I hope everyone had a stress-free December. As you can tell, I’ve slacked off with my posts but I’m back now and ready to feed you a wealth of information to help you cope with anxiety, depression and stress and provide you with some answers.
My approach will be a bit different from my previous posts. Rather than just sharing my own knowledge as I’ve done in the past, I’ll be finding some of the best places on the internet where you can get advice from the pros.
Over the holidays, I was looking around the internet for such sites that I can share with you. If you haven’t discovered on your own, believe me there are a lot of extremely helpful pages out there, but you have to be sure the advice is not misleading. Regardless of how good the sites are, none can compare with getting professional help if you need it.
Fortunately, you can do a lot to educate yourself to determine whether you need professional help.
The first step is to identify what you’re experiencing, since there are various types of anxiety. They include: Generalized anxiety, where you have an unspecific overall sense of anxiety that you cannot explain, and Social Anxiety, where you dread being in a public place.
Social anxiety is something I struggle with and I can tell you that it’s not nearly as bad as it was in my younger years. Still, I do feel apprehensive quite frequently when I eat in public or face groups of people although I’m usually fine being with one individual at a time.
Here’s a blog post that gives you an example of social anxiety, specifically about eating in public. Go to http://blogs.webmd.com/anxiety-and-stress-management/ . Scroll down the page to the post titled: Thursday, December 20, 2007 Social Anxiety: Eating. Within the post are links to learn about anorexia and bulimia. Below that post, you’ll see another link to more information about social anxiety disorder.The post begins:
Eating can be both a pleasure and a painful experience, depending on how you view it. I’m not talking about people with eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia.
Another blog offers more information about social anxiety and depression, and points to the question many people ask, when do you know it’s natural and when it’s a mental health condition. Here’s a snippet:
The larger issue is when is a feeling a mental illness? Where do we draw the line in saying that this feeling is so bad, it deserves not only a name, but a whole set of diagnostic criteria, research backing, and multiple treatment approaches? Philip over at Furious Seasons makes the case that something that is so common as depression should no longer be considered a mental disorder…
Go to http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2007/11/06/social-anxiety-disorder-or-just-plain-shy/ to read the rest of the post titled, “Social Anxiety Disorder or Just Plain Shy?” by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
I hope you find the information helpful.
