Journey Towards Better Mental Health

3 Ways to Reduce Anxiety

2015-03-21T17:28:00.000-04:00

I'm not good with stress. Handling it, managing it, reducing it, living with it - stress is a byproduct of life that I had previously never been able to get a handle on. And with all that stress, comes anxiety - the million-mile-per-hour (at many times contradictory) thoughts, rapid heartbeat, uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach. Anxiety for me has led to countless mini-meltdowns all because I was so worried about what COULD happen in any given situation, not focused on what was happening at that very moment.

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Animal therapy for anxiety

2014-10-23T16:11:00.000-04:00

Whether you’re in college or have already graduated, you probably understand the ridiculous stress of midterms and finals. When I was studying for the MCAT, my roommate would frequently come home to find me sitting, zombified, in the corner of the apartment watching endless videos of rag doll kittens falling over instead of actually doing work. As it turns out, there’s a scientific reason I make it my life goal to watch all the kitten videos on the Internet when stressed; a study published in the Journal of Creativity in Mental Health shows that animal therapy reduces anxiety and loneliness in college students by as much as 60 percent.

Animal therapy has been shown time and time again to help in all kinds of situations,
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Sarah Silverman's Quandary: Should Depressed People Avoid Having Children?

2014-10-21T13:13:00.003-04:00

Comedian Sarah Silverman, who routinely courts controversy with her edgy humor, recently made an attention-getting statement of a more intimate nature: because of her personal and family history of depression, she declared that she would not have biological children, to avoid passing her mental problems to the next generation. “I don’t want kids,” she said on The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet. “I know that I have this depression and that it’s in my family. Every family has their stuff but, for me, I just don’t feel strong enough to see that in a child.”

Pundits across the Internet praised Silverman for her honesty and sense of responsibility, duly citing research that shows that depression is deeply heritable. People with a parent or sibling with major depression are two to three times more likely than average to develop it themselves.

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