Healthsifter by mary desmond pinkowish, since 2003

Why Phobias?

Patricia Pearson, author of “A Brief History of Anxiety … Yours and Mine,” has a fascinating blog post at the New York Times about the origins of phobias. Here's an excerpt:

Oddly, this act of transmuting anxiety into fear does possess a kind of logic. Anxiety has been described as fear in search of a cause, and there’s little question that fear is more actionable. Instead of being paralyzed by a sense of directionless menace, as would be the case with a generalized anxiety disorder where danger is everywhere and nowhere, the phobic can pour all dread into one vessel, and then swiftly run away.

In other words, phobia can be a form of compartmentalization.

But, she adds, about one third of phobias are inexplicable, like her own discomfort around honeycombs. Read the whole piece.

Rewrite Your Bad Memories--Before They Take Hold

The night that a drunk crashed into my Mercury Montego (hot) about a block from home, my dad came down to pick me up. When we were ready to leave the scene, he made me drive. No way--I'd just had a near miss and was pretty shaken up. But he prevailed. Not only that, he made me drive around the area for about 20 minutes before we headed home. He said if I avoided driving immediately after the accident, I risked "getting spooked" by driving. Yeah, sure.

Father Knows Best. Read today's article in the New York Times magazine by Gretchen Reynolds on overcoming fear by revising fearful memories, using the example of skiers and snowboarders and the nasty tumbles they take on the slopes. Here's an excerpt: 

Revising a fearful memory is a mental, neurological process. You are calling up from memory circuits the unpleasant vision of yourself tumbling down the mountainside and overlaying it with a vision of yourself staying upright. If you can’t practice the technique right there on the slope, that’s probably O.K., Ms. Schiller says. The key seems to be reliving the experience (as quickly as possible) and then, without delaying or turning away, rethinking it. You have only a short window in which a memory is ‘‘vulnerable to revision,’’ Ms. Schiller says, before it’s returned to long-term brain storage.

This technique won’t, by the way, rid you of the memory. ‘‘We think that you can’t change the content of a memory,’’ Ms. Schiller says. ‘‘But you can change the emotions around it.’’ You can make that fall, in memory, tolerable.

It's good advice. But my dad already knew that. 

More ways to quell anxiety

OK, so I have some experience with garden-variety anxiety. I like this article at RealSimple.com by psychologist Robert L. Leahy, PhD on 10 Ways to Cope with Anxiety. Helpful stuff and some tips I hadn't really thought about before. Some of it is quite funny, and we all know that laughter is the great enemy of anxiety. You knew that, right? 

Thank you, Dr. Leahy.

Anxious? Depressed? Try Some Acetaminophen (Tylenol)

The areas of your brain that manage physical and social pain overlap. So is it any surprise that a common pain killer might alleviate social/psychological as well as social distress? Here's an excerpt from an article at PyschCentral:

In the first experiment, 62 healthy volunteers took 1,000 milligrams daily of either acetaminophen or a placebo. Each evening, participants reported how much they experienced social pain using a version of the “Hurt Feelings Scale” – a measurement tool widely accepted by psychologists as a valid measure of social pain.

Hurt feelings and social pain decreased over time in those taking acetaminophen, while no change was observed in subjects taking the placebo. Levels of positive emotions remained stable, with no significant changes observed in either group. These results indicate that acetaminophen use may decrease self-reported social pain over time, by impacting emotions linked to hurt feelings.

Continuing...

Defeat Procrastination to Reduce Depression, Anxiety

Read Nancy Schimelpfening's excellent column at About.com on how depression/anxiety can feed into procrastination. The combination can get your head into a nasty spin cycle. Been there, done that. She has some good advice here, and it might be useful to you as you write your New Year's resolutions--or whatever you do on the last day of the old year. 

Got an Anxious Kid? Here's Help

You may have read about this study. Granted, they tried only one drug--sertraline, aka Zoloft. But the big picture is the important part: Lots of kids suffer from anxiety, and help is readily available from both medications and therapy. Read about the findings in The Philadelphia Inquirer. This article also includes a checklist of childhood anxiety symptoms. The therapy portion of the program is called Coping Cat, because kids learn how to deal with the symptoms rather than eradicate them. The Promising Practices web site has a page describing the Coping Cat program. Here's an excerpt:

"The Coping Cat program is a cognitive-behavioral therapy intervention that helps children recognize and analyze anxious feelings and develop strategies to cope with anxiety-provoking situations. The program focuses on four related components: (1) recognizing anxious feelings and physical reactions to anxiety; (2) clarifying feelings in anxiety-provoking situations; (3) developing a coping plan (for example, modifying anxious self-talk into coping self-talk, or determining what coping actions might be effective); and (4) evaluating performance and administering self-reinforcement. By incorporating adaptive skills to prevent or reduce feelings of anxiety, the Coping Cat therapist uses a workbook to guide the child through consideration of previous behavior in situations in which the child felt anxious, as well as the development of expectations for future behavior in anxious situations. The Coping Cat workbook is used for children aged 8 to 13 years and the C.A.T. Project workbook is used for children aged 14 to 17 years. The C.A.T. Project differs from Coping Cat only in the use of developmentally appropriate pictures and examples for older ages."

Got an anxious kid? Ask your doctor about these treatments. Please.