Anxiety.

     According to the NIMH, anxiety disorders affect about 40 million American adults in a given year. (x) Many, many american's today suffer from severe anxiety. Anxiety feels like you're completely out of control no matter what you do. Things trigger you and there's nothing you can do about it. Common anxiety disorders include 


-Panic disorder
-Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
-Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
-Social phobia (also called social anxiety disorder)
-Specific phobias
-Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)

     Most people struggle with GAD or Social Anxiety. In most cases of PTSD, it has happened after some traumatic life event like rape, attack/assault, or in soldiers returning from war. In a popular movie "Iron Man 3" the main character Tony Stark suffers from PTSD, resulting in anxiety attacks, insomnia, unnerving feelings, exhaustion, migraines, etc. 

     Panic attacks caused by anxiety usully feel like physical pain; I.E., tight chest/chest pain, tight muscles, clenched jaws, you feel jittery, fidgety, panic, fear, anger, sadness, neurotic behavior, yelling, crying, intense emotions.

     Anxiety also makes people feel like they're out of control of their emotions and feelings, and that's a huge part of controlling disorders like OCD. OCD is often linked to extreme germaphobia. The need to organize, move things, touch things repeatedly or even clean is linked to needing to be able to control everything around you like germs and object placements. 

April 7th post!

Success is when you achieve a goal that you've been working at, as big or small as it may be. In my live, I have been most successful in making art. My success has been centered around how much I've practiced and how hard I've worked top achieve my artistic ability. To achieve it I've literally practiced so much to get where I am today as an artist.
"In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure." - Bill Cosby

Failure, to me, is when you cannot succeed in doing something and you consistently fail at doing it. I feel failure in being able to go to sleep on time at a good hour. I can never sleep when I know I should and I fail at quite large when it comes down to it. School and work ultimately led to this I believe. I work A LOT and school also takes up a large part of my life, so it really cuts into the sleep that I can get.
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill

I think that success motivates me more than failure, because sometimes I can be a defeatist and let failure get to me. It influences my personal motivation positively whenever I turn out a piece of art work I am proud of and motivates me to do more and better.

My goals for this project were not only to educate others on different matters such as self harm, depression, and anxiety, but to further educate myself as well. I think my project has been successful because its been getting positive feedback, and I've been working really hard at making it detailed and educational. I would personally say I've failed at committing to it 100 percent, and coming up with more interesting topics than I have. I think I need to change how much I post, I have a higher goal for the amount of posts that I want to post and I need to work harder at achieving a number of posts I'm happier with. I'll know if I've reached success when I get a grade that I know I wanted and worked hard for, failure if the grade isn't as good as what I was hoping.

Are you a tigger or an eeyore?

   This is the true question of life. Are you a tigger? Are you a happy go lucky, glass is half full type of person who sees the bright side of things? Or are you an eeyore? A sluggish, sad, glass is half empty type who doesn't really know what to do with themself. Sometimes you don't fully get a choice, you want to get out of bed, dress nice and smile at strangers; but depression and anxiety makes that hard for some people. Depression is the hardest mindset you can ever overcome. You could be a tigger, who gets out of bed at the crack of dawn and puts on a suit in the morning and holds the door for a whole line of people at Starbucks. When you decide for yourself that you want to change, you want to be happy when you have depression or anxiety. You might need help, like seeing a therapist. It's hard to do it on your own, but I think with help (if needed) you can truely change your mindset. Maybe you even need medication, but ultimately; you have to want change to accept it and move forward. Sometimes the only true motivatiors are yourselves. 

Depression and anxiety in pop culture today -

         In modern day society, people have a tendency to glamorize depression, self harm, eating disorders, and anxiety. Pop culture has a huge impact on the way children and teenagers view life and themselves. Growing up in the era of vanity, I get this. Looks and fashion and weight have always been a huge issue in media growing up. I've never not looked up to a celebrity in my life. Also in society, we have a tendency to base our personal happiness on the amount of things we buy and how much we spend on those things. We live in a very materialistic culture. If teenagers can't afford the same things are the celebrities they look up to, they feel like less of a person. Celebrities are people just like us who just so happen to get paid ungodly amounts of money to do what they love (or, don't love. Just do.). Referring back to my post about celebrities with depression and anxiety, those celebrities struggle just like everyone else. This article is a good source to talk about how material culture is really affecting teenagers today.

Music post

A lot of times people turn to music to help them through situations, or to cushion them when they're down. As a person who listens to every type of music imaginable, I seem to have something different to fit every mood. When I'm feeling extra down, happy, angry, or anxious I have something different for each. Sometimes when I'm angry it might be Metal, pop punk, grindcore, hardcore, or anything like that, which also might apply if I'm happy with music like pop punk or hardcore bands. When I'm calm or mellowed out I like to listen to indie a lot of the time. I have playlists for different moods I'm in and I generally am always listening to music. I find that music has a way of helping me through a lot of issues, and bands have a way of being huge role models in my life. Currently I have around 80 GB of music on my computer at home, which if you can imagine, is a lot. My suggestion is that you turn to music before you turn to hurting yourself. But be weary that songs can make you sad too.

✌️🎧

Anxiety relief breathing

           

7/11 breathing is a good skill to use for anxiety. It’s recommended to do it for 10-15 minutes. Like any other skill it does require a lot of practice I advice that you practice it when you are feeling calm (so you are ready in a time when you need it). If you lose count, simply start again until you do 15 minutes. It will also help with distraction even if you don’t get it right the first time. 

Breathing out longer than you breathe in actually activates your parasympathetic nervous system-

Anxiety is your sympathetic nervous system (“fight or flight”) setting off all the alarms, while breathing like this will set the parasympathetic system (“rest and digest”) into action shutting off the alarms and settling your nerves.

Other things that help are laughing, checking out what’s going on around you (moving head and eyes to orient to your surroundings), or getting curious about something. :)

personal update

Through out this project, I have educated myself a lot on different topics regarding depression and anxiety, as well as learned things in class about them. I have my own personal view point on depression being a person who struggles with it, as well as anxiety, in my regular everyday life. Being a person who struggles with depression, I always want to understand why what's going on in my head is. This project has made it a lot easier to learn about these things from a psychological point of view, instead of just my personal understanding. It is, however, hard to blog about this without it getting too personal, but I do find it to be an interesting topic to venture upon. All I can hope is that I can help someone in some way.

                                                -Shiloh