My favorites are # 10 and 14!

http://themighty.com/2016/01/26-pieces-of-advice-that-have-actually-helped-people-with-mental-illness/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=themighty&utm_campaign=Email_Share&utm_content=story-header

26 Pieces of Advice That Have Actually Helped People With Mental Illness

By Sarah SchusterJan 13, 2016

– Mental Illness

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With that expert’s list of ways to manage anxiety, the latest trendy mental health app and that “magical cure for depression” your aunt heard about on TV, it seems like everyone’s full of mental health advice these days.

So, we asked our mental health community to share pieces of advice they’ve actually found helpful. These little nuggets of wisdom aren’t FDA-approved, but when used correctly side effects may include: self-care, acceptance and a little more patience with yourself.

Here’s some advice that’s actually helped people with mental illness:

1. “On a particularly difficult day, I was trying to fight through an anxiety attack and finish all the child-related tasks I needed to complete. My husband kept offering help, and I kept refusing. He pulled me aside in the laundry room as I was frantically folding another load and said, “Just let me help you.” It doesn’t immediately make the anxiety go away, but it’s helped me learn to let go.” — Maria Heldreth

2. “Don’t wait. See a doctor. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be embarrassed.Chances are, someone knows exactly what you’re going through.” — Kristin Salber

3. “I have depression and anxiety (as well as other chronic medical conditions), and after the worst week I’ve had in a while, my doctor  said, “Find something you enjoy, and if you can’t find that, find the joy in something.” This really had an impact on me and still reminds me to look for a silver lining.” — Faith Merryn

4. “I have generalized anxiety disorder, and I made friends with someone who’s extremely similar to me. She told me to always be myself and the people who truly care will stick around. It truly did help.” — Julia Ann Lange

5. “Words can hurt to say, but they need to come out. Write all those words down on paper.” — Melissa Cote

6. “A friend recently told me that no matter if I get a job one day or not, your life matters as long as you can make people smile. When I think of it that way, it’s easier to see my life as something of worth.” — Emma Wozny

7. “A great therapist I had told me to focus on ‘harm-reduction, not perfection.’ I felt like I was expected to magically ‘get better,’ and she helped me learn that starting with baby steps was totally OK.” — Jen Decker

8. “Someone said, ‘I’ve been here, I know a way out, I’m here to show you too.’ And, ‘It gets better, it may not leave, but it gets better. And it has.” — Tom Everman

9. “I have anxiety and major depressive disorder. This is going to sound ridiculous, but my best friend once told me, “When you’re sad, watch ‘The Simpsons.’” It actually works when I’m panicking, too. It gets my mind off whatever I’m obsessing about, and I usually end up laughing.” — Dawn Czarnecki Seshadri

10. “It wasn’t long after my diagnosis that I was told pretty bluntly: ‘This illness is has no cure. You’re going to carry this illness for the rest of your life. So you can either wallow in the weight of that, or you can fight for your only life and make it a good story.’” — Lyss Trayers

11. “My depression and anxiety stem from a traumatic childhood. Just hearing ‘it wasn’t your fault‘ from my psychologist was incredibly helpful.” — Kathrine Elise

12. “Don’t always believe what your brain is telling you.” — Kerri Lewis Brock

13. “It’s OK to feel sad. You don’t need to pretend.” — Allyson White

14. “The best advice: Treat yourself as if you were a good friend.” — Julie Jeatran

15. “Celebrate every accomplishment, no matter how small, instead of dwelling on all the things we perceive as failures.” — Jennifer Northrup

16. “I have post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder. When I was in intensive outpatient therapy, the counselor looked at us and said, ‘It’s over. That moment is over. It isn’t going to happen again.’ For some reason, that resonated with me.” — Nicole Hanes

17. “They told me this: ‘You are not broken; you are a whole person. You are just human. A human who is living, learning and growing. And learning, living and growing comes with bumps in the road. Remember that this is just a bump.‘” — Kallie Kieffer

18. “Your worst days will only be 24 hours.“ — Arielle Smith

19. “You wouldn’t skip a dialysis or chemotherapy appointment. Your therapy appointments are just as important. No excuses.” — Jennifer Davis

20. “‘I think you need to give therapy a try.‘ Thanks to that, I started therapy and I’m now on the path to recovery.”  — Julianne Leow

21. “Your struggles are your accomplishments in disguise.” — Katherine J Palmer

22. “Remember: Depression lies. Don’t believe it.” — Beth Brogan

23. “Always ask for help. There is never any shame in asking for help.” — Meghan Shultz

24. “Take life 5 minutes at a time.” — Stephanie Lynn

25. “You can’t give everyone else everything you have. You absolutely have to save a little of yourself for yourself.” — Shawn Henfling

26. “I am a human being. Not a human doing. I just have to be.” — Michelle Balck

 
https://bbrfoundation.org/brain-matters-discoveries/researchers-trace-anxiety-control-to-specific-brain-region​

In animal research reported in the November 12 issue of the journal Nature, scientists have identified a specific region of the brain that helps regulate behaviors and physiological changes associated with anxiety. Cells in this area, known as the basomedial amygdala, differentiate between safe and potentially threatening environments, and work together to suppress anxiety when conditions seem safe.

Better understanding of how the brain regulates fear and anxiety is likely to help researchers develop more effective treatments for anxiety disorders.
The new work was conducted in the lab of BBRF Scientific Council member and 2005, 2007 NARSAD Young Investigator Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford University. Avishek Adhikari, Ph.D., a NARSAD 2014 Young Investigator, led the work together with Talia Lerner, Ph.D., and Joel Finkelstein.
In their study, the scientists examined connections between the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, regions known to be involved in regulating fear and anxiety. Connections between these regions have been found to be disrupted in people with anxiety disorders.
Using powerful technologies, the team traced connections in the mouse brain from the medial prefrontal cortex to a specific part of the amygdala, its basomedial region, and showed that artificially activating these connections reduced anxiety-related behaviors in the mice. When the connections were switched on by the experimenters – using a method Dr. Deisseroth and colleagues invented called optogenetics — the animals were more likely to explore open spaces. What’s more, the increase in breathing rate usually associated with anxiety was not seen, even when the animals were in an exposed environment, which mice usually perceive as threatening.
The opposite effects were seen when the researchers experimentally inhibited the same connections: mice exhibited signs of anxiety even in a safe and familiar environment.
Many of the cells in the basomedial amygdala fire more actively when a mouse is in a safe environment, suggesting that these cells differentiate between safety and potential threats.
The scientists further showed that connections between the medial prefrontal cortex and the basomedial amygdala are important for extinguishing learned fears – that is, learning through experience to dissociate a feared stimulus from expectation of a negative outcome. Mice that had been trained to fear an auditory tone overcame these fears more quickly when the researchers artificially stimulated medial prefrontal cortex-basomedial amygdala connections.

 
  


 This seems like an effective way to train your brain to do or not do what it is doing. And there are no medications involved here. Could this really work? No medications, simply training your brain to feel desired emotions and not feel the undesirable ones. Here are encouraging results shown in this article: “In results from a more recent study, Dr. Young says that after two sessions of neurofeedback, depression scores dropped 50%. In the control group, they dropped 10%. These results are not yet published, but were presented at the Society of Biological Psychiatry annual meeting in 2015.”
Sounds promising. I would give it a try. 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/brain-training-for-anxiety-depression-and-other-mental-conditions-1453144315​

Excerpt from article: 

In neurofeedback, patients lie in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. In general, they are told to conjure memories or look at pictures while their brains are scanned. The activity of certain brain regions related to subjects’ illnesses is analyzed via computer. Patients see visual representations of their brain activity almost in real time—often presented in the form of a thermometer or colored bar.Based on what their brains are doing, subjects are told to enhance or suppress that activity. Patients “need to train their brain like they train their muscles when they want to be fit,” says Anna Zilverstand, a postdoctoral researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and lead author of a 2015 study using neurofeedback to treat women with a phobia of spiders.

Firstly, it has provided a chronology of my moods, showing me in no uncertain terms that what goes up must come down, but not only that. It has shown me that I am not my moods, I can transcend my moods. Something I think is forever, is certainly not. The next blog post shows that clearly. It has helped chronicle my journey and helped me be kinder, more loving towards myself as well as kinder and more loving towards my family and friends. Yes we all may go off the deep end, myself totally included, but we can also swim, walk, skate (haha), fly , drive, jog, or ski, back to places of joy, laughter, kindness, love and equanimity.

Also, since I have been posting a lot of my family history, going back 200 – 300 years (the mansion), there has been the unexpected, but truly welcome result of bringing my family together. As not uncommon in families, we have had our differences, but this clear illustration with pictures, of our roots and commonality has forged a strong bond of familial love. And I am endlessly happy about that.

Our trip to Pakistan also obviously strengthened our bonds with our beloved family.

So, on to more blogging and more laughter, lovely, healthy relationships and hugs and kisses for all of you, my friends, family and readers.

Samina.

My great grandfather

My grandfather

My grandparents with my cousin, their first grand child.

My grandfather

My eldest aunt’s wedding.

My youngest uncle, who passed away at age of 21 in an accident.

My aunt (left) and my mother (right)

My aunt learnt how to play the sitar! A sort of a big deal, as music was not allowed in Islam (!?!?) But my grandfather was an enlightened man, who also sent my mother to a medical college to be educated as a doctor. She became an OBGYN!

My grandmother and my oldest cousin.

My cousin and I (on the right.) 

My Fatto Khala in healthier days.

“Our common sense has been rigged, you see, so that we feel strangers and aliens in this world, and this is terribly plausible, simply because it’s what we’re used to. That’s the only reason. But when you really start questioning this, say: is this the way I assume life is? I know everybody does, but does that make it true? It doesn’t necessarily, it ain’t necessarily so. So then as you question this view that underlies our culture, you find you get a new kind of common sense, it becomes absolutely obvious to you that you are continuous with the universe.”

posted on http://projectiamyou.com/2016/01/19/it-starts-now/