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TED Talk: The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage

August 3, 2018 in LINKS

susandavid

Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored,they get stronger. Psychologists call this amplification.

In this talk, Susan David discusses the concept of emotional agility—allowing ourselves to really feel our negative emotions, like sadness and anger, instead of pushing aside those feelings. She argues that brooding, bottling and false positivity always are unsustainable—internal pain always comes out.

Here are some ideas for the next time you are unsure how to label your feelings.

  • Journal. Write about how you are feeling. You may find yourself pinpointing the cause of your emotions while expressing them.
  • Acceptance. Instead of saying, “I’m fine,” or “I’m just stressed,” take a moment to really think about what it is that you are feeling instead of dismissing it.

Click here to watch the original Ted Talk!

What strategies and practices do you use when you’re not sure what you’re feeling? How do you help yourself let your feelings out without brooding or bottling up?

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Losing Sleep Over FOMO

August 2, 2018 in Social Media Guide

phonepillow01Have you ever been in the library and checked your phone compulsively while slaving away on a final paper or cramming for a final exam? Are you checking to see what other people are doing—in case they’re having a more interesting life than you are?

That’s called FOMO, or fear of missing out.

And it might continue after you walk home at 2 a.m. and climb into bed—so you take your phone.

We at SOVA haven’t yet written much about FOMO, but it’s a real thing that can be detrimental to your wellbeing. A recent study looked at how much first-year college students are affected by FOMO on social media. Student participants in this study talked about how they kept their cell phones in bed, even under their pillows, for fear of being left out of interesting social situations. One student said,

I’ve been known to answer my [phone] or to answer texts while I’m sleeping.

Some other student participants talked about how they stay on social media while trying to fall asleep. One young woman’s FOMO led her to stay on Skype with her boyfriend so late into the night that they regularly fell asleep with Skype still open on their computers. Her roommate, a participant in the study, said,

One time I was sleeping in the room and I literally woke up because I heard her boyfriend snoring on Skype.

The study found that the participants who went to bed with their phones or computers lost significant sleep because of their FOMO. And good sleep is super important to our physical and mental wellbeing.

What does FOMO feel like to you? How has your attitude and behavior with taking your phone or computer to bed changed over time? If you take your device into bed, have you noticed any effects on your sleep? Let us know in the comments!

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Perfectionism: A Good or Bad Way of Thinking?

August 1, 2018 in Educate Yourself

perfectionismI strive for perfection all the time, especially when it comes to academics. If I feel as if I scored less than an A on any assignment or exam then I have terrible anxiety accompanied with crying spells. During these times of distress, it’s nearly impossible to calm myself down. I shake and mentally exhaust myself so much that I cannot do anything else for the rest of the day. These intense distressful experiences last for hours.

The definition of perfectionism is a person’s constant effort to achieve unobtainable goals, and measuring their self-worth according to their accomplishments rather than their own values and essential worth as a person. Being a perfectionist can have positive aspects, such as being very detail-oriented and highly motivated. However, when perfectionists fail to meet their unrealistically high standards, they can become depressed.

The problem is, no one is perfect. Therefore, holding yourself to standards of perfection will always create unhappiness, because those standards are not attainable.

It may seem difficult to let go of perfectionistic ways. I know for me it is hard to stop obsessively worrying about exams that I have taken in which I’m worried that I did not get an A. Here are some ways to take your mind off your perfectionist ways:

  • Watch a movie
  • Color or draw
  • Talk a walk
  • Hang out with supportive friends
  • Meditate
  • Exercise

Engage in any pleasurable activity that does not relate to the activity you are trying to perfect. This will assist in easing the obsessive thoughts that come along with perfectionism.

A recent study showed that activities that foster self-compassion help perfectionistic people avoid falling into depression. So meditation, positive self-talk, and any other activity that supports compassion toward yourself can be especially helpful if you’re obsessing about the latest exam and your possibly imperfect grade.

How do you get past your worry that a poor grade on your biology or chemistry exam will ruin your chances of success? How do you work with the voices in your mind that tell you you’re a failure if you don’t get an A? 

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Does Your PCP Screen You For Depression?

July 31, 2018 in Educate Yourself

teenpediatricianAs many as one in every five teens experiences depression during adolescence, but their symptoms often go undiagnosed and untreated because they lack access to mental health specialists.

But everyone’s main point of contact with the health care system is usually their primary care physician—and for adolescents, that can mean a pediatrician. So to support adolescent mental health, in February the American Academy of Pediatrics for the first time in 10 years released updated guidelines on adolescent depression.

These guidelines call for detecting depression early by screening every young American age 12 to 21 every year.

While it might be weird to think of an older teen, such as a college student, going to a pediatrician, it can be helpful for what’s called “continuity of care,” which means keeping the same doctor that you trust because—well, because you can! Some pediatric practices see patients until age 21. A pediatric practice that is adolescent-friendly will have at least one exam room that’s isn’t filled with balloons and teddy bears—it will resemble an adult exam room. And there are pediatricians—like SOVA’s own Dr. Rad, who was just featured in the Washington Post—who specialize in adolescent and young-adult medicine.

A lot of parents take their children to their pediatricians for scraped knees and sore throats “but don’t think of them when it comes to seeking help for emotional and behavioral issues,” said Rachel Zuckerbrot, MD, FAAP, a lead author of the guidelines. She added,

The American Academy of Pediatrics is supporting pediatricians so that they are prepared to identify and treat these types of issues. The earlier we identify teenagers who show signs of depression, the better the outcome.

The guidelines recommend:

  • Providing a treatment team that includes the patient, family, and mental health experts
  • Offering education and screening tools to identify, assess and diagnose patients
  • Counseling on depression and options for management of the disorder
  • Developing a treatment plan with specific goals in functioning in the home, with peers and at school
  • Developing a safety plan, as needed, which includes restricting lethal means, such as firearms in the home, and providing emergency communication methods

“We would like to see teens fill out a depression screening tool as a routine part of their regular wellness visit,” said Amy Cheung, MD, also a lead author.

Parents should be comfortable offering any of their own observations, questions or concerns, which will help the physician get a well-rounded picture of the patient’s health.

It’s important to have health-care providers that you trust. Has your doctor screened you for depression? If not, have you still been able to talk with your doctor about your mental health challenges? Share with us in the comments!

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Color to Your Heart’s Content Online, with Weavesilk

July 27, 2018 in LINKS

weavesilkColoring books for big people are a huge trend these days. If your hands find themselves wanting to do something and you don’t have markers and paper, but you do have a computer, here’s a way you can make art.

Weavesilk allows you to make symmetrical art easily with only a mouse or touchpad.

Here are some guidelines to help you get started.

  • Once you’re on the site, click “Draw something.”
  • In the upper left hand corner, there is a blue dot. Hover over it—it should say “controls.”
  • Click on that—it will show seven colors, and you can change the color you are working with by clicking on the color you want.
  • You can mix colors by holding onto color with your mouse and dragging it to another dot of color.
  • You can also play with the bar labeled “rotational symmetry,” and turn the “mirror across center” and “spiral towards center” on or off.
  • Draw by clicking in the center and moving your mouse.
  • To clear the page hit the space bar, and to undo click “z.”

Do you have any other sites you like to use when you need a distraction or to keep your hands busy? List them below!

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Do You Have A “Finsta”?

July 26, 2018 in Social Media Guide

finstaA lot of teens have a fake Instagram account, or “Finsta,” because they think it allows them more privacy than a real Instagram account.

Finstas are usually more private and closed than accounts with the owners’ reals name on them.

To teens who have a Finsta, it may feel like a place where they can be more authentic. To post on a real Instagram account, a lot of teens feel pressured to post every day, use multiple filters, and produce perfect photos of themselves living a perfect life. And they also feel pressured to get tons of likes, views, and comments.

On Finsta, they feel like they can be more honest about their feelings and looks and have more honest and meaningful conversations.

This is all very positive and can actually enable adolescents to find community and connection.

But because the audience is so closed, Finsta is also a place where teens might feel free to post pictures of drinking, drug-use, or physically revealing pictures. The posters feel like the inappropriate content won’t get shared. But have you ever heard of the word “screenshot”? This is where Finstas can become unsafe.

Adolescents sometimes create Finstas because their parents have cracked down on their social media use, maybe confiscating their passwords or even shutting down their accounts. They do this because they’re afraid for their kids.

It’s important for everyone, including adolescents, to remember that “privacy” doesn’t really exist online, even with fake accounts. And there can be consequences if you share inappropriate content.

Many parents and adolescents are not used to talking about social media. Instead, adolescents get into the habit of hiding their social media use, and parents in turn try to manage and control their use by confiscating devices, passwords, and so on.

But what if the Finsta is being used for beneficial purposes, rather than inappropriate ones? It’s important for parents not to make assumptions about kids’ behavior, and it can be hugely helpful for kids to trust the adults in their lives enough to actually talk about their social media use when their parents bring it up. They may learn something important about how to use the internet.

And they might get closer to their parents, too!

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Police Killings Hurt Mental Health In Black Communities

July 25, 2018 in Educate Yourself

(TW: trauma.)

Antwon Rose Jr., 17, was unarmed when he was shot to death by a white police officer on July 19 in East Pittburgh.

Antwon Rose Jr., 17, was unarmed when he was shot to death by a white police officer on July 19 in East Pittburgh.

Each year, American police officers shoot to death more than 300 black Americans. (By the way, that is a lot more than the number of deaths per year in school shootings.) At least a quarter of the victims are unarmed, and some of them are adolescents or young adults.

Recently, an international medical journal called The Lancet published a study that indicates that when police in the United States kill unarmed black people, it harms the mental health of black people living in those states.

Black readers might be like, “Duh, we could have told you that.” But it’s important that scientists study people’s responses to traumatic events, so that they can assess actual harms that social systems do to populations and use that data to call for larger responses.

In this case, the study suggests that police violence is harming black Americans’ mental health, and it calls for further study of these effects as well as policy changes. One of the study’s authors explained the mental health effects this way to the New York Times:

Having seen something so horrific and traumatic that happened to someone else, I’m reminded in a very painful and salient way that the deck might be stacked against me. It’s really about all the kinds of insidious ways that structural racism can make people sick.

The study also showed that:

  • white people don’t experience adverse mental health effects from these shootings
  • neither white nor black people experience adverse mental health effects when police kill unarmed white Americans, or black Americans who are armed.

The study mentioned in particular the shootings of six victims, four of whom were adolescents or young adults (Oscar Grant III, 22; Michael Brown, Jr., 18; Freddie Gray, 25; and Stephon Clark, 22). And at about the same time as this study was published in The Lancet, unarmed 17-year-old Antwon Rose, Jr. was killed by police in the Pittsburgh area.

The mental health effects of these killings specifically on black American adolescents and young adults has not yet been studied—and since so many victims are adolescents, it ought to be. Since black teens and young adults are part of the black population, they certainly must be experiencing adverse effects—it would be important to look at what kinds and how severe they are.

The study’s authors suggest that programs and policy be designed to decrease the frequency of police killings and to help reduce the adverse mental health effects within communities when these killings happen. Activists are calling for trauma-informed practices in schools, workplaces, and families.

How have you been affected by police shootings of unarmed black people? Have you been personally affected—emotionally, psychologically? What do and your friends do to take care of yourselves and each other? Share with us in the comments.

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Treating Teen Insomnia Could Prevent Mental Illness

July 24, 2018 in Educate Yourself

teen insomniaIt is usually assumed that disturbed sleep is a symptom of depression. But health-care professionals are starting to think that maybe that idea is putting the cart before the horse, especially with adolescents. For example, a study of more than 350 middle- and high-school students found that sleep irregularities may actually happen before mental health problems.

The study indicated that teens with insomnia were more likely to have depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and panic disorder—and that early treatment of insomnia might have prevented the onset of depression in almost half of the cases.

When adolescents experience disturbed sleep, it usually occurs in the following ways:

  • Non-restorative sleep, in which teens wake up feeling tired
  • Difficulty falling asleep easily
  • Waking in the middle of the night and having trouble falling back to sleep
  • Early morning awakening

So teens who have these sleep problems ought to visit their primary care physicians for evaluation and treatment so that the insomnia doesn’t morph into mental health problems. Research has also shown that treating insomnia reduces risk of suicide.

Adolescents need nine hours of sleep—more than the eight hours adults need—and they usually go to sleep later and wake up later than adults. Early-morning school starting times can really disturb adolescents’ sleep.

One of the most important things to do if you’re having insomnia is to avoid looking into backlit screens, including computers and phones, for at least two hours before you want to go to sleep. The blue light from the backlit screens convinces our brains that it’s still daytime. So if you use Netflix or YouTube to try to fall asleep, it might be making the problem worse.

How well do you sleep? What are your sleep patterns? How do you sleep differently during summer vacation as opposed to the school year? What do you do to adjust to those changes? Share with us in the comments!

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Changing the Mind’s “ANTS”—Automatic Negative Thoughts

July 23, 2018 in Be Positive

ANTSThere’s a myth that has circulated for a long time that we have somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 thoughts per day. This would mean that each minute, we’re thinking 35 to 50 thoughts. The reality is that nobody knows how many thoughts we humans have per day … but we certainly have many! And for those with anxiety and depression, a majority of those thoughts may be automatically negative.

In addition, as creatures of habit, humans think the same thoughts day after day after day. And if most of them are negative, that’s a big negative habit.

Thoughts don’t just “happen” to us, though—we can actually change them. We can identify the negative thoughts, we can let them go, and we can decide to put positive thoughts in their place. (By the way, this is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy—and CBT is one of the most effective strategies for changing thought patterns. Therapy really does work.)

Here are some strategies about how to do that!

Relax your body, and your mind will follow: Negative thoughts can make the jaw clench or the stomach tie up in knots. Consciously focusing on relaxing those areas of the body in turn helps the mind relax.

Mindfulness: Be conscious of your thoughts. Even give your negative thoughts names or physical descriptions—and then tell them you will NOT pay attention to them, and let them go.

Screen Shot 2018-07-23 at 10.07.00 AM

Which triggers are your personal hot buttons?

Know your triggers: Pay attention to the circumstances that affect your thinking.

Entertain yourself: this is another way of saying, Distract yourself. Do something that you enjoy, that relaxes you, and/or that helps you learn something new. Listen to music and color a picture. Quiet your mind for a while.

Exercise: Physical workouts release neurochemicals that make your body feel good, and this can counter negative thinking.

Daily journal: write down everything positive that you experienced during your day—even if you had what you’d call a “bad” day. For example, if you ate a healthful meal, that’s a positive thing! Over time, you can look at your journal and see how far you’ve come.

Talk to your image in the mirror: Say positive messages to your own face. This might feel strange at first, but it’s a powerful way to connect with yourself.

Remember that automatic negative thoughts don’t change overnight. It takes time and practice to create new thought patterns!

Check out the video below for more strategies for changing automatic negative thoughts!

What are some of your automatic negative thoughts? How have you learned to cope with them? Share your practices in the comments!

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Keep Calm and Listen to White Noise

July 20, 2018 in LINKS

keep calm

I grew up in the country in a two-story house that had no air conditioning. When June rolled around and the steamy weather arrived, my dad would go down to the cellar and bring up our huge standing fan, set it in the upstairs hallway, and turn it onto the highest setting to try to pull the cool evening air into the hot house. I was a pretty anxious kid, and resistant to changes, so for the first couple of nights after the fan came upstairs, I’d have trouble sleeping—and then I’d sleep like a baby. And when September came and he took the fan back to the basement, it would take me a couple weeks to learn to fall asleep without that “white noise,” because it was—and is—so relaxing.

Sometimes you might want to listen to something while you’re reading, working, or trying to relax but music is too distracting. Try a “white noise” app or website! On noisy summer nights, you can switch on your white noise to drown out the sound of your neighbor mowing the lawn at 11 p.m.

  • Free white noise app: White Noise Lite
  • You can also buy a white noise machine for around $50.
  • Listening to white noise instead of music can help you to be more focused, calm, and productive!  More info on what white noise can do for your brain here.

Or you can go to Target and buy a fan for a lot less than $50 🙂

So tune into that soothing static and relax!

What kinds of white noises are your favorites? How does listening to white noise make you feel? Share with us in the comments!

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