Personal well-being

Personal and psychological well-being is our natural state, our default, but things happen that disconcert: things can sometimes go wrong, or we feel something hard, or things are bad, in our lives, in the world, in our families, when we're young, even a generation ago, now, that impact us heavily. Sometimes it's a love affair we feel broken-hearted about. To cope and to be fully you, one needs to dig deep. Therapy is a formal way of addressing these core personal stories that we carry and the symptoms that they manifest in us.

• Anxiety attacks: The feeling of anxiety we have in panic attacks is associated with the fight or flight (and freeze, as well as now in new research from 2020: the friendly) reflex that we also have in response to real danger and threat. It's automatic and happens faster than our eyes can show us the threat; adrenaline is released before we are conscious we have registered a threat. This is also called the hyphothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and this HPA axis can be chronically activated in anxiety sufferers. In treating anxiety resolving and talking through the concerns and crises, conflicts that sit beneath anxiety feelings with someone you trust can help to address these symptoms.
  

• Signs of depression: In coping with depression, one may consider Sigmund Freud, originator of modern psychotherapy who said depression was when we find ourselves hitting a dead-end, a level of stuckness and intractable lostness, that when we feel depressed our unconscious mind is giving us a sense of hopelessness and bleakness -we feel that emotionally and cognitively- but also a message that this path or state of affairs is not feeling good, in our lives, that we can't keep doing the same thing, this thing. Often there is something wrong, from long ago, or deep down, or recent. Depression is dangerous, to our psychological health and physiological health, and constitutes a fundamental challenge to the self to grapple with that's complex and that needs to be taken seriously. Signs of depression include at its core; hopelessness, thoughts of death, despair, dysphoria, indecision, low concentration, insomnia, weight changes, loss of interest in activities previously enjoyed and sadness most simply that is imovable, saturating.