The following article from Johns Hopkins University provides a broad range of excellent tips for managing anxiety. As you review these, notice that all together they suggest having a healthy lifestyle as a strong defense against stress. The author covers all of the fundamentally important areas - exercise, meditating, healthy thinking, good eating habits, etc. Most of us would do well to engage in many of these activities - especially if we are feeling stressed - V. Caimano

Do you worry excessively? John's Hopkins provides nine strategies to help you take control of your anxiety.

We live in anxious times, full of bad news. We worry about our families, our country, our basic health and safety. But while a little bit of worry can be a good thing -- it can steer us away from taking unreasonable risks, for instance -- free-floating anxiety can be paralyzing, unproductive, and self-defeating. If you think that you, or someone you love, has an anxiety disorder, then therapy or medication may be in order. But even if you're receiving treatment, or if you're bedeviled by garden-variety over-worrying that doesn’t warrant treatment, the following tips may help.

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According to noted psychologist Robert Epstein* there are four stress management competencies that we can use to effectively deal with the stress that is in our lives.  They are:

• Managing the Sources of Stress 
• Practicing Relaxation Techniques 
• Managing Our Thoughts 
• Preventing Stress from Occurring

As it turns out, while all of these are important, some of these competencies are more strongly related to having a better life.  Preventing stress was the best of these four competencies.  It includes actions like having personal goals, planning how we will use our time and keeping to-do lists. The next best is managing sources of stress.

*Fight the Frazzled Mind, Scientific American Mind, September/October 2011

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Back in 2002 when I was becoming a serious student of depression treatment I learned something that literally changed my life.  I found out that what was commonly understood about brain flexibility or neuroplasticity was incorrect.  For a long time, right up to the late ‘90s it was thought that your brain was only “plastic” or able to change in significant ways until a person was in their early 20s.  After that if you had a serious brain injury or tumor and lost some brain functionality you were thought to be out of luck.

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It’s amazing how the way we focus our lives can impact how we are feeling.  It’s like zooming in and out of a map on a smart phone with GPS.  If we zoom all the way in we can see exactly where we are sitting at the moment.  The focus is all us.

If we zoom out we can see the larger world around us.  All of the homes, stores, offices, streets, highways, etc. that surround us.  We gain a perspective about our world that can’t be appreciated when we are zoomed way in.

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Exercise is important for our general health and it also part of effective strategy for dealing with depression.  For depression, exercise can release "feel good" endorphins, increase the blood supply to your brain and give you a feeling of self-mastery.  If you get some of your exercise outdoors you can have the added benefit of getting exposure to energizing sunlight.

In our recent poll on exercise obstacles we heard that a lack of energy was the most frequent issue - cited by 31% of respondents.  Nineteen percent said that "it's too hard to do anything on a regular basis" and 15% cited physical limitations.  All of these reasons might be rooted in thinking distortions about exercise.  For example we might think that we can’t exercise because if we expand any of the very small amount of energy we have we will be even more lethargic.  Or we may imagine that there is no form of exercise that we can do that would be worthwhile at our diminished energy level.

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