Subscribe Feed (RSS)16 Surprising Things That Can Cause You to Develop Depression, Anxiety or Even Panic Attacks
March 7th, 2008 by admin | Filed under Uncategorized.Anxiety and depression are amongst the most common, and the most serious, of all of the mental illnesses. Right up until a very recent study of nearly 50,000 patients in Latin America, showing how easily these problems can be treated, psychologists believed that they were both difficult and expensive to treat.
But we now know that using a combination of lifestyle management together with re-conditioning of the nervous system itself via specific mental “exercises”, relief can be very rapid, usually within just days.
Scientists and physicians around the world agree that the overwhelming majority of physical and mental illnesses today are caused by damaging lifestyle habits.
The problem is that for most people, their poor lifestyles are regarded as “normal”, when they are anything but!
Read on and consider whether any of these 14 items have become part of your life. If so, make a decision today to change them, and if the challenge seems too great, we urge you to obtain help to substitute healthy lifestyle habits, and gain the health, happiness and wellbeing that you are capable of.
1. Dieting: Dieting has many serious health effects, one of which is the lowering of your metabolic rate. In fact studies show that even thinking about dieting can lower your metabolic rate, seriously impacting on your immune system, and on the production of hormones essential for mental wellbeing!
2. Missing Breakfast: When people miss breakfast their blood sugar level drops dramatically. This not only causes the metabolic rate to drop, but creates cravings for very high-energy fatty or sweet food. This is how people who miss breakfast often end up making the worst possible food choices at 10 or 11 am! And why that food creates even more fat than it normally would!
3. Not Eating Enough: It’s essential to keep fuelling the body if you want to prevent your blood sugar level from dropping too much, and to keep your metabolism humming! This means healthy snacking between meals, at approximately 10 am, 2 pm, and 5 pm.
4. Not Sleeping Enough: In a busy world people think that getting little sleep is some kind of badge of honour. It is not! Sleep deprivation (including interrupted sleep) lowers your metabolic rate, and slows healing, including healing from mental trauma.
For the body and brain to operate at peak performance, the average adult needs at least 8 hours of quality sleep each night (lots of people actually need more).
5. Putting up With Stress: We all need some challenges and stress in order to function well, but when that stress is because we are trapped with no end in sight, it becomes intensely destructive and reduces many functions, including immune and metabolic. This kind of stress builds very quickly when families are dysfunctional.
If you are in that situation, help is always at hand to resolve it. Make sure you reach out!
6. Dehydration: If we aren’t adequately hydrated, most body functions slow down, including metabolic rate. If you’re waiting until you’re feeling dry before you drink water, you’re waiting too long!
The average adult needs around 2 litres a day, more if you’re active, and much more if you’re playing sport, or the weather is very hot.
7. Insufficient Fibre or Fruit: Believe it or not many adults eat like little children who don’t know yet what’s good for them! Fruit and fibre are essential for good health and you can’t get those benefits adequately from a pill!
Eat fruit morning and afternoon. The best fibre for breakfast is indisputably …. oats! Eggs, beans and fish are also outstanding breakfast foods.
8. Portions Out of Whack: We’ve become so used to super-sizes in take-away shops, and massive serves of pasta in restaurants, that we think we’re starving our family if we serve up any less! We absolutely must re-learn correct portion sizes because we’re stuffing ourselves and our children to death!
9. Hidden Calories: Sometimes we just don’t realise what’s in the food we’re eating. For example, one Malteaser has the equivalent energy of running up and down a football field! A glass of vegetable juice might feel like “nothing”, but contains the same amount of calories as if you’d eaten several vegetables.
10. Myths and Legends: It’s always amazing to us what people believe, especially if they read it in a book by someone with the title “Dr”! One client of ours was having a huge glass of vegetable juice with her evening meal, but believed it had zero calories because a doctor had told her it “went straight to the blood”.
And just for the record, almonds do not have “negative calories”. No food does. Combining food does not alter the way that your body uses it. Your blood type has nothing to do with the food you need. Etc, etc, etc.
11. Deprivation: I’m here to tell you that there is nothing wrong with the occasional pig-out, whether that’s coffee and cake with the girls, or a huge family feast! Food deprivation causes food cravings, so do not think for a minute that you must miss out on “goodies”!
The only time these things become a problem is when they happen regularly, often because people think that feast eating is normal eating.
12. Not Enough Community Time: Community time can be thought of as time spent in leisure, in groups. This may be playing sport, a walking club, book club, being involved in a charitable endeavour with others, or simply sharing friendship. Without adequate community time, people quickly become ill.
If you’ve become more isolated to the point where you perhaps have few friends, or are not engaging in group activity, this needs to be rectified urgently. Sometimes face to face meetings in groups are too overwhelming, but there is an easy interim step, which is joining an on-line group in order to build confidence and comfort in a group environment.
13. Sedentary Work: Even more than exercise time, the little bits and pieces of movement we do each day (our general activity level) is vital in keeping our metabolic rate up.
If we’re in front of a computer screen all day, we need to stretch every 15 minutes, and get up and actually walk around. We’re not meant to be immobile!
14. Depriving Yourself of Play Time: If a parent deprived a child of play time, they’d be rightly accused of abuse! And yet adults deprive themselves of play time, all the time!
Did you know that it’s safer to engage in smoking and unprotected sex than it is to have insufficient physical activity? It’s true! The mortality rates calculated by your Health Department are proof in black and white!
Be a good role model for children and show them how a healthy, functioning adult lives, by taking time out for physical care, engaging in your favourite sport regularly, walking with the family or group of friends, generally being an active family!
And if it feels like “exercise”, you probably picked the wrong thing! Pick something that makes you feel like a kid again!
Play time also refers to the time we spend with other people, our social activity. Humans aren’t designed to live in isolation, and if we don’t get “people time” then we get very sick very fast!
Make sure you have a great social life in your family, and a great social life for yourself outside your family, in the wider community.
15. An Unsatisfying Sex Life: All adults need quality sexual interaction which is meaningful and pleasurable to them. If we deny this, the result is mental and physical ill health. Sadly, many adults, even within marriages, are missing out on this very intimate form of expression and bonding with their partner.
16. Being Without a Purpose: Everyone needs to build meaning into their life – we cannot exist healthily if we do not have an abiding interest in something, if we do not have in our lives something that really matters to us. This may be something grand, for instance working to solve global warming, or something on a much smaller scale, scrapbooking family history or learning more about a topic that interests you.
Sometimes my depressed or anxious clients report that there is nothing that interests them, and of course this is true. The trick is to find an activity which is “less boring” than others they can think of, and to do that in a disciplined and committed way. Gradually (and quite surprisingly) the passion and energy return, and the patient begins to make real choices about what is important to them, and how they wish to spend their time.
An effective program for depression, anxiety or panic attacks will consider and work with as many of these factors as you are comfortable with. In addition it will examine your individual “triggers” for your symptomatic feelings and sensations and use very modern methods to free you from these, permanently.
These days you’ll find that medication, or harsh behavioural therapies, are simply not necessary, and you can make very rapid progress, very easily.
Christine Sutherland is a Perth clinical researcher, and a clinician specialising in anxiety and depression. She is the author of “Resolving Depression” and co-author with Dr Joaquin Andrade of “Panic Attacks: From Panic to Peace”. You can read more on Christine’s program to achieve relief from anxiety or depression on realhelpforanxiety.com realhelpforanxiety.com
Tags: anxiety, cialis, diet, exercises, sensations, sleep, smokingRelated posts
Tags: anxiety, cialis, diet, exercises, sensations, sleep, smoking
