Our lives are filled with stress. Everyday living confronts us with a continuous stream of potentially stressful situations. From driving, school work, driving to work during morning rush hour, harsh weather, the daily struggle, relationships, to watching the latest terror attack, school shooting or lock-down on the nightly news. WhetherContinue Reading
Stress is an everyday fact of modern life and difficult to avoid. It attacks us environmentally through bad weather, pollution, traffic, noise and lockdowns. Stress is present in our schools (bullying), on the job, in our relationships, in our mailbox, in our personal economics, and in illness or loss ofContinue Reading
Throughout our articles about stress and anxiety we point out how important an exercise program is to our well-being. Exercise relieves stress, even if you only do it fifteen minutes a day, or just take the dog out for a walk and hopefully a jog around the block. Daily exerciseContinue Reading
When your time is at a premium but you still wish to relax, here is a great, abbreviated and progressive muscle relaxation technique to relax your body quickly. Begin this relaxation training session with a 10-minute Mindful Breathing exercise (time permitting). Shorten the session as desired. The same muscle groupsContinue Reading
Knowing the damaging effects of stress, one of the simplest ways of reducing and managing stress, requiring no expensive equipment or membership, is relaxation. More than sixty studies have found the relaxation procedures can help alleviate headaches, high blood pressure (hypertension), anxiety and insomnia (Stretter & Kupper, 2002). One suchContinue Reading
People who have personally witnessed or survived a disaster are most influenced by traumatic stress. Twenty percent of the people who lived near the Twin Towers in New York City suffered serious stress disorders. Even people who witnessed those events from a distance were traumatized. Over forty percent of theContinue Reading
Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) Psychoanalytic Theory proposed that beginning in childhood, people repress intolerable impulses, ideas and feelings, and this submerged mental energy sometimes produces mystifying symptoms such as anxiety. Many of todays psychologists have turned to two contemporary prospectives – learning and biological – for more complete understanding. The LearningContinue Reading
The term “adrenal fatigue” has become a health buzzword for feeling burned out, stressed out, and exhausted, despite claims from the prominent medical journal BMC Endocrine Disorders that “there is no substantiation that ‘adrenal fatigue’ is an actual condition.” Chronic stress is becoming a way of life. According to aContinue Reading
Worry is the primary symptom of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. You might have a problem with worry if you have excess apprehension or avoidance for more days than not during the past six months. Seriously anxious people have difficulty being able to control their worry and typically suffer with sleep interruptions,Continue Reading
How to cope with exam and test anxiety? Test anxiety is a combination of heightened physiological arousal, increased nervousness, sweating, pounding heart and excessive worry. This combination – arousal plus worry – tends to distract students with a rush of upsetting thoughts and feelings (Stipek, 2001). Studies show that studentsContinue Reading