Resilience

How to develop resilience to face difficult times Resilience is a process that people can learn and activate to help recover from personal or community disaster, trauma or loss.  While it has sometimes been described as a trait that some people have and others don’t, it is better understood as a skill, or series of skills, that we can all …

Mood Homeostasis and Depression

MoodSurfing advocates identifying strategies for managing moods without medications, not because we think medications are bad, but because they do have potential adverse effects. We think that some of these strategies are very helpful, but the psychiatric establishment has not always agreed. A recent study1 provides evidence that choosing activities to stabilize mood can have a big impact on mental …

Compassion and Family Stress

Tips for surviving a quarantine with the family. Quarantines and lockdowns have become a common feature of our lives, and while we may be grateful for not being exposed to dangerous viruses, we are also suffering in a real sense from too much closeness to the people we live with. Weeks of stay-at-home orders may still be ahead of us, …

Seven Great Coping Strategies for the Pandemic

Moodsurfing readers have been sharing their thoughts and findings about “what works” in navigating these difficult times, and we’ve collected a series of coping strategies that everyone can use while homebound and social distancing. Keep Active.  Some people report that they are walking up and down the stairs at home, some have unearthed old exercise equipment that they had lying …

Anxious Times

Anxious Times, Anxious Thoughts Anxiety is a common companion for mood disorders, in fact, anxiety is, for many people, the first mood-related symptom they remember from childhood, before other symptoms began to develop.  Studies show that as many as 90% of people with bipolar also have an anxiety disorder. Anxiety often takes the form of constantly repeated worry about worst-case …

Sense of Life Purpose

What is my purpose in life? Having a sense of the purpose of one’s life, or a feeling that there’s a job to do or potential to be fulfilled is known to be an important determinant of both length of life and freedom from illness.  A sense of purpose is the belief that one has a direction in life, or …

Facing Fear Through Prescribed Worry

In this time of heightened fear and anxiety, all of us need to work on strategies for managing fear.  The usual way most people try to manage fear is by repression or distraction, but we all know that those “strategies” just let the fears fester and come sneaking back later. How can we manage our fears in a constructive way …

Stress and the Coronavirus

Stop. Breathe. Think. How to deal with stress when you’re stuck at home and the TV keeps sending in more and more scary images?  Stop. Breathe. Think. Our brains are hardwired to deal with threats by the primitive fight or flight response.  Adrenaline flows, higher thinking goes offline, emotional and bodily responses take over, blood pressure goes up and you …

Getting Back to Nature

Connections between mental health and the natural world Urbanization is a reality of modern life, and many people feel that their connection to nature – green growing things, animals, trees, the stars, the wind, the ocean and the mountains – has been disrupted, or has simply vanished.  Mental illness is another reality of modern life that shows some correlation to …

How to Make a New Year’s Resolution Work

Are you contemplating a significant lifestyle change this year?  Quitting smoking for good, or really getting fit, not just losing a few pounds and gaining them back later? Research shows that making real changes in life is not just a matter of motivation, commitment, or not being “lazy”.  Change requires skills and knowledge that can be learned and applied for …

Change Talk

Change Talk versus “Should” Talk or Loss Talk

For many years I thought that if I berated myself enough for not making some positive change in my life it would motivate me to make the change. A colleague with an interest in motivating people to make big changes got me thinking about this strategy… He would often ask people “how did that work for you?” and after years …

Can a Change in Diet Cure Psychological Illnesses?

Can a change in diet cure psychological illnesses?  What dietary changes or interventions may be effective in treatment or management of mental or mood disorders? Diet is more than weight loss, and has been invoked, modified and studied for a wide variety of physical and mental ills and conditions.  Yet there is surprisingly little hard data available to tell us …

Is Daylight Savings Time Making You Crazy?

Daylight Savings Time (DST) is an item again, as we all try to remember “Spring forward, Fall back”.  Many people complain of difficulty sleeping, or getting enough sleep, and also of depressive episodes associated with “falling back” in November. In our clinical practice, the main thing we have observed year after year, is sleep disruption, which is especially problematic for …

Can Smiling Make You Happier?

Can smiling make you happier?  A long held folk belief holds that if you smile even when you don’t feel happy, the act of smiling itself will lift your spirits, and conversely, frowning makes you feel worse.  A 1998 study asked volunteers to hold a pencil between their teeth in such a way that their mouths were forced into a …