Depression and Aloneness
We’ve all been there at some point – experiencing that feeling of loss, helplessness, or sadness that creeps up on us. Sometimes it’s over in a couple of hours. Sometimes it last for days. Often there doesn’t seem to be an explanation as to why it happens, but those who have experienced severe, debilitating depression know that it is real. It is important that if a person experiences depression over and over, and it’s affecting their emotional well-being, it’s time to seek help. You don’t have to suffer alone. Find a counselor that you feel comfortable with,...
Read MoreHow To Improve Your Mental Health Through Physical Exercise
Your mental health is just as, or in some circumstances even more, important than your physical health. Although we are constantly bombarded by personal advice or medical articles regarding how we can improve our physical health, there are abundant methods you should use to assist your medical health. Most interestingly, there is a way that you can knock both matters out at the same time. All you have to do is comprehend that your mental health can be enriched when you exercise. So, you aren’t only furthering your muscles or cardiovascular health, you’re also relieving stress,...
Read MoreUsing EMDR Therapy to Heal Your Past: Interview with Creator Francine Shapiro
Francine Shapiro, Ph.D, first discovered and developed EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) in 1987 to help people process traumatic memories. Today, EMDR is recognized by the US Department of Defense and the American Psychiatric Association as an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Traumatic memories come in many types. While some may involve violence or physical abuse, others involve everyday life experiences, such as relationship problems or unemployment, according to Shapiro in her recently published book, Getting Past Your Past: Take...
Read MoreEMDR Can Build Self Esteem Faster than Talk Therapy
Self Esteem generally gets established based on a) Feedback from the people around us–especially during childhood, and b) How much sense of mastery in our world we develop. When feedback from parents, siblings, peers, teachers, etc is shaming, children often don’t develop good self-esteem. Children take feedback that is punishing, contemptuous, insulting, undermining, teasing, mean, neglectful, unappreciating, bullying, abusive and so on as information that they are not worth much. When this is the source of low self-esteem, EMDR can often help, because each of these...
Read MoreHow Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain (article from the New York Times)
Why would exercise build brainpower in ways that thinking might not? The brain, like all muscles and organs, is a tissue, and its function declines with underuse and age. Beginning in our late 20s, most of us will lose about 1 percent annually of the volume of the hippocampus, a key portion of the brain related to memory and certain types of learning. Exercise though seems to slow or reverse the brain’s physical decay, much as it does with muscles. Although scientists thought until recently that humans were born with a certain number of brain cells and would never generate more, they now...
Read MoreWhy Time Doesn't Heal All Wounds
If we cut ourselves, unless there is an obstacle, we tend to heal. If we remove the block, the body goes back to healing. That’s why we’re willing to let ourselves be cut open during surgery. We expect incisions to heal. The brain is a part of the body. In addition to the millions of memory networks just described, we all have hardwired into our brains a mechanism – an information processing system – for healing. It is geared to take any sort of emotional turmoil to a level of mental health or what is called a level of adaptive resolution. This means a resolution that includes the...
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