Emotional healing is no easy road. In varying degrees, anxiety and depression are ingrained patterns of behavior, reactive attempts to deal with stress that become increasingly ineffective, and eventually, life-impairing.

These patterned responses are particularly resistant to change as they are associated with emotional-command circuitry in the brain that automatically activates the body’s survival system in response to stress or certain triggers.

Human being are fully equipped inside however, with everything needed to unlearn these responses, and self-direct change and own healing.

In Part 1, we looked at reasons why it’s essential to tune into your inner-world experience more than you do outer-world signals, in particular, to become aware of any prevailing mindsets, personal or cultural, that are limiting.

The bottom line is that foods have an immense impact on your emotions, moods and physical health, all of which directly impact your ability to deal with not only challenges, and day to day stressors, but also issues in your relationships.

Findings show that nutrition deficiencies cause biochemical conditions in the brain and body that raise stress to toxic levels, fostering depression and anxiety and other emotional (and physical) disturbances. More specifically, the culprit is chronic inflammation of the brain and body.

Chronic Inflammation, a public health issue?

Inflammation itself is the body’s natural immune response to harmful stimuli, an automatic initial defense of the body, without which wounds would never heal.

• When acute, inflammation is a healthy process that is designed to restore balance by containing harmful irritants that would otherwise spread and harm the body; at the same time, it moves restorative agents, such as white blood cells, to the region to allow healing of injury, infection, stress, etc., to take place.
• In contrast, chronic inflammation is a prolonged condition that attacks healthy cells and tissues instead of protecting them; it can lead to a host of diseases, among others, diabetes, asthma, heart disease, arthritis, autoimmune and neurological problems.
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If there is evidence that questions both the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs and whether they cause more harm than good, what are options to consider (with your doctor, as necessary)?

In Part 1, we looked at some of the significant findings and publications that sound alarm on the prevailing take-a-pill approach to mental health (and health in general), and certain forces responsible for fueling an epidemic of mental (and physical) illness in the last decades, curiously unique to the United States.

In the next post, Part 3, we consider five essential strategies that studies show reduce anxiety and depression naturally. Here, we first consider five factors that can elevate stress in the mind and body to toxic levels, and that must be addressed in treatment to successfully eliminate or lower the toxic levels of stress that can feed anxiety or depression.

The position of this therapist is that depression and anxiety are serious problems with affect regulation that are learned neural associations or chemical-reaction patterns, rather than genetic diseases.

If you’re not already exercising, and wish to make exercise part of your lifestyle, you may be wondering how you will ever find the energy, the will or even the time to exercise.

If so, you first need reasons to love exercise for its many benefits so you can begin to energize your heart and mind to fully embrace, and welcome a balanced exercise program into your life, for its many benefits to your physical and emotional wellbeing.

Naturally, the next step is to talk to your doctor about taking a fitness test, to determine if there are any exercises that are unsafe or off limits for you. [Hopefully a doctor that values a preventive, holistic approach to primary care...]

And now, to really get started, here are 12 tips or guidelines to follow, and more and more, to enjoy making exercise an integral part of your lifestyle:

The idea of ego-strength has a long history in the field of psychology that can be traced back to the development of Sigmund Freud’s three-tiered view of personality in terms of id, ego, and super-ego.

Thanks to numerous contributions since, this and other Freudian concepts were significantly revamped by many of his followers, such as Alfred Adler, Carl Jung and Erich Fromm, known as NeoFreudians, all of whom positioned their own theories as complements to Freud’s. More specifically, each shifted away from Freud’s deterministic, and pessimistic, view of human nature and, in its place, added what was sorely missing: An empowering view of human personality and behavior as, by nature, primarily social in focus and self-determined by intrinsic motivation.

In particular, NeoFreudians rejected Freud’s emphasis on sexual urges as primary motivators of ego drives and behavior. A follower of NeoFreudians, Abraham Maslow, who later made significant contributions of his own to psychological (and organizational) theory of human motivation with his now famous Hierarchy of Needs, put it this way in his book, Toward a Psychology of Being: “It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.”