The small stuff adds up
Mental health boils down to how we manage anxiety. Anxiety is the feelings we get from experiencing stressors in our environments. It’s impossible to get rid of the constant flow of stressors, but it is possible to learn self-regulation skills. The more a person limits stressors on one side of their mental health teeter totter, e.g. turning off the evening news, and adds even little behaviors, e.g. a daily 20-minute walk, that reduce anxiety on the other, the more quickly she can come back to a balance and ease. Note: pharmaceutical anti-anxiety meds are being proved to cause Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Don’t go there.—MR
When stressed, we ‘catastrophize’ – but we can learn to calm our irrational fears
by Sophie Brickman, The Guardian US, June 20, 2022
Our primitive brains summon up worst-case scenarios to protect us from danger. In today’s world, that can be debilitating.
