Earlier this week, you may have seen Sandy Naiman’s post about how to bounce back from unemployment stress:

In today’s economy, with soaring unemployment rates, …

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It’s common to have some concerns and worries about being pregnant, having a healthy child, giving birth, and parenting your little one, according to Pamela S. Wiegartz, Ph.D, and Kevin L. Gyoerkoe, PsyD, in their book, The Pregnancy & Postpartum Anxiety Workbook: Practical Skills to Help You Overcome Anxiety, Worry, Panic Attacks, Obsessions and Compulsions.

However, for some moms-to-be, anxiety becomes so severe and distressing that they’re unable to function day-to-day.

It’s only recently — over about the last decade — that researchers have begun exploring anxiety in pregnancy. Consequently, much more work is still needed.

But here’s what we do know.

Children, like all of us, continually experience loss. As much as they may celebrate their increased capacity to ‘do stuff’ like riding a bicycle or attending school, they also feel the loss of the special attention and privileges they had when they were younger and more dependent.

They feel loss when their family moves, when people in the family leave home, when pets die, when the boy or girl they like doesn’t like them, or when their best friend finds a new No. 1. They feel loss when holiday traditions change or vacations are suspended due to financial strain on the family. They feel loss when Grandpa can’t pick them up and twirl them around anymore, and when Grandpa dies.

Learning to grieve for losses great and small is a critical skill in a child’s healthy development. Children who do not learn to grieve are unequipped for life, as life and loss are indivisible.

Moms aren’t the only ones who struggle with postpartum depression. Dads struggle, too.

In this 2010 meta-analysis published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers reviewed 43 studies with over 28,000 participants and found that 10 percent of men had prenatal or postpartum depression. That’s more than double the rate of men who suffer from depression in the general population — 4.8 percent.

Symptoms of Depression

In their book The Pregnancy & Postpartum Anxiety Workbook: Practical Skills to Help You Overcome Anxiety, Worry, Panic Attacks, Obsessions and Compulsions, authors Pamela S. Wiegartz, Ph.D, and Kevin L. Gyoerkoe, PsyD, note that depression can strike dads at any time, from their wife’s pregnancy to months after their child’s birth.

Symptoms of depression can include depressed mood; loss of interest in activities; fatigue; changes in sleep; changes in appetite or weight; difficulty concentrating or making decisions; feelings of guilt or worthlessness; and thoughts of death or suicide.

Men, however, may struggle with different symptoms. The lead author of the above meta-analysis, James Paulson, told Scientific American (in this piece by Katherine Harmon) that some researchers have called for a change in the diagnostic criteria because men tend to struggle with irritability, detachment and emotional withdrawal.

It’s been a long week, hasn’t it?

The days are getting longer here in the northern hemisphere — and for many of us, the extra light brings joy.

But the extra light also keeps us wakeful for longer. Soon, even 8 pm will be nearly as bright as mid-day.

That extra light — as welcomed as it might be after such a long and dark winter — can do us a big disservice. When there’s more daylight outside, do you ever feel like you pack more activities into your day? Does it take more effort to slow down for bedtime? Do you tend to go to bed later?

If you’ve answered “yes” to any of the above questions, keep reading! I made a video just for you.

Today, as I was walking across the Rite-Aid parking lot at my local strip mall, I saw something peculiar.

Peculiar to me, at least.

I saw three boxy red cars in a row. Two SUV’s an an old Geo Prism.

Now, let me explain: red cars are everywhere. There’s nothing remarkable about them and there’s truly no good reason to stare at them, almost achingly, when they’re parked in perfect alignment in a parking lot.

Unless you play Bejeweled.

No matter how busy you are, you can find five minutes or fewer in your day to take better care of yourself. Here are five expert tips on relaxing your body, soothing anxiety and coping with stressful thoughts.

1. Practice 3-3-6 breathing. According to Darlene Mininni, Ph.D, author of The Emotional Toolkit, this type of breathing provides more oxygen to the brain and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. That slows down breathing and heart rate, relaxes the muscles and causes blood vessels to dilate, improving blood flow. It essentially sends a message to your brain that everything is OK, and there’s no reason to fight or flee, Mininni said.

You can practice this breathing technique any time, anywhere, whether you’re waiting in line, stuck in traffic or sitting at your desk.

Bullying has swept into the general public’s consciousness in the past decade more so than in any other time in our society. Awareness of the issue is a good start, because it’s a problem that’s been going on for a very long time.

But the stereotype of bullying isn’t limited to a big burly kid threatening a smaller, scrawnier kid on the playground. Bullying happens in far more ways — and in more places — than it did 20 or 30 years ago. One of the more insidious and harder-to-see forms of bullying happens online. In countless tumblrs, comment sections and smaller communities online, bullying is often the norm.

Bullying isn’t limited to kids, either. Adults suffer at the hands of bullies, too. No more famous example of that is Steve Jobs, who was probably one of the country’s biggest adult bullies. The bad example he set has mistakenly led other management executives to believe that bullying was one of the key traits leading to Apple’s success. The truth is that Apple was successful despite Jobs’ bad behavior — not because of it.

Which makes me very pleased to introduce our new blog on bullying, Beating the Bully: Cope with Bullying At Any Age with Katherine Prudente, LCAT, RDT. This blog will help readers understand how to overcome bullying — whether your a teen, a child or an adult. What can you do to defuse a bully’s power? How can you best cope with the feelings of being bullied?

Moving by the seat of our pants isn’t that helpful for efficiency. For one, rushing can mean making silly but time-consuming mistakes, like misplacing important items, locking your keys inside the house or glossing over errors at work.

And we might miss out on life altogether. “When things go too fast, we aren’t cognitively able to process the information, so a lot of our lives literally whizzes by,” according to Christine Louise Hohlbaum, author of The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7.

Below, Hohlbaum shares several helpful tips on slowing down and saving time.

If you’re a college student and you’re depressed, chances are you have a student counseling center that’s available to you, at no charge.

Sounds good, right? In an ideal world, the student counseling center would properly assess, diagnose and even treat students with mental health concerns — such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and more.

But we don’t live in an ideal world and student counseling centers don’t make a university any money. So they aren’t necessarily well-funded, overflowing with well-paid staff or have access to all the resources they need.

That’s why Emily Merlino’s column about her experience at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), supposedly one of the better universities in the country, was a bit disheartening to read. In it, she details how she was experiencing depressive feelings and sought out help from a professional at the UMass Mental Health Services clinic.

“The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.” 
~Thich Nhat Hanh

 “You have to make the mind run the body.”
~General George S. Patton Jr.

A recently published article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology by Kearney, McDermott, Malte, Martinez, and Simpson (2012) may have broad implications for veterans suffering with symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 

These researchers demonstrated that engagement in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) showed significant improvements after six months in reducing soldiers’ symptoms of PTSD, depression, behavioral activation (the ability to engage in activities to achieve a goal in spite of aversive symptoms), and self-acceptance. 

Like adults, kids also get stressed out. They stress over school, bullies and fights with friends. They worry when their parents argue. They experience loneliness and have fears about many things from failing an important test to not fitting in.

In her book The Power of Your Child’s Imagination: How to Transform Stress and Anxiety into Joy and Success, child educational psychologist and UCLA professor Charlotte Reznick, Ph.D, shares nine tools that help kids access their inner world so they can better traverse the trials and tribulations of growing up.

Here’s a brief look at Reznick’s valuable tools.