How to Fight Depression and Anxiety

What's the best way to deal with depressiona and anxiety? Quickly and definitively. Whatever kicks them off, depression and anxiety both are maintained by styles of thinking that magnify the initial insult and alter the workings of the brain in such a way that the longer an episode exists, the less it takes to set off future episodes.

Anxiety and depression are probably two faces of the same coin. Surveys have long shown that 60 to 70 percent of people with major depression also have an anxiety disorder, while half of those suffering anxiety also have symptoms of clinical depression.

The stress response system is overactive in both disorders. Excess activity of the stress response system sends emotional centers of the brain into overdrive so that negative events make a disproportionate impact and hijack rational response systems. You literally can't think straight. You ruminate over and over about the difficulties and disappointments you encounter until that's all you can focus on.

Researchers believe that some people react with anxiety to stressful life events, seeing danger lurking ahead everywhere—in applying for a job, asking for a favor, asking for a date. And some go beyond anxiety to become depressed, a kind of shutdown in response to anticipated danger.

People who have either condition typically overestimate the risk in a situation and underestimate their own resources for coping. Sufferers avoid what they fear instead of developing the skills to handle the kinds of situations that make them uncomfortable. Often enough, a lack of social skills is at the root. Some types of anxiety—obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, and social phobia—are particularly associated with depression.

The fact that anxiety usually precedes the development of depression presents a huge opportunity for the prevention of depression. Young people especially are not likely to outgrow anxiety on their own; they need to be taught specific mental skills.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) gets at response patterns central to both conditions. And the drugs most commonly used against depression have also been proved effective against an array of anxiety disorders.

Although medication and CBT are equally effective in reducing anxiety/depression, CBT is better at preventing return of the disorder. Patients like it better, too, because it allows them to feel responsible for their own success. What's more, the active coping that CBT encourages creates new brain circuits that circumvent the dysfunctional response pathways.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy teaches people to monitor the environment for the troubling emotional landmines that seem to set them off. That actually changes metabolic activity in the cortex, the thinking brain, to modulate mood states. It works from the top down. Drugs, by contrast, work from the bottom up, modulating neurotransmitters in the brainstem, which drive basic emotional behaviors.

Treatment with CBT averages 12 to 15 weeks, and patients can expect to see significant improvement by six weeks. Drug therapy is typically recommended for months, if not years.

Exercise is an important adjunct to any therapy. Exercise directly alters levels of neurohormones involved in circuits of emotion. It calms the hyperactivity of the nervous system and improves function of the brain's emotion-sensing network. It also improves the ability of the body to tolerate stress. What's more, it changes people's perception of themselves, providing a sense of personal mastery and positive self-regard. It also reduces negative thinking.

However, just telling a distressed person to exercise is futile, as depression destroys initiative. The best thing a loved one can do is to simply announce: "Let's go for a walk." Then accompany the person out the door.

Source: Click Here
Copyright Sussex Publishers, LLC. 2006. 

DEVELOPMENT OF EGO AND PERSONALITY

From childhood onwards we accumulate experiences which affect us in our thoughts, feelings and actions so that we develop a specific personality. It may be an orderly, comfortable personality or it may be the opposite. The personality is formed by the interplay between our attempts to protect, satisfy and express ourselves and the world in which it finds itself. It is never independent of the social, cultural conditions under which one grows up and lives. Thus, personalities may harmonise more or less well with the surrounding world and people vary as to the degree of inward harmony and fruitful outward relationships. Persons whose characters are formed in one society can therefore have major problems adjusting to having to live in another, while a relative misfit at home may thrive abroad.

Much investigation on the growth of the ego has been done in modern times, even to the virtual exclusion of any higher aspects of personality. The very extensive and diverse results and viewpoints in psychological research can hardly be summarised here, but some salient features of the ego can be noted, as seen from the viewpoint of the higher psychology.

The origin of the ego is sought in identifications made in very early development and in how these have taken part in forming the particular personality and character. The ego-feeling arises with the first assertion of 'I want', of possessiveness, and its growth is closely connected with the need to feel pleasure and avoid pain.

The normal human identity is developed in part precisely through perceiving and learning distinctions between 'I' and 'the other', between 'mine' and 'not mine'. The sense of 'me, mine and I' are obviously unavoidable in the growth of the normal human person, though personal growth eventually stops if these identifications are not later transformed. Conditions of extreme psychic unbalance - from alienation, identity crisis, intense withdrawal to certain states of depression and amnesia - usually involve a self-negating disruption of normal processes of ego-affirmation, especially in early life.

A basic thesis of modern developmental psychology is that "some sense of self does exist long prior to self-awareness and language. These include the senses of agency, of physical cohesion, of continuity in time, of having intentions in mind and other such experiences..."1

Controllable experiments combined with well-grounded inferences have shown, contrary to most previous psychological opinion, that a subjective sense of self is present at least from birth onwards as the infant gradually relates to its body, its surroundings and to persons as being other than itself. That is to say, the infant is not a passive object of external stimuli that gradually generate a sense of self and experiences connectedness of things, events and actions so as slowly to form the ego or personality, but is from the start an active participant in the organisation of the personality.

The natural and healthy development of the ego-feeling from early childhood, attendant on the growing discovery of self as 'me/mine', relates identity to body, possessions, abilities and thought (mind) in a progressive discovery of selfhood ('I'). Early on the ego-identity becomes related to the body, yet whether the sense of 'I' as subject is or can be present prior to these body-identifications cannot be tested definitively, not least due to the child's lack of language at that time.

Unbalanced parental reactions to a baby's burgeoning desires to control its environment - when to feed, sleep, move etc. - can stunt the growth of a healthy ego-personality. The mean between over-indulgence and unreasonable discipline has to be found. The process of allowing babies to learn self-regulation and to behave within a reasonable sphere of autonomy furthers the establishment of a more harmonious ego. The drives on which the ego is founded can be wrongly diverted into unusual channels, giving rise both to feelings of inadequacy, and compensatory egotism. Undue frustration or regulation of these drives leads to destructive tendencies and/or undue passivity and can lay the ground for complex inferiority and superiority feelings.

One is not born with the sense of me and mine, but with the capacity for developing it, along with the mind and the ego. Even the reflexive idea 'my body' does not arise until the child is many months old.

The ego is the worldly identity resulting from three main desires: the urges to be, to know and to experience pleasure (joy).2 The desires are (presumably) not personally articulated at birth, but receive specific form and structure from the growing person's interaction with the environment, physical, social and spiritual. This does not mean, however, that one is not born with predetermined tendencies of a psychic nature. Vedantic thought insists that we are born with 'tendencies' (vasanas), karmic inheritances from the previous existence of our souls. This accounts for the controlled observations showing marked differences between individual children at very early ages indeed, differences that are not explainable by any known environmental influences. Whether or not these are formed by genetic means, as for example in the case of genes which are shown to predispose some people to impulsivness, and whether underlying karmic conditions are also at work cannot be demonstrated.

The genetic hypothesis that traits are exclusively the result of biochemical mechanisms has a sound physical basis, yet it has so far been unable to account for the specific qualitative differences in very early personality characteristics between babies that both experienced parents and child psychologists recognise. The Vedantic view is that these are 'carried over' from the end of the preceding existence in the form of the life principle (prana). Symbolised as the breath, the life principle or subtle pranic energy bears our karmic tendencies. The 'last breath' at death allegedly contains the cumulative effects of the actions (karma) of the individual (jiva), which in turn are the determinants of forthcoming tendencies in the next birth(vasanas). There exists a wide range of evidence to support the rebirth thesis.3

The sense of identity and patterns of behaviour that sustain and protect it can be said to form an 'ego-structure', which may for example be more or less weak/strong, rigid/flexible and so on. How a person reacts to whatever opposes the satisfaction of desires or to what hinders straightforward personal development will influence the particular kind of ego-structure. This raises issues like whether there is a need for so-called 'defence mechanisms' to protect the ego when (felt to be) threatened. This again leads to the question of the origin of personality disturbances and pathological states caused by irregular ego-development.

Many studies have been carried out on the role of the environment in the development of specific patterns of personality, including the ego. It is likely that the more harmonious and less prone to conflict the family, local environment and society in which one grows up, the less likely that strong self-defensive and dominating ego traits will be required and hence developed. Also, the earlier in life that difficult emotional and social burdens have to be borne, the less likely a well-balanced ego pattern with good self-control can be developed.

An ego-structure refers to those personal characteristics by which the individual's identity is established, known and asserted through words and actions, whereby this structure becomes indirectly accessible to empirical study. The ego comes to expression in and through the social environment, where it can be studied through reconstruction. For example, an ego-structure can include strong possessive attachments to certain persons and properties, negative and fearful feelings about other persons, difficulties in expressing positive feelings verbally and a tendency to criticism, back-bite and slander. Many fine distinctions between differing ego-structures can be made according to one's purpose.

One can distinguish a continuum between the strong, assertive ego and the weak, self-denigrating ego. The types of ego at these extremes are generally less suited to positive developments than those types in between, according to psychological researches. The overbearing ego, with its sense of possessive attachment, often disturbs learning and its related processes such as perception, judgement, memory, capacity to abstract and symbolise etc. Extremely egocentric behaviour includes manipulative psychopathic tendencies and other mental derangements. The ego is also the main cause of most kinds of projection onto others of one's own emotions and thoughts or distorted variants of these.

The alternative to ego-centered living with 'defences' against whatever is perceived as a threat to the fulfilment of desires, is self-experience without defences, that is 'being oneself'. What being oneself implies depends in each case upon the individual and the stage of self-fulfilment reached.

How we best may control or transform a (developed) egocentric tendency and its likely motivations includes questions of self-discipline, social control, self-knowledge, self-transformation and eventual self-mastery through transcending the ego-feeling.


Source: Click Here

Brain regions responsible for optimism located

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Imagine receiving a big chunk of cash in the future. Or winning a prize.

Chances are, such optimistic thoughts are coming from two places in the brain that play an important role in enabling people to, as the old song says, accentuate the positive, New York University scientists said on Wednesday.
Pinpointing the brain regions involved in optimism and positive thinking about the future, the researchers said, may also have shed light on what might be going wrong in people with depression.
The researchers used sophisticated brain imaging to track brain activity in 15 young adults -- seven men and eight women -- while they asked them imagine future scenarios. They included getting a lot of money, winning an award, going to a birthday party or ball game or the zoo, being lied to, the end of a romantic relationship, going to a funeral and others.
When scenarios filled with optimism were imagined, two brain regions -- the rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala -- lit up with activity in the brain scans, the researchers said.
"What's interesting is these two regions that we saw that were involved in projecting optimistic futures are also the same two regions that we see affected in depression," Elizabeth Phelps, an NYU professor of psychology and neural science involved in the research, said in a telephone interview.
It had been unclear what was going wrong in these two regions that might contribute to depression. "But our data would suggest that one of the things they're doing is making it hard to think about things optimistically. Of course, one of the primary symptoms of depression is pessimism," Phelps said.
Phelps said the findings had the potential in the future to help guide new treatments for depression.
The research was published in the journal Nature.
OPTIMISM BIAS
The rostral anterior cingulate is part of the brain's frontal cortex that may be involved in regulating emotional responses. The amygdala is an almond-shaped brain structure in the medial temporal lobe involved in emotion.
"Understanding healthy optimism is important because optimism is related to mental and physical health and to success. We can have people who are not necessarily depressed but have different levels of optimism," said another of the researchers, Tali Sharot of University College London who was at NYU when the study was conducted.
Phelps said the research team is not saying these are necessarily the only brain regions involved in optimism.
The researchers said they examined how the brain generates what some scientists call the human "optimism bias."
"Humans expect positive events in the future even when there is no evidence to support such expectations," the researchers wrote in the journal Nature.
"For example, people expect to live longer and be healthier than average, they underestimate their likelihood of getting a divorce, and overestimate their prospects for success on the job market," they wrote.
Phelps said the researchers had a hard time getting the volunteers to think of purely neutral events in the future.
"They tended to make them positive," she said. "We sort of stumbled upon this optimism bias that psychologists have talked about before."

Sourcs: Yahoo News!