How To Have Happy Holidays

I've been thinking a lot about holiday stress. I guess the fact that it's holiday time would explain that. At any rate, a favorite book of mine is called Unplug the Christmas Machine. It is focused on putting the 'reason for the season' back into celebrating holidays. How we can strip off the commercial junk and focus on the celebrating part. Panic and anxiety have a hard time coexisting with comfort and joy.

I also read a good article on About.com's Panic Disorder page called "How to Cope with Holiday Party Anxiety". I liked the author's suggestions focused on self-care. This focus is probably a good one for all times of the year, not just the super-stressful holidays.

Anxiety attacks don't have to be a part of the December madness. Panic can be alleviated with attention to some of the basics (enough sleep and hydration) and many of the hints and tips mentioned in the How to Cope article above. Have a safe and panic-free holiday season and a calm new year!

Is It All In My Head?

My son just recently took the GED. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s the test you take in the US to get your high school ‘equivalency’ if you don’t finish high school. Basically it’s what lets you move on to the next step in life and it's something that can cause people a lot of anxiety - even lead to a panic attack.

He had studied some for it, but he’s always done pretty well on standardized tests like this, so he wasn’t too worried about if he could pass it or not. But taking the test was a pretty important event because of what it stands for in his life, especially since he struggles with depression.

The morning of the test, he woke up with a killer stomachache. He was miserable. He had no idea what he was going to do because he couldn’t miss the test. He tried a couple of home remedies including eating some chicken noodle soup, but the stomachache wouldn’t go away.

A couple of friends suggested that he ‘just try to relax’. Sounds like an easy thing when it’s someone else, but not so much when it’s you who has to do the relaxing!

Well, he got to the test. He looked at the test. He started to review the contents of the test. He told me later, that about 30 seconds after he realized how easy it was going to be, his stomachache was almost completely gone! He had been holding in that tension; that anxiety so strongly that he had caused himself actual, physical pain.

He was really lucky to have a concrete way to get rid of the stress even though he didn’t know it until it happened. It’s not always that easy to let it go, especially if you don’t know what you’re anxious about.

Sometimes you just need some ‘reprogramming’ so you don’t need to know exactly what’s going on – sometimes you have to get relaxed a little just to be able to figure out what’s going on. Luckily, one of the ways you can do that is with the use of Think Right Now programs. I've been using the Think Right Now! for Windows product for years and it's a really cool way to send yourself 'subliminal' messages of encouragement and positive energy - relaxation, whatever you want more of. Click here to learn more about these products and enjoy.