Learning to Recognize Symptoms of Stress
The nagging headache starts at the office. You feel tired. You’re having trouble concentrating. Your productivity starts to suffer, and you begin to wonder if you’re coming down with the flu. By the time you get home you’re ready to tuck yourself into bed. The chills and fever never materialize but your symptoms don’t go away. While persistent headaches, fatigue, frequent forgetfulness and decreased productivity can be signs of illness, stress is often the culprit. Stress can affect your body physically, can impair thoughts and emotions, and can...
read moreIs Happiness Contagious?
Happiness has the same ripple effect as dropping a pebble in a pond. Its effect radiates outward in ever-greater rings, affecting everyone it touches, brightening each person’s life in turn. Surrounding yourself with happy people, just being near a happy person, even knowing someone who knows a happy person, makes you happier. Happiness is contagious, says Harvard University physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Using study data that tracked 5,000 people over 20 years, Christakis tracked the path of happiness. He found that being around happy people makes us happier but that...
read moreWomen’s Sleep Habits Linked to Mood
When mom doesn’t get enough sleep, the whole family suffers. In women, there’s a definite connection between sleep and mood. Worry, stress and anxiety can interfere with sleep, and sleep problems can increase depression and anxiety symptoms. According to a 2007 National Sleep Foundation study on women’s sleep habits, the relationship between sleep and mood is bi-directional. More than half of the women surveyed in the NSF poll said they had felt unhappy, sad or depressed in the past month, and one-third (36%) had felt hopeless about the future. Most reported problems...
read moreNot All Mood Swings are Bipolar Disorder
I sometimes hear people ask “one minute I feel down, the next minute I’m really happy, am I manic depressive?” Bipolar disorder or manic depression is a mood disorder whereby a person has discreet episodes of depression or mania. The index episode is a term used to define the first episode. If a person’s index episode is depression, they may not be diagnosed with bipolar disorder until they have a manic episode. That is, this person may be diagnosed as having depression for years until they have a manic episode at which time their diagnosis will change to bipolar...
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