Category: Mental Health

Job burnout: Are you suffering and taking right action?

Does your work schedule and stress causing an impact on your health and happiness; does it make you weak and you constantly need rest; does it worn you out everyday and you feel deeply exhausted? If the answer is yes, you are most likely to suffer from job burnout.

Find out early if you are feeling any of the below symptoms and discover if you are at risk of job burnout.

If we explain about what Job burnout is, it is the special type of stress where the physical, emotional or mental exhaustion increases to alarming levels and it is often combined with doubts on competence and self worth. You need to take some action before job burnout starts affecting your health badly.

Self check for Job Burnout

Just ask yourself following questions and find it yourself if you are suffering from job burnout.

1. Do you behave cynically or critically at work?
2. You do not have clarity about your job and you often feel disillusioned?
3. Are you relying on drugs or alcohol to make you feel batter?
4. Did you saw any changes in your sleeping habits or eating routine?
5. Do you have unexplained headache or backaches which cripples your day and work schedule?
6. Do you behave improperly with co-workers, customers or clients and often get into arguments?
7. Do you feel your energy has been sucked out consistently while at work?
8. Are you unsatisfied with what you have achieved?

If you have answered Yes to at least 3 of the questions above, you might be experiencing Job Exhaustion or burnout.

What causes job burnout?

There could be many causes of Job burnout but some of the most prominent ones are:

1. If you think that you have no control over the important decisions about your work like schedule, workload, assignments, etc, you tend to feel burned out and exhausted.
2. If you are not clear on your job expectations, it makes you feel uncomfortable at work further causing job related stress.
3. If you are working with a office bully, or has a micro manager in your boss, things can go highly stressful.
4. The job you are doing if unfit for your interests and skills make you more and more unsatisfied with the job causing huge stress over time.
5. Isolation at work or in personal life, make you stressed a lot.
6. If you are not able to maintain Work-life and carry lot of work home making family and kids waiting for your time always, you will soon become worn out and become a victim of job burnout.

How to take care of Job Burnout?

  1. Manage the stress factors that contribute to job burnout.
  2. Evaluate your options.
  3. Adjust your attitude.
  4. Seek support.
  5. Assess your interests, skills and passions.
  6. Get some exercise and sleep.

Top Ways in Which Social Media is Changing our life

Rewind about 20 years from now, who would have ever thought about the smartphones, social media, twitter, facebook linkedin, etc. The Social Media Revolution has been in the corner since last one and half decade or so when it was present in some isolated places and with websites like Friendster and MySpace. Although they had decent adoption, still the population in general was not at all aware of such imminent revolution.

Fast forward to 2017 and the revolution has been converted to a buzzing trend in the current times. It has spread all across the world with Billions of people logging in to social media every day. It has not only attained the status of one of the most important part of modern lifestyle, but also a unique and surprisingly fruitful marketing channel for businesses types. My son once was stunned to know that cell phones (smartphones) was unheard of about 20 years back and we never carried phones earlier.

Things have been changing with a great pace and looking at the social changes it looks like things are changing permanantly. It has officially and diligently entered in our culture at all levels ranging from top to grass root level.

Effects of Social Media on People

According to Health experts we are more and more sitting than moving or walking. It is like sitting is the new smoking. Sitting is one of the worst thing we can do to our health and it can raise many disease vulnerabilities. There is similar risk carried by the things we are doing while we are sitting. If we are scrolling the social media accounts and news feeds mindlessly for either minutes, hours or days, it is ruining and affecting our mental health. This phenomenon is affecting our collective psychology.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued few warnings to parents about the negative effects of using social media on young kids and teens. They have shown increased risk of cyberbullying and facebook depression in children, same as like in adults.

Although there are few benefits of using Social media like getting connected with people far off and find all your old pals and relatives whom you have never talked since years. If you are looking at using social media as a time killing tool or using it for some emotional lift is a bad choice. Studies have shown that if you leave facebook or other social media activities, it is going to raise your psychological well-being.

Try to use this powerful tool in moderation and don’t let it become a emotional and psychological turbulence.

How Social Media has changed our daily lives

These brilliant communication tools have profoundly changed the world of communication and interactions all over.

1. Where We Get Our News – Now we rely on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin for the news from friends and family, rather than relying on the newspapers and online news.In this way, you can choose the people or groups you wish to read or know about and rest you can keep in the back burner.

2. Start and Do Business – Setting up and launching business has become easier and simpler with the proliferation of social channels of marketing. Earlier, the setup and operations of business was quite a task but now, interest-focused Facebook groups, Twitter searches, and niche social networks helps in doing business activities easily and become more trget focused.

3. Providing newer means and horizons for Interactions – We will not stop using large media organizations and neither will we stop communicating by phone or in person meet. We will now have another tool to help in communication in the form of social media.

4. It has opened up the channel between customers and businesses. Now the orders can be placed on twitter rather than waiting to talk over phones, faxes, meetings, etc.

Brain’s Alertness Circuitry Conserved Through Evolution

NIH-funded scientists revealed the types of neurons supporting alertness, using a molecular method called MultiMAP in transparent larval zebrafish. Multiple types of neurons communicate by secreting the same major chemical messengers: serotonin (red), dopamine and norepinephrine (yellow) and acetylcholine (cyan).

Using a molecular method likely to become widely adopted by the field, researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health have discovered brain circuitry essential for alertness, or vigilance – and for brain states more generally. Strikingly, the same cell types and circuits are engaged during alertness in zebra fish and mice, species whose evolutionary forebears parted ways hundreds of millions of years ago. This suggests that the human brain is likely similarly wired for this state critical to survival.

“Vigilance gone awry marks states such as mania and those seen in post-traumatic stress disorder and depression,” explained Joshua Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which along with the National Institute on Drug Abuse, co-funded the study. “Gaining familiarity with the molecular players in a behavior – as this new tool promises – may someday lead to clinical interventions targeting dysfunctional brain states.”

Karl Deisseroth, M.D., Ph.D., Matthew Lovett-Barron, Ph.D., and Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, colleagues, report on findings using a neural activity screening technology they call Multi-MAP (Multiplexed-alignment of Molecular and Activity Phenotypes) online Nov. 2, 2017 in the journal Cell.

For the first time, Multi-MAP makes it possible to see which neurons are activated in a behaving animal during a particular brain state – and subsequently molecularly analyze just those neurons to identify the subtypes and circuits involved.

In this case, the researchers used the technique to screen activity of neurons visible through the transparent heads of genetically-engineered larval zebra fish. They gauged vigilance by measuring how long it took the animals to swish their tails in response to a threatening stimulus.

A molecular analysis revealing subtypes led to identification of six suspect circuits composed of distinct populations of neurons that modulate neuronal activity, only one of which had previously been linked to vigilance. Virtually the same players were operative in follow-up experiments examining such reaction time-related circuitry in mouse brain. Using optogenetics – another breakthrough exploratory tool developed by Deisseroth and colleagues — the researchers narrowed the field to three circuits that definitively boost alertness in mice, including the one previously known. The other three are thought to play a reportorial rather than regulatory role.

Depression’s Transcriptional Signatures Differ in Men vs. Women

Divergent illness processes may point to sex-specific treatments

Brain gene expression associated with depression differed markedly between men and women in a study by NIMH-funded researchers. Such divergent “transcriptional signatures” may signal divergent underlying illness processes that may require sex-specific treatments, they suggest. Experiments in chronically-stressed male and female mice that developed depression-like behaviors largely confirmed the human findings.

NIMH grantee Eric Nestler, M.D., Ph.D., of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and colleagues, reported their findings online August 21, 2017 in the journal Nature Medicine.

Discovering the likely differing causes of “depression” may lead to more precise diagnosis and treatment. Sex differences could hold clues. Women are 2-3 times more likely than men to develop depression. Evidence has been mounting of sex differences in symptoms, treatment responsiveness and brain changes associated with the disorder. But, until now, little was known about molecular mechanisms in specific brain regions that might underlie such differences.

To explore these, Nestler’s team sequenced the transcriptomes of six suspect brain regions in postmortem brains of 13 males and 13 females who had depression and 22 unaffected people.

In both sexes, all six regions showed illness-linked changes in transcription, when compared to brains of controls. But there was little overlap (5-10 percent) between male and female brains in depression-linked gene expression patterns across the regions. Upon further analysis, males showed only 31 percent of illness-linked modules of co-expressed genes seen in females, and females shared only 26 percent of such modules with males. Moreover, functions of the depression-associated modules largely differed between the sexes. The transcriptional changes affected several brain cell types in males, but mostly neurons in females. Yet, despite the lack of overlap at the level of gene transcripts, several of the same overall molecular pathways were ultimately implicated in depression in both men and women.

Similarly, genetically identical male and female mice showed little (20-25 percent) overlap in transcriptional signatures associated with depression-like behaviors experimentally induced by chronic stress. In the brain’s executive hub and reward center, expression of dozens of the same implicated genes increased and decreased in the same sex-specific directions in both humans and mice. This indicated that both species may share sex-specific stress-induced pathology, converging on several of the same biological pathways.

“The mouse work allows investigation into the cellular mechanisms by which the observed changes in gene expression lead to changes in neural circuit function and behavior,” explained Laurie Nadler, Ph.D., chief of the NIMH Neuropharmacology Program, which co-funded the study.

Using genetic engineering, the researchers uncovered molecular mechanisms underlying the sex-specific effects of changes in activity of two genes never previously linked to depression or stress responses.

The study results suggest that depression-related stress susceptibility is mediated by mostly different genes and partly different pathways across the sexes, although these converge in some common outputs. Since genome-wide studies have not turned up sex differences in genetic variation (DNA) associated with depression, the researchers suggest that the differences instead take place at the level of gene transcription. Such changes in similar gene modules organized and expressed differently across brain regions in males and females may disrupt coordinated neural activity needed to cope with stress, they propose.

These findings illustrate the importance of examining sex differences in neuropsychiatric phenomena,” said Dr. Nestler. “They also provide insight into possible approaches for the treatment of depression that selectively target women or men.

Researchers found little overlap between illness-related gene expression changes in postmortem prefrontal cortex (an executive decision-making hub) of depressed men (blue) compared to those found in depressed women (pink). They found more, but still limited, overlap between gene expression changes in the comparable brain region of chronically stressed male and female mice. They say the latter finding is particularly striking, given that the mice were genetically identical, exposed to identical stresses, and subsequently showed equivalent depression-related behavioral abnormalities. The study suggests that depression appears to involve fundamentally different molecular abnormalities in men versus women.

The Art of Nostalgia

“The Art Of Nostalgia” is a elaborate collection of nine personal essays of Lauren. These essays aim to capture nostalgia’s essence on how does it effects the person and the thought process. The essays bring the reader on a journey as Lauren crafts a timeline of memories that reflect a deep-rooted nostalgia for places, people, and transient phases of life. She, inadvertently, strings together pieces of herself, pieces that shape who she is at her core, daring us to ponder our own stories, our own past that vitally remains within us.

Here is some insight on how to tame the phenomenon that is nostalgia.

The cycle of Nostalgia

Keep in mind that you’ve missed things a thousand times before, and it always becomes easier. It may take weeks, or months, but it always does. Whether it’s a place, a person, or your favorite food that you can no longer eat because you just found out you’re gluten free, it always gets easier.

Be Realistic: The most dangerous part of nostalgia is the tendency to romanticize. When you look back, look back on the past as it actually was. Doing so will prevent you from ranking the past as better than the present.

Look Forward: Avoid excessive planning, but when that new movie tells you how enlightening your twenty-something years are, or how incredible your forties are, listen. Your grandmother is right when she says you have a lot to look forward to. Be excited for, and do not fear, what lies ahead.

Always Live In The Moment – Try to embrace how exciting life can be when you truly live in the moment. Respect the epitomic Cards and try new things everyday.

Balance – Try to find a balance between the past and the present. Keep in touch with old friends, and remember the events that made you the person you are today. Most importantly, always participate in Instagram’s “throwback Thursday.”

The first and probably the most important consideration is the attitude with which we approach our material. Since nostalgia serves no immediate purpose besides providing pleasure it is a fundamentally aesthetic memory experience, which means we should approach our material with the mindset of an artist.

How Many Ways Can We Measure Well-Being?

The definition of well being is different for different people. Everyone has a different opinion about it. But most of the people now believe that it is just not material possessions and consumptions. It is more and more related to other aspects as well such as health and good social relations. Can the happiness and its levels in life can be quoted as the fundamentl attribute towards well being? So what is the real measure of well being? Is it happiness, social progress, or combination of all factors of good life?

How to Measure happiness and Well being?

One possibility of finding this is through some opinion survery where the participants respond to simple questions on their degree of happiness or life satisfaction. According to some of these surveys it has been found that money, econimic progress, financial wellbeing has lesser than expected contribution towards satisfaction.

Some Expert opinion about Well Being

Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has pointed out that knowing well-being on the basis of feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, or happiness has below two issues.

The first is called physical-condition neglect wherein, human beings adapt at least partially to unfavourable situations, meaning the poor and the sick can still be relatively happy.

The second issue is called valuation neglect wherein valuing a life is a reflective activity that should not be reduced to feeling happy or unhappy.

The Office for National Statistics in the UK was asked by the Prime Minister David Cameron to know what is happiness and wellbeing and can they be measured. After six months of project the Jill Matheson, the director of the program reported that happiness is one intangible thing and wellbeing is measurable in the same way our economy is.

Some key aspects for Well Being

Children’s happiness
Economy and inequality
Health
Work/life balance

Harvey Weinstein Proves Sex Addiction Doesn’t Exist

Harvey Weinstein is been in news recently for allegations of sexual misconduct. He is reportedly seeking treatment at a center in Arizona currently which focuses on sex addiction. He has some serious more than 20 allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment and assault. He stated in one of the emails to the CEO’s and directors the following: “All I’m asking is let me take a leave of absence and get into heavy therapy and counseling. Whether it be in a facility or somewhere else, allow me to resurrect myself with a second chance,” Weinstein reportedly wrote. “A lot of the allegations are false as you know but given therapy and counseling as other people have done, I think I’d be able to get there.”

After Weinstein’s resolution for seeking treatment for sex addiction and the corresponding mental illness can wrongly make such abusive actions stand along with sexual addiction for comparison.

It is not only sexual addiction which can be seen as a mental issuess in Weinstein. There could be other mental problems, too, and why not see his primary problem as

• The abuse of power?
• The incredible lack of empathy?
• Self-destructiveness?
• The fear of being insignificant, of not even existing?
• The inability to keep marital vows?
• The lack of integrity?
• The inability to feel sufficiently nourished by an incredible career?
At the end with the Weinstein’s case it is being discussed deeply that there’s no such thing as “sex addiction,”. So what does Weinstein and others suffer from then?

The difference of offending behavior and ‘sex addiction’

Chris Samuels, director of the Sexual Addiction Treatment and Training Institute in New York, stressed that these are two separate issues. “The perpetrator (of sexual misconduct) is opportunistic, often motivated by power dynamics and often self-justifying and remorseless,” she said. “The sex addict, by contrast, is fairly constantly dealing with compulsive urges to act-out as a coping modality, is seeking emotional relief from stress rather than seeking to exercise power over another, and is rarely without shame or guilt about his or her behavior.”

Top tips to Live Your Life Well like a Dream come true

You might have bumped into the articles and theories around how to keep yourself happy and live a life well. These tips are scattered around all subject areas and do not divulge the top of these tips to make you live happier and healthier for years. There are many such tools and tips which can make you feel stronger and more hopeful.

1. Connect with others
2. Stay positive
3. Get physically active
4. Help others
5. Get enough sleep
6. Create joy and satisfaction
7. Eat well
8. Take care of your spirit
9. Deal better with hard times
10. Get professional help if you need it

Why Mental Health Matters for all of us?

Does this question poses any dilemma in your mind thinking that mental health matters only to people with mental illness? Well the answer is mental health is not dependant on you being a patient of mental health.

Here are some of the kep benefits of putting a check on your mental well being and pay attention:

1.You can keep your emotions, thoughts and attitudes under check to affect your energy, productivity and overall health in positive manner.
2. Good mental health strengthens your ability to cope with everyday hassles and more serious crises and challenges.
3. It is essential to creating the life you want.
4. Same as you brush teeth for healthy teeth and gums, take bath for proper hygiene; similarly take steps to promote your mental health. Start with the first step to keep stress under check.

Ten Things You Can Do for Your Mental Health

Each and every one of the us are important and so our thoughts in their individual way are important. We need to take care of our mental health along with the physical health. There has to be a balance which is needed to keep things under positive routine. Follow these tips to help find the right balance in your life.

We should be Valuing ourself – You should be treating yourself with kindness and respect. You should not opt for self-criticism, since it tend to take things in wrong direction. Take your timeout for hobbies and favorite projects, Spend time for something like crossword puzzle, planting in garden, dance lessons, learn to play musical instrument or learn another language. Challenges as well as satisfaction you get by overcoming these hobby related challenges gives greater sense of self respect and value.

Start taking god care of your body since healthy mind resides in a healthy body. Take some of the important steps such as eat nutritious meals, say no to cigarettes, drink lots of water, do regular exercise and get enough rest or sleep. Researchers have time and again proven that sleep deprivation is one of the leading cause of people becoming depressed or mentally unfit.

Always be in company of good and positive people. You can just surround yourself with people who take life as it comes and live it to the fullest. According to research in different universities across locations, people with strong family or social connections are healthier than those who lack a family support network. If being with family is a challenge, then you should participate in activities where you can meet new people, such in a club, class or support group.

Give your services and time for someone else. You can volunteer your time and energy to do something for others which can be tangible for helping others in need.

Stress is present in all phases for all types of people. The only solution to stress is to learn how to deal with it. You can start by practicing good stress coping skills like following One-Minute Stress Strategies, do Tai Chi, exercise, take a nature walk, or write a journal Remember that a good laugh can boost your immune system and reduce stress.

Empty your mind from negative thought and make it free from noise. You can do this for meditation, mindfulness and prayers. It can help improve your state of mind and outlook on life.

Expectation, whether from self or from others are doomed to fail someday. The only solution to this common issue is to set realistic and acheivable goals. Whether the situation is academic, professional or personal, write simple steps which can make you realize your goals. Try not to over-schedule. Progressing towards your goals make you get the satisfaction and determine your own self-worth.

Keep changing your routine things to ensure any monotonous fatigue creeping in your mind. You should break the monotony and perk up a tedious schedule. Someday, try to change your jogging route, take a unplanned road trip, choose different park for your daily meetup, etc.

Say a big NO to alcohol and drugs. These things can only aggravate problems and gives no relief, whether temporary or permanant.

Reach out for help when you think you have some trouble in your daily life and you have tried some of the above tips without remarkable changes. Asking for help is a sign of strength and it is in no sense a type of weakness. In order to lead a full, rewarding life, we should take advice and help from the experts and other people with similar experiences. At the end we are the social animals and the only way to solve our problems is to discuss and seek help.

Why Mental Health in Workplace is so Crucial?

Last week, Walgreens Boots Alliance announced that it will expand its mental health services beyond simply filling prescriptions. Now, it will offer essential tools like screening and treatment, including teletherapy services. This is definitely something to cheer about during Mental Health Month—or in any month, really. A giant like Walgreens can give a huge boost to mental health awareness.

Why is awareness so crucial? Because one in five Americans currently suffer from mental health conditions, more than those suffering from medical conditions like diabetes and heart disease. In 2013, the United States spent more on mental health care than it did on any other category of medical care, according to a study published last week in Health Affairs.

This is more than just a goodwill play on Walgreen’s part: Today, patient adherence to prescriptions is worse for mental health conditions than for physical illnesses. Screening, awareness, and treatment will be good for their business.

But wait! It’s good news for everyone’s business. And as leaders, advocating for mental health is as important as any wellness or health benefit initiative. We absolutely must take mental health out of the closet. Serious mental health issues require serious care. Our colleagues must be encouraged through education and support to get help when they need it. If you aren’t convinced, read on:

1. Mental health issues often go unaddressed until it’s too late. The Association for Psychological Science reports that only 59% of people with mental illness—depression, anxiety, et cetera—receive treatment.

2. Stigma around mental health treatment, while lessening, still exists. When people don’t feel safe, they don’t take action.

3. Mental health is still treated as a taboo subject. If you don’t agree, just ask yourself: When’s the last time one of your colleagues went on disability for depression? Did you know about it? Doubtful.

4. Recently published, longitudinal studies show that work stress—in the form of psychological demands—is predictive of new cases of depression and general anxiety disorder.

5. Those in high-stress environments are twice as likely to develop new mental health problems as those in lower-stress environments.

No, it’s not likely that every person in need of help will also enroll in therapy. Walgreens, for example, has set a goal of screening three million people by 2017. But leaders can take action in other supportive ways: Reviews of effective ways to mitigate the stress reaction suggest that cognitive behavioral therapy—learning to recognize triggers and respond differently—has the best effects. Resilience training, via digital delivery, is an essential, accessible first start and a promising initial line of defense in mitigating or preventing mental health issues before they take root.

Resilience—the ability to cope and thrive in stressful situations—is associated with better attendance and job satisfaction. It’s also been shown to improve performance and reduce turnover. Resilient workers report less stress in their lives, are four times more likely to be satisfied on the job, and they’re 50% less likely to miss work in the first place.

Clearly, promoting mental health in the workplace needs to be part of any company’s wellness initiatives, and resilience is a key way to integrate good mental health with productivity. In an era when mental health awareness is slowly but surely creeping out of the closet, we owe it to our employees, to our businesses, and to ourselves to lead the way.