Decrease Anxiety Quotes

If you have a comprehensive explanation for everything then it decreases uncertainty and anxiety and reduces your cognitive load. And if you can use that simplifying algorithm to put yourself on the side of moral virtue then you’re constantly a good person with a minimum of effort.

Most people are about as happy as their self confidence will allow them to be.

Testosterone also increases confidence and optimism, while decreasing fear and anxiety.5 This explains the “winner” effect in lab animals, where winning a fight increases an animal’s willingness to participate in, and its success in, another such interaction. Part of the increased success probably reflects the fact that winning stimulates testosterone secretion, which increases glucose delivery and metabolism in the animal’s muscles and makes his pheromones smell scarier. Moreover, winning increases the number of testosterone receptors in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (the way station through which the amygdala communicates with the rest of the brain), increasing its sensitivity to the hormone. Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock

There is overwhelming evidence that meditation can increase focus and decrease anxiety, depression, and cortisol flooding. There is evidence that it decreases activation in the amygdala, one epicenter of fear in the brain, and increases activity in the prefrontal cortex. People who meditate are able to unstick themselves from cyclical, dangerous thinking and see things from a calmer, more positive perspective. The sympathetic nervous system, or the fight or flight system, is activated by stress. This is the system that gets us ready to run. The counter to this is the parasympathetic nervous system, the resting and digesting system. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure, slows breathing, and directly counters the stress response. Meditation activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s literally the antidote to stress. Plus, it’s what all the evolved, cool girls who look good without makeup are doing, according to social media.

According to research, people who live with animals have decreased anxiety and lower blood pressure. They have lower cholesterol. They are more relaxed and less stressed and are, overall, in better health. Unless of course you have a dog who pees uncontrollably wherever it wishes or eats your furniture to shreds.

Any decrease of anxiety is a step toward love.

There’s support for the idea—three of my favorites are that (a) forcing depressed people to smile makes them feel better; (b) instructing people to take on a more “dominant” posture makes them feel more so (lowers stress hormone levels); and (c) muscle relaxants decrease anxiety (“Things are still awful, but if my muscles are so relaxed that I’m dribbling out of this chair, things must be improving”). Nonetheless,

Access to nature has been shown to improve sleep quality, decrease blood pressure, and even lengthen lifespan. Large-scale studies conducted in the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands show that people living in greener areas have a lower incidence of anxiety and depression and display an ability to recover more quickly from stressful life events than those in less green areas.

Stress and glucocorticoids have inverted-U effects here as well. Moderate, transient stress (or exposure to the equivalent glucocorticoid levels) increases spine number in the hippocampus; sustained stress or glucocor-ticoid exposure does the opposite.7 Moreover, major depression or anxiety—two disorders associated with elevated glucocorticoid levels—can reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number. This arises from decreased levels of that key growth factor mentioned earlier this chapter, BDNF. Sustained stress and glucocorticoids also cause dendritic retraction and synapse loss, lower levels of NCAM (a “neural cell adhesion molecule” that stabilizes synapses), and less glutamate release in the frontal cortex.

What’s important to note about Pennebaker’s research is the fact that he advocates limited writing, or short spurts. He’s found that writing about emotional upheavals for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day on four consecutive days can decrease anxiety, rumination, and depressive symptoms and boost our immune systems.

If you are unhappy before you achieve, you will be unhappy after. It’s not the achievement that brings happiness, it’s you.

Men with more “masculine” 2D:4D ratios tend toward higher levels of aggression and math scores; more assertive personalities; higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decreased risk of depression and anxiety (disorders with a female skew). The faces and handwriting of such men are judged to be more “masculine.” Furthermore, some reports show a decreased likelihood of being gay.

When you use the 5 Steps, your self-regulation improves and you can start getting a handle on managing your anxiety. This doesn’t mean it will go away entirely; you actually don’t want it to, because anxiety is telling you something about your life that you need to know. It does mean, however, that your anxiety will decrease over time, and you will learn to manage it—it will work for you and not against you. Anxiety is not an illness; it is a warning signal that something needs attention in your life. It is normal to feel periods of anxiety. The Neurocycle method can help you find and manage what needs attention.

When adults are randomly assigned to reduce their daily step count, 88 percent become more depressed. Within one week of becoming more sedentary, they report a 31 percent decline in life satisfaction. The average daily step count required to induce feelings of anxiety and depression and decrease satisfaction with life is 5,649. The typical American takes 4,774 steps per day. Across the globe, the average is 4,961.

Oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate mother-infant bond formation and monogamous pair-bonding, decrease anxiety and stress, enhance trust and social affiliation, and make people more cooperative and generous. But this comes with a huge caveat—these hormones increase prosociality only toward an Us. When dealing with Thems, they make us more ethnocentric and xenophobic. Oxytocin is not a universal luv hormone. It’s a parochial one.

Reframing the discussion from mental health to brain health changes everything. People begin to see their problems as medical, not moral. It decreases shame and guilt and increases forgiveness and compassion from their families

And we're not just talking high school students; this practice of hovering often begins before they've learned how to write. Kids used to grow up in a neighborhood-- on the block or in the parks, playing games with other kids. These games had rules, but the kids themselves determined them, flexing their imaginations. Social scientists called these activities -- capture the flag, bike races, pickup baseball games -- "free play, " and it's been steadily decreasing since the 1950s. Scientists have also noted a correlation between the decreasing amount of childhood free play—any play not directed by adults—and the increasing rates of anxiety and depression among kids. As free play decreases, anxiety increases.

We Don’t Do Fair, We Do Individual Needs” I see so many families set a goal of being “fair” as a method of attempting to decrease conflict, but in fact, making things fair is one of the biggest propellants of conflict. The more we work for fairness, the more we create opportunities for competition. When we make things fair, we increase a child’s hypervigilance; we essentially say, “Continue to watch your sibling like a hawk. Make sure you keep track of everything your sibling has, because that’s how you can figure out what you need in this family.” And there’s a longer-term reason why we don’t want to aim for “fairness” in our families: we want to help our kids orient inward to figure out their needs, not orient outward. When my kids are adults, I don’t want them to think, “What do my friends have? What are their jobs, their homes, their cars? I need what they have.” Talk about a life of anxiety and emptiness. It leads to a life with no interiority—no sense of who you are on the inside, only a sense of how you stack up to other people on the outside.

The power of mindful meditation can reduce anxiety, increase focus, increase creativity, reduce pain, reduce depression, decrease blood pressure, reduce inflammation in the body, boost immunity, lower systemic cortisol levels, improve sleep, and offer more balance to our emotions.

Punishment always has “fallout.” That is you may punish a behaviour you didn’t intend to decrease, or you may promote aggression because of missed associations. Your dog may become distrustful of you. Punishment can contribute to arousal and anxiety levels, pushing them ever higher.

James Pennebaker, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Writing to Heal, has done some of the most important and fascinating research I’ve seen on the power of expressive writing in the healing process. In an interview posted on the University of Texas’s website, Pennebaker explains, “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are—our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.” Pennebaker believes that because our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us, translating messy, difficult experiences into language essentially makes them “graspable.” What’s important to note about Pennebaker’s research is the fact that he advocates limited writing, or short spurts. He’s found that writing about emotional upheavals for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day on four consecutive days can decrease anxiety, rumination, and depressive symptoms and boost our immune systems.

Stay in the now. Pay attention to the things that are happening now, and don’t pay attention to the things that aren’t happening now. Focusing on the present helps reduce anxiety and worry, because it decreases emotional, self-focused processing in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Attention to the present also increases dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal activity, allowing these regions to calm the amygdala.15 Improving your ability to stay present, a practice known as “mindfulness,” helps enhance these activations and leads to long-term improvements in anxiety and worrying.

phase three clinical trial found that rhodiola exerts an antifatigue effect that increases mental performance and concentration and decreases cortisol response in burnout patients with fatigue syndrome; other studies have found similar outcomes including the amelioration of depression and anxiety.

Understanding reduces the complexity of data by collapsing the dimensionality of information to a lower set of known variables. " "There you have it: a generalizable principle. What was once a massive, high-dimensional dataset has now collapsed to a single dimension, a simple principle that comes from using the data but is not the data itself. Understanding transcends context, since the different contexts collapse according to their previously unknown similarity, which the principle contains. That is what understanding does. And you actually feel it in your brain when it happens. Your “cognitive load” decreases, your level of stress and anxiety decrease, and your emotional state improves.

The A.W.E. Method A.W.E stands for Attention, Wait, Exhale and Expand. Attention means Focusing your full and undivided attention on something you value, appreciate or find amazing. Wait means slowing down or pausing. Exhale and Expand amplifies whatever sensations you are experiencing. A.W.E. is a quick and easy intervention that can cultivate awe in the ordinary, at any time and in any place. Cultivating awe for less than a minute a day reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety, improves social connection, decreases loneliness, reduces burnout, lowers stress, increases wellbeing and reduces chronic pain. The capacity to help heal the mind and body is only one of awe's superpowers.

The science of meditation is very clear and provides overwhelming evidence: even twenty minutes a day doing mindfulness meditation increases happiness, vitality, emotional stability, and focus. It also decreases irritability, anxiety, depression, blood pressure, and the stress hormone cortisol. Meditation induces a physiological relaxation response in your body that counteracts daily stress.

Decrease Anxiety in an Instant The best way to instantly feel less anxious is to slow your breathing. Try this whenever you feel physically overaroused due to anxiety, or when your thoughts are either racing or frozen. Slowing your breathing will automatically slow down your heart rate. You’ll feel calmer. Since this is a physiological fact, it’s about the only anxiety strategy that has a 100% guarantee of working. The effect is nearly instant. Here are some tips for slowing your breathing 1. Before you try to slow your breathing, drop your shoulders. It’ll make it easier. Also, focus on breathing slowly rather than breathing deeply. 2. If you have an area of tension in your body, like your neck and shoulders are tight, imagine you’re breathing fresh new air into those areas. There’s nothing sciencey about this, but lots of people like this method.

As we are aware, the effect of the vagus nerve is to slow the level of inflammation and keep it in check. If we are sending repeated messages of inflammation over a long time, we are essentially training the vagus nerve to stop having its positive anti-inflammatory effect. This is why it is most common for people to begin experiencing and receiving diagnoses of these autoimmune conditions in their 30s and 40s. After 30+ years of inflammatory signals, the vagus nerve has been trained to stop functioning as an anti-inflammatory intervention. Between the ages of 35 and 40, the vagus tone has decreased significantly and the anti-inflammatory signals stop being sent out. These conditions often arise following the stress of pregnancy, having children, and lacking sleep during the first years of a child’s life—all of which are stressors that decrease vagus nerve function.

Importantly, maternal stress impacts fetal development. There are indirect routes—for example, stressed people consume less healthy diets and consume more substances of abuse. More directly, stress alters maternal blood pressure and immune defenses, which impact a fetus. Most important, stressed mothers secrete glucocorticoids, which enter fetal circulation and basically have the same bad consequences as in stressed infants and children. Glucocorticoids accomplish this through organizational effects on fetal brain construction and decreasing levels of growth factors, numbers of neurons and synapses, and so on. Just as prenatal testosterone exposure generates an adult brain that is more sensitive to environmental triggers of aggression, excessive prenatal glucocorticoid exposure produces an adult brain more sensitive to environmental triggers of depression and anxiety.

DO YOU HAVE OR HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS . . . — PART A — ■ A feeling you’re constantly racing from one task to the next? ■ Feeling wired yet tired? ■ A struggle calming down before bedtime, or a second wind that keeps you up late? ■ Difficulty falling asleep or disrupted sleep? ■ A feeling of anxiety or nervousness—can’t stop worrying about things beyond your control? ■ A quickness to feel anger or rage—frequent screaming or yelling? ■ Memory lapses or feeling distracted, especially under duress? ■ Sugar cravings (you need “a little something” after each meal, usually of the chocolate variety)? ■ Increased abdominal circumference, greater than 35 inches (the dreaded abdominal fat, or muffin top—not bloating)? ■ Skin conditions such as eczema or thin skin (sometimes physiologically and psychologically)? ■ Bone loss (perhaps your doctor uses scarier terms, such as osteopenia or osteoporosis)? ■ High blood pressure or rapid heartbeat unrelated to those cute red shoes in the store window? ■ High blood sugar (maybe your clinician has mentioned the words prediabetes or even diabetes or insulin resistance)? Shakiness between meals, also known as blood sugar instability? ■ Indigestion, ulcers, or GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease)? ■ More difficulty recovering from physical injury than in the past? ■ Unexplained pink to purple stretch marks on your belly or back? ■ Irregular menstrual cycles? ■ Decreased fertility?

Hiking calms. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a ninety-minute walk through a natural area led to lower levels of brooding and obsessive worry. Brain scans of the subjects found that there was decreased blood flow to the subgenual prefrontal cortex. Increased blood flow to this region of the brain is associated with bad moods. Everything from feeling sad about something, to worrying, to major depression seems to be tied to this brain region. Hiking deactivates it.

Getting a massage is also a great way to relax your muscles. Massage reduces pain, stress, and anxiety, and it improves sleep. The wide-ranging effects likely result from the fact that massage boosts your serotonin and dopamine levels and decreases cortisol. Sometimes it’s even helpful to give yourself a massage with a tennis ball by lying on it, leaning against it, or rolling it firmly against your muscles. It probably doesn’t have all the same effects as getting a massage from a person, but it’s cheap and quick, and it can still feel great.

Replace Behaviors That Make Your Rumination and Worry Worse There’s not much point in using strategies to decrease rumination and worry if you’re concurrently adding fuel to those fires. Self-criticism is one kind of fuel. Other types of fuel include things like excessive reassurance seeking, spending hours looking up health information online, or compulsively looking at your ex’s Facebook page. Look out for behaviors that seem to provide a temporary reprieve from anxiety but, in fact, make you feel like you need to go back and repeat them. Look into seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist if you can’t stop those behaviors on your own.

So testosterone does subtle things to behavior. Nonetheless, this doesn’t tell us much because everything can be interpreted every which way. Testosterone increases anxiety—you feel threatened and become more reactively aggressive. Testosterone decreases anxiety—you feel cocky and overconfident, become more preemptively aggressive. Testosterone increases risk taking—“Hey, let’s gamble and invade.” Testosterone increases risk taking—“Hey, let’s gamble and make a peace offer.” Testosterone makes you feel good—“Let’s start another fight, since the last one went swell.” Testosterone makes you feel good—“Let’s all hold hands.” It’s a crucial unifying concept that testosterone’s effects are hugely context dependent.

In the same measure as the sense for causality increases, the extent of the domain of morality [ Sittlichkeit] decreases: for each time one has understood the necessary effects and has learned how to segregate them from all the accidental effects and incidental consequences (post hoc), one has destroyed a countless number of imaginary causalities hitherto believed in as the foundation of customs — the real world is much smaller than the imaginary — and each time a piece of anxiety and constraint has vanished from the world, each time too a piece of respect for the authority of custom; morality as a whole has suffered a diminution. Whoever wants to increase it must know how to prevent the results from being subject to control.

Reproductive hormones aren’t the only hormones that affect how you look and feel and think. Among the most influential are the hormones produced by your thyroid gland. Too little thyroid, and you feel like a slug. Hypothyroidism makes you feel like you just want to lie on the couch all day with a bag of chips. Everything works slower, including your heart, your bowels, and your brain. When we perform SPECT scans of people with hypothyroidism, we see decreased brain activity. Many other studies confirm that overall low brain function in hypothyroidism leads to depression, cognitive impairment, anxiety, and feelings of being in a mental fog. The thyroid gland drives the production of many neurotransmitters that run the brain, such as serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline. A

We have witnessed hundreds of clients and patients damage their metabolic and hormonal health through low-carb diets. It is becoming increasingly apparent that there is an epidemic of metabolic and hormonal dysfunction emerging in the hordes of people who have been following low-carb diets. This is particularly impactful for women—and especially physically active women—who commonly suffer side effects from their low-carb diets, including: A stopped or irregular menstrual cycle (amenorrhea)418 419 420 421 422 Decreased fertility423 424 425 Hypoglycemic episodes and blood sugar swings426 Depression, anxiety, and irritability427 428 429 Poor libido430 431 432 Disrupted sleep/insomnia433 434 Dysfunctional relationship with food and fear about eating either fat or carbohydrate435 436 Cycles of restriction and binges437 438 Chronic fatigue 439 440 441 442 Poor thyroid function (and a slow metabolism)443 444 445 446 447 448

Naomi Wolf wrote, in The Beauty Myth, about the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subjugation has decreased. It’s as if our culture has mustered an immune-system response to continue breaking the fever of gender equality—as if some deep patriarchal logic has made it that women need to achieve ever-higher levels of beauty to make up for the fact that we are no longer economically and legally dependent on men. One waste of time had been traded for another, Wolf wrote. Where women in mid-century America had been occupied with “inexhaustible but ephemeral” domestic work, beating back disorder with fastidious housekeeping and consumer purchases, they were now occupied by inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work, spending huge amounts of time, anxiety, and money to adhere to a standard over which they had no control. Beauty constituted a sort of “third shift,” Wolf wrote—an extra obligation in every possible setting.

The 2D:4D ratio is so variable, and the sex difference so small, that you can’t determine someone’s sex by knowing it. But it does tell you something about the extent of fetal testosterone exposure. So what does the extent of exposure (as assessed by the ratio) predict about adult behavior? Men with more “masculine” 2D:4D ratios tend toward higher levels of aggression and math scores; more assertive personalities; higher rates of ADHD and autism (diseases with strong male biases); and decreased risk of depression and anxiety (disorders with a female skew). The faces and handwriting of such men are judged to be more “masculine.” Furthermore, some reports show a decreased likelihood of being gay. Women having a more “feminine” ratio have less chance of autism and more of anorexia (a female-biased disease). They’re less likely to be left-handed (a male-skewed trait). Moreover, they exhibit less athletic ability and more attraction to highly masculine faces. And they’re more likely to be straight or, if lesbian, more likely to take stereotypical female sexual roles.72

When your interactions are inhibited by social anxiety, you are unable to get as much out of life as possible, and so a “harmless personality trait” can become a major obstacle that stands in the way of fulfillment and productivity. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Social anxiety is a learned response-a habit that can be broken. This book will show you, step by step, how to break the social anxiety cycle that may have caused loneliness in your personal life, decreased productivity in the workplace, and an overall lack of fulfillment. As you begin to understand that social anxiety is a combination of attitudinal, emotional, behavioral, and physical responses, you will see that there is actually no such thing as shyness. Rather, what you may refer to as “shyness” is actually social anxiety, a psychophysiological response that you can learn to control. To recognize social anxiety is to give yourself permission to resolve the issues that cause your symptoms. In working through this self-help program, learn to substitute the phrase “social anxiety” for the vague term “shyness” and you will start to see your response pattern in a different light: as a way of reacting that you have chosen, not some unchangeable instinct that has chosen you.

Pursue Meaning, Not Happiness Feeling happy is like feeling warm. It’s a state of being that feels good. It might sound counterintuitive but focusing directly on pursuing happiness isn’t always the best approach to increasing it. This parallels the idea that focusing on reducing anxiety isn’t always the best way to decrease it. What’s an alternative to focusing on increasing your happiness? A better idea is focusing on pursuing things that feel meaningful. I’m not necessarily suggesting Mother Teresa-type activities. What gives you a sense of meaning could be anything from cooking for your friends to puttering away on projects in your garage. Pursuing meaning rather than happiness helps you feel calmer when you’re not feeling happy in a particular moment. It smooths out the emotional bumps that come with mistakes, failures, and disappointments. There’s research showing that stress tends to be harmful only if you believe that it’s harmful and that you can’t cope with it. It’s easier to believe in your capacity to cope with stress if the stress is part of the bigger picture of building a meaningful life. Experiment: What makes for a meaningful life from your perspective? Skip over what you think you should answer and identify what’s actually true for you.

Although anxiety can sometimes seem like a flaw, it’s actually an evolutionary advantage, a hypervigilance system that causes us to pause and scan the environment. Feeling anxious triggers us to start looking out for potential threats. If you detect a potential danger, it’s not supposed to be easy for you to stop thinking about that threat. While that’s great when you’re a caveman worried about protecting your family, it’s not as great when you’re an employee convinced you’re getting fired. For many of us who suffer from anxiety, our anxiety alarms fire too often when there isn’t a good reason to be excessively cautious. Why does this happen? We may have more sensitive anxiety systems. Or we may have been doing things to decrease our anxiety in the short term, such as avoiding things that make us feel anxious, that have actually increased it in the long term. Having some false anxiety alarms—where you see threats that don’t exist or worry about things that don’t eventuate—isn’t a defect in your system. Think of it in caveman terms: In a life-and-death sense, failing to notice a real threat (termed a false negative) is more of a problem than registering a potential danger that doesn’t happen (termed a false positive). Therefore, having some false anxiety alarms is a built-in part of the system, to err on the side of caution.

Conscientiousness Not every anxious person is conscientious, but because you’re reading a CBT-based self-help book, there’s a good chance you’re at least moderately high in conscientiousness—a personality trait associated with having a strong work ethic and a thorough, orderly approach to tasks. People high in conscientiousness often get particularly great results from learning cognitive behavioral principles and skills. Why? They tend to like the systematic nature of a cognitive behavioral approach. They do well because they work hard to understand themselves and are diligent in applying their learning to their lives. Anxious people sometimes underestimate how conscientious they are, so make sure you give yourself enough credit for your conscientiousness. It’s important to understand that conscientiousness is not the same thing as perfectionism. For example, perfectionists might spend so long trying to make something “just right” that they don’t have any willpower left over for other important tasks. Perfectionism and conscientiousness tend to be associated with opposite outcomes. For example, in a study of older adults, perfectionism was associated with an increased risk or mortality. Conscientiousness was associated with a decreased risk. There are big advantages to reducing perfectionism but retaining your conscientiousness!

Try Mindfulness Meditation Mindfulness meditation is like Tylenol, in that the same treatment is capable of helping with multiple issues: decreasing anxiety-induced overarousal, boosting your focus, and improving your ability to detect rumination. Mindfulness-based therapies have been shown to be effective for helping people reduce anxiety. Mindfulness meditation does not need to be intimidating. Research by the makers of the Lift goal-tracking app found that beginner meditators start with an average of three to five minutes. They also found that once people had meditated 12 times, there was around a 90% chance they’d do more mediation. Experiment: Explore and find a version of meditation that works for you. Start with three minutes of one of the following practices, and increase the time you spend meditating by 30 seconds each day: --Pay attention to the physical sensations of your breathing. Lie down and put your hand on your abdomen to feel the sensations of it rising as you breathe in and falling as you breathe out. --Sit or lie down and listen to any sounds and the silence between sounds. Let sounds just come in and out of your awareness regardless of whether they’re relaxing sounds or not. --Walk for three minutes and pay attention to what you see. --Walk and pay attention to the feelings of air on your skin. --Walk and pay attention to the physical sensations of your body moving. --Do three minutes of open awareness, in which you pay attention to any sensations that show up. Pay attention to anything in the here and now, which could be sounds, your breathing, the sensations of your body making contact with your chair, or the sensations of your feet on the floor. --Spend three minutes paying attention to any sensations of pain, tension, comfort, or relaxation in your body. You don’t need to try to change the sensations; just allow them to be what they are, and ebb and flow as they do. When your thoughts drift away from what you’re supposed to be paying attention to, gently (and without self-criticism) bring them back. Expect to need to do this a lot. It’s a normal part of doing mindfulness meditation and doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. You’re likely to get more benefits from meditation if you do it on a regular basis and for longer amounts of time per session.

Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for

According to research, people who live with animals have decreased anxiety and lower blood pressure. They have lower cholesterol. They are more relaxed and less stressed and are, overall, in better health.

Hundreds of studies have since been conducted to figure out how writing heals, because it does mend and transform. Social scientists have established that expressive writing decreases anxiety and depression; reduces pain and complex premenstrual symptoms; improves the body's immune functions including boosting antibody production; enhances working memory, physical performance, and social relationships; reduces illness-related doctor's visits; improves the

Depression and anxiety are associated with increased risk for exercise-induced heart attacks. In contrast, greater levels of positive emotions are associated with decreased risk. Being heart healthy is important. But in our whole-system approach, the physical organ is only part of the story. The other part has to do with one’s attitudes and outlook.

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DEPRESSION Many of the individuals in my program have pointed to a level of depression as an initial symptom. Depression—pervasive, overwhelming feelings of sadness and hopelessness—is a natural result of social anxiety. Anyone who has been inhibited by anxiety and fear will experience less success, less pleasure, less gratification, and ultimately, lower self-esteem. The more pervasive this pattern, the more frustration and anger build. The result can be a reactive depression, caused by the situation the individual finds himself in. Other forms of depression—indigenous or biological depression—have a chemical basis. But some degree of reactive depression is common among socially anxious people, and many mental health professionals erroneously identify depression as the overwhelming problem (in fact, social anxiety is at the root, and has caused the depression). With this kind of depression, decreasing social anxiety and promoting healthy interaction is the long-term answer.

It’s not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” – Bruce Lee Before

Here are a few things yoga nidra can do: Activate the relaxation response and deactivate the stress response (which improves functioning of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and the endocrine system). Increase immunity and the ability to fight germs and infections (Kumar 2013a, 82–94) Improve heart functioning by lowering blood pressure and cholesterol (Pandya and Kumar 2007) Decrease pain Improve control of fluctuating blood glucose and symptoms associated with diabetes (Amita et al. 2009) Significantly improve anxiety, depression, and well-being in patients with menstrual irregularities and in those having psychological problems (Rani et al. 2011) Manage pre- and postsurgical conditions (Kumar 2013a, 56) Reduce insomnia and improve sleep: while not intended as a substitute for sleep, one hour of effective yoga nidra practice is equivalent to about four hours of sleep (Kumar 2013a) Increase energy, especially when needed most Reduce worry and enhance clear thinking and problem solving Improve and refresh your outlook Replace mood swings and emotional upsets with greater emotional understanding and stability Develop intuition and increase creativity Improve meditation and enhance its benefits Integrate, heal, and revitalize your body, mind, and spirit Enhance your Self-awareness and ability to experience witness consciousness (defined later in this chapter) Transform thoughts and feelings of separation into a direct experience of wholeness Finally, one of yoga nidra’s prime benefits is that it brings yoga’s essential teachings to life that have been handed down to us over the ages from the Upanishads, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Bhagavad Gita, Tantric texts, and others.

Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy has demonstrated that standing for two minutes in a ‘power pose’ – a stance in which we expand our body and take up space – has the benefit of increasing testosterone (a hormone that makes us feel powerful) and decreasing cortisol (a hormone released during the fight, flight, or freeze response that makes us feel anxious).

The average daily step count required to induce feelings of anxiety and depression and decrease satisfaction with life is 5,649. The typical American takes 4,774 steps per day. Across the globe, the average is 4,961.

Fear. First, it’s important to recognize that fear-based thinking is evolutionary. It is called the “negativity bias,” and scientists believe it originated as an adaptive mechanism to help human beings survive. Imagine that one of our early ancestors saw rustling in tall grasses. If his instincts consistently told him it was a tiger, rather than a rabbit, his risk of extinction decreased. In these circumstances, fear saved lives.

One might argue then that in order to learn, one must increase survival anxiety, yet this only increases our overall tension because the sources of learning anxiety do not go away. To facilitate new learning, we need to decrease learning anxiety. We need to feel that a new behavior or practice is worthwhile, not threatening, and possible to learn.

Your anxiety decreases as your understanding of your father increases.” Putting this thought into practice, in what ways can you pursue a deeper understanding of who God is?

Blood glucose instability is a huge problem that affects the moods of millions of people. The brain accounts for only about 2 percent of body weight, but requires 25 percent of all blood pumped by the heart (up to 50 percent in kids). Therefore, low blood sugar hits the brain hard, causing depression, anxiety, and lassitude. If you often become uncomfortably hungry, you’ve got a serious problem and should solve it. Eat high-protein, nutrient-dense meals, and snack enough to keep your blood sugar up, but not with insulin-stimulating sweets or starches. Remember that hunger kills brain cells, just like getting drunk. Be careful of caffeine, which causes blood sugar swings, and never crash diet. Food sensitivities are common reactions that are not classic food allergies, so most conventional allergists underestimate the damage they do. They play a major role in mood disruption, much more frequently than most people realize. They cause chemical reactions in the body that destabilize blood sugar and wreak havoc upon hormonal and neurotransmitter balance. This can trigger depression, anxiety, impaired concentration, insomnia, and hyperactivity. The most common sensitivities, unfortunately, are to the foods people most often overconsume: wheat, milk, eggs, corn, soy, and peanuts. The average American gets about 75 percent of her calories from just 10 favorite foodstuffs, and this narrow range of eating disrupts the digestive process and causes abnormal reactions. If a particular food doesn’t agree with you and commonly causes heartburn, gas, bloating, water weight gain, a craving for more, or a burst of nervous energy, you’re probably reactive to it. There are several good books on the subject, and there are many labs that test for sensitivities. Ask a chiropractor, naturopath, or doctor of integrative medicine about them. Don’t expect much help from a conventional allergist. Exercise and Mood Dozens of studies indicate that exercise is often as effective for depression as medication, partly because it increases production of stimulating hormones, such as norepinephrine, and also because it increases oxygen flow to the brain. Exercise can, in addition, help relieve and prevent anxiety, creating a so-called tranquilizer effect that persists for about 4 hours after exercising. Exercise also decreases the biological stress response, which dampens the automatic fear reaction. It is also uniquely effective at causing secretion of Nerve Growth Factor, one of the limited number of substances that cause brain cells to grow. Another benefit of exercise is that it increases endorphin output by about 500 percent and decreases the incidence of major and minor illnesses. For mood, the ideal amount is 30 to 45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise daily. Studies show that exercising less than 30 minutes or more than 1 hour decreases mood benefits.

biomedical view, for its part, increasingly recognizes the power of things like meditation and traditional talk therapy to render concrete structural changes in brain physiology that are every bit as “real” as the changes wrought by pills or electroshock therapy. A study published by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2011 found that subjects who practiced meditation for an average of just twenty-seven minutes a day over a period of eight weeks produced visible changes in brain structure. Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for similar reasons as psychiatric medications do, exerting their effects not just on some abstract concept of mind but concretely on our bodies, on the somatic correlates of our feelings. Recent research has shown that even old-fashioned talk therapy can have tangible, physical effects on the shape of our brains. Perhaps Kierkegaard was wrong to say that the man who has learned to be in anxiety has learned the most important, or the most existentially meaningful, thing—perhaps the man has only learned the right techniques for controlling his hyperactive amygdala.o

Several studies have demonstrated that subjects who meditated for a short time showed increased alpha waves (the relaxed brain waves) and decreased anxiety and depression.

Activating the PNS can decrease anxiety and stress, calming mind and body. A host of benefits occur when our bodies are relaxed: our muscles soften, our heart rate slows, blood pressure is reduced…and that's not all!

We use our SES to read emotions and connect to other people, and it is in observing others that we learn to read ourselves. And when our social interactions are coming through a screen (and perhaps not even with real people on the other side of the device), it impairs our ability to develop this system and to benefit from its healing power. Face to face interactions are being replaced by face to screen interactions and anxiety and alarm in our children is increasing, while at the same time, empathy in our children is decreasing. It is no coincidence that the lack of activities that mature the SES is corresponding to a jump in anxiety and alarm in our children.

Research has shown that anxious children may elicit overprotective behavior from others, such as parents and caretakers, and that this reinforces the child's perception of threat and decreases their perception of controlling the danger. Overprotection might thus result in exaggerated levels of anxiety.

only you are capable of helping yourself and the role of a mental health professional is only to guide you in the right direction and provide you with the tools for independent work. Using medication only temporarily decreases anxiety and is merely a supplement to the solution of the core problem.

What happens to the gut during menopause? With estrogen decline, there is… •​Increased gut permeability •​Bloating, constipation, reflux •​Less bile production to help us break down fats and detoxify estrogen •​IBS symptoms •​Thinning of the mucosal lining of the gut due to estrogen decline •​Decreased calcium absorption (rapid bone loss) •​Increased levels of cortisol due to a decline in estrogen, which can often lead to anxiety and a cortisol belly •​A slowdown in digestion of food due to high cortisol, which leads to digestive and gut imbalances and constipation •​Brain fog, anxiety and depression, poor energy, and insomnia

anxiety, nervousness, and abnormal dreams on a single night, it magically teams. weakness, drowsiness, and fatigue these things, even the doctors cannot critique. insomnia, tremor, and nausea all come with this excessive euphoria. also, decreased libido and weight gain are just part of its long-term reign. current findings suggest they are anti-suicidal pills but more effective it seems, are the daffodils. and to anyone who wants to withdraw would find themselves back in the devil's claw.

When put through stressful situations, if we use self-distanced inner dialogue, it not only helps decrease anxiety, shame, and rumination, but also leads to better overall performance.

IT BLOWS ME AWAY EVERY TIME I walk into a nice home and meet its proud, overweight, out-of-shape owner. They just don’t get it. Your real home is not your apartment or your house or your city or even your country, but your body. It is the only thing you, your soul and your mind, will always live inside of so long as you walk the earth. It is the single most important physical thing in this world you can take care of. We have a choice: To take care of ourselves, or to simply let time make us worse. And it is right now, at this moment, not later, that we must make this decision. Most people in this world choose to lose. They drag themselves through a second-rate life, overweight and under-energetic. They just let time take its toll. Their waistline increases and their height decreases as they get older and their backs hurt and hunch. Eventually their mobility becomes limited. And they meet their maker well before they should. Then there are the others, the minority who decide to really, truly do something about their health. They exercise, and they watch what they eat, not obsessively, only just enough. They have an understanding of nutritional basics, and workout about 20 – 30 minutes a day, 4 – 5 times a week–less than 1.2% of their time–because that is all they will ever need. They meet life’s obstacles with physical, mental, and spiritual strength. They care about how they look, and they look good. They thrive on the energy exercise gives them every day. How it washes away so many of the bad things in life–depression, anxiety, nervousness, tension, boredom, impatience. It lets them think easily and clearly. They know how much worse their lives would be if they did not exercise, so they simply don’t let that happen. They are in control, not their excuses.

Human beings are the only life forms that are pre-occupied. By pre-occupation, I am referring to anything that takes someone out of the present and decreases their power. Pre-occupations include guilt, shame, resentment, grief, anxiety, heartbreak, chronic pain, self-consciousness or worry. Conscious pre-occupation is a distraction and it drains energy from what there is to do in the present.

Still others argue that the attention span of the American population has decreased across the board, likely due to increased time spent in front of screens, and this is being mistaken for ADHD.

Studies on Buddhist monks suggest that their intense meditation practices alter their brain in lasting ways, decreasing activation in brain areas related to fear and negative emotionality. That's a sign that they have come to live in the openness of discover mode, rather than in the guardedness of defend mode.

It is estimated that ninety percent of disease is stress related. Nothing increases the aging process faster than high stress. Massage alone won’t alleviate stress entirely, but adding regular massage to your routine of self care does lead to: • Decreased anxiety. • Enhanced sleep quality. • Greater energy. • Improved concentration. • Increased circulation. • Reduced fatigue.

WHY FAST: Brain function. A neuroscientist Mark Mattson found that intermittent fasting increases levels of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. This, in turn, stimulates new brain cells in the hippocampus, the region of the brain that is responsible for memory. (Shrinking of the hippocampus has been linked to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.) Increases mood. The protein called BDNF that helps improve memory also suppresses anxiety and elevates mood. Mattson showed this to be true in a study of rats. He injected BDNF into their brains, and it had the same effect as a regular antidepressant. Increases the effectiveness of insulin, the hormone that affects our ability to process sugar and break down fat. Reduces blood pressure. As your insulin level increases, so does your blood pressure. Insulin stores magnesium, but if your insulin receptors are blunted and your cells grow resistant to insulin, you can’t store magnesium; it ends up passing out of your body through urination. Magnesium in your cells relaxes muscles. If your magnesium level is too low, your blood vessels will constrict rather than relax, which will raise your blood pressure and decrease your energy level. Reduces triglycerides. Insulin upregulates LPL on fat tissue and inhibits activation on muscle cells. On the other hand, glucagon upregulates LPL on muscle and cardiac tissue, while inhibiting the activation of fat. Weight loss. You burn fat, rather than sugar, in a fasted state.

Lactobacillus helveticus can decrease anxiety in mice,10 and Lactobacillus reuteri can reduce the likelihood that mice will develop infections when they’re stressed.11 Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG has been reported to reduce obsessive-compulsive behaviors, such as marble burying, in mice,12 and as we mentioned in the section on autism, probiotic strains of Bacteroides fragilis can rescue mice from some autistic-like traits, including cognitive deficits and repetitive behavior.

But the myth of job stability may be the least of our concerns. A 2011 study conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of Canberra in Australia concluded that having a job we hate is as bad for our health and sometimes worse than not having a job at all. Levels of depression and anxiety among people who are unhappy at work were the same or greater than those who were unemployed. Stress and anxiety at work have less to do with the work we do and more to do with weak management and leadership. When we know that there are people at work who care about how we feel, our stress levels decrease. But when we feel like someone is looking out for themselves or that the leaders of the company care more about the numbers than they do us, our stress and anxiety go up. This is why we are willing to change jobs in the first place; we feel no loyalty to a company whose leaders offer us no sense of belonging or reason to stay beyond money and benefits.

It’s not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” – Bruce Lee

MATCHING YOGA-BASED STRATEGIES TO GOALS FOR INTERVENTION Challenge Goal Chair-based Yoga Posture Feeling frozen, rigid, holding on to things (hoarding, constipation) Letting go Forward Fold Anxiety, tension, panic Decreasing hyperarousal Neck Rolls, Ratio Breathing, Belly Breathing Isolation Building relationship Mirrored mindful integrated movement; group practice Defensiveness, avoidance of intimacy Opening boundaries Sun Breaths Dissociation Grounding Mountain pose, noticing feet on floor Feeling off-balance, conflicting feelings Centering Seated Twist, Seated Triangle, Seated Eagle, balanced movement, bringing awareness to core Emotionally overwhelmed, unprotected Containment Child’s pose (adapted) Stuck, unable to make decisions or take action, unable to defend self Unfreezing; reorganizing active defenses Movement-based postures Somatic dissociation, emotional numbing Awareness of body Any mindfulness practice Reenactments, revictimization Boundaries Sensing body, creating physical boundaries Feeling helpless, disempowered Empowerment (feeling core power) Lengthening spine, Leg lifts, moving to standing posture Emotionally numb or shut down, low energy Decreasing hypoarousal Activating postures (standing), breathwork

Thyroid Panel (blood test)—Abnormal thyroid hormone levels are a common cause of anxiety, depression, forgetfulness, confusion, and lethargy. Having low thyroid levels decreases overall brain activity, which can impair your thinking, judgment, and self-control and make it very hard for you to feel good. Low thyroid functioning can make it nearly impossible to manage weight effectively. To know your thyroid levels, you need to know these figures: thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) Free T3 Free T4 Thyroid antibodies (thyroid peroxidase and thyroglobulin antibodies)

Liked Following Message More Contact Us .. Status Photo / VideoOffer, Event + . Write something... . 1 Draft Created Saturday, November 5 at 4:05pm. See draft. . The Year of “Alphabetization In the Cuban post revolution era it was at “Che” Guevara who promoted educational and health reforms. 1961 became the “Year of Cuban Literacy” or the “Campaña Nacional de Alfabetización en Cuba,” meaning the “Year of Alphabetization in Cuba.” The illiteracy rate had increased throughout Cuba after the revolution. Fidel Castro in a speech told prospective literacy teachers, “You will teach, and you will learn,” meaning that this educational program would become a two-way street. Both public and private schools were closed two months earlier, for the summer than usual, so that both teachers and students could voluntarily participate in this special ambitious endeavor. A newly uniformed army of young teachers went out into the countryside, to help educate those in need of literacy education. It was the first time that a sexually commingled group would spend the summer together, raising the anxiety of many that had only known a more Victorian lifestyle. For the first time boys and girls, just coming of age, would be sharing living conditions together. This tended to make young people more self-sufficient and thought to give them a better understanding of the Revolution. It is estimated that a million Cubans took part in this educational program. Aside from the primary purpose of decreasing illiteracy, it gave the young people from urban areas an opportunity to see firsthand what conditions were like in the rural parts of Cuba. Since it was the government that provided books and supplies, as well as blankets, hammocks and uniforms, it is no surprise that the educational curriculum included the history of the Cuban Revolution, however it made Cuba the most literate countries in the world with a UNESCO literacy rate in 2015, of 99.7%. By Captain Hank Bracker, author of the award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba,” Follow Captain Hank Bracker on Facebook, Goodreads, his Website account and Twitter.

Sense for morality and sense for causality in counteraction.—In the same measure as the sense for causality increases, the extent of the domain of morality decreases: for each time one has understood the necessary effects and has learned how to segregate them from all the accidental effects and incidental consequences (post hoc), one has destroyed a countless number of imaginary causalities hitherto believed in as the foundations of customs—the real world is much smaller than the imaginary—and each time a piece of anxiety and constraint has vanished from the world, each time too a piece of respect for the authority of custom: morality as a whole has suffered a diminution. He who wants, on the contrary, to augment it must know how to prevent the results from being subject to control.

Vitamin B. This vitamin promotes alertness while decreasing anxiety. Signs of deficiency include fatigue and irritability. Look for vitamin B in bananas, spinach, and salmon.

In one study, investigators observed a decrease in anxiety-like behavior when they fed the probiotic

This study, published in 1991, had one of the best outcomes ever recorded for PTSD. The neurofeedback group had a significant decrease in their PTSD symptoms, as well as in physical complaints, depression, anxiety, and paranoia. After the treatment phase the veterans and their family members were contacted monthly for a period of thirty months. Only three of the fifteen neurofeedback-treated veterans reported disturbing flashbacks and nightmares. All three chose to undergo ten booster sessions; only one needed to return to the hospital for further treatment. Fourteen out of fifteen were using significantly less medication.

STRATEGY: MINDFUL MOVEMENT Use the simple act of mindful walking to ground yourself into the here and now and to let go of or decrease the intensity of obsessive thinking. You can do this anywhere and at any time—walking to your car, walking around the grocery store, walking around your neighborhood, or walking to work. While walking, focus less on your thinking self and more on your physical experience. For example, what does your foot feel like as you lift it and lower it to the ground? How do your arms feel as you move? Try to feel the earth from within your body. What is that sensation like? Does the sole of your foot on the ground feel heavy? Can you make it soft? Explore each of your senses. Notice what you feel on your skin; is the air hot or cool? Do you smell anything as you inhale and exhale? Simply observe any sounds you hear. Notice what you see. You are here in this moment; feel your presence and your alert state of mind. With each step, mindfully breathe in, and breathe out. Count your steps as you inhale and as you exhale. How many steps does it take as you inhale? How many as you exhale? Keep your attention on the steps and your breathing. Each time you become aware of your mind drifting, gently bring your attention back to observing what it feels like in your body to walk. There is no rush; all that matters in this moment is to be aware of your body as it glides through space.

Caffeine: It’s astounding how many people who struggle with anxiety also drink a lot of caffeinated beverages. Make no mistake: Caffeine increases anxiety. Decreasing or eliminating caffeine and other stimulants from your diet will immediately lessen the intensity of your anxiety. Consider removing all caffeine from your diet, and if that’s too hard, halve it and work down from there.

Research has shown that anxious children may elicit overprotective behavior from others, such as parents and caretakers, and that this reinforces the child’s perception of threat and decreases their perception of controlling the danger. Overprotection might thus result in exaggerated levels of anxiety. Overprotection through governmental control of playgrounds and exaggerated fear of playground accidents might thus result in an increase of anxiety in society. We might need to provide more stimulating environments for children, rather than hamper their development [emphasis added].

De-escalation De-escalation tactics are an important self-defense strategy used to defuse a potentially dangerous situation. The first and only objective in de-escalation is to reduce the level of anger/agitation so that a calmer discussion becomes possible. Reasoning with an enraged person is not possible. De-escalation skills are an important tool when dealing with people who are highly agitated, frustrated, angry, fearful, or intoxicated. These may ordinarily be peaceful individuals who are responding to an unusual or extreme circumstance; or, they may in fact be individuals with disruptive or potentially violent personalities. By controlling yourself and using tactical communication, you can reduce the increasing threat in a situation. The goal of de-escalation is to reduce the likelihood of the situation transitioning from a verbal altercation to physical violence. De-escalation can be achieved by developing a rapid rapport and a sense of connection with an agitated person. De-escalation, although a verbal tactic, consists not only of verbal techniques, but also psychological (emotions) and nonverbal (body language) techniques. De-escalation is a tactic of altering your demeanor to fit the circumstances. To use de-escalation as a self-defense tactic, you need to adapt your demeanor to the situation at hand and overcome or control your personal emotions. Here are some additional tactics to put into your toolbox: 1. Body Language: Have a confident body posture, but don’t look too aggressive. Pay close attention to your emotions, and be cautious to avoid tensing up your shoulders, neck, hands, or face. If you’re unable to compose your emotions, they can (and likely will) be felt by the aggravated person and may cause your de-escalation efforts to fail, despite using an appropriate tone and words. Stand relatively still, avoiding sudden jerky or excessive movements. Make sure to keep your hand gestures to a minimum. Basically, think similarly to how you would deal with an angry dog. 2. Voice: You generally want to keep your voice calm, firm, and low while speaking slowly and evenly. The tone, inflection, and volume of your voice can increase or decrease the other person’s anxiety and agitation. However, if the person is yelling, you may need to initially speak in a louder tone in order to be heard, and then guide them to a softer and slower pace. • Listen actively. Gather information by asking questions to develop a rapport, if possible under the circumstances, and gather information in order to begin to guide the communication in a less volatile direction. • Acknowledge their feelings. Some agitated people are unable to problem solve until their feelings are dealt with. By acknowledging their feelings, it often lets them know that they’re being heard. • Communicate clearly by explaining your intentions and conveying your expectations. Repeat yourself as much as necessary until you’re heard.

When we know that there are people at work who care about how we feel, our stress levels decrease. But when we feel like someone is looking out for themselves or that the leaders of the company care more about the numbers than they do us, our stress and anxiety go up. This is why we are willing to change jobs in the first place; we feel no loyalty to a company whose leaders offer us no sense of belonging or reason to stay beyond money and benefits.

The DSM-5 defines depression as a person having multiple symptoms, which may include a depressed mood, loss of energy, diminished ability to concentrate, changes in appetite, and decreased interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities, for more than a two-week period. It also states that depression is disruptive, meaning that a person’s decreased mood is interfering with their ability to comfortably live their lives. A person with depression may have a lot of trouble getting out of bed in the morning, finishing basic tasks, or connecting with friends and family. One of my patients once described depression to me as what happens when life loses its color—and I think that’s a very illuminating description.

Here are three quick and easy strategies for decreasing the physical agitation and arousal—shortness of breath, increased heart rate, sweating, shaking—that accompany panic and anxiety: Take slow, deep breaths, feeling your chest rising fully. Each time you exhale, make the exhalation a little longer than the one before. If you’re too keyed up to breathe freely, count your breaths. Counting helps distract your brain from anxious thoughts. Count 1 when you inhale, 2 when you exhale, and so forth up to 20. Then start again with 1. Repeat this a few times; the arousal will start to decrease. If breathing doesn’t work, place your hand on your heart. Notice the speed. See if you can slow it down with your breathing. Put all your attention into observing the beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . of your heart.

Here is just a sample of the research outcomes from nearly a hundred studies of DM.54 Lower levels of perceived stress Lower use of avoidance coping strategies Fewer depressive symptoms Less anxiety Improved functioning in borderline personality disorder Reduced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms Improved adaptive coping strategies Reduced rumination Less catastrophizing about pain Diminished neuroticism Improved executive function Decreased impulsivity Increased emotional stability

1. Body Language: Have a confident body posture, but don’t look too aggressive. Pay close attention to your emotions, and be cautious to avoid tensing up your shoulders, neck, hands, or face. If you’re unable to compose your emotions, they can (and likely will) be felt by the aggravated person and may cause your de-escalation efforts to fail, despite using an appropriate tone and words. Stand relatively still, avoiding sudden jerky or excessive movements. Make sure to keep your hand gestures to a minimum. Basically, think similarly to how you would deal with an angry dog. 2. Voice: You generally want to keep your voice calm, firm, and low while speaking slowly and evenly. The tone, inflection, and volume of your voice can increase or decrease the other person’s anxiety and agitation. However, if the person is yelling, you may need to initially speak in a louder tone in order to be heard, and then guide them to a softer and slower pace. • Listen actively. Gather information by asking questions to develop a rapport, if possible under the circumstances, and gather information in order to begin to guide the communication in a less volatile direction. • Acknowledge their feelings. Some agitated people are unable to problem solve until their feelings are dealt with. By acknowledging their feelings, it often lets them know that they’re being heard. • Communicate clearly by explaining your intentions and conveying your expectations. Repeat yourself as much as necessary until you’re heard. Certain behaviors have been found to escalate agitated people: • Ignoring the person • Making threats • Hurtful remarks and/or name calling • Arguing • Commanding or shouting • Invading personal space • Threatening gestures with your arms or hands, such as finger wagging or pointing Keep in mind that our natural instincts when in an aggressive or potentially violent encounter are to fight, flight, or freeze. However, in using de-escalation, we can’t do any of these. We must appear centered and calm even when we’re terrified. Therefore, these techniques must be practiced before they’re needed, so that they can become second nature. But keep in mind: It’s always important that you trust your instincts. If you feel that de-escalation is not working, STOP! You’ll know within as little as a few minutes to sometimes only a few seconds if it’s beginning to work. If not, tell the person to leave, escort him/her to the door, call for help, walk away, and/or call the police.

Study after study showed that green spaces shifted the autonomic nervous system from fight-or-flight to rest-and-digest. Consequently, moods, blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing patterns improved, and stress hormone levels decreased. Short doses of nature, including mere photographs of nature, sharpened performance. Other studies showed they increased feelings of generosity and social connectedness. The presence of houseplants in hospital rooms lessened pain and hastened recovery from surgery. Studies of functional brain scans showed regions associated with empathy and love lighting up when exposed to nature scenes, while urban scenes and sounds lit up regions associated with fear and anxiety. I added my next entry to the How to Get Off the Couch list: 4. Get a daily dose of nature.

The links between faith and decreased anxiety can even be seen at the neurological level. For example, scientists have shown how belief calms activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—a part of the brain associated with what we might call “alarm bell” experiences. When we feel annoyed or threatened, certain patterns of activity in the ACC intensify. These are the same patterns that ramp up in those suffering from anxiety disorders, and they’re also ones that are reduced by alcohol and medications like Valium and Xanax.

W., echoing Freud, says that while fear is produced by “real” threats from the world, anxiety is produced by threats from within our selves. Anxiety is, as Dr. W. puts it, “a signal that the usual defenses against unbearably painful views of the self are failing.” Rather than confronting the reality that your marriage is failing, or that your career has not panned out, or that you are declining into geriatric decrepitude, or that you are going to die—hard existential truths to reckon with—your mind sometimes instead produces distracting and defensive anxiety symptoms, transmuting psychic distress into panic attacks or free-floating general anxiety or developing phobias onto which you project your inner turmoil. Interestingly, a number of recent studies have found that at the moment an anxious patient begins to reckon consciously with a previously hidden psychic conflict, lifting it from the murk of the unconscious into the light of awareness, a slew of physiological measurements change markedly: blood pressure and heart rate drop, skin conductance decreases, levels of stress hormones in the blood decline. Chronic physical symptoms—backaches, stomachaches, headaches—often dissipate spontaneously as emotional troubles that had previously been “somaticized,” or converted into physical symptoms, get brought into conscious awareness.p But

Your anxiety decreases as your understanding of your father increases. Here is what I think: our biggest fears are sprained ankles to God. Here is what else I think: alot of people live with unnecessary anxiety over temporary limps.

Regular coffee consumption is associated with a decreased risk of several cancers (including breast, prostate, colorectal, and endometrial), cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and possibly depression and suicide. (Though high doses can produce nervousness and anxiety, and chances of committing suicide climb among those who drink eight or more cups a day.)

Research has shown that laughter increases the secretion of the natural chemicals, catecholamines and endorphins, that make people feel so peppy and good. It also decreases cortisol secretion and lowers the sedimentation rate, which implies a stimulated immune response. Oxygenation of the blood increases, and residual air in the lungs decreases. Heart rate initially speeds up and blood pressure rises; then the arteries relax, causing heart rate and blood pressure to lower. Skin temperature rises as a result of increased peripheral circulation. Thus, laughter appears to have a positive effect on many cardiovascular and respiratory problems. In addition, laughter has superb muscle relaxant qualities. Muscle physiologists have shown that anxiety and muscle relaxation cannot occur at the same time and that the relaxation response after a hearty laugh can last up to forty-five minutes.

If your long path is short-circuited by stress, and your brain is using the short path instead, you might be so alarmed at the mere thought of a shark that you have a panic attack just thinking about taking a swim in the ocean. All the body’s machinery of FFF then gets engaged by this imaginary threat, just as if you were nose to nose with Jaws. Your gut clenches, your heart races, your breathing becomes fast and shallow, and your focus narrows to the point where you can’t think about anything other than the threat. This takes a huge biological toll on the body. High adrenaline produces dramatic reductions in life span. Stressed people have much more disease and live much shorter lives than unstressed people. Whatever form stress takes—depression, anxiety, or PTSD—correlates with higher rates of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. The deficits in the life spans of stressed people are measured in decades rather than years. In meditators, the amygdala is quiet. It becomes even quieter with practice. The difference in amygdala activation between the longest-term meditators and their less-experienced peers has been measured. The adepts show 400% less reactivity to stressful events. But even in novices who practice mindfulness for 30 hours over 8 weeks, decreased amygdala activity is found. Other structures within the midbrain or limbic system work together with the hippocampus and amygdala. One of them, the thalamus, is like a relay station. Close to the corpus callosum, it identifies information coming in from the senses like touch, hearing, and taste, and directs it to the consciousness centers of the prefrontal cortex. The thalamus typically becomes more active during meditation, as it works harder to suppress sensory input (like “that buzzing mosquito” or “this chair is too hard”) that pulls us out of Bliss Brain. With the hippocampus regulating emotion, the thalamus regulating sensory input, and the long path in good working order, stress-inducing signals aren’t sent to the amygdala. In turn, all the body’s FFF machinery remains offline. This produces corresponding biological benefits. Heart rhythm is even. Respiration is deep and slow. Digestion is effective. Immunity is high. That’s why so many studies show pervasive health and longevity benefits among meditators.

The insula also gives rise to empathy. People who are more sensitive to emotional cues from others have greater insula activation and score higher on tests of empathy. And the insula lights up during meditation sessions, especially when the meditator is feeling kindness and compassion. As the meditator expands his definition of connection to include other people and eventually the entire universe, he feels one with everything. In the words of a comprehensive meditation review, “the habitual reified dualities between subject and object, self and other, in-group and out-group dissipate.” As he expands the borders of his tent to infinity, massive changes occur in his brain activity. Insula Activation Benefits Increases Decreases Elevated emotional states Anger Motor control Fear Kindness Anxiety Compassion Depression Empathy Addiction Longevity Chronic pain Immunity Happiness Love Sensory enjoyment Introspection Sense of fulfillment Feelings of connectedness Focus Self-awareness As well as mediating our empathy and compassion circuits, the insula has several other functions. It collects information from a far-flung network of receptors inside our body as well as from our skin. It then stimulates feelings such as hunger that then prompt actions such as seeking food. The dark side of this mechanism is that it can stimulate cravings for drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. Addicts show increased insula activation even before consuming their drug of choice. The insula also lights up when we feel pain or even anticipate feeling pain. Meditators are more “in the moment” when it comes to physical pain, releasing it more quickly. They may also experience overwhelming cravings, as we’ll see in Chapter 5. These are positive cravings directing them toward the ecstatic states found in Bliss Brain.