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 impact behavior.

• Physically, excessive or long-term stress can cause headache, back pain, chest pain, high blood pressure, erratic heart beat, stomach and intestinal problems, and sleep problems. Persistent stress can decrease your immunity to disease and cause heart disease.
• Emotionally, persistent stress can cause anxiety, restlessness, excessive worry, irritability, sadness, anger, feelings of insecurity, inability to concentrate and forgetfulness. Left untreated, stress can lead to serious depression.
• Behavior changes associated with constant stress include overeating or undereating, problems managing and controlling anger, drug or alcohol abuse, increased smoking, social withdrawal, crying spells and relationship conflicts.

If you are experiencing any of these symptoms of excessive or chronic stress, it is important to seek medical help. Naturally, a trip to your primary care physician to rule out and address any physical illness that may be responsible for your symptoms is in order. However, if chronic stress is the source of your symptoms, you will have to go beyond your primary care physician to cure what ails you. 

Chronic stress can be treated and overcome and you can learn to live a happier, more balanced, relatively stress-free life. With the help and guidance of a psychiatrist experienced in stress management, you can learn to recognize your personal stressors and how they impact your life and health. Through cognitive-behavioral therapy, an experienced psychiatrist can help you learn to recognize and control your reaction to stress. With expert guidance, you can learn new techniques for responding to stressful situations and people. You don’t have to let control your life. With help, you can learn to control stress and regain control of your life.

Is 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 contact didn’t need to be direct for happiness to be transferred. The model worked both with social ties, such being around family and friends who were happy, and with simple physical proximity. Just being in the same room or check-out line with a happy person or passing a smiling person on the street allowed enough contact to “catch” happiness.

It’s easy to understand how the happiness of family and close friends can make us happier. The surprise in Christakis’ analysis came in finding that happiness is able to transcend direct links. We become happier not only when our friends are happy; but when the friend of a friend is happy, even if we don’t know or have any direct contact with that person. The bottom line is that surrounding ourselves with happy people makes us happy, makes the people we love happy, and makes the people they love happy.

In addition to spending time with happy people, what can you do to become happier? Try some of these ideas to brighten your day:

• Read a funny book. Dave Barry and Janet Evanovich are tw0 authors who make me laugh out loud.
• Watch a funny movie or a video of your favorite comedian. Tim Allen, Robin Williams and Jeff Foxworthy tickle my funny bone.
• Create your own happiness ripple. Smile at strangers as you walk down the street or through the mall. You’ll be surprised how many smile back.
• Look for the little things in life that give you pleasure and make you smile: leaves blowing in the breeze, birds on a wire, rosy sunsets, a shining sliver of moon.

Happiness is all around if we just look for it. Grab some and pass it along.

Women’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 sleeping, and 40% had been diagnosed with a sleep disorder.

Biology affects a woman’s sleep habits. The NSF study analyzed sleep patterns at each stage of a woman’s life:

• Menstruation. Menstruating women slept longest, averaging 7 hours, 32 minutes of shut-eye; however, 67% reported insomnia several nights a week. One-third experienced sleep problems during their cycle.
• Pregnancy. Women got more sleep during pregnancy than at any other time — approximately 8 hours, 14 minutes per night — although 84% complained of insomnia several nights a week and 30% said they never got a good night’s sleep.
• Post Partum. Women slept least — an average 7 hours, 46 minutes — after childbirth. Nearly half (47%) reported never getting a good night’s sleep, and 84% experienced chronic insomnia, 90% related to child care. Two in every 10 women experienced post partum blues or depression.
• Perimenopausal. During menopausal transition, women got the least amount of sleep (7 hours, 12 minutes). More than half (59%) reported insomnia a few nights each week; and 43% experienced a sleep disorder, hot flashes or night sweats that interfered with sleep.
• Postmenopausal. Postmenopausal women slept an average 7 hours, 19 minutes but had the highest incidence of sleep disorders (50%) and insomnia (61%). Forty-one percent used a sleep aid several nights a week.

Because of the link between sleep and mood, psychiatric treatment that addresses both issues through cognitive-behavioral therapy and psychodynamic therapy can be most effective. A board-certified psychiatrist like Dr. Tracey Marks with considerable experience treating sleep disorders can help you find workable and lasting solutions to sleep better and enjoy life more.

Not 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 disorder. The person who has mania as their index episode will start with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

Everyone is different, but a typical course of the illness is such that a person may have 1-2 episodes of mania and/or depression in a year or every few years. Rapid cycling bipolar disorder is defined by having four or more episodes in a year.

So back to the question – people with bipolar disorder don’t switch between depression and mania within the course of a day. In fact, depression requires symptoms lasting two weeks to be considered a depressive episode. The situation of extreme moods that flip back and forth over the course of a day would be considered emotional lability or emotional volatility that may be present in a person with anxiety or a mood disorder (such as depression or bipolar disorder). But it can also be a part of someone’s personality. For example, people with histrionic personality traits can have dramatic or “over the top” responses that are intense reactions to life issues that are not necessarily a mental disorder that requires medication treatment.