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Whether your candidate won or not, this election season was one of the worst.  And if you're still feeling anxious and upset (count me in), there's one way to pull it all back. According to newswise.com, it's mindfulness .  Now, that's not a new concept.  But it's about being in the moment, something most of us just cannot do.  Count me in again. When I was diagnosed with cancer twice, I swore I would never let go of this precious moment again.  But life interfered and before I knew it, I was projecting into the future,and mourning the past, and well, just about anywhere but in the present. If your candidate was on the losing side, you may be feeling a sense of profound disappointment, anger, even a sense of hopelessness about the consequences of the election result, experts say. Again, count me in. Even if your candidate won, you may feel a need to wind down from weeks or months of stress and anger. The technique of mindfulness—living in the present m...

I'm guilty of this. I'm an overprotective (some might call it "intrusive") parent and now a new study is saying that parents like me could lead my son to be overly critical of himself. High levels of self-criticalness are linked to depression and anxiety Great.  I've tried so hard to be a good parent, given my late start, and now this.  Newswise.com reports that, in a five-year study on primary school children in Singapore, researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) found that children with intrusive parents had a higher tendency to be overly critical of themselves and this tendency increased over the years. Children in the study who demonstrated high or increased levels of self-criticalness also reported elevated depression or anxiety symptoms. The study examined how maladaptive perfectionism - commonly known as the ‘bad’ form of perfectionism - develops in primary school children in Singapore. “When parents become intrusive i...

My husband and I talk about this all the time, how some politicians think global warming (or the new PC term, climate change) is false. I know it may be hard to believe when it snows three times in April (and only once in all of January, February and March) but March was the 2nd or 3rd warmest ever and last year was the warmest ever, beating out 2014 by a hair.  2016 looks to end up even warmer. And if we keep going, Manhattan will be under several hundred feet of water in the next century.  But there's no such thing as climate change. Anyway, a new study has found that the threat of climate change has been found to be a key psychological and emotional stressor. According to newswise.com, consequences can range from minimal stress and distress to clinical disorders, such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and suicidal thoughts.  Messages from the media, as well as public communication about climate change, can affect perceptions of physical and s...

I can so relate to this. A new study says that many of us baby boomers may not be able to retire at 65 and maintain our style of living because we're afraid to think about dying . Say what? Yup.  Roughly 52 percent of American households will not have enough retirement income to maintain their standard of living if they retire at 65.The reason? People are afraid of thinking about their own death, according to newswise.com.   Fear of death tempts people to avoid making decisions about how to manage their savings during retirement. Researchers from Boston College in Massachusetts decided to investigate why so few people choose to invest in annuities, a guaranteed steady stream of income during retirement. The public's lack of interest in annuities, known as the "annuity puzzle," has stumped researchers for decades. The investigators explored a new solution to the annuity puzzle: What if people avoid this option because it evokes thoughts about mortali...

I suppose it should come as no surprise. But people who are anxious perceive things differently than those who are not.  It turns out, according to a new study, that people suffering from anxiety perceive the world in a fundamentally different way than others. That means that people diagnosed with anxiety are less able to distinguish between a neutral, “safe” stimulus (in this case, the sound of a tone) and one that had earlier been associated with gaining or losing money. In other words, when it comes to emotionally charged experiences, they show a behavioral phenomenon known as “over-generalization,” the researchers say, newswise.com reports. “We show that in patients with anxiety, emotional experience induces plasticity in brain circuits that lasts after the experience is over,” says Prof. Rony Paz of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. “Such plastic changes occur in primary circuits, and these later mediate the response to new stimuli. The result is an...

Your mobile phone.  It links you with friends, lets you know about events, even tells you the (bad) news that Trump's probably going to win the Republican nomination for president. But did you know using it can also cause lead to anxiety and depression?  According to newswise.com, a new study from the University of Illinois finds that addiction to, and not simply use of, mobile technology is linked to anxiety and depression in college-age students.  Researchers surveyed over 300 university students with questionnaires that addressed the students' mental health, amount of cellphone and Internet use, and motivations for turning to their electronic devices. Questions included: "Do you think that your academic or work performance has been negatively affected by your cellphone use?" and "Do you think that life without the Internet is boring, empty and sad?"  "People who self-described as having really addictive style behaviors toward the Inte...

I don't know about you but I don't like when I have knots in my stomach.  Or my hands get clammy, or I start to sweat a lot. But did you know those signs of anxiety could actually help you? A new study says feeling anxious in a crisis could be good for you. New findings by French researchers show that the brain devotes more processing resources to social situations that signal threat than those that are benign, according to newswise.com. The results explain the apparent "sixth sense" we have for danger. This is the first time that specific regions of the brain have been identified to be involved in the phenomenon. The human brain is able to detect social threats in these regions in a fast, automatic fashion, within just 200 milliseconds. It was previously thought that anxiety could lead to oversensitivity to threat signals. But now researchers are saying it's a good thing, and it goes all the way back to the dinosaurs.  Well, practically. Be...

Pretty funny.  Did you know that reading self-help books can stress you out? Really.  Turns out that consumers of self-help books are more sensitive to stress and show higher depressive symptomatology, according to a new study in Montreal. I think I might know why.  Probably those of us who are drawn to these kinds of publications are already under stress and looking for solutions.  I know when I was an aficionado of these kinds of books, it was only because I was totally stuck in some situation that I couldn't figure how to get out of. “Initially, we thought we had observed a difference in participants in terms of personality, sense of control, and self-esteem based on their self-help reading habits,” explains Catherine Raymond, first author of the study and a doctoral student at the CSHS of the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal, at newswise.com. “In reality, there seems to be no difference between those who read and those who do not re...

This will not surprise the parent of any teen (I'll find out in June when mine turns 13), but teens are more stressed out than the adults in their lives. OK, so they don't have to work and provide a roof over their own heads, or live through a divorce, or even, deal with their own, or their elderly parents', serious illnesses.  But believe it or not, according to NBC News," merica’s teens are every bit as stressed as the adults around them — and sometimes even more — according to a new survey that offers a snapshot of adolescent angst." The Stress in America survey found that 30 percent of teens reported feeling sad or depressed because of stress and 31 percent felt overwhelmed. Another 36 percent said that stress makes them tired and 23 percent said they’ve skipped meals because of it. On average, teens reported their stress level was 5.8 on 10-point scale, compared with 5.1 for adults, according to NBC News. “You have to be able to perform at a much hi...

Let's talk about sleep.  Not the sweet angel and clouds sleep.  But the down and dirty.  Like, when you can't.  We've all been there.  Some, more than others. I know when I'm anxious and upset about something, I'm still watching TV at 4 a.m.  I've always been a poor sleeper, I suspect, since my college experiences in the late '60s when there was so much unrest on campuses across America and people stayed up all night, blasting stereos and shouting and demonstrating.  Ever since then I've had to have complete quiet (I've convinced my wife to let me use a sound machine when we travel and at home I have the AC on, even in the winter, for its soft insistent hum). But for many, getting to sleep is a frustrating, upsetting process that can sometimes lead to devastating outcomes. More on that later. Sleep has turned into a multi-million-dollar industry these days. Bed makers have gotten people to shell out thousands of dollars for mattresses that change fro...

If you have an anxious child, chances are you've taken her to therapy, maybe even tried some meds.  But a disturbing new study has found that less than half of all kids treated for the condition get over it permanently. Fewer than one in two children and young adults treated for anxiety achieve long-term relief from symptoms, according to the findings of a study by investigators from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and five other institutions, as reported by newswise.com. “Our findings are encouraging in that nearly half of these children achieved significant improvement and were disease-free an average of six years after treatment, but at the same time we ought to look at the other half who didn’t fare so well and figure out how we can do better,” the Web site quotes lead investigator Golda Ginsburg, Ph.D., a psychologist at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.   “Just because a child r...

It's been said we're more afraid of it than death.  People don't sleep for nights before it.  It may even have broken up some marriages. What is it? Public speaking. But now a new study is saying that, instead of calming down -- taking deep breaths, imagining a beach with cooling breezes and gently lapping waves, a margarita beside us -- we should, instead, before a speech -- ride a roller coaster, see a scary movie, find a crowd and start the Harlem Shake.  Get excited, is the new mantra. People who tell themselves to get excited rather than trying to relax can improve their performance during anxiety-inducing activities such as public speaking and math tests, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association, newswise.com reports. "Anxiety is incredibly pervasive. People have a very strong intuition that trying to calm down is the best way to cope with their anxiety, but that can be very difficult and ineffective," the Web site q...

Scientists have long wondered where exactly smells  come from, in the brain, and how they "exert their influence biologically on the emotional centers of the human brain, evoking passion or disgust, has been a black box." But a new study has revealed how they've peeled back the brain to show how "anxiety or stress can rewire the brain, linking centers of emotion and olfactory processing, to make typically benign smells malodorous," according to newswise.com. A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Waisman Center has found that the brains of human subjects "experience anxiety induced by disturbing pictures and text of things like car crashes and war transform neutral odors to distasteful ones, fueling a feedback loop that could heighten distress and lead to clinical issues like anxiety and depression," newswise reports, and this may help scientists "understand the dynamic nature of smell perception and the biology of anxiety as the brain ...

I was really disappointed when I went to give blood for a bone marrow drive this summer and was turned away because I'd had radiation therapy for breast cancer.  I'd never given blood and I thought it was time. I have friends who give it all the time.  But they're actually quite rare.  Do you know what percentage of people who are eligible donate blood? Three percent.  That's right.  Barely anyone. The Mayo Clinic recently did a study to find out why, and it's not really a big surprise.  Fear and anxiety, it turns out, according to newswise.com. But there are those who can be depended on to donate, sometimes more than they should.  U.S. hospitals are always in need of new donors.  "At Mayo Clinic, that need is heightened by concern about iron deficiency in frequent givers," newswise.com reports. Mayo recently began requiring people to wait 12 weeks rather than eight between donations, a change that means an estimated 10 percent drop in ...

Did you know that even a little stress  can make it hard to get your emotions under control? That's the outcome of a new study, that's found that even mild stress "can thwart therapeutic measures" to keep from getting emotional, according to a team of neuroscientists at New York University. As newswise.com reports, this points to the limits of clinical techniques, and creates bigger hurdles for those trying to deal with "afflictions such as fear or anxiety." “We have long suspected that stress can impair our ability to control our emotions, but this is the first study to document how even mild stress can undercut therapies designed to keep our emotions in check,” newswise.com quotes Elizabeth Phelps, a professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science and the study’s senior author. “In other words, what you learn in the clinic may not be as relevant in the real world when you’re stressed.” Many therapists use what is cal...

It's those with mental illness. According to Nicholas Bakalar, " people with mental illness may be at sharply increased risk of dying by homicide, a new study has found." Bakalar reported that, "after controlling for age, education level, income and other factors, they found that   people with mental illness were almost five times as likely to be a victim of murder as a person without a psychiatric diagnosis ." Substance abusers, for obvious reasons, were among those most likely to be victims of homicide -- 9 times the risk of the average population. Those with personality disorders were next, at triple the risk of the general population, while depressed people had 2 1/2 times the risk, and those with anxiety or schizophrenia had about twice the risk, Bakalar noted. It's been talked and talked about how our mental health system needs shoring up, if not rebuilding. But what's one of the first programs to be slashed when the budget-cutters come out? ...

What if a wearable device could alert you to something that's going to upset you? http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/a-watch-that-monitors-stress-tells-you-what-to-avoid/8767?tag=nl.e660&s_cid=e660 http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/a-watch-that-monitors-stress-tells-you-what-to-avoid/8767?tag=nl.e660&s_cid=e660