sadness gets transformed to a mental disorder

If you would believe all the information which reaches us from the mass media – we are facing an epidemic of depression. Major depressive disorder is said to afflict approximately 10% of population at some point during their life. Theoretically one of the things which differ depressive disorder from deep sadness in most of the diagnostic tools is that major depression is defined as depressed mood on a daily basis for a minimum duration of 2 weeks. Suicides caused by depression is one of the leading causes of not natural deaths in the world. The number of antidepressant medication prescribed is constantly rising. But have you ever thought that the current medical science is sometimes simply transforming a normal sadness to a pathological illness which is aimed to treat by medicine at any case.

To understand why there might be a big misguidance while saying that the number of depressive disorders’ cases is constantly rising firstly we should discuss the way this statistical data is collected and analyzed. Johanna Olexy from American Sociological Association tells that the high percentages of depression have been greatly exaggerated firstly due to the methodology of community surveys. Johanna and her colleague were encouraged to do a research on methodology when some community surveys reported almost half of American population to be suffering from depression. According to her colleague Alan V. Horwitz community surveys rely on standard, closed-form questions about symptoms with no context provided to differentiate between normal reactions to every day stress and a mental condition. Image if you get this kind of survey and one of the questions would be asking whether you are suffering from a lack of motivation. If you don’t like your job you will obviously answer ‘yes’. The other question is asking whether you lost interest in activities you used to enjoy. If you are working overtime every day you will answer ‘yes’ again as you know you just didn’t have time for these activities the past days. So imagine you score 5 ‘Yes’ which is enough for the researches of the community survey to indicate you with depression. But does the fact that you don’t like your job and the week was stressful so you had to do over time indicate you to be suffering from a psychological disorder? It is natural you are tired and stressed, but to call you depressed would be way too far.

The second source which states that the number of depressed people is constantly and intensively growing is the data on prescribed antidepressant medication. However, if you would look closely where the data comes from there are two facts that make it not fully valid. First of all, the current medics, especially the ones which lack psychological insights and considering the fact that most of the antidepressants are prescribed by GPs, tend to merge depressive disorder with a natural human reaction which appears after a loss or major disappointment in life. Before 1980, only symptoms that were ‘excessive and inexplicable relative to their provoking context were considered signs of the depressive disorder. After 1980 all symptoms, even those that are proportionate to their provoking cause, were defined as disorders.  As Paul Koeck, MD and a psychiatrist says, most of the times medication relieves the symptoms but not the causes which trigger them. Many doctors have too much statistical and medical attitude which makes them believe that removed symptoms will mean a cured person. But actually sometimes these symptoms does not mean depression disorder but rather a natural reaction to the things the person is unhappy about and they have to be dealt with in psychological therapies rather than with the help of medication.

The second reason why so many people get antidepressants prescribed, according to Horwitz and Wakefield, professors of sociology, who been researching the depression phenomenon, is that mental health advocates, for instance, liked the fact that it produced high estimates of the amount of depressive mental disorder so that it seemed as if depression was a “public health problem” of massive proportions. Clinicians could get reimbursed for conditions that might actually be non-medical problems. Clinicians simply needed a disorder to write down in the documents in order to keep receiving money for treating the person. That most of the prescription cases were due to a wrong diagnosis (diagnosing with depressive disorder than the person was actually suffering from complex psychological problems) can be illustrated by a study led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. This study indicated that the antidepressants Paxil and Imipramine work no better than placebos  for people with mild to moderate depression. In this case mild and moderate depression could just have been an intense sadness rather than mental disorder which explains why the medicine did not work on such a large amount of people. And doctors were simply prescribing it as it was easier to put one more number in statistics rather than spend time applying therapies. Study has shown that the pills don’t work for people who aren’t really depressed — people with short-term, minor depression whose problems tend to get better on their own. For many of them, it’s often been observed, merely participating in a drug trial (with its accompanying conversation, education and emphasis on self-care) can be anti-depressant enough.

Other thing we should not forget is the interest of pharmaceutical companies.They found that they could portray people who suffered from widespread psychosocial problems in their advertisements while at the same time marketing their products as treatments for depressive mental disorders. And at the same time, people cached the idea of ‘being depressed’ and all the benefits you get from it. More and more people started seeking for treatment from depression sometimes only because it is much more ‘comfortable’ to say that you have a mental disorder rather than admit you have some psychological problems and you need to change the way you behave with people around you and your attitude if you want things to become better. And the fact that there is more and more articles, information on the traditional media and internet which spreads awareness of depression while describing symptoms, etc on one hand makes people more educated in the field of psychology and psychotherapy. On the other hand, some people tend to diagnose them selves and go to the physician already demanding for the antidepressants as they are sure that what they suffer from is a mental disorder even it is not.

What is important to understand first of all is that intense sadness differ from depression which is a mental disorder and there are other ways than medication to deal with it. First of all it is various therapies which in most of the cases are proven to be same affective as medicine. Hopefully what people and their physicians don’t do is make the simple assumption that the presence of a particular group of symptoms for a short period of time always indicates the presence of a depressive disorder. “The message for patients with mild to moderate depression,” Dr. DeRubeis said, “is, ‘Look, medications are always an option, but there’s little evidence that they add to other efforts to shake the depression — whether it’s exercise, seeing the doctor, reading about the disorder or going for psychotherapy.’

To some up, as sociologists say there are number of reasons to make people believe they are suffer from depression than actually the are not. Certain health care institutions, which are interested in governmental funding would like the government to believe they are fighting against something affecting half of USA. Another reason is that pharmaceutical companies capitalize on these survey findings to broaden their markets and considering how much antidepressant medication been sold the past years and that the number is constantly growing just proves it. Even the general practitioners sometimes would rather make a personal statistical unit and get reimbursed than  look to the underlying causes of emotional state person discovers himself at that moment.

The advantages of Depression. What role does it play in evolution?

Even you hear about depression everywhere and everyday the past years it does not mean that it never existed before. Maybe it was not such a major mental illness, but it was always there. Research shows that depression is found even in the tribes which are still living reserved in the South America and have never had a contact with the outside world and civilization. Psychology science is still pretty young comparing with the rest so it is normal to presume that the reason why depression became such a subject of discussions and researches now is that simply there was no name for this kind of illness before. Obviously, I must agree that people years ago were not suffering from depression as much and as often as they do now. And it is all the problem of that ‘American dream’ we are all aim to reach. The idea of no limits spoiled us. We aim higher we crash lower.

Just imagine you were a farmer in XVIth century. You live in the time than apple and blackberry were just fruit. You world is as big as you can see from your window and the rest is unknown. You go on with your daily life and can not imagine that something can be different. You live in the reality, maybe not the most easy one, but it’s all yours. And now lets get back to our age. You always hear about these unlimited possibilities, about chasing you dreams, doing impossible possible, seeking career and stuff. It is great. But most of us just aim too much. We live with the idea that we have to reach these dreams even most of the times they are not realistic. Than we get disappointed that our American dream never came true, start the endless cycles of self pity and get depressed. Lets face reality – most of us are simply not born to become new Neil Armstrong, Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein.

Bus this post is not about American dream and the suffer we get when we don’t reach it. My aim this time is to briefly discuss what kind of role does depression play in evolution process and what are advantages of depression. You read correctly – advantages. I do believe that nature is perfect. Everything is regulated the way it should be and all bugs which occur are the ones who are there due to the humans intervention. So is the human’s body which is the most amazing system and mechanism ever to be developed by nature. Evolution is the on going process which time by time corrects our mechanisms and lets us adopt to the changing environment. Nature is perfect and all the processes in it have a meaning. Even the negative ones. Or so we think that they are negative. Just think about the situation than you have fever. You take fever as such an annoying symptom. But on itself its absolutely meaningful and has a purpose. Fever fights the infection in your body and fixes it at the same time giving you a signal that something wrong is going on with your body so you should be careful.

So if we presume that everything has a reason and nature created all the diseases in order to tell us something what is the role of depression? What is the aim of depression in evolution process?  Have you noticed that all the genius authors, scientists, musicians – almost all of them were depressed. Even Darwin, the father of evolution theory was depressed. Have you ever thought how come that major mental disorders are extremely rare (Schizophrenia affects less than 1% of population) depression is extremely common (research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives). This would be explained in a way if depression would be affecting only old people as by the age all parts of out body wear out. However, its more and more young people suffering from depression.

In an article recently published in Psychological Review, which also discusses whether depression is some kind of bug which appeared during evolution process, scientists argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits. You would think what can be the benefits of depression? A person lacks motivation and stops getting pleasure from such activities as sex. However, what depressed people do is they intensely think about their problems. As an article in Scientific America says: “These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.” Analytic way of thinking is the most productive and that might explain why the best music, scenarios and scientific works were written than their authors were suffering from depression. They managed to split the problems that occurred is smaller parts and solve them in that way, and at the same time as nothing else interested them they could yield themselves to working on that particular thing. And depression here even performs the changes in the body which help to concentrate on one thing – depressed person most of the time stop feeling hungry, doesn’t want to sleep and lose any interest in social interactions. Some of  research have found evidence that people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test.

Studies even show, that depressed people are better at solving social dilemmas. Andy Thomson, psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, in one article said that recently he has cut on antidepressant medication prescriptions to his clients after the research done on the benefits of depression and its role in evolution. According to him drugs can sometimes interfere persons genuine recovery leaving their social dilemmas unsolved. Depression for these people are natures way of saying that something is going wrong with their life and changes must be made. In the same article Thomson mentioned a female patient who once came to him asking to reduce the dosage of antidepressants. He obviously asked whether medication is not working and what woman answer was that medication were working perfectly for her but she was still married to the same alcoholic husband just now as she is taking medication she tolerate him. This example shows, that sometimes we are so afraid of natural sadness and depression that instead of looking for the reasons which caused it and solving them we just try to avoid it while taking medications.

Nature made depression as way of telling you that you have complex social problems and your mind is intending to solve them because current situation became unbearable. Depression is a chance given to you to reconsider what you do wrong, that you ended up in situation which is making you miserable and until you solve it nothing will give you pleasure anymore. Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression. Depression after all, might appear to be the state than you actually have something productive done that is going to improve your life.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m3525848615000v4/

http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep05584604.pdf

How our temperament is related to depression and anxiety risk

In psychology, temperament refers to those aspects of an individual’s personality, such as introversion or extroversion, that are often regarded as innate rather than learned. A great many classificatory schemes for temperament have been developed; none, though, has achieved general consensus in academia. In general there are 4 types of temperaments:

1) Sanguine – extroverted, very social people. Sanguine can also mean very sensitive, compassionate and thoughtful. Not very dependable.

2) Choleric – this person is a doer. They have a lot of ambition, energy and passion.

3) Melancholic – a thoughtful ponderer. Kind, considerate, perfectionists.

4)Phlegmatic -self-content and kind. Prefer stability to uncertainty and change. Can be dependable.

Temperament is something that partly influences the way we behave, react to other people and situations. Can it also influence our chances of getting depressed or struggling with anxiety disorders? As some research shows, apparently temperament is something that can be noticed even on the newborn baby and does not change much through all our life. And these research tell us that some people with certain type of temperament are more likely to struggle from anxiety and depression than the others.

Jerome Kagan, a professor of Psychology at Harvard, started his research in 1989 and had gathered enough notices to draw some conclusions. He performed a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Kagan was researching temperament from the simplified dimension while seeing whether babies were easily upset then exposed to new things. This dimension was chosen because it was easily measurable and actually reflects adults behavior: as some of us get excited about every new thing in life and the others prefer stability as something new is always something threatening. Kagan  suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. All the babies were captured on the video while looking for the irritable behavior. 18 out 19 babies were calm toddlers than the number 19th seemed to nervously react to all new things, smells, people, colors.

Kagan was (is) actually tracking all these babies through their lives. And 15 years later it appeared that they all stayed true to their temperaments they revealed as babies. Baby number 19th, a 15 years old teenager at the time appeared to be different than the rest of the 18 kids on the research. She admitted to be terrified of how people see her, afraid to make fun of her self in public, anxious about her future and lacking self confidence.

For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain. And as the research revealed temperament highly indicates the chances of anxiety in the future.Kagan’s researches have also demonstrated that some of us, like Baby 19, are born anxious — or, more accurately, born predisposed to be anxious. As it appeared from 15-20% of babies have high reactivity to new people or things and these babies are more likely to grow up anxious due to they inborn temperament. However research showed that even when temperament remains, behavior associated with it might change. Most of us have certain fairs but some of us just yield into them and the others learn how to resist them and develop a defense mechanism which would not allow our fairs to affect us. So some of us develop mechanisms which help as to deal with the issues we naturally have exaggerated reactivity to.

Not only anxiety but as well depression is strongly related to the temperament of the person. Here it is necessary to come back to the above mentioned types of the temperament. As research shows some of them tend to have a higher chance to get depressed while exposed to the same circumstances as the others. First type to discuss should be phlegmatic as most of the people wrongly believe that these are naturally depressed people. It is actually wrong.

Phlegmatics are the ideal type to discuss first as people tend to see them depressed and unmotivated. Actually, they are simply the people who like moderate and low-key lifestyle. These people are naturally calm and not too much expressive.  Their needs are fulfilled in this simple and quiet life; in fact, most phlegmatics are completely happy until someone comes along and complains that they are “depressed too much” or that they “lack ambition” or that “something is wrong because they sit around too much.” Then, they may end up sitting around considering that they just might be depressed. They will soon have themselves convinced that they are, and may even come up with some very valid reasons as to why.

Than it comes to the sanguine type, it is the type you would consider to be least depressive due to their pro activity and energy. However, this influences the fact that these kind of people sometimes get tired trying to do everything at the same time and fit everywhere. Sanguine are prone to seasonal depression and mood swings because they are highly influences by such outside stimuli as weather, other people’s moods, even food etc.

Melancholic types tend to get depressed more easily than any of the others.  Phlegmatic may always seemed depressed- even they are not, but melancholics are actually the ones to suffer from almost constant self-induced depression caused by their over-evaluation and reflection on life. These are the kind of people who have troubles letting things go and often see a problem where it does not actually exist.

Choleric types rarely get depressed even they naturally like drama. Then they get depressed it is because of some significant loss or someone really hurt them. Then they will let all the world around to know that they are depressed but as soon as they will see something interesting to do they will get over it.

While treating depression it is pretty important to figure out the temperament of the person as sometimes something that is inborn might be tried to damage. It is important to understand in self help as well, that somethings you can not change. You can only learn to adapt them the way you want so they would not disturb you anymore. It is something like developing a certain mechanism which is very unique and exactly fits your natural inborn character.

To sum up, even there are so many discussions going on about the causes of anxiety and depression, it is a fact that many secrets are still not revealed. There are many researches waiting to be done in order to figure out the best self help techniques and therapies. The truth is that each individual is so unique that it is difficult to summarize the reasons and possible treatments of depression or anxiety. Each self help therapy, even the most effective one, still needs to be adopted to the very individual requirements of the person.

Kagan’s research:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=6&no_interstitial

What you need to know about anxiety

Victoria is a housewife. Her husband works full time as an engineer and his income is enough to provide full comfort for the family so Victoria stays at home with two children. Most of the time the day passes while doing cleaning, washing and cooking. More than a month ago there was a fire in a neighborhood and two people died. Press says it was due to the gas leakage from the cooking stove. Since then Victoria has problems sleeping. Every time she is about to fall asleep she feels an urge to get up and check if the gas is off in the stove. Sometimes she wakes up at night with her heart beating fast, thinking she can smell gas, goes to the kitchen and checks the stove once again even she did it few hours ago. Victoria can not control this fear anymore and it is on her mind almost all the time and waking up three times a night to check the cooking stove became a norm.

John recently was promoted to a unit manager. This means he will have to give a speech in a monthly employees meeting. He was told about it yesterday by his boss. The moment he heard about the speech his mouth became dry, hands shaking. During the day he has these images of him saying the speech and forgetting what he was talking about, everyone laughing at him and pointing fingers. Every time this image occurs his heart starts  beating fast and he finds it difficult to breath. He is already thinking maybe he should resign just to avoid the speech.

Jessica is a student. She has exams soon and it makes her stressed even she was always doing fine. She spend days and days studying. Recently she noticed that every time she gets out to public she starts sweating enormously and feels like everyone is staring at her. She has this fear of making fool of herself in public. People around started making her nervous and shaky. Recently she avoids leaving home and finds any excuse not to meet even her friends. Jessica feels safe only than she is in her room with the doors closed.

Victoria, John and Jessica are all suffering from the anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders, as a group, are the most common mental illness in America. More than 19 million American adults are affected by these debilitating illnesses each year. Children and adolescents can also develop anxiety disorders. It is important to understand that anxiety and fear at the certain level are normal. It is only than they start disturbing us in our daily life and prevents us doing the things we would normally do it becomes a disorder.

Also there is a difference between anxiety and fear. Fair is a very natural feeling which prevents us from doing something that might have negative consequences to us and is directed towards a very concrete external thing. You might be afraid of failing the exam, fear that you partner will brake up with you or you will not catch the plain on time. Than it comes to anxiety it is most of the times difficult to say what you are afraid of as the focus is more internal. It is not a concrete thing you fear but a very vague and unreasonable thing like ‘embarrassing yourself in public’. Anxiety affects you physiological way, as you body reacts unconsciously (trembling, difficulties breathing), psychologically (obsessive thoughts, uncontrolled worrying) and behaviorally (closing yourself at home, waking up at night).

There are different kinds of anxiety disorders:

Panic Disorder—Repeated episodes of intense fear that strike often and without warning. Physical symptoms include chest pain, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, abdominal distress, feelings of unreality, and fear of dying.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder—Repeated, unwanted thoughts or compulsive behaviors that seem impossible to stop or control. (Like Victoria’s constant checking if the gas is off in the cooking stove)

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—Persistent symptoms that occur after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event such as rape or other criminal assault, war, child abuse, natural or human-caused disasters, or crashes. Nightmares, flashbacks, numbing of emotions, depression, and feeling angry, irritable or distracted and being easily startled are common. Family members of victims can also develop this disorder.

Phobias—Two major types of phobias are social phobia and specific phobia. People with social phobia have an overwhelming and disabling fear of scrutiny, embarrassment, or humiliation in social situations, which leads to avoidance of many potentially pleasurable and meaningful activities. People with specific phobia experience extreme, disabling, and irrational fear of something that poses little or no actual danger; the fear leads to avoidance of objects or situations and can cause people to limit their lives unnecessarily. (Jessica’s case)

Generalized Anxiety Disorder—Constant, exaggerated worrisome thoughts and tension about everyday routine life events and activities, lasting at least six months. Almost always anticipating the worst even though there is little reason to expect it; accompanied by physical symptoms, such as fatigue, trembling, muscle tension, headache, or nausea. (John’s case)

As you so in the examples given above anxiety disorder might affect very different people: different gender, age, social status, income etc. If you believe that you can get anxiety disorder only after going through some traumatic experience in your life – you are wrong. You might get anxiety disorder even nothing that much significant ever happened to you. There are different theories about what causes anxiety disorders. One of the theories presented by the experts are ‘single-cause’ theories. According to Ph.D. Edmund J. Bourne such theories tend to greatly oversimplify anxiety disorders and are susceptible to one of two mistaken lines of reasoning: the biological fallacy and the psychological fallacy. The biological fallacy assumes that a particular type of anxiety disorder is caused solely by some biologica or psychological imbalance in the brain or body (for e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorder is thought to be caused by a deficiency in a particular neurotransmitter substance in the brain called serotonin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin). The psychological fallacy makes the same mistake just to the opposite direction and takes into account only psychological reasons (e.g. childhood traumas) but does not involve biological causes.

It is important to understand that than it comes to anxiety disorder there is no purely psychological or biological reasons why it occurred. Sometimes one factor might be bigger than the other but at the end they are both connected. Sometimes biological changes in the body might be triggered by psychological stimuli and conclude in anxiety. Sometimes it can be the other way round. It is difficult to generalize the causes as each case is so unique due to the fact that even our brain and body follow the basic patterns there are still so many unique reactions and processes going on in each of us. The causes of anxiety disorders vary not only according to the level at which they occur, but also according to the time period over which they operate. To sum up, the causes of anxiety disorders in the scientific literature are classified as follows:

Long-term, Predisposing causes (inherited or coming from your childhood)

Biological causes (biological changes in the body, related diseases that might be causing anxiety)

Short-Term, Triggering causes (some current changes in life, traumas, stress)

Maintaining causes (mistaken beliefs, withheld feelings, stressful lifestyle)

There are over 100 symptoms of anxiety disorder. This is due to the fact that each body uniquely reacts to psychological problems. The symptoms can be divided into two groups: emotional and physical. The most common emotional symptoms are: feelings of apprehension or dread, trouble concentrating, irritability, restlessness, anticipating the worst, feeling tense. The most common physical symptoms are: pounding heart, sweating,  shortness of breath, muscle tension, headaches, insomnia. However, the symptoms might be very unique and uncommon like reduced hearing.

In the following posts I will try to give more information on the different types of anxiety disorders and to provide you with some useful exercises that you could practice on your own if you suspect that you might have anxiety disorder.

A difference between emotions and feelings

Neurologist Antonio R. Damasio once interviewed by ‘Scientific American’ made an interesting remark. According to him there is a big difference between feelings and emotions even though we confuse these two terms very often in our daily life. And if asked to explain the difference you would probably be very confused as well. According to Damasio the feelings emerge only then our brain registers physical changes in the body. What does that mean? That means that our emotions are certain reactions the body has to stimuli. When someone intimidates us we begin to blush, when some even excites us our heart beats faster, when somethings scares us our skin turns pail. Pure physical. Something from outside triggers and our body reacts automatically and unconsciously. And it is not something we can control and avoid as these physical changes appear before we understand them. And according to Damasio feelings occur in our brain only  when we become aware of the mentioned physical changes and only then  we experience feeling of intimidation, excitement or fear.

The other thing what Damasio states and most of the psychiatrist would definitely agree with him is that emotional disorders form the core of most psychological illnesses and the best example in this case is depression. This means that the way body reacts to outside stimuli gets out of order, therefore, wrong or too strong emotions are formed which later mislead our brain which forms wrong feelings. This practically explains how such psychological illnesses as anxiety occurs. We are constantly confronted with different things, situations, people, events. If the system which convert our emotions to physical changes and registers them in the brain, filling them all together, work properly, than psychological illnesses are not very likely to occur. It is normal that some things upset us, some things will make us to be afraid, some things will get us stressed. But if our body interprets emotions correctly non of these outside stimuli cause us depression, anxiety or stress disorders. Of course unless stimuli are extreme.

However, sometimes the system registering our emotions and processing them in the brain in order to convert into feelings goes wrong. Imagine you lost a job. You will obviously get upset and will be sad for a while. This outside stimuli will make you turn pale after hearing about the loss. Than your brains process it and turns it into sadness. And it is normal. However, if there is a ‘bug’ in the system the way stimuli become emotions, you emotions will be much stronger than it is suppose to be normally, the body will send exaggerated signals to the brains which will read them and instead producing sadness as a feeling it will produce depression. Same is for anxiety. Fears become irrational because the events which are causing them are wrongly interpreted at first and the wrong feelings are caused.

It is very important to understand what is the background of these psychological illnesses as it is the only way to control them, to treat them or to make them not bother us to much so we could go on with a normal life. Unless you know where is the ‘bug’ in your system how can you remove it?  The following blog posts will tell more about anxiety, as the previous were mainly focusing on depression and how we can find that ‘bug’ and remove it form our systems.

The Origin of Habits

Firstly it is important to define what habit is.  Habit – is a kind of behavior which is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously.  Most of the times we don’t even notice that we have developed the certain habits. Some of them might be very minor and contribute to making us a unique personality but some of them might sometimes be annoying and even disturbing. So there is a big difference between having a habit to read your magazine from the last page going to the first one (that’s exactly what my friend does with all the press), banging a teaspoon to the sides of the cup while stirring  (a bit annoying when someone does it, but lets say it’s just a bad manner) and always hoping for the worst even the problem itself is not really likely to occur.You might say it is pessimism. But I believe pessimism is a habit.

The great thing about habits is that even they are subconscious – you can still control them. You can get rid of them, gain new ones or modify them. This process is called habit formation or habituation and is said to be the most  simple way of learning. It is then you repeat a certain action and your subconscious after being exposed to the same stimulus later just does that action automatically.

Learning new habits is one of the most important things in various self help techniques. Only the newly developed habits can help you to cope with all the problems you are facing or might face in the future and instead of letting these problems to bring you down. The graph below shows how fast a new information or behavior can be learned if repeated often (Bron, Journal of Training and Development, 1997)

So as you see, in order to develop new habit it is important to repeat the action frequently enough as it is new to your subconscious and it is not the way your subconscious is used to react to stimulus. Later, you will need to consciously repeat it less and less because  this action will become familiar to you. At the certain point you will loose control over it and it will occur every time as a natural reaction which seems to have been there for ages.

But let’s get back to self help and why is it so important to learn new habits while repeating actions which might help you deal with whatever issues you have. Let’s say you are suffering from anxiety and every time a slight thing at your work goes wrong you become all extremely stressed and worried. You know that there are different exercises which can help you to cope with it but at the same time every time you actually need to use the exercise your anxiety overwhelms it all and you just don’t think of it. What if every time you are slightly worried you perform an exercise. Firstly do it twice a day, than every day and every few days. The moment negative stimulus will be affecting you your subconscious will recall that exercise naturally.  Same is with depression. Depression is not something that just suddenly hits you out of nowhere and you can feel than you get sad and unmotivated and that your way towards it started. What if you would learn to replace your negative thought with a certain habit? Something that would distract you from your negative thoughts. It is interesting, that if you are a man, you actually tend to do it naturally, but if you are a woman it is something you need to learn. For example, if a man lost a job probably he will leave swearing, will kick the door on the way out, will go an d get drunk in the bar or will spend 3 hours in the gym. Obviously these might not be the best habits which occur every time he needs to deal with negative feelings – but they help. They distract you from your negative feelings until they pass. In the same situation woman would cry sitting on the coach and analyzing what’s wrong with her that she was the one sacked. To get distracted you need to develop a new habit. Sometimes a simple physical activity like jogging might help. Now, I would like to give you a short list of the new habits you can develop and which will work as a self help activities for you:

1. To manage anger and anxiety: every time you get really angry or feel bothered by anxiety close your eyes and count till 10 in your mind. As soon as the counting is done you will see that the anger is gone and you can see everything clearer.

2. To become more positive about life: if you think you are way to negative sometimes this little habit will affect the way you and people around you feel and act. Stop using negative words than you talk. Sounds difficult? Actually it is not. Instead of saying ‘ I don’t have time to call you tomorrow’ say ‘ I am very busy tomorrow, can I ring you some other day?’, instead of saying ‘I don’t like my job’ use ‘I hope to get a more satisfying job in the future’. Think positive act positive.

3. To avoid yielding into depression: nothing distracts from negative thoughts and feelings as much as physical work. Every time you feel depressed, sad and like your world is falling apart go and do some physical exercise. If you can not afford going to the gym just clean all the windows in your apartment. After this you wont have any energy to think about your bad mood and hopefully the next day will bring something better.

An exercise which will help you to set your goals

In the previous post I was already talking about how important it is to set the goals. Also, I have mentioned the power of visualization. However, not everyone can do it without any guidance and sometimes you are not able to ask many questions yourself just because you are afraid you won’t be able to answer it. But what if someone else asks you these questions? What if someone else makes you think about where you want to be in you life in a year? What are your fairs? What are your dreams? What are your secrets? What is someone asks and even pauses and keeps all silent and you have nothing left just to think and answer. I would like to suggest you to try this exercise displayed in the video and just follow the directions: