Category Archives: Stress

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

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IMG_3905For many people, faith is indispensable to mental health. Religious beliefs and practices strengthen their emotional resiliency in the face of hassles and stressors.

Healthy spirituality can infuse  emotion and intellect with hope and clarity.  Awareness of the Holy Spirit lessens the sense of aloneness  and imparts wise counsel.  Reading of religious texts, with focus on scriptures that emphasize God’s love and grace, can correct cognitive distortions regarding low self-worth or helplessness.

Looking inward, prayer provides a structure in which to list problems and to facilitates a mental state of receptivity to new solutions.  Going deeper into a meditative state, while contemplating God as creator of the universe yet intimate companion,  enlightens the mind to a bigger-picture image of life that causes worries to melt.

Clearly spiritual belief can support mental health.   People tell me this, in one way or another, most days.

It is also true that spiritual belief can become emotionally unhealthy.  People also remind me of this on a regular basis.  A woman with obsessive compulsive disorder tells me of crippling obsessions over past sins.  Victims of clergy-abuse describe long-lasting wounds.

And so, healthy and unhealthy beliefs can be intimately interwoven in the mind.  Disentangling these beliefs can be hard and the process of uprooting unhealthy spiritual beliefs can be psychologically traumatic.  Often, it is better to start with cultivating spiritual wellness through the practices noted above.   In time, emotionally healthy spirituality will begin to yield fruits of improved mental fitness.

Stress and Skin Electricity

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imagesSteams of electrical current are coursing over your skin, increasing in power under periods of stress.  Like measurements of cortisol in your bloodstream, electrical currents over skin reflect the level of stress in your mind and body.

You can now buy a device, to measure the electrical activity flowing over your skin.  But rather than purchasing a galvanic skin response instrument for $200, why not just use this observation to realize that high stress impacts on your body and do something about it?

You don’t need a new high-tech gadget to tell you to lower your skin electricity and relax.  Use common sense and know that the human body needs time to rest and unwind.  Too much stress as reflected by increased sweating and skin electricity is not good for your heart, your brain, or your emotional balance.  Be deliberate about making some time for exercise and meditation, two behaviors proven to lower stress.

For the spiritually-minded person, find a quiet space to relax, take some slow deep breaths, and reach out to the Comforter in prayer.  Your blood pressure will ease and the electrical currents passing over your body will diminish.

See Popular Science (March, 2015) for nice discussion of the biology of stress and relaxation.

Thawing Your Heart With Gratitude – Guest Post

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photo_4 (1)Hearts can become cold after months of freezing temperatures.  As we pass the time waiting for warmer days, now is a good time thaw our frozen hearts with gratitude.

Gratitude is an attitude, a habit of being thankful for the little things.  Research shows that gratitude and dark moods cannot rest in the same mind at the same time.

Studies have found that college students who wrote down things they were thankful for 9 weeks exhibited fewer physical illness symptoms than those who recorded hassles or neutral events.  Time focused on positive events kept them healthier.

In a study of subjects with a neurological illness, participants who counted their blessings daily for 21 days were found to sleep better than those in the control group.  Counting blessings appears to foster a sense of ease and contentment.

A final piece of research I will mention reports on a sample of 82 adults receiving treatment for hypertension.  Here, scientists found that participants who received a 10-week gratitude intervention, as well as their regular treatment, experienced greater decreases in blood pressure than the control. Gratitude can reduce symptoms of high stress, including high blood pressure.

For a few moments each day, be grateful.  Your blood pressure may drop and your sleep may improve.

Angela Hall., MA.  Resident in Counseling, Riverside Counseling Center

Anti-inflammatory Medicines May Have a Future in Depression Treatment

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New research out in October suggests that anti-inflammatory medications may prove helpful in treating depression (1).  Scientists are becoming more interested in this class of medication due to a growing body of research suggesting that depression and many other illnesses develop, in part, due to inflammatory processes in the brain.

Stress hormones and inflammatory products produced when the body is stressed make their way to the brain and damage neurons.  They also interfere with natural brain cell repair mechanisms.

Although prior studies of aspirin have failed to show improvements in treatment of depression, scientists in this month’s report looked a 18 studies (over 10,000 participants) of anti-inflammatory medicines and found that treatment with this class of medication was associated a significant reduction in depressive symptoms.

Studying the link between inflammatory processes and the onset of depression may lead to a completely new way of treating this illness.  While it is not time to rush out to the drug store and begin self-medicating ourselves with anti-inflammatory products to improve mood, this research does offer hope for a new class of antidepressant medications being developed in the future.

(1) Ole Kohler and others.  Effect of Anti-inflammatory Treatment on Depression, Depressive Symptoms, and Adverse Effects.  JAMA Psychiatry (Online First), October 15, 2014.