Anxiety Help L.A.

Month: October 2010

  • Fear is Scary

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    Profiles in fear from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Yael Levin used to be so afraid of insects that she avoided going outside. Visits to the park and backyard cookouts brought on extreme anxiety.  “I would panic, have difficulty breathing and have to run away when encountering insects…” Link down. Here’s a page about fear of insects.

  • Willpower Push-ups

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    Judith Beck offers tips about how to increase willpower.  First three ideas: Specify your goal in behavioral terms. Not, “I want to be more physically fit,” but, “I want to go to the gym three times a week for 45 minutes.” Make sure your goal is reasonable. If you have been sedentary, you may need…

  • Anxiety and (Quitting) Smoking

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    Study:  Anxiety makes it harder to quit smoking. Smokers often experience craving, negative feelings and difficulty concentrating in the minutes or hours after finishing a cigarette, and those feelings can be heightened simply because the smokers know they’re about to attempt to quit…In addition, participants with a history of panic attacks or social anxiety disorder…

  • Friends for Health

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    A study says social support helps your overall health. We all know that to improve our medical health we should not smoke, exercise more and have better eating habits…Now, new research suggests psychological and social support can convey health protective values on par with the famous threesome.

  • Perception of Time Affects Stress

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    How you perceive time can affect your level of stress, a study says. “I actually didn’t find one single room in my school that didn’t have a clock. In India, clocks are not of such importance,” she noted, adding that cultural differences and attitudes toward time affect the way people manage time and deal with…

  • Anxiety and Surgery

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    The Los Angeles Times reports on a study that shows depression and anxiety interfering with healing after surgery. Why would depression and anxiety make a patient more vulnerable? The researchers offered several theories. Among them: Depressed patients don’t take as good a care of themselves, so when they go in for surgery, they may have…

  • Virtual Exposure Therapy

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    Virtual reality meets exposure therapy (Scientific American). Recently, some psychologists have successfully combined exposure therapy and virtual reality to treat fears of flying, heights and spiders, asking patients to interact with simulated environments that guarantee their safety…Now, a team of psychologists has completed the first clinical trial testing the treatment of cockroach phobia with augmented reality—a younger…

  • 8 Tips for Reducing Anxiety

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    Anxiety reduction tips from Matthew Edlund on the Huffington Post.  Number one is nice and simple: Start with deep breathing. Stand up straight and breathe in to the count of four, out to the count of eight. Repeat for five breaths.

  • Whatever Doesn’t Kill You…

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    …makes you stronger, says study. “Our findings revealed,” he says, “that a history of some lifetime adversity — relative to both no adversity or high adversity — predicted lower global distress, lower functional impairment, lower PTS symptoms and higher life satisfaction.”

  • Fight, Flight, Freeze

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    What an experiment with voles tells us about stress and anxiety (PsychCentral). “It’s not a question of being more or less afraid,” says Prof. Eilam. “Under threat, members of a social group will adopt a common behavioral code, regardless of their individual tendency towards anxiety.”