I ran into the Psych Central website this year. I am following their blog and it had interesting topics daily.
This is a compilation of their best blog posts and articles throughout 2012 and it's worth digging into:
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/12/26/top-10-psychology-and-mental-health-topics-of-2012/
Hope you all have a great new year 2013!
Here's a free e-book that you should not miss. It's a compilation of quotes from the best contemporary minds. It's inspiring. It will make you stand up from your chair and make a difference. I plan to print it and read at least one page a day... hey, it might even get me to start writing again.
Below is one page extract that is significant to this blog... Just like the author below, I found that once I became free of my anxiety I became much more skilled socially than most of the people around. While being trapped in social anxiety and trying to find a rational way out of it, without even realizing it, you learn a lot about human nature and being social.
S O C I A L S K I L L SPenelope Trunk is the founder of BrazenCarerist.com. Her blog is
I have really bad social skills, so I am constantly noticing
how the whole world revolves around social skills.
Research that really blows me away is that people would
rather work with someone who is incompetent and
likable than someone who is a competent jerk. And
then I saw that in some cases elite British crew teams
will put a weaker, but very likable, rower on a boat
because people row faster if they row with people they
like.
In my life, I have had to learn social skills one by one,
because I have Asperger Syndrome. I learned to smile at
jokes even though I’m too literal to understand most of
them; I listen to the rhythm of a sentence to know
when it’s time to laugh. And I learned how to say, “How
are you,” with the right tone of voice – to express
interest – although to be honest, saying that phrase
gives me so much anxiety that I never actually say it.
A few years ago I found myself smack in the middle of
the recruiting industry. I ended up, somehow, being an
expert on how to attract candidates, and an expert on
how to present yourself well to employers. At first I
thought it was absurd. I’ve never worked in human
resources, and I’ve never been a recruiter. But then I
realized that I’m an expert on the hiring process because
it’s all about social skills, and I’ve been studying them
my whole life so that I don’t look like a freak.
In fact, it’s not just getting a job. Or giving a job.
Getting or giving anything is about social skills. The
world is about being comfortable where you are and
making people feel comfortable, and that’s what social
skills are. What’s important is to be kind, and be
gracious and do it in ways that make people want to do
that for someone else.
Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.
It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.
Our original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year – so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different.
A bit of levity.
At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.
To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:
Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this – just five questions in plain, simple language – can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.
So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.
Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.
One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.
Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.
To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here
Dr. Rob has a great post on anxiety. Make sure you read it. It's worth knowing what happens in a doctor's head when you have anxiety.
http://distractible.org/2009/10/09/anxiety/
Long time, no see!
No man is an island, and as human beings, we have to interact with society in some form or the other if we are to survive on a day to day basis. So you can understand how social anxiety becomes a problem for those who live with it day after day and restrict their lives because of this mental disorder. When you’re afraid of communication and other aspects of public life like driving, flying, walking on the streets, shopping and the like, you can see how it becomes a problem to do perform even the most basic activities.
While some people turn to medication as a way to resolve these feelings of anxiety and fear, drugs are not recommended unless your symptoms are severe and unmanageable. Besides, medicines that are used to treat such disorders include anti-depressants, beta blockers and benzodiazepines that are full of chemicals that could turn out to be addictive and that also come with their own side effects. Instead of relying on medicines, one of the best ways to tackle social anxiety is to try exposure therapy.
For those of you who know how to ride a bike, this form of treatment is just like learning to ride your bike for the first time. You’re scared, you have no sense of balance, and you’re terrified of hurting yourself. But you go ahead and try it because you so badly want to ride that new bike. Exposure therapy is all about overcoming your fears too, step by step, bit by bit. Just as someone holds on to your bike for the first few minutes and then lets go so that you try to gain a sense of balance, exposure therapy too involves breaking down your fear into smaller pieces and tackling the smallest one first.
So if you’re scared to talk to the opposite sex, start out by talking to someone you already know, like the girl/boy next door who always smiles at you, the smile that you were too nervous to return until now. Then move on to talking to people who are normally courteous, like salespeople and customer service representatives. It’s not going to be easy, and just like in the biking lesson, you’re going to end up falling quite a few times. But the key to success is to pick yourself up, brush the dust off your clothes, forget the minor bruises that you may have, and get right back on that bike again.
xposure therapy works best when you have someone to support you, just as your dad or mom would hold on to the bike till you’re able to find your bearings. You also need to know when to push yourself and when to stop – go as far as your fear will let you go but stop once you reach that point. You need to keep at one level till you feel no fear at all, and only then can you move on to the next level. It’s a slow process, but the infusion of confidence you feel when you master each level and move on to the next one will help you cross the next one faster than you did the first. So stick with it, and you’ll find yourself managing your anxiety in no time at all.
A commenter asked me to recommend other books like Michael Pollan's. I did not read other books like Michael Pollan's, but here's another recommendation: brand new, released on March 17, David Romanelli's book: Yeah Dave's Guide to Living in the Moment - Getting to Ecstasy through wine, chocolate and your iPod list.
6 years ago, on Valentine's day, I was admitted into the hospital. I was 24 weeks pregnant and I was feeling great. But my doctor's appointment showed a blood pressure of 180/100, and my kidneys were spilling a lot of protein - sign that they are not functioning well... I had preeclampsia. It is a disease that could be very dangerous for the mother and the baby. The only known cure is delivery of the baby, and at 24 weeks of pregnancy, this is problematic as the babies cannot live without a lot of interventions and they risk blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, and all sorts of other issues.
For the last couple of years while I was blogging about social anxiety, I also followed a number of other social-anxiety related blogs. And, happily for all of us, it seems that we all graduated:
I heard a few people positively mentioning Michael Pollan's - The Omnivore Dilemma, so I read it and I loved it so much that I had to also read In Defense of Food.
I had a post earlier this year ranting about health websites that try to buy small blogs like mine. The website that contacted me was Wellsphere - basically a collection of medical blogs. I answered to the mass email by saying that i am not interested and that if they really want to help people they can link to my blog. I did get the link and as opposed to people that gave away their posts, I actually got a few hits from them.
A yoga teacher friend of mine, Kitty had a heartbreaking post today about her hearing getting worse. She a great yoga teacher and she's taking beautiful nature pictures. If you want to see and buy some of her stuff, you can visit her on Etsy. She's a wonderful person, one of those that I probably would have never known if blogging and social networking wasn't around. I am so moved by Kitty's inner beauty and by the fact that people like her exist and they are around us. One more time, social networking is heaven for us the socially anxious.
I visited a friend yesterday and met her nice husband. This gave me a moment of reflection on how my life changed over the last couple of years. Two years ago, I thought I only have my husband close. I looked at anyone with suspicion: I was scared of being cheated, abandoned, ignored. I was scared to leave my kid with anyone. I only trusted one or two doctors.
I am yogileana on Twitter.
Oh, wow! I was nominated in the finalist list of best patient blogs! That's pretty neat! Here's the list of finalists. The voting starts tomorrow. If you like this blog, feel free to vote for me.
I disappeared for a while in a "holiday anxiety". I suspect this is not unusual to those of you that struggle with the same issues as I do. I decided to go with the "presence is the best present" this holiday and to share time and love instead of buying presents and sending cards, but I did not tell anyone and when the time to give love came, I just got ashamed of going outside the box and avoided it all.. This is too funny and a good lesson that if I will try this again, I need to better plan who do I send love to, when and how, because picking up the phone and calling is not my thing apparently! It's all behind now and next year there will be a new holiday season.
2008 was a great year. It was an year of change. I came to terms with my anxiety, I learned to love my job, I learned to be a better mother, wife and person, and to be nicer to myself especially. I got someone to help with the household and this was major: because I learned what it takes to work with someone successfully, mostly trust and the knowledge that everything will be well. She is a wonderful person too, but I saw that it is possible to find wonderful people. This freed my time for myself, and my family. My health was so and so, but I learned that I am not my diseases and I learned to put my health in the background. I also learned that I am the best person to take care of myself and it is my responsibility to figure out what my body needs or doesn't need.
What about 2009? More and more I realize that I want to write, I need to write, and it is also my best way to communicate with others. So I hope I'll find a way to incorporate more of that into my life. I want to continue to add more exercise and fun into my schedule. And continue to work on my health and my relationship with my family and others. I think it will be another even better year.
Happy New Year!
This post might come as an unexpected and unpleasant surprise to some of you. It might even push some away if you haven't yet seen this idea. The first time I read about it, I was uncomfortable and resistant, but thinking about it some more, I realized it is so true.
This condition might look like we are caring a lot about others, but we mostly are caring about others in relationship to US: do they like ME, do they think I'm looking good, writing well, doing the right thing? We are quite self-centered. We bask in the happiness that someone likes us, we are anxious about saying the right thing or saying anything or not blushing, or not sweating. We fear that the wrong look or attitude might push some away. It's important for us to be called someones best friend, the best employee, the nicest person, etc., and we're desperate if someone else becomes the employee of the month, the best friend, etc.
I want to be nominated in the 5 best patient blogs, but I do not want to win, this would be disastrous next year when I might not even be nominated anymore. I will probably quit before that happens - running away is better than being demoted. I think this is actually a common trait, probably most people think more or less about things this way, we just take it to extreme.
So, what to do about it? It's ironic, but the first thing to do is to accept that we are normal, OK, looking good enough, acting OK, saying the right things, and when we don't, just accept that it happens to everyone: we all say stupid things every now and then, we blush at the wrong time, friendships die, relationships end, with or without our help. It's just stuff. And while being relaxed about us, we can now look at others with more compassion and love: see what they really are about, hear them, help them without caring what they think about us. Most people would feel more honesty in this approach and will be more attracted to us.
We need to relax, and we'll start seeing a bigger picture and doing things to help everybody and we will be appreciated even more. And if not, it just happens, just move on. We all are just fine and normal.
My world has changed a few days ago. One of our acquaintances, a young guy just out of college, died from an overdose of medication. He was battling depression for a long time and addiction more recently. Over the last couple of months his family and friends (my husband included) tried an intervention on him. Everybody tried their best, but in the end none of this worked. Maybe I, probably just like everybody else around him, feel a little bit of guilt. As it happens he was one of the nicest kindest guys I ever met.
I knew about his depression, I heard that he feels worthless maybe an year ago. And I just listened and didn't do anything at the time. So I am doing something now. I am doing it for any of the guys out there that might be depressed and feeling worthless. I am doing it in the hope that someone will understand that their perception that they are worthless is just that: a perception. That depression and any other mental health issues can be treated and resolved, that the stigma is not as huge as it seems, that opening up is possible and helpful. I am working to get this blog more popular. It's not about me anymore.
It feels like for me increasing my self esteem was the solution. But there was so much work into this, and I was a successful professional: my husband, my therapist, a successful profession, a healthy child, all my blogging friends and all my friends that supported me even after finding out that I have social anxiety. And the cherry on the top: yoga with their concept that the divine is in each of us. And finally I got it: I am worth something.
If you hear someone repeatedly mentioning how they are no good, then it's time to act and talk to them. If you think you are no good, go get help. We are all worth for living a decent life.
I nominated myself for a 2008 patient blog award. I mostly did it to increase the readership of my blog. There are two kind of people that might be interested:
