Chances are pretty good that if you are under thirty you’ve never even heard of a Rolodex. Of course if you’re over fifty…there is probably one on your desk. (SVP, voir plus bas pour la version Française) I think of Rolodexes and manual typewriters whenever I think of how much my world has changed since [...]
Tag Archives: Anxiety
My brain chemicals are out of whack!
I don’t know about you but I’ve never understood what is meant by the phrase “chemical imbalance.” Pharmaceutical companies use the term as a means of describing depression. It gives the condition a medical-sounding cause, which of course requires a medical-sounding treatment (such as the pill they happen to sell). Before I go any further, [...]
I have a feeling about my feelings
This week’s article is about our tendency to add problems to our problems: I have a feeling about my feelings (Source: Je ressens quelque chose à propos de mes sentiments. Journal Métro, July 02, 2013) Voir plus bas pour la version Française. A funny thing about people is that we have feelings and then we [...]
Prepping for the latest nightmare
Following the shootings at Newtown, I was called by a journalist who wanted to know what I thought of the fact certain schools were planning to practice lockdown drills. I wasn’t free to film a segment for his report but I decided to address the topic in my column of February 12, 2013. There are [...]
OK, Big Guy, whatever you do, don’t look nervous!
Ain’t anxiety a bitch? It always seems to come when you least want it. The more you hope to stay calm, the more anxiety you feel. Hmm, I wonder if there’s a pattern there? Anxiety is the body’s alarm in response to a threat. If you see a bear in the woods…ding ding…the alarm rings [...]
The new hypochondriac
Most anxious people have pretty well been like that most of their lives. Their anxiety may get better or worse but, for the most part, they always consider themselves anxious people. But in a small number of cases, a debilitating anxiety disorder seems to come out of the blue. These people seem to have functioned [...]
Batman’s belt
Stress is all about the challenges we face. The greater the challenge, the greater the stress. The negative emotion we feel is usually labelled anxiety when it is acute. In more chronic situations, we feel a general sense of unease which often produces burnout or depression. These negative feelings push us to address the problem and [...]
I’ll trade you that needle for a bus ticket
In my last post I wrote about stigma by discussing how two similar experiences can be lived in radically different fashions. I used the example of losing a loved one. Because we live our lives through our subjective lenses it is easy to label someone as weak when they handle something less well than us. [...]
I think I jinxed my rabbit’s foot
Why do we knock on wood or carry around a rabbit’s foot? It certainly isn’t because these things will prevent us from experiencing a disaster. What they do, however, is make us feel as if they will. “Don’t Jinx It,” my last column before my usual August break, dealt with superstitious behaviour. (For a real [...]
The fertile output of the anxious mind
Here’s a question? What’s scarier: reality or imagination? The crazy thing is that even though we know that imagination is not real, it can often cause more suffering than reality. The reason for this is the human stress response. Stress is the body’s way of responding to and protecting itself from a threat. When I [...]
