Anxiety
Census Bureau Data Shows 2020 Brought a Spike in Anxiety and Depression
From posttraumatic stress to sleep disturbances, recent studies have begun to confirm that the coronavirus pandemic has brought a range of mental health consequences. Now, an analysis of data from the US Census Bureau provides what appears to be some of the most robust evidence yet that 2020 saw a rapid decline in the United…
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3 Traits That Might Help With Jobs Involving Trauma
Certain jobs put an extra burden on the mental health of people who do them because they frequently involve dealing with traumatic situations. Not everyone who does potentially traumatic jobs experiences negative mental health effects, though. So why are some people able to take on these jobs and still enjoy relatively good mental health? A…
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Study Shows Uptick in Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms During Lockdown
In March, as public health officials around the world were dialing up measures against COVID-19’s spread, a group of researchers published an article in The Lancet highlighting the potential psychological consequences of widespread quarantine. When that article came out, most of the available evidence was from past epidemics. The authors pointed out that little was…
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Crochet, Crafts and Mental Health
If you’re looking for a new hobby to take up, consider crochet. Why? The results of a recently published study from researchers in Australia give some possible reasons. In that study, the researchers surveyed over 8,000 crocheters to learn about how people saw the hobby as affecting their mental health. The vast majority of the…
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The Tweets That Go With a Quarter-Life Crisis
From getting married to buying homes, millennials are accused of doing everything later. But that’s not true when it comes to having life crises. As the rise of the term “quarter-life” crisis suggests, having life crises is something millennials seem willing to do early and often. So what do you do when you want to…
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Happiness Is Possible With a History of Anxiety
Mental health conditions like anxiety can interfere in almost any aspect of people’s lives, with real consequences. And yet, in the long-run, that doesn’t mean happiness is unobtainable. I’m not saying that to provide words of inspiration. I’m saying it because a newly published study suggests it’s true. The study surveyed 2,128 adults in Canada…
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2 Reasons Self-Control and Forgiveness Go Hand-in-Hand
Forgive and forget? Easier said than done, but also easier to do if you have high levels of self-control, it turns out. Previous psychology studies have repeatedly pointed to a link between people’s levels of self-control and their capacity for forgiveness. That link appears to be especially strong when “forgiveness” is seen in terms of…
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A Text-Message Treatment for Social Anxiety
Online interventions are a promising new way of providing mental health support, as I’ve written about before. And the logical conclusion of that idea is that if we can treat mental health conditions over the internet, why not over text messaging too? A new study titled Text Message Safety Behavior Reduction for Social Anxiety suggests…
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Social Anxiety May Disrupt Conversational Synchrony
Although people with high levels of social anxiety don’t necessarily leave as bad an impression as they think, there is some evidence that those without social anxiety receive more favorable assessments overall when meeting new people. As the authors of a recent study point out, this is the irony of social anxiety: being afraid of…
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When Therapy Helps With Social Anxiety
A type of therapy that is often recommended for social anxiety disorder is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. In this type of therapy, people learn to challenge unhelpful thought patterns, create new behaviors, and respond to their emotions in more productive ways. As with any treatment, there is a range in how much CBT improves…
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