We all know the uncomfortable feeling of anxiety. Our hearts race, our fingers sweat, and our breathing gets shallow and labored. We experience racing thoughts about a perceived threat that we think is too much to handle. That's because our "fight or flight" response has kicked in, resulting in sympathetic arousal and a narrowing of attention and focus on avoiding the threat. We seem to be locked in that state, unable to focus on our daily chores or longer-term goals. As a Cognitive-Behavior Therapist with more than 15 years of experience, I have found a variety of techniques that I can teach my patients with anxiety disorders such as phobias, panic attacks, or chronic worry. Some are based on changing thoughts, others on changing behavior, and still others involve physiological responses. The more aspects of anxiety I can decrease, the lower the chance of relapse post-therapy. Below are six strategies that you can use to help your anxiety.:
(1) Reevaluating the probability of the threatening event actually happening
Anxiety makes us feel threat is imminent yet most of the time what we worry about never happens. By recording our worries and how many came true, we can notice how much we overestimate the prospect of negative events. (2) Decatastrophizing
Even if a bad event happened, we may still be able to handle it by using our coping skills and problem-solving abilities or by enlisting others to help. Although not pleasant, we could still survive encountering a spider, having a panic attack, or losing money. It's important to realize that very few things are the end of the world. (3) Using deep breathing and relaxation to calm down
By deliberately relaxing our muscles we begin to calm down so we can think clearly. If you practice this without a threat present at first, it can start to become automic and will be easier to use in the moment when you face a threat. Deep breathing engages the parasympathetic nervous system to put the brakes on sympathetic arousal. (4) Becoming mindful of our own physical and mental reactions
The skill of mindfulness involves calmly observing our own reactions, including fear, without panic or feeling compelled to act. It is something that can be taught in therapy and improves with practice.
(5) Accepting the Fear and Committing to Living a Life Based on Core Values
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is an approach that encourages people to accept the inevitability of negative thoughts and feelings and not try to repress or control them. By directing attention away from the fear and back onto life tasks and valued goals, we can live a full life despite the fear.
Soothing & healing strategies for your mind
(6) Exposure
Exposure is the most powerful technique for anxiety and it involves facing what we fear and staying in the situation long enough for the fear to habituate or go down, as it naturally does. Fear makes us avoid or run away, so our minds and bodies never learn that much of what we fear is not truly dangerous. I use these techniques regularly in my clinical practice in Mill Valley, CA 94941.
My website is http://www.melanieagreenbergphd.com.
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Interesting enough for me, I "used" to have a litle pomeranian daughter.. but "she" kept it when we split... anywhooooo....
In a photo captured by Yoshiaki Mae a Black Pomeranian or Dwarf Spitz named Goma gives a ride to a wild baby Japanese macaque monkey.
Yoshiaki Mae spotted the young, frail Japanese macaque on a mountain near his home and took it home in order to care for it and nurse it back to health. It is believed that the youngster was separated from its mother when Typhoon Roke swept through Tanabe in Wakayama prefecture, central Japan.
Yoshiaki Mae said the monkey and his dog hit it off instantly, becoming pals and entertaining friends and neighbors. As cute as the partnership is, it is fleeting and all the more precious for it: Mae is planning to return the baby monkey to its natural habitat shortly, as soon as it regains its health.
Few things in life are more appreciable than a bromance. A bromance is when two dudes metaphorically come together in platonic matrimony to be best guy-friends. It’s a union that’s evolved by leaps and bounds since society decided to be cool about guys getting in touch with their emotions & stuff in between talking football and boobs.
Bromances are like everything else in that you get out of it what you put into it. But before you can put into it, maybe it’s wise to think for a moment about why you’re getting into it and make sure you’re not setting yourself up for a bromance fail.
Here are five motivations for initiating a bromance you might want to steer clear of.
5.You want your childhood back
We all miss being a kid, sometimes. But you’re a man now, and it can be dangerous to parlay a bromance into bringing back the good ole days. Part of the fun of the good ole days was the combination of mischievous adventure and destruction. You could break some rules and get away with it. You could do stuff like get into a fight, or break a church window, or light a cat on fire, or compare boners on sleepover nights without any profound repercussions.
But those feelings are like glasses of water. When you’re young, the glass is easy to fill up. But the older you get, the bigger the glass gets, and the same amount of liquid that filled you up as a kid doesn’t do the trick anymore. Being all grown up and seeking mischievous adventure and destruction usually means either getting sued or ending up in jail. One dude bromancing another dude just so he can watch him fight a homeless guy, or hold his beer can so he can do some ninja stuff to it can only end in disaster.
4.You don’t think you’re multicultural enough
There have been plenty of famous interracial bromances over the years that have taught us the wonders of cross-color man-love. Some of them were real (Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo), some scripted (J.D. and Turk from Scrubs), and some that should’ve quit while they were ahead (Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker).
Real or fiction, swirl bromances like these tend to have one thing in common—both bros were more or less brought together by force. Piccolo and Sayers were assigned to be roommates because they played the same position for the Chicago Bears, J.D. and Turk worked at the same hospital—the one where every nurse is hot, and Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker were running low on cash so they had to make another sequel.
It’s a good thing for us to maybe take a lesson from these guys—something about broadening our horizons, not judging a book by its cover, we all make the colors of the rainbow, and so on and so on. It’s kind of a dumb thing for a dude to pin his hopes on becoming a better person, or a hipper person, or a get-laid-more person by going out of his way to find people outside his race/class/creed and trying his damndest to plant bromance seeds.
On a related note, we’d now like to introduce you to somebody. His name is Scumbag Steve.
Maybe you’ve heard of him. Maybe you haven’t. Maybe you think he’s one of the biggest douche bags you’ve ever seen (probable). Scumbag Steve is the ghost of guy-who-tries-too-hard-to-be-something-he’s-not future. A guy can end up like him if he’s not careful.
3.You’re lonely
One could argue that every other dubious reason on this list is just a variation of this one, but whatever. Post-college life can sometimes hit our social lives hard. A whole new set of professional and personal obligations have to come to fruition once that diploma hits your hand.
First, you have to get a big-boy job. Not just you, but all your friends, which sometimes means moving to different cities and states. Then the clock starts ticking on collaring a wife and spitting out some kids. These two things lead to a gradual lifestyle change that few wolf pack’s can survive.
Further complicating things is the fact that you can’t have a bromance with your wife/girlfriend. You just can’t. If it was possible, your wife/girlfriend would have no problem hearing you tell the story of how you got a handy from your ex at your high school reunion last week. So that just leaves you and your lonesome. But you can’t get needy. Desperately pursuing a bromance is like desperately pursuing sex with said wife/girlfriend. If you demand it, you won’t get it.
2.You’re bicurious
Bromances don’t work unless there’s an unspoken and agreed upon boundary between “nice abs, bro” and “you look so vulnerable right now…I must draw you, bro.” Normally, we’d have no problem condoning a lil’ experimentation now and again, but man-love and literal man-on-man love have to be kept separate, because that’s not how bromances work.
Remember that scene in Chasing Amy where Holden kisses Banky and then suggests they have a threesome with his girlfriend? And he more or less ends up ruining their bromance for even floating the possibility that they subconsciously yearn for each other’s meat? That’s pretty much what we’re talking about, here.
Bromances were realized with the idea of having a safe-haven intimacy that went nowhere any guy involved didn’t want it to go. They exist so dudes can slap each other on the ass and not feel gay about it.
1.Because he’s awesome on TV
Who’s awesome on TV? Some dude you’ll never share a drink with in real life, which would actually qualify this as more of an unrequited man crush than a possible bromance, but it’s on the list because there’s a lesson to be learned, here.
Man crushes basically work like this: random guy see’s another guy whom he instantly recognizes—for whatever reason—as infinitely more badass than he. Whether the guy’s a pro linebacker, a shark wrangler, or Richard Branson, the random dude pines for him in the most hetero way possible the same way he’d pine for a gold-encrusted AR-15.
Fictional man crushes are a dangerous thing. You tend to get the rug pulled out from under you. Just because he played a badass that one time doesn’t mean he won’t show up in the next Indiana Jones raping movie. For shits and giggles, let’s talk about Nicolas Cage. If anybody ever had a man crush on Nicolas Cage, we reserve the right to question their homosocial judgment. But in fairness, he was kind of a badass once upon a time in Con Air. Observe:
Now, if Cage had dropped dead from a heart attack the day after filming wrapped on Con Air, his appropriateness as a man crush would’ve stayed intact. But he didn’t. He kept making movies. Most of them bad. Some of them really bad. At one point, he punches a girl while dressed as a bear. Observe:
