Anxiety

There’s nothing like extreme anxiety to make you feel like you’re falling apart. Using a few basics of mindfulness as self-help may be a way to pull yourself back together. The all-embracing anxiety I’m talking about comes close to panic. It’s an explosion of fear that hits everything. Certain situations can set it off, or […]

  Some of the most frightening moments I’ve had during long years of depression were not those of despairing mood or even suicidal thinking. Instead, they were the times of panic when I’d feel yanked into a wind tunnel, no hold on anything, air sucked out of my lungs, my body fired into emptiness. Most […]

I think of creativity as an opposite of depression. As the driver in my life that connects and communicates, it represents everything I cannot do in the midst of the illness. Yet there was a time when it led to panic. Creativity is usually discussed in connection with the arts, and the idea gets overblown […]

As I discussed in this earlier post, writing helps heal the depression that dominated decades of my life. That post reviewed James Pennebaker’s research, as summarized in Opening Up, but said little about how I go about writing to confront the most powerful feelings and maintain the progress I’ve made in recovery. For writing is […]

It was one thing to get depression out of my life. It was another to get it out of my memory. Doubt about recovery from depression could linger on and keep playing tricks with the past. Vivid memories of old words and actions while depressed continued to torture and twist through me. They became my […]

(Anxiety has dominated more of my waking hours than I care to admit, yet I’ve written relatively few posts about it. While working on the next ebook, Depression Present Tense, I came across this early post that captures a typical incident. The new book is an attempt to capture the inner feelings of depression in […]