Did you know that if you have anxiety in almost any form, list making is your friend?
Anxiety in its purist form is about loss of control. It is that feeling that you cannot control the outcome you so desperately wish to do. And what better way to harness a little of the feeling of being in control than making a to-do list?
Sometimes I am so tired of the self-help industry and the imposed expectations it places on us. While reading an interesting article about the differences in shamanic treatments for mental illness that are radically different from the Westernized way, my senses were heightened about the level of expectations in this culture. It is exhausting.
I was reading an excerpt from an interview given by Dr. Atul Gawande on his book Being Mortal: What Matters in the End, and he commented that:
“People have priorities in their lives besides just living longer and they matter a great deal. The most reliable way to learn what those priorities are is to ask and we don’t ask. The result is that when you don’t ask, the care and treatment that people get is often increasingly out of alignment with their priorities and what really matters most to them.”
This time of year there is a lot going on with end-of-summer vacations, children going back to school, some leaving for college, and the gears that must shift as we head into late summer/early fall.
There’s a lot of bravery going on right now. The young kids that must adjust from the sudden loss of limbs from shark bites this past week at Oak Island, North Carolina, and the families of the slain in Charleston, South Carolina, are all having to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Maybe South Carolina will take a brave look at a sometimes sad heritage, as well as the rest of America, face our violence, and actually do something to change this awful path.
Ever heard of “Theory X & Theory Y”?
First proposed by Douglas McGregor of MIT in 1960, it was one of the most famous management school innovations in business history. It boils down to this: effective managers have an optimistic view of human nature -Theory Y. Ineffective managers think that people are basically unreliable and lazy – Theory X.
There are experts, such as psychologist Margaret Wehrenberg, who believe that anxiety and depression should be treated as chronic conditions. Read more