The way that people use language predicts stress levels quite reliably, according to a 2017 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many different stressors (traumatic stress, poverty, loneliness, being told that you have a life threatening illness) all activate a single pattern of profound changes in the function of the immune system. The changes are known …
Exercise Prevents Depression
A study of 34,000 healthy adults followed for 11 years shows that exercise prevents depression. The authors of the study found that the dose of exercise needed to optimally prevent depression was surprisingly low. Just 15 – 20 minutes of aerobic exercise per day was effective. The study is the largest prospective study to date to show the benefits of …
Suicide Survivor Day for Loved Ones
Suicide Survivor Day is the one day a year when people affected by suicide loss gather around the world at events in their local communities to find comfort and gain understanding as they share stories of healing and hope. Discover more about Survivor Day. UCSF and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention are hosting an important event for suicide survivors on November …
App for Depression in Pregnancy – Nancy
Moodsurfing has looked at smartphone apps for depression and those for bipolar disorder and a new study is available that looks specifically at a smartphone app for depression in pregnancy. Mental health in pregnancy is a topic that can raise real anxiety in people’s minds, in part because so much divergent information is readily available on the internet and from family …
Time Change Mood Effects
This Sunday the Government will do its best to make its population more depressed. It isn’t a conspiracy, but I encourage you not to let them get away with it! Hundreds of articles have consistently shown that the best way to make someone quickly more depressed is to shift their sleep time so that they are waking up later in …
Find Hope Despite Adversity
Finding hope can feel miraculous when wrestling with the endless challenges of any chronic illness, including depression. At the end of a long week struggling to help others I ran across an article by a psychiatrist who has thought long and hard about the sources of hope, and felt the wonderful sense of renewal that hope brings to the beleaguered. …
News Media Create Stress – Nancy
Bipolar disorder can make it hard to maintain stability of moods, and deal with the stresses of life. The news and social media are one of the biggest sources of stress that can make stability challenging, and the media overload only seems to be getting worse. In a 2014 study conducted by National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation …
Unpaid Emotional Labor
A new phrase captures neatly a dilemma that many good friends face: when are they being taken advantage of, being asked to provide unpaid emotional labor? I was talking with a very thoughtful young man who has two good friends who have been going through a lot of emotional turmoil for the past year. He has been trying to be a …
Smartphone Apps for Depression
Are smartphone apps for depression effective? Two articles published in 2017 by a group of Australian and American researchers examined the question of whether smart phone apps for depression and anxiety are effective. In both articles the authors comprehensively analyzed the world medical literature for research articles that evaluated the effectiveness of smart phone delivered interventions for either depressive symptoms …
Recovering from Disaster – Reclaim Your World
It seems appropriate to write about an aspect of recovering from disaster. We have been through an extraordinary period of natural and human caused disasters these past few months. And while every experience is different, one thing that successful recovery requires, is the capacity to reengage with the world as it is, and with a sense of the possibility of …
Bipolar Depression Light Therapy
The news that bipolar depression light therapy may be effective is good news and follows a series of studies this past year highlighting the importance of treatments that affect circadian rhythms by manipulating light and dark in treating mood disorders. Bipolar depression is one of the hardest conditions to treat effectively. Antidepressant medications may have significant side effects, including inducing …
Better Decision Making – Nancy
Better decision making is important for many people dealing with how moods can influence our choices. How much self-control do you have? Do you make the decisions you really want to make? A new field of brain science is discovering how people make decisions, and how they utilize self-control to make better decisions. A recent article in Medical Xpress included …
Bipolar at Work – Nancy
Bipolar At Work: Disclosure and Accommodation Federal law provides important protections for workers who are coping with disabling mental or physical illnesses in the workplace. Know your rights, and plan carefully for whether, when and how to request accommodations and disclose special needs at work. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against anyone with a health-realted disablitiy in …
Feeling Trapped
Feeling trapped is one of the most painful emotional experiences. The need to escape from this place can sometimes lead us to do things that are irrational and self-destructive. A young woman who I’ve been working with for couple of years who struggles with chronic depression, finally seem to be making some headway in her life with a new relationship …
Mood Planning – Gina
Mood planning is an activity that is closely aligned with the goal of this website: helping people to live creatively with moods. Having a plan in place ahead to time for when you notice warning signs or full symptoms of mania can minimize the negative impact a mood episode can have on your life. I often work with patients in …
Contagious Moods
A well designed study of adolescents suggests that there are contagious moods. This study follows on earlier research suggesting that surrounding yourself with more “contented” or “discontented” people affects how likely you are to feel contented. The new research involved groups of junior-high and high-school students who took part in depression screenings and answered questions about their best friends, many of whom were …
Mood Spectrum
Author and psychiatrist James Phelps presented a thought provoking presentation about the notion of a mood spectrum (from very unipolar to very bipolar) and how that idea is changing the way that clinicians work with people with depression. The title of the presentation was “A More Nuanced View of Hypomania” but the talk itself is broader than that. The spectrum …
Mindfulness and Illness
Newcomers to the practice of mindfulness meditation tend to imagine that mindfulness practice should ideally be associated with a state of calm happiness or relaxed bliss, so the idea of mindfulness as an approach to illness may seem odd or incongruous. It is worth going back a few years to Jon Kabat-Zinn‘s early work popularizing mindfulness in the United States. …
Preparing for Fall
My fall preparation for 2017 illustrates the lessons learned over the past two years about what affects sleep.
Purposeful Living Makes Us Stronger
Purposeful living makes us stronger – that is the conclusion of a study of people over the age of 50. We all know that physical health and mental health are closely connected, and changes in one can have tremendous effects on the other. However, there is often a lack of empirical evidence to back up recommendations for a change in …