Savoring success is so important for nourishing our sense of accomplishment and keeping perspective. If you find that you have difficulty savoring success, it’s time to tap into that inner experience. Have you developed an inner critical voice or is there a critical voice of someone else you hear that plays in your mind? It’s important to be able to step back and notice when that’s occurring. Other ways to be able to save our success include practicing gratitude. Gratitude involves being grateful for your accomplishments, for the steps you have made, even if they feel small. Really taking note of those and being grateful for yourself, your unique strengths and qualities that make you who you are. Lastly, practicing mindfulness is very important for savoring success. Sometimes our brain goes away with us. Our mind follows into the land of what’s next? What do I have to do next? Instead of staying in the here and now of I did this, this task is done. I accomplished this. Practicing mindfulness keeps us in the here and now and allows you to savor the success that is occurring.

Research into anxiety and its treatment and causes has been ongoing for decades and as technology advances, then new areas for research are opening up. One such area is being explored by neuroscientists right now who are trying to identify specific brain cells – specific neurons – that are implicated in anxiety. A study recently found that certain cells in the hippocampus are very important in the way anxiety works in our brains. Most of these tests are being done currently on mice – not in humans yet – but they’re hoping to further this research and identify more and more specific neurons in the brain that are implicated in anxiety’s mechanism in our brain so that down the road, additional drug therapies might be developed to turn certain of these neurons on and off and provide relief for people who suffer with anxiety.

Home is supposed to be our refuge, so when stress and anxiety crop up there – it can be especially distressing. One thing to pay attention to is whether you might be inadvertently contaminating home with stress from work or school or some other area of your life. It’s often helpful to compartmentalize parts of our life to some degree so that we leave work at work and school at school and maybe perhaps don’t return emails in the evening, etc. And instead allow ourselves the ability to savor the non-work or the non-school parts of our lives. Now at the same time, it’s also important to let people in when we’re experiencing distressing thoughts or feelings so that we don’t feel that we’re shouldering that burden all by ourselves. So if you open up to the people around you, you’re accomplishing a couple of things at once: one, you’re alleviating some of that stress and anxiety, and two, you’re cultivating intimacy with that person. So it’s important to try to find a balance between these two. Compartmentalizing and sharing and being open with people about the struggles that you face. Also consider carving out some time every day, even if it’s only 30 minutes for you – for self-care activities for you. So what is it that you like to do to take care of yourself? Do you like to take a bath? is there a hobby you like to do? What is it that calms and soothes you? Just you. Some time that you can claim for yourself because taking care of yourself can relieve stress and anxiety and also help you show up more for the people in your life. So it’s a win-win situation. And finally I’d recommend considering starting a mindfulness meditation practice. This is a practice of orienting more toward our present moment experience and letting go of the future oriented thoughts that tend to worry us. So again, this can produce direct improvement in stress and anxiety, but notably empathy and compassion also naturally arise when we practice mindfulness meditation. And so the practice can help you be a better family member too.

If you’re in school, you know that it’s a stressful time because in addition to the academic pressures, you’re dealing with many other pressures including your own and other people’s expectations, financial pressures, maybe even worries about the future career that you might have. So this is a critical time for you to develop healthy habits and practices in coping with those demands. It’s important to set good boundaries around the activities that you know help you to feel healthier and more at ease. So this includes things like taking time to tend to your physical health and your relationships and your mental health. But striving to find more balance in your life can also tend to feel like another obligation, so just remember that sometimes it’s okay to unplug just for the sake of unplugging. Now, speaking of unplugging – social media is a way that many of us keep in touch with the people who matter to us (and that’s really important) but social media also has a downside and that is that the more time we spend on it, the more we can feel stressed and anxious – especially when we’re seeing depictions of other people’s lives that make them seem so much happier and better off than we are. Also, too much social media use can impact your grades, studies show, so try to engage in social media in moderation. Also, consider trying mindfulness meditation. It’s a practice of paying more attention to your present moment experience and as a result, worrying less about the future. Now, some amount of worry can be helpful. After all, it’s probably worrying about how you’ll do on your final that causes you to study harder for it. But if you practice mindfulness meditation, there’ll be more focused and attentive to what you’re doing so that you can use your energy in a productive way rather than wasting it on excessive worry.

Many of us spend half or more of our waking hours at work, so it contributes disproportionately to our sense of stress and anxiety in the rest of our lives. One thing that contributes to stress and anxiety in the workplace is disorganization. One quick way that you can begin to get your arms around the duties that you have and feel less stressed by them is simply to become more organized, which can be as simple as keeping a daily to-do list or being more diligent about entering your upcoming appointments in a calendar so that you know exactly when things will be happening. This reduces the unknown that often gives rise to anxiety. Something else I recommend is to take frequent breaks throughout the work day – so something you might try is something I call the “50-10 approach.” Work hard for 50 minutes and then take a 10 minute break each hour and use that 10 minutes to get up and go hydrate or go for a walk or do a quick meditation while you’re sitting at your desk and then go back to work for the next 50 minutes. What a lot of people find is that doing it this way, they end up more productive during the working 50 minutes than if they just try to push through an entire work day nonstop. Now that being said, in your quest to be a productive successful worker – make sure that you’re being realistic about what you’re trying to achieve within the time limits that you have available. Furthermore, you need to really pay attention to your whole life wellbeing. So guard your personal time and as much as you want this to succeed at work, make sure you’re devoting equal time to your physical, social, and psychological health so that you’re not only a successful worker, but a successful and happy human being.

When you’re experiencing anxiety, you have a million worries racing through your mind. Things like: “is my boss happy with my work? Will I be able to pay that bill next month? Did my teacher look at me funny today? Why did I say that?” Excessive worries like this don’t accumulate and develop into an anxiety disorder overnight and anxiety disorders don’t disappear overnight, either. Non-drug treatments for anxiety often involve developing new habits of thought and behavior and letting go of old ones. So for instance: if you’re having thoughts about people’s negative judgments about your work product, for instance, then over time you can develop a habit of noticing those thoughts as they arise and then testing them to see how true they are and developing new, healthier, more balanced ways of relating to situations in your life and then responding to them. Like any skill, this one requires practice, but it’s the kind of practice that can yield a sense of accomplishment as you do it. Similarly, with mindfulness meditation practice (something else I recommend) this is a practice that can yield more benefits over time. It can deepen and enrich your life over years of practice and at the same time produce immediate short term benefit in the form of stress reduction and relaxation and many other benefits. You should speak with your mental health care provider to determine what treatment approach might be best for you and how your treatment may progress over time. But the important thing is to get started and take that first step.

If you’ve been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, then there are a number of treatment options available to you that you’ll want to discuss with your mental health care providers – which includes both your therapist and slash or your psychiatrist. For some people and situations. Prescription drugs may be the best treatment option or at least part of the best treatment option. But for other people, that isn’t necessary and there are non drug treatments that can benefit people generally regardless of whether they’re taking prescription medications or not. Let’s talk about a couple of those: one is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a type of therapy that you can do one-on-one with a therapist that helps you identify and change unhelpful thought and behavior patterns. Another option you might wish to explore is mindfulness meditation. That’s the type of meditation that involves cultivating acceptance of your present moment experience and de-emphasizing those future oriented thoughts that tend to be related to the things that you’re worried about and overtime can provide some relief. You might be able to find resources both in your area and certainly online that can provide guided mindfulness meditations for you to try in your daily routine. Finally, you might wish to explore something called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is really a blending of the two things I just mentioned and since each of those can be helpful with anxiety, the indication is that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy can also be very helpful for anxiety as well. I encourage you to speak with your mental health care providers to discuss these and other treatment options and they’ll help you figure out which ones are best for you.

If you find yourself lying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling when you’re trying to go to sleep because you’re worried about these problems that are headed your way, whether they’re real or imagined, it’s possible that you might be experiencing generalized anxiety disorder. But don’t let that possibility be another worry for you because if you are, there are plenty of treatments available that can help you to feel better. Your first step will be to seek help from a mental health professional who will speak with you, learn about what you’re experiencing, and then properly assess you to determine whether you’re experiencing generalized anxiety disorder. Some of the things that they’ll want to know include some of the symptoms that I mentioned just a second ago. Are you experiencing excessive worry about a variety of topics for an extended period of time, six months or more? That seems difficult to control. Also, they’ll be asking about other symptoms you might be experiencing, including physical and emotional symptoms such as irritability or difficulty sleeping or concentrating, even muscle soreness. They’ll also be asking about other factors in your life such as stressors that you’re facing, ways that you cope with them and your use of substances – including alcohol, caffeine, and other drugs. With a proper assessment, a mental health professional can help you understand the feelings that you’re experiencing, and if you end up being diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, then they can help you create a plan to feel better.

Anxiety can come from a number of causes or a combination of them. For one thing, you might be genetically predisposed to anxiety because it runs in families. It’s also more likely to affect women, people who were shy as children, people who’ve experienced stressful events in their lives and people who are economically disadvantaged. Some behavioral choices that you make might also be influencing the extent to which you’re experiencing anxiety too, because using alcohol or caffeine or other substances can cause or worsen anxiety. Our relationship to our environment can also play a role, which means that as we experience stressful situations or major obligations in our life that produce stress, that stress can mount and over time develop into an anxiety disorder – especially if we feel that we aren’t up to the challenge that they pose to us. Now, if that happens and we develop anxiety, then there’s an additional risk, which is that 60% of people who develop anxiety also then go on to experience a major depressive episode – a form of depression. It so happens that people who experience both anxiety and depression tend not to fair as well in the long run as people who experience just one or the other. So please: if you’re experiencing any symptoms of anxiety (or depression for that matter) please contact a mental health professional so they can help you understand what it is you’re experiencing and help you devise a plan to feel better.

Everyone worries from time to time: about that performance review coming up, that bill that you might have to pay next month or what it is that your unruly child might get into next and some amount of worry is actually helpful because we’re worry causes us to take action to resolve problems and avoid problems that our lives. But when that worry starts to feel like it’s too much, when it’s taking up more space than you think it should in your life – if you’re worried about a variety of things in your life more often than not, and that’s lasting for six months or more and that worry feels like it’s difficult to control and if you’re also feeling some other symptoms, maybe even physical or emotional symptoms like irritability or restlessness or difficulty sleeping or concentrating, then you might be experiencing generalized anxiety disorder. This is becoming a more common problem in this country. In the US, the National Institute of Mental Health reports that almost 3% of adults will experience generalized anxiety disorder in a given year and almost 6% will experience it in their lifetime. Now, if we expand those statistics to include other anxiety disorders – things like social anxiety and panic disorder – then about 1 in 5 adults will be touched somehow by anxiety in their life. So if you’re finding yourself experiencing worry to the extent that it’s impairing your ability to function or meet your social obligations in life, then please seek help from a mental health professional who can help you understand what it is you’re experiencing and then help you create a plan to feel better.

Anxiety has to do with worry and when we talk about anxiety disorders, we’re talking about worry that is taken to more of an extreme. Anxiety disorders cover a spectrum of conditions that range from the most generalized in the form of generalized anxiety disorder, which involves worrying for an extended period of time about multiple problems in your life to things as specific as phobias, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. Things like being afraid of spiders or heights or even clouds. Your worries might have more to do with public situations like of being in a public environment that feels unsafe and that you’re unable to escape for some reason, which is the case in agoraphobia. Or it might relate to a fear of being embarrassed in public, such as the case in social anxiety and in one of its most debilitating forms – panic disorder – you can be left feeling so worried and afraid that you feel short of breath and an impending sense of doom coming over you. So if you’re experiencing any sense of worry or fear that is impairing your ability to function or to meet your social obligations in life, please go see a mental health professional who can help you understand what is happening and how to feel better.

You can recognize early signs of depression in a loved one often by seeing changes in their thinking and their behaving. So if you notice that a loved one is starting to become more pessimistic or negative, they’re talking about feeling like they’re a failure or they are letting other people down: these may be signs of depressive feelings. If you notice changes in behavior, particularly a tendency to isolate, not wanting to engage with things they used to like to do or be around people they love: these may also be early signs of depression. Changes in sleep, wanting to sleep more or sleep less, and changes in appetite (like eating a lot more or having no appetite) are also signs of depression. The best way to get someone help or intervene is to talk to them about their feelings and mention that you’ve noticed a change. Depression is real. It’s important to validate their feelings even if you do not understand why they are feeling this way. If you come to them with a compassionate stance, there’ll be more likely to be open to talking to someone and getting treatment to help them feel better.

Therapy is a great place to deal with symptoms of depression and improve your ability to cope with depression. Depression often involves a tendency to have negative thoughts about how we view ourself, the world, and the future. Therapy is a place where you can step back and notice those thought patterns and begin to replace them with more healthy and adaptive thoughts. Depression also involves difficulty in relationships and losses. Therapy is a place that you can work through those feelings and learn how to communicate in your relationships better. Overall, as a whole, therapy is a place for you to get support, but unlike the other supports you have in your life (like your family members, your friends) your therapist is an unbiased objective, support who is there to help you with your life without having their own perspective because they’re uniquely interwoven into your life. That’s an important distinction of how your therapist is different from other supports in your life. Lastly, medication is a very important part of the treatment of depression and maybe necessary in addition to therapy. Often a combination of both medication and therapy is the gold standard for treating depression.

If you find yourself staying in unhappy relationships for too long, it’s important to develop insight into this pattern and what makes it so difficult to say goodbye. Through therapy, you can identify what are the types of partners you tend to be drawn to and the relationship patterns that you tend to get into and where does this stem from? It’s important to understand not only the root cause of this tendency, but also how is this continuing to happen in your life? What are the factors that lead you to stay in this relationship? Sometimes (but not always) staying in unhappy relationships has to do with putting other people’s needs over your own or concerns and questions about self-worth. Therapy can help you sort these out and gain more insight and also improve your self-worth and improve your ability to put your needs first and identify what you need in relationships.

If you feel anxiety in relationships and find yourself pushing people away, an important thing you can do is develop insight into this pattern and how it began. A great way to do this would be to go to psychotherapy. Through gaining insight into the pattern, you can also understand what function is this serving? Oftentimes, when people want to push others away, it’s often because of a fear: a fear of being abandoned or being mistreated or being hurt or some other fear of a negative thing happening in that relationship. Often, these fears have arisen from past experiences – but not always. Psychotherapy is a wonderful place to sort out these fears and develop more insight into this pattern so that you can allow yourself to get close to people and let them in, being able to trust them.

Boundaries are the barriers we create between ourselves and others that allow us to have a healthy amount of distance in our relationships. Boundaries can be both physical and psychological. Although boundaries are a very important and healthy part of every relationship, setting boundaries can feel hard. The first step in setting boundaries is to get in touch with and notice your own limits and your own needs in a relationship, and then be able to communicate those directly. Examples of setting a boundary might be deciding to not hang out with someone or spend as much time with someone because they’re getting on your nerves a little bit, or it could be saying no to something that someone else wants you to do, but you just don’t feel comfortable with. A big part of setting boundaries involves tolerating the negative emotions that may come up when you have to say no or set a limit. Psychotherapy is a wonderful place to get more in touch with your own needs, your own limits, and learn how to set boundaries in healthy relationships.

If you find yourself constantly consumed with thoughts that failure is looming around the corner, you’re probably living in the land of “what-ifs” as opposed to living in the land of the here and now. The very important way to combat this tendency is to engage in mindfulness. Mindfulness is a skill that involves a lot of different parts, but the core of it is that you’re focusing on noticing your thoughts and feelings as they come and go without judging them, and then bringing your attention back to the here and now: the physical sensations in your body, what’s going on around you and your environment, things that are actually happening. That takes us away from the anxious cycle that we tend to go down otherwise. Other important ways to combat those fears of failure include engaging in positive affirmations, so telling yourself “I’m going to do this, I’m going to be great”, focusing on your strengths, writing them out even at times and visualizing success – so when you’re going into something, visualizing what it’s gonna look like for you to be successful. Having all of those strategies helps you have a positive mindset and combat those fears of failure.

Making life decisions is naturally anxiety-provoking and stressful. However, you can feel more secure in your life decisions by taking a few steps: the first step that’s important to start with would be to hone into your own personal values. Think about the values that guide your life and think about how this decision can fit with those values. Maybe you get a new job opportunity in a different state, but that would take you further away from your family and you really value being around your family. That’s an important value to consider in this decision-making process. Second, it’s very important to think about all the different options that you could possibly take when making a decision – even the ones that feel dumb or that you’re definitely not going to do – consider those. Then list out all the pros (the positives) to making a certain decision and the cons (the negatives) to making a certain decision. You can look at all of these laid out and that can make you feel more comfortable that you’re really thinking through this decision thoroughly. Lastly, it’s very important to remember that there’s no perfect decision in life ever and that every decision is going to come with positives and negatives. Having some compassion for yourself and making decisions is challenging but it really helps you to feel more secure and understanding of yourself when you’re having some trouble making decisions in life.

If someone you know is contemplating suicide or you suspect that they may be wanting to commit suicide, it’s very important that you talk to them. It’s a myth that talking to people about suicide makes them more likely to commit suicide. You talking about it is only going to help them get treatment and get the help that they need. So how do you go about doing that? Because that feels very overwhelming and stressful and it may feel like you don’t want to make the other person feel uncomfortable. Ways to bring it up: the best way would be to just directly ask the person: I’m concerned about you. Are you thinking about hurting yourself or killing yourself? Showing empathy, showing that you care about the person is very important. If you are watching this and you are contemplating suicide, call a suicide hotline immediately. They can get you the help you need. If you are concerned about someone you love or someone you know committing suicide, take them to the nearest emergency room and there they will get the help they need as well.

Suicide is a devastating and tragic event. There’s been more emphasis on awareness about suicide in our current society and culture – which is very important. Some warning signs of suicide include: if you notice that someone is isolating (so spending more time alone, not wanting to do things with friends and family) – that’s a very concerning sign. If they’re talking about death, wanting to die, wanting to kill themselves or hurt themselves – these are also warning signs for suicide that needed to be taken very seriously. If people start giving away their possessions or you notice that they suddenly have no interest in things that they used to have interest in, this can also be a warning sign for suicide. People experiencing extreme emotional reactions and feeling out of control those emotions and using substances to try to feel more in control of their emotions also are at higher risk for suicide. All of these are signs for suicide but the most important thing is being able to directly ask someone: Do you feel like hurting yourself? Do you feel like killing yourself? It’s a myth that asking people about suicide makes them more likely to commit suicide.

It’s important to become in tune with our feelings as they provide important information to us. They impact the way we think and behave and they help us feel more connected to our sense of self. One really important and easy way to feel more in tune with your feelings is to notice what the physical sensations you’re having are, particularly when you’re feeling off or things feel kind of out of sort. So for example, you might take a moment to step back and notice, has my heart rate changed? Am I feeling tension somewhere in my body? Am I sweating? These are good cues that you may be feeling a certain emotion. It’s also really important to learn the different names of emotions. So in addition to happiness and sadness, also anger and the more emotions we don’t think about as much like shyness. Lastly, it’s helpful to journal and to write down your thoughts and feelings and reflect on them later. That can really help you get in tune with your feelings. If you tend to be someone who wants to avoid feelings, is important to know that they’re there as much as we try to suppress them. And the more we resist them, they tend to persist.

Our relationship with our earliest caregivers – so mom and dad, but also extended family members, people who are really close to us in our childhood – impact our relationship behaviors in the future, and set the template for our relationships. Often, (but not always) relationship anxiety can be related to those early childhood attachments. So for example, if you had inconsistent caregiving then that may cause some level of relationship anxiety that persists later in your life even into adulthood – even if you’re not aware that that’s what’s going on and underlying feeling anxious. However, it’s not just your attachments, there are also other factors that impact whether you develop relationship anxiety. Some of those include your genetics, your predisposition towards having mental health problems because you have mental health problems in your family. And lastly: stressors. Stressors include stress at work, living in an unsafe environment that may create stress that you’re not even aware of, dealing with stressful relationships, having financial strains, etc. Those are kinds of things that are stressors that can also impact whether relationship anxiety is expressed. So although childhood attachments are very important and are key part of relationship anxiety, they’re not everything and the only thing.

We all experience anxiety in relationships as relationships are inherently emotional, they have ups and downs, and they’re just complex. However, relationship anxiety can get out of hand. Some signs that your relationship anxiety may be running away with you would be if you find yourself being preoccupied with thoughts about your relationships or overly reading into interactions that occurred with people. If you find yourself preoccupied with thoughts that you might lose important people in your life or if you find that you have trouble connecting and letting other people in – these may all be signs that relationship anxiety has gotten the best of you and it may be time to seek out treatment.

As a rule of thumb, I would say that if you are wondering whether you need help, it’s probably a sign that your intuition is kicking in and that it might be time to reach out. Therapy is an incredibly useful tool for, not only working through problems and dealing with symptoms, but also to deepen your understanding of yourself and get more in touch with your purpose and values that you can live a more meaningful, fulfilled life. Other than that, some signs that may show that it might be time to go to therapy would include finding that your old ways of coping with stress are no longer working. Seeing that you’re developing some new unhealthy habits, getting feedback from important people in your life that they’re worried about you, or lastly feeling that you’re not able to function at school, work, at home, or in your relationships.

Sadness is a very normal and useful emotion. We can’t avoid sadness. It’s part of the natural ups and downs in life. However, sometimes if sadness feels like it’s really pervasive and taking over, it may be a sign that there is a depressive disorder going on. Depression disorders have many different features and there are different types. However, what they all have in common is that there is a fundamental inability to function in life’s roles, so when sadness is taking over and you’re unable to perform at work, be present in your relationships or it’s impacting the way you feel about yourself, that may be a sign that it’s time to seek treatment, as sadness has become a depressive disorder.

Worry is a very normal and useful emotion that we all experience. In fact, even though worry feels pretty uncomfortable at times, we need it to motivate ourselves in life. However, anxiety can begin to feel like it’s out of control and become an anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders have a lot of different features. There are many different types of anxiety disorders, but what they all have in common is there is a fundamental inability to function in life that occurs. So if you notice that your worry has become so overwhelming that you’re unable to function in your roles – such as at work, at home or in relationships – then that’s a sign that it might be time to get treatment, as you may be experiencing an anxiety disorder.