Saturday, June 3, 2017

4 Stress-Management Techniques for Anxious Kids


Image via Pixabay 
Approximately 50% of mental illness symptoms begin by age 14, even if parents or kids don’t immediately recognize the symptoms. Even if you don’t suspect your child has a mental health condition, you may worry about how much stress he experiences. Stress can have a major impact on the body, especially if it remains untreated for a long period of time. The stress-management techniques below can help alleviate childhood anxiety, whether you’re parenting one of the 17.1 million kids with a psychiatric condition or simply helping your child cope with temporary stressors.

Talk it Out

Sometimes a vent session is all your child needs to recover from a stressful experience. When your child is worried about something, encourage him to talk about what’s wrong. Academic stress, peer pressure or bigger issues like moving to a new school, can all have a big impact on a child’s mental health. Ask open-ended questions that encourage discussion, such as, “Can you tell me what happened at lunch today?” or “I haven’t seen Emily over here lately. What’s new with her?” This gives your child the option to give you a detailed explanation of what’s happening rather than resorting to a one-word response.

If your son or daughter hates talking about uncomfortable topics, give them a journal. Encourage them to jot down anything that comes to mind, good or bad, each day. Consider setting aside quiet time for journaling before bed or first thing in the morning so that your child gets in the habit of jotting down their feelings. If your child struggles with spelling or doesn’t know how to read, have them draw pictures instead. You can also give them a stack of old magazines and encourage them to cut out pictures that they like or relate to so that they can paste them in the journal.

Create a Checklist

Not every episode of anxiety has a specific trigger, but some anxiety attacks stem from a fear of the unknown. You can help mitigate this type of concern by having your child create a checklist that details how to react in a stressful situation. You can create different checklists for common situations or develop one basic sheet that applies to any issue.

Keep the checklist as concise as possible while still covering everything that your child wants or needs. This prevents the checklist from becoming an overwhelming to-do list that adds - rather than alleviates - stress. Kids who can’t read can draw pictures to help them remember what to do when they’re stressed. You can also take photographs of different things, such as your child taking deep breaths or coloring in a notebook, for the checklist.

Practice Breathing Exercises

When anxiety strikes, encourage your child to take slow, deep breaths and focus on his breathing. Have him close his eyes so that there are fewer distractions, and ask him to breathe through his nose rather than his mouth.

You may have seen adults count to 10 or even 20 during deep breathing sessions, but high numbers can be difficult for kids with limited attention spans. Start by counting to 3, and increase to 5 or 7 over time if you feel your child is ready. Have your son or daughter take a deep breath, hold it for the count of 3, and exhale for the count of 3.

Perform Visualization

What’s your child’s favorite thing to do? Is there a special place he loves to visit? When stress strikes, have your child close his eyes and picture his desired destination or activity. Have him incorporate all of his senses during his visualization exercise. If he’s on the beach, he should smell the ocean and feel the warm sand beneath his toes. If he’s pretending he’s eating his favorite meal, he should smell the food and think about how it feels in his mouth.

Remind your child that he is in control and nothing bad can happen during his visualization. The weather is nice, and everyone is happy. There are no tornadoes, spooky clowns, or anything else that may terrify your child.

Coping with anxiety is difficult at any age, but there are ways to effectively tackle worries. Encourage your child to try the techniques above next time an episode of anxiety occurs so that he can find much-needed relief from the situation.

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Cool headed

How many can relate?


My source: https://twitter.com/holdmyale/status/863725509674496001/video/1

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Trickster's path

A reader has published a book, with this description:

About the Author

Alcibiades Anon is the pseudonym for a highly functioning sociopath that likes to hear himself speak even while remaining silent.  Anon has spent a lifetime exerting his influence over the world and now, as he gets older, he had a whim to teach his thoughts to the young sociopaths around him.  The ongoing knowledge and tools he wishes to impart are his last great gift to humankind.  Anon often rambles and dreams and loves a good tangent but the quality of his lessons are apparent for those that can see them.   Anon dreams of a world where he and those like him do not need to hide what they are, while believing even in that world he would likely remain hidden.

Description of the Book.

The Trickster’s Path is one sociopath’s attempt to understand himself and others like him.  The Trickster’s Path uses the theories of experts and other sociopaths to describe what exactly a sociopath is.  The Trickster’s Path goes further to break the different areas of sociopathic tendencies into attributes.  Anon uses those attributes to describe how he has remained functioning in the world he finds so alien.  The book rambles and takes multiple tangents as Anon self discovers what he and those like him are.  The Trickster’s Path is an honest portrayal of one person’s attempt to understand himself and deal with the world around him.


Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Resconstructing ourselves

A reader gives an update on the child with reactive attachment disorder (RAD) who was featured in the documentary, Child of Rage, discussed previously on this blog here. I always avoid using her name, but you can read the details on the link (and it's always a little shocking to me that they used her name in the "documentary" featuring her, a minor, in what seems a pretty exploitative way, showing her actual therapy tapes? How did her parents allow this?).

There is a happy ending! She recovers from the reactive attachment disorder in a big way and becomes a happy and contributing member of society. The link for the update on her life is here. The quick summary is she is a nurse, she seems to still have a good relationship with her family, and she seems like just a normal person living a normal life.

As I was looking for the documentary I stumbled upon some other child mental disorder documentaries that seemed just a little less exploitative, and then finally a clip of a "news" show interviewing a young, attractive teacher that got busted for sexual relations with a 14 year old student. She was saying that it was a mistake and she had done it because of a troubled past, including mental illness, but scrolling through the comments -- every single person continued to vilify her. Out of the millions of views, not a single one would accept her apology, either as being sincere or as her being capable of change or worthy of forgiveness.

I know that the urge to ostracize and shame others runs deep in humanity's evolutionary past, but (and I've said this literally dozens of times before, including the penultimate post) society's willingness to let self-righteous feelings to dominate their rational capacity and/or empathy to continue to persecute people for something that they did or said in the past... I just struggle to understand why it's still such a problem, and one that is rarely discussed as such. As much as you hear about anti-bullying campaigns, there seems to be an unspoken understanding amongst most people that bullying is absolutely ok if the person you're bullying is a bad person. I hear even intelligent people whom I respect defend the shaming and the shameless poor treatment of their fellow humans for real or imagined wrongs. What society does with its social undesirables is basically one step away from tattooing them with their convict number and hounding and persecuting them through the rest of their lives.


But I sometimes think, what if we talked about more examples of recovery and more stories of people being dynamic and capable of change, maybe we could educate the evolutionary impulse a little so it's not so prone to mob mentality and see our fellow humans a little more accurately -- people that weren't really the same person decades ago and won't really be the same decades from now. Like NPR's Invisibilia piece on the myth of the static personality featuring the story of Dan, a rapist turned good guy: "I'm forever going to be a criminal," he says, "which I'm not. I've become a completely different human being at this point." "I have to atone for my crime. But I realize now I'm just paying for someone else's debt. The person who committed the crime no longer exists." How can we adjust the way we deal with people who we don't want to associate with (for whatever reason) so there can still be an appropriate level of accountability or precautionary measures while also more accurately reflecting the dynamic nature of who humans are?

"Maybe we're not thinking right about who we are and what we could be," says Walter Mischel [author of the famed marshmallow study]. "People can use their wonderful brains to think differently about situations," Milgram says. "To reframe them. To reconstruct them. To even reconstruct themselves."

(The Invisibilia piece oddly excepts sociopaths from this ability to change, assuming the myth of sociopathy to be incurable without questioning it as most do. But baby steps.)

Saturday, April 1, 2017

Baby Boomers = generation of sociopaths?

I have expressed my prejudices re baby boomers before (i.e. generation of narcissists), but someone wrote a book about how they're sociopathic. From the Huffington Post:

In his new book, A Generation of Sociopaths, writer and venture capitalist Bruce Gibney puts forth the controversial hypothesis that baby boomers ― specifically the large subset of white, middle-class boomers ― are, both individually and as a group, unusually sociopathic. Gibney cites mental health data showing boomers have significantly higher levels of antisocial traits and behaviors ― including lack of empathy, disregard for others, egotism and impulsivity ― than other generations.

As a result, boomers have used their substantial voting power to create a society and government that don’t work very well. Or, as Gibney puts it, boomers’ “private behaviors congealed into a debased neoliberalism.”

The author regarding the impact of boomers' dogged self-interest:

There’s obviously been a substantial deceleration of economic growth. The Great Recession arguably began in 2001 and we’ve never entirely recovered ― so that’s 16 years of lost opportunity. 

The second big thing on the economic front is the intergenerational passing of burdens, and the most salient one is the debt. Gross debt to GDP 40 years ago was 34 percent, and today it’s around 105 percent. It’s projected by [the Congressional Budget Office] to exceed the World War II highs by the early 2030s. When boomers start taking control and influencing policies, the policies get worse on the debt, so that now we haven’t seen these levels of debt in more than 70 years.

There are consequences to these levels of debt. ... But that’s not really relevant for the boomers. This is not their problem and they have not been serious about it. The debt wasn’t discussed as a serious issue during the 2016 presidential election, but Social Security was ― because we know that this program is going to be partially insolvent by 2034. And this is the only thing that Trump and Clinton could agree on: Social Security ― untouchable. Medicare ― untouchable. These things are sacred. They couldn’t even agree where to stand on the stage together, and they agreed on Social Security.  

People who know me personally know I rarely pass up an opportunity to take potshots at baby boomers. It's not even the selfishness that gets on my nerves, because really everyone is selfish. It's the delusional self-aggrandizement. Boomers all think they're self-made success stories, just because they happen to have been born perfectly timed to profit from one of the biggest economic booms in known history. As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats, but a lot of boomers credit their success to being a particularly skilled captain. I think it's great (for me) when these people apply that hubris to their trades in the stock market, but it generally makes them boorish dinner companions.

Sociopath, though? No, I stick by my initial assessment of narcissists. I'd like to think that the average sociopath is much more self-aware than the average baby boomer.
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