Living with mental illness or mood disorder day after day can be taxing and tiring. You have to be more disciplined, stronger, more organized and more on top of things than anyone else you know. You are bombarded with advice about dealing with a chronic illness: exercise helps, diet is important, be sure to get enough sleep, but not too …
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 …
Fear of Catastrophe
How to respond to the fear of catastrophe? Many people are having trouble getting to sleep these days. Fear of catastrophe has reemerged as we contemplate the craziness of nuclear war. This seems like a good time to review what we know about situations where there is the potential for something really bad to happen but the magnitude and nature of that …
Examine Your Fears
Why would you want to examine your fears? Remember that part in the scary movie when the hero suggests going down into the basement to take a look around and you cringe in your seat and mentally say “don’t do it”? Tim Ferriss, who has bipolar himself, says that engaging with and examining your fears is how to stay mentally …
Avoid Intimidation
Rick Hanson has written an elegant and timely newsletter article about how to avoid intimidation and fear from paper tigers and media demagogues. I love his weekly email newsletters and it is again time to encourage readers of this blog to sign up. Here is the link. One of Rick’s themes, elegantly outlined in this most recent article, is how …
Stand Up to Intimidation
How and when to stand up to intimidation is a topic much on the minds of many people in the United States and around the world. I’m on the board of a regional society of psychiatrists and at our most recent meeting this topic generated the most vigorous and enthusiastic discussion that I have seen at that meeting in years. The …