Blogs
When anxiety shouts at you and makes a lot of noise, tune in to music to tone down anxiety. It’s a fact, based in scientific research and reported in numerous sources including HuffPost1 and Lifehack2, that listening to music can tone down anxiety (Music Therapy For Treatment Of Anxiety Disorders).
How does one go about staying sober in a bar if you're an addict? Recently, my travel writing job assigned me an article I probably should have declined--review the five best sports bars in Indianapolis. This is a problem for me because I am an alcoholic, and I'm putting myself in temptation's path (What Is Your Reason To Stay Sober?). So recently I've been thinking about staying sober in a bar when you're an alcoholic.
In marriages with mental illness, one of the biggest struggles can be the loss of a couple's sex life. But, you can revive your sex life. Because of the side effects of medications, symptoms of mental illness, and conflicts within the marriage, many couples struggling with mental illness are also suffering from a lack of sexual connection. But, there is hope. Here are five ways to revive your sex life in spite of mental illness in your marriage.
When you have an eating disorder, you need to know what to tell an eating disorder treatment decision-maker. After all, having an eating disorder sucks and being worried about affording, or being denied eating disorder treatment, adds to the suckiness. During my stay at an inpatient facility, one of the girls threw up blood, and still, her insurance kicked her out after 11 days. Another girl with anorexia was there before I arrived and stayed after my release. To insurance companies, people are words on a page. They don’t know us. Even if they saw a picture, they might think we’re fine when we’re not. What they don’t know, is that just because we don’t look like a skeleton, it doesn’t mean we’re not at risk of dying. Here's what eating disorder treatment decision-makers need to know.
Radical acceptance can help your self-esteem. Radical acceptance is a skill in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) that helps you move from anger and pain to accepting the realities of life. You don't have to like the situation but you don't have to torture yourself about it. When you are stuck in blame and can't accept, it makes it harder to find compassion and love for yourself. Help build self-esteem with radical acceptance.
Distress tolerance is important for depression sufferers and depression caregivers. These skills can be vital in showing a depressed person that they are accepted even when they are suffering. Here's why distress tolerance is important for depression and why we need distress tolerance skills.
How does one go about staying sober while on pain medication? Recently I fell while on the bus and suffered a bruised coccyx and strained sacroiliac ligament (not to mention wounded ego). The doctor told me it would be extremely painful for three-to-four weeks and wrote me a prescription for a narcotic painkiller. While I have no history of prescription drug abuse, I am an alcoholic, so I was concerned with staying sober while on pain medication. Here is the advice I got from my Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting about staying sober while on pain medication.
I just celebrated a sobriety birthday, an event that always prompts reflection on how I got sober and clean in the first place. I do believe that a power greater than myself, a divine power, is ultimately responsible for me still being alive (Winehouse Death Due to Alcohol Poisoning and Tolerance). That being said, there are some practical components that have been vital to my getting sober and clean and staying that way.
Have you ever felt that having a mental illness makes you ugly -- not just imperfect or slightly flawed, but soul-deep, glaringly, hideously ugly? I have. It comes over me in waves of revulsion and self-loathing. When I scrape my hair back at night or catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror window I feel ugly. Every day I take off my makeup and find another wrinkle, another blemish, or an additional hint of age. And it terrifies me. I see the puckered white-purple scars on my arms and legs, the chapped skin on my lips. I see somebody who it is impossible to love. I wonder if having a mental illness makes me ugly?
It's common to hear people describe the way they're feeling in a stressful or nervous situation as anxious. We often find ourselves snowed under with the daily pressures of life, and that can make us feel a certain level of anxiety. What I do believe however, is that the word anxiety is regularly taken out of context. People need to understand the difference between suffering from the condition of anxiety and feeling stressed.
I believe she will only be able to rid herself of her demons, and hopefully her BPD as well, when she's ready to confront the abuse of her father. If she can put the blame where it belongs, she may stop projecting that victim/perpetrator cycle on the present men in her life. These demons are a metaphor for the purgatory she has created for herself. That reality has consequences in the real world, but it need not be real in the tangible sense. Exorcising her demons will require the expenditure of real physical energy and probably the destruction of aspects of her personality. If this ever happens, and it's possible but not probable, then these demons will evaporate. They are only as real as one's personality is real. In short, reality is not the question, it's what you make of the things you feel to be real.