Self-Help Techniques that Reduce Stress

For most of us stress is a normal part of daily existence. However, if we don’t learn to manage our stress it can spiral out of control, leaving us worried, anxious and unable to enjoy life. Left untreated, chronic stress can take a physical toll and even lead to self-destructive behaviors or depression. Learning what triggers your stress and how to effectively manage your stress are key to living a healthy, happy life.

Since you don’t control the universe, you may not be able to rid your life of stress, but you can certainly learn to modify your response to stress. In other words, you can learn how to manage your stress successfully and significantly decrease how stressful life feels, a worthy and life-affirming goal.

Identifying the things that cause you the greatest stress and discovering why they affect you so deeply may require guidance from a skilled psychotherapist. You may need help understanding what motivates your response to stressful situations. With the right guidance, you can learn to replace negative behaviors with positive ones and regain control.

There are also several proven self-help techniques that you can learn and practice that are effective at reducing daily stress.

• Meditation is a process that quiets the mind, blocking external distractions and allowing you to focus on a state of internal peace. Meditation has been proven to decrease tension, anxiety and depression and improve concentration and focus. As you focus on your breathing and relaxing muscle groups, you’ll be able to feel your blood pressure drop, headaches dissolve and muscles untense. Meditation energizes the body and the mind.
• Guided imagery allows you to place yourself mentally in another time and place, one that is soothing and restful. In guided imagery you imagine yourself in a peaceful scene, allowing each of your senses to fully experience the sight, sound, smell and feel of your peaceful setting. Guided imagery recordings can help provide a framework for practicing the technique and making it your own.
• Progressive muscle relaxation teaches you to consciously relax your muscles, one group at a time. As you systematically tense and release each muscle, body achieves total relaxation. Relaxation recordings can coach you through the process as you learn to relax individual muscles. Tension and stress float away and you feel renewed and refreshed.

Dr. Marks Debuts Self-Help Tools for Better Mental Health

You take responsibility for your physical health. You see your doctor when you don’t feel well or something isn’t right, but there are a lot of things you do for yourself every day to stay healthy. You watch your diet, stock up on fruits and veggies, cut back on salt and fats, and take it easy on dessert. You force yourselves to exercise, stop by the gym regularly, walk the dog, take the stairs, and ride bikes with the kids.

It should be the same with your mental health. Just as people sometimes need the help of a medical specialist to deal with heart problems or diabetes or disease, there are times in most people’s lives when they need the help of a skilled psychiatrist to recover from loss or adjust to a major change in their lives or manage a behavior problem. And in the same way that we engage in self-help activities to keep our bodies healthy, we can engage in self-help activities to keep ourselves mentally strong and healthy.

Recognizing the need and interest people have in protecting their mental and emotional health, Atlanta psychiatrist Tracy Marks this week introduced several self-help features and products on her website. Every Wednesday, you can now join Dr. Marks for a weekly educational podcast about mental health issues of general interest. Podcasts can be viewed and downloaded from Dr. Marks’ website; just click Podcast on the toolbar. This week on Dr. Marks Personal Development Tool Chest, the doctor talks about depression and anxiety and offers seven valuable coping strategies. A printable self-help depression and anxiety checklist and worksheet is included for viewers’ personal use. We invite you to tune in every Wednesday as Dr. Marks shares interesting and useful information on how to maintain good mental health and warning signs to watch for if you or someone you love is having problems.

In response to readers’ enthusiasm for the self-help articles published on our website, Dr. Marks now offers three educational self-help CDs:

• Discover How to Relax teaches muscle relaxation and deep-breathing exercises to relieve stress and renew energy.
• Peaceful Sleep combines soothing sleep suggestions with therapeutic music selected to erase tension and anxiety and prepare you for peaceful sleep.
• Peaceful Mind is a soothing aid to stress-relieving, soul-renewing meditation.

It’s all in your mind

Self-Help Techniques Improve Daily Life

There are many times when we need professional psychiatric help coping with a life crisis or moving through a major life change or finding our way during a particularly challenging time. People often need a psychiatrist’s professional support, skills and guidance to successfully meet life’s challenges and overcome major problems. But there are other times when we just need some practical guidance on how to help ourselves. Marks Psychiatry is pleased to introduce a new Self-Help feature on our website.

Click the “Self-Help” tab on our homepage to find useful articles prepared to help you improve your day-to-day living. Our first series of articles focus on self-help techniques designed to reduce stress, something we’re all feeling in these difficult economic times. We invite you to read the articles and listen as the specially prepared audio tracks help you achieve a rejuvenating state of deep relaxation.

Meditation. A process of blocking out external distractions and quieting the mind, meditation can help people achieve the mental downtime crucial to well-being, Dr. Marks explains. Meditation, which can take many forms, has numerous psychological and physiological benefits, including decreasing tension, anxiety and depression and improving concentration and memory retention. Regular meditation can decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease, lower blood pressure, decrease migraine frequency, enhance the immune system and increase energy, among other benefits.

Guided Imagery. A meditation technique that helps people focus their attention so they can achieve a state of restfulness, guided imagery is a way of visualizing a relaxing scene. By prompting you to imagine each sensory detail of a pleasant scene — a sun-drenched Caribbean beach, for example — a narrator helps you immerse yourself in the scene and live in that moment, completely relaxed and at peace. To experience this relaxation technique, click here to listen to a 10-minute guided imagery audio tape.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation. A meditation technique used to reduce muscle tension, progressive muscle relaxation is the sequential tensing and relaxing of individual muscle groups. Used to treat anxiety and depression, progressive muscle relaxation is a proven tension reliever. To listen to a 13-minute recording that coaches you through the progressive muscle relaxation process, click here.