Blog Entries tagged 'anxiety'

What do you fear the most?

editor@uticopa.com — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Is it growing old, the dark, cancer, death? We all have our fears, but how to deal with them so that our stress levels don't get blown sky-high?

Let's take ‘growing old'. If you talk to youngsters and ask them how they view the old people they pass on the city streets, often they will laugh and say things that indicate the old are aliens from another planet. The truth is that children need educating. Those old people are not ‘aliens': it is me [...]

Could climate change be bad for our mental health?

editor@uticopa.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Historically, British people have always ignored the effects of our poor, wet weather. The heavy rain has always been there, so most carry on regardless. However, as the world shifts towards global climate change, water-related problems are arguably the most imminent and most personal. As Britain's temperature rises and weather patterns become more extreme, will our health be compromised by a lack of clean water and diseases spread by polluted floodwater?

And what of our mental [...]

Solving the stressful equations of life

editor@uticopa.com — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

How to solve the stressful equations of life?

Rather like a stack of dominoes, once the bankers of Wall Street unleashed their economic ills onto an uncertain world, piece by piece, the world's economy started to collapse. Eventually, the unstoppable force reached the common man. But there were considerable knock-on effects on individuals, resulting in mounting stress levels.

Living in such unpredictable times evokes feelings of anxiety or even fear. There is a solutio [...]

Anxiety is in your genes

editor@uticopa.com — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

I don't believe it - anxiety is in your genes!

It's what we've always thought. There's a gene to explain our anxiety attacks. Researchers have now found that certain variations in a mood-altering gene actively influence whether or not we take an anxious or sunny view of the world.

Psychologists from the University of Essex came up with the results after showing 97 volunteers pictures depicting positive and negative images. The participants were shown pairs [...]

Laughter is the best medicine

editor@uticopa.com — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Of all the tools to combat depression and negativity, humour is by far the best medicine - for both patient and doctor! Television and radio are both under-rated as purveyors of exactly this kind of medicine, no data ever being collected on the numbers of sick people made to feel appreciably better by switching-on at home and laughing uncontrollably at the comic of the day. From the comedians of yesteryear like Laurel and Hardy or Jack Benny, to Tommy Cooper or that special bran [...]

I wish I'd known - Learning from our mistakes and living your life to the full

editor@uticopa.com — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

When we reach that point in life when the middle years have passed, would we have done things differently if we had somehow gained the wisdom that comes from learning from our own mistakes?

They say that education is wasted on the young. When we are adolescent, suffused by swirling hormones and an intolerable need to impress our peers, how can we concentrate on learning those school subjects that will be so essential to our future life? How to show due diligence at scho [...]

Bipolar disorder

editor@uticopa.com — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

At a recent seminar on bipolar disorder at St. Andrew's University, the personality Stephen Fry discussed his condition with psychiatric students and practitioners. He has also made a series of programmes for the BBC about his condition and how it famously manifested itself in 1995 when he walked out of the West End play Cellmates.

Other celebrities who also suffer from bipolar include Hollywood actors Richard Dreyfus and Carrie Fisher, and British comedians Tony Slattery and Jo Br [...]

Worrying: the bad, the good and the downright positive

editor@uticopa.com — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0100

The bad

We all recognise the syndrome. You can't sleep and you can't get those pessimistic thoughts out of your head. All those doubts and fears deep within your mind paralyse your thinking. An invidious cycle begins whereby your anxiety levels soar sapping your emotional energy and darkening your day-to-day life with burgeoning black neuroses. Constant worrying takes a heavy toll. It keeps you up at night and makes you tense and edgy during the day. You hate feeling like a ne [...]