Sunday, February 22, 2009

Vitamins for Stress and Anxiety Articles


Your stress or anxiety symptoms may be worsen by your nutrition. Fortunately there are foods containing minerals and vitamins for stress and anxiety that may help with your stress and anxiety symptoms.

You can check here: Nutrition Health Wellness to find articles about vitamins for stress and anxiety.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Ask a doctor about symptoms


Ask a doctor about symptoms. Why?


You may experience physical stress or anxiety signs and symptoms. We have already published a post about physical symptoms of stress you can check here:
Physical Stress Signs and Symptoms.

The problem with stress and anxiety signs and symptoms is that they may also be caused by other medical problems. For example headaches and dizziness are common stress or anxiety signs. Severe and persistent headaches may also be caused by other serious disorders (like brain aneurysm, brain tumor, stroke, brain infection like meningitis or encephalitis). Most causes of dizziness are not serious and either quickly resolve on their own or are easily treated but there are serious conditions that can lead to lightheadedness include heart problems (such as abnormal heart rhythm or heart attack), stroke, tumor, and severe drop in blood pressure (shock).

So your number one priority is to ask your doctor about symptoms you experience. Your doctor will take a medical history and perform a physical examination, paying close attention to your pulse, blood pressure, and respiratory rate. Your doctor will also ask diagnostic tests that may include blood tests (CBC, thyroid function tests) as well as an electrocardiogram (ECG), etc. After excluding other serious conditions your doctor may conclude that your problem is stress or anxiety related. Your doctor can help you determine if your anxiety would be best evaluated and treated by a mental health care professional.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

7 Steps Formula to Positive Thinking


Attitude and thoughts do not change overnight. Positive or negative thinking is a habit. Although changing the way you think is a simple process, it takes time and practice.


If you really want to change negative thinking to positive one, here is a 7 steps formula:

Step 1: Read about this subject, think about its benefits and persuade yourself to try the 7 steps formula .

Step 2: Use your imagination to visualize yourself in the position you want to be.

Step 3: Give yourself positive affirmations, daily. Believe me it works. In a future post I will explain you how positive affirmations helped me.

Step 4: Become aware of your thoughts. If you find yourself thinking negative things, stop immediately. Replace the negative thoughts with positive ones.

Step 5: Always consider any failure as a learning experience, and an important step toward your next success. There is something good within failure.

Step 6: Look for positive people to associate with.

Step 7: Keep a list of your goals, positive thoughts and actions.

Reasearch shows the benefits of positive thinking: decreased negative stress, better coping skills during taft situations, easier breathing, a sense of well-being, improved outlook, better relations, more chances to success, better results than the drugs and more long-lasting benefits. If you practice positive thinking you believe in yourself and your abilities, you see negative events as minor setbacks to be easily overcome, and positive events as evidence of further good things to come. You also take more risks and create more positive events in your life.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Reduce stress- Change the way you think


I believe in positive thinking. I believe that positive thinking helps with stresses in my life. Actually I believe in Buddha's quote: "We are what we think."

Yesterday I was searching for effective stress relievers. I found a very important study that was published in 2007, with an unexpected discovery: playing video games can reduce production of the stress-related hormone cortisol. What I found interesting in this study was that a significant part of daily stress comes from our social perceptions of the world. Where do you pay your attention in your social life? Do you play attention to positive things or negative, rejecting, attacking things?

If your attention is drawn during the day towards social threats like rejections and criticisms, you’re filtering the world such that you’re going to see it as more stressful, more threatening. Actually stressed people, who tended to pay more attention to frowning faces rather than smiling faces were more likely to have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their systems. On the other hand people who paid more attention to the smiling faces were more likely to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their systems.

The scientists ( Prof. Baldwin and his team) were looking for a way to help people train automatic habitual patterns of thought. They decided to design a game to use repetitive thought processes, to help people train positive, helpful thought processes. They created the game and tested it to groups of students and groups of telemarketers.

Their results were interesting. The group of students who played the game felt less stressed about their exam and less anxious during the exam. The group of telemarketers who played the game had 17 percent less of the stress hormone after just one week--and a 68 percent increase in sales. They also reported they had less stress and higher self-esteem.

Their conclusions were very interesting. The game trained people to pay attention to positive things rather than negative things. So do you pay attention to negative, rejecting, attacking things? The more important of their finding was that it is possible to change that fairly simply by practicing over and over again a certain pattern of thought at a very specific level.

So do you want to change your life? Change the way you think.

In our next post we'll discuss how you can change your thoughts to positive ones and how that will help you with your stress.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Stress Anxiety and Panic Attacks- What is the difference!


Stress is a cognitive and emotional process. Stress can come from any situation or thought that makes you feel frustrated, angry, nervous, or even anxious. What is stressful to one person is not necessarily stressful to another. There is also good (excitement) and bad stress. Too much stress may cause a range of health problems including infection, headaches, upset stomach, high blood pressure - even strokes and heart disease.


Anxiety is a feeling of apprehension, doubt or fear about whether an event will occur or the outcome of the event. The source of this uneasiness is not always known or recognized, which can add to the distress you feel. Anxiety is often accompanied by physical symptoms, including: twitching or trembling, muscle tension, headaches, sweating, dry mouth, difficulty swallowing, abdominal pain, and other symptoms like dizziness, irregular heart rate, rapid breathing, etc.

A panic attack is a sudden episode of intense fear (very frightening situation) that develops for no apparent reason and that triggers severe physical reactions. When panic attacks occur, you might think you are loosing control, going crazy, having a heart attack, stroke or even dying.