Cost of living stress and mental health are closely connected. When rent, food, transport, childcare or mortgage payments become harder to manage, the impact is not only financial. Ongoing pressure can affect sleep, relationships, concentration, mood and a person’s sense of control over their life. In Aotearoa New Zealand, many households are having to make [...]
It’s now exactly 30 years since classic 80s movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off gave us the immortal line, “Life moves pretty fast – if you don’t stop and look around for a while, you could miss it” – but it seems few of us, even now, are paying any attention. Although statistics show that, on [...]
According to new research you’re more at risk of suffering with anxiety if you are a woman and if you’re under 35. The UK review, which analysed more than 1200 studies from around the world and concentrated on 48 primary pieces of research, also looked at the global distribution of anxiety disorders and discovered that [...]
We’re well-acquainted with the idea of “blues” referring to depression and poor mental health – but the world’s “blue zones” are characterized by longevity and healthy, beneficial lifestyles. The term was coined by author Dan Buettner after research revealed five hotspots around the globe where people tended to live demonstrably longer lives: Okinawa in Japan, [...]
Getting started on projects can be hard for some people – equally, many of us like to put off deadlines until the last moment. But for the real procrastinators amongst us, that habitual delay is both a symptom and a cause of serious life-affecting anxiety. It’s a relatively simple cycle: You’re anxious about a task [...]
It is both a matter of research and clinical reality that girls are more likely to develop most anxiety disorders than boys. In his recent New York Times blog, author and psychologist Leonard Sax painted an “increasingly common” picture of “the laid-back, underachieving boy” as opposed to the “hyperachieving, anxious girl” and came up with [...]
No sooner had the Halloween masks and fireworks disappeared from the shops, than storefront displays turned to Christmas. Although the marketing is designed to reinforce the festive season’s fun, family-orientated side – how can anyone forget those lyrics “it’s the most won-der-ful time of the year” – all those expectations can lead to a highly [...]
It seems whenever we’ve talking about anxiety in this blog, we always have to talk about some form of spiral of cause-and-effect – and it’s much the same with children wetting the bed. But, first things first, it’s important to remember that bed-wetting in children is commonplace (around 20{7e66f01e68c52d858b59d425bd8f3886b02d30322136bee7d8e459b39be00af4} of all five-year-olds and 10{7e66f01e68c52d858b59d425bd8f3886b02d30322136bee7d8e459b39be00af4} of [...]
The straight translation from ancient Greek is “fear of the marketplace” but agoraphobia has come to mean the fear of any uncontrolled situation whether it’s an open public space, busy thoroughfare or a confined method of transport such as a car or bus. The effect of agoraphobia is crippling to the person who experiences it [...]
Anxious and depressed? They are treated as two separate disorders but for many people they co-exist as two interweaving plots in the same story. Looked at distinctly, they seem very different – depression is a highly individual response in which someone shuts down whereas anxiety is typified by panic and high-speed, repetitive emotional, physical and [...]
