You can live anxiety free by practicing yoga on your own or participating in yoga therapy. Sometimes, in trying to beat anxiety, we go after our anxiety symptoms. After all, the symptoms are how we experience anxiety in our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and actions. Taking actions to reduce the symptoms of anxiety can be quite helpful; however, it can be incomplete. Growing research is demonstrating that treatments that address the whole person, beyond just symptoms, can lead to a new anxiety-free life. Yoga and yoga therapy are holistic approaches to anxiety and overall wellbeing. 

It's dangerous to compare yourself to others, although most of us do have this tendency. Even beyond the more obvious points of comparison such as beauty, wealth, and popularity, we tend also to compare our respective struggles. In some ways we want to be sure that we are doing better than other people — that they are "worse off" than we are. But in other ways, we almost wish that we are the ones who are worse off — the ones who struggle the most, suffer the most, hurt the most. 

Because Thanksgiving is so close, I wanted to discuss how anxiety has done something positive and made me realize how thankful I am for many things in my life. Though mental illness is seldom framed positively, they can give you a valuable perspective that people who aren’t mentally ill don’t have.

The prevalence of food shaming rituals around the holiday season presents an absurd contradiction. This time of year is undeniably food-centric, and there are both positive and negative implications for that. I will first address the positives—a shared meal is enriching, communal, intimate, and nostalgic. The experience is social, the atmosphere is filled with connection, and the memories created at the table become cherished family traditions. But in many cases, eating seasonal foods like mashed potatoes, biscuits, turkey, and stuffing can punctuate the mealtime with guilt, remorse, or insecurity. And that's when food shaming comments or behaviors materialize. This ritual is often distressing for people who face issues with body image and disordered eating, so I want to examine why food shaming intensifies around the holiday season and how to mitigate its adverse effects.

Seeing a psychiatrist for the first time can be scary. But everyone around me knows that I'm very open about my experience receiving mental health treatment, so I talk about it. I work as an advocate for recovery. Many friends and family have asked me for insight when it comes to asking for help. I am always happy to provide encouragement and support, even if you're seeing a psychiatrist for the first time.

We've all heard that meditation can reduce stress, improve our emotional wellbeing, and help us increase self-awareness. As a person who struggles with anxiety, I found meditation difficult in the beginning. I wanted to relax, but my mind continually wandered to all the things I needed to do. My body was fidgety, and I worried I was doing it wrong. I brought my concerns to my meditation teacher who helped me see you don't have to meditate perfectly to reap the many benefits of meditation.

Facing your fears when you have low self-esteem makes a big difference in how you view yourself. When you struggle with low self-esteem, you tend to hold particular self-limiting beliefs about yourself. You may, for example, believe that they are useless and incapable of doing certain things. If you are confronted with a situation that stirs up feelings of fear and anxiety, you can convince yourself that you are unable to deal with that scenario, that you’re doomed to failure. This traps you in a vicious cycle. As you avoid these anxiety-inducing situations, you use this as further evidence of how useless you are.

My name is Kristen Milstead and I am thrilled to be a new writer for HealthyPlace on Verbal Abuse in Relationships. I grew up confused about what verbal abuse was. I learned that it was okay for people to say abusive things as long as they also mixed in kind or loving statements, apologized later, or both. Not surprisingly, I started choosing boyfriends who ended up saying and doing abusive things to me. Not all my relationships were that way, but enough of them to call it a pattern.

To stay present in the here and now is one of the great challenges of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Flashbacks and triggers can pull you back to the past and a world that is no longer reality. With practice, however, you can train your brain to stay present instead of tormenting you with the past.