Sometimes, just when you think things are going pretty badly, they get worse.  That's when a person feels like crawling under the covers and never coming out.  That's what has happened while I've tried to deal with my sisters.  Life was easier when I wasn't dealing with them. 

I may have told you this some time ago.  I have five sisters.  One I haven't heard from in about 10 years and I don't even know where she is.  I've tried to send Christmas cards to an old address but they come back.  Another sister rarely communicates at all...a note every few months.  Two of the other three are great people and I've had good relationships with them in the past...with the exception of the times there was interference by the third sister.  That third sister is the only one who is older than I am.  She continues to be a bully, even on our family website. 

Yesterday I banned her from the site and I feel terrible about it.  I fear I've made myself feel sadder about our relationship than she was making me feel.  I was the cause of things going from bad to worse!!!  Now that's hard to face.  However, I don't feel as anxious and depressed as I did and that's a little hard to understand....maybe I now feel a little bit of control over a bad situation.  Maybe writing about it here has helped me. 

Here is a guest post for you to enjoy.  It is written by one of my online friends, Maria Rainer.  I took yoga classes for approximately two years and can tell you that yoga really does help a lot with one's anxiety level. 

Yoga does more than help your balance, core fitness and flexibility - it helps to reduce anxiety and relieve stress. With the hustle and bustle of today’s society, it’s normal for people to stress about life, money, work, family and whatever else causes daily anxiety. Yoga relieves and reduces stress in three ways:

1. Through regulated inhaling and exhaling breaths. As you inhale, you're sending more oxygen to the brain, which stimulates your nervous system. Exhaling helps regulate this process and releases toxins from your bloodstream, helping your body relax. The double leg raise and certain yoga breaths like alternative nostril breathing are great ways to send oxygen to the brain and circulation to your body thus reducing stress levels.

2. Meditation and relaxation helps you find your center and focus, while using your regulated breaths to relax the mind. Once the mind is relaxed, you're able to transfer your relaxation to the rest of your body while meditating and focusing on this process. Meditation helps you focus on quieting the mind and finding your inner strength when stressful situations arise.

3. Through regulated breathing and meditation, you're able to focus and block out outside noises while focusing on your inner self and your inner strength. This aspect of yoga is also vital for focusing on your breathing and meditation. This may be one of the harder aspects of yoga to grasp – being able to focus and not become distracted with inner thoughts and outside noise. Focus and lack thereof is a major contributor to daily stress; with so much going on, we can struggle to focus on accomplishing one task before we can complete another.

Once you've mastered the aspects of breathing, meditation and focusing through yoga, you're able to calm your nervous system, relax your mind and block out outside noises, which are all contributors of stress.

Bio: Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching various online degree  programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

Stress serves an important purpose: it prepares your body for action in order to keep itself out of danger. But unfortunately, the kinds of challenges we experience today aren’t always best solved by that kind of decisive physical behavior. The result, if stress continues, can be a host of mental and physical problems, including depression.

What is stress?

Stress results from many different situations , but the form it takes is generally the same. That’s because stress never developed to help us to cope with the demands of the modern world – high workloads, relationship problems, money worries, problem colleagues and difficult commutes. In its evolutionary context, stress is our body’s mental and physical response to a direct, immediate threat. Its job is to enable us to take typically one of two simple behaviors: fight or flight.

That’s why we experience stress the way we do. Our heart rate rises and we start to breath faster, to supply oxygen to the muscles. We sweat, to cool our bodies from the coming exertion. We may feel cold, or nauseous, as blood is directed away from the stomach to more essential areas. A cascade of hormones makes us more alert and faster to react. Essentially, it’s a one-size-fits-all response to a threat. That means we can feel much the same symptoms whether we are physically challenged – perhaps by a mugger, or less directly and intentionally by a careless driver – or threatened emotionally or mentally.

Changing the way we think

Stress has mental and physical effects. As well as preparing the body for action, it alters the way we think. Our thinking becomes polarized, black-and-white, or ‘all or nothing’ as psychologists call it – enabling us to take fast and decisive action to deal with the potential threat.
 

When the threat genuinely is physical – that car that pulls out in front of you without warning, or an unexpected noise in the house you thought was otherwise empty – then that makes good sense. But in the more nuanced situations that we more regularly find ourselves in, this kind of all-or-nothing thinking doesn’t tend to do us any favors. Relationships, tricky work situations and the like demand a more measured response than the immediate quick-fixes that stress evolved to help us deal with.

Unfortunately, when a stressful situation goes on for a long time, so do the changes in our thought patterns. We become more anxious and irritable, more impulsive and less flexible in our thinking. We are harder on ourselves, because – in its original context – stress demands that we have to be: it’s what keeps us safe. Stress forces us to think in terms of do/do not; at risk/safe; pass/fail. If the source of stress is still present, then we self-evidently haven’t succeeded in keeping ourselves out of danger. One consequence is that we become far more prone to depression, as our failures are implicitly emphasized over and over as the source of the stress remains unchecked.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and other techniques can be useful in overcoming this unhelpful way of thinking, but essentially, it’s worth remembering that stress is often our body’s best – but ultimately inappropriate and unhelpful – attempt to deal with a bad situation.

StressingOut.org, is a website providing self-help resources for stress, depression, anxiety and related conditions.

I hope you will appreciate the following guest post.  I think Abby is an excellent writer and am happy to have her article on His and Hers Blog.

It’s a disease as deadly as cancer, yet we don’t accord depression the same importance – the latter eats away your body and turns you into a living vegetable, and the former does the same to your mind and soul. When you’re affected by depression, the world becomes a darker place and everything takes on a shade of grey. Your vision is compromised and you don’t see the positive side of any situation or circumstance. Some forms of depression are more severe than others and need medical intervention and continuous treat. They take years to cure, and by the time you learn how to cope and manage your thoughts, you find that every aspect of your life has undergone a sea change.

However, some kinds of depression can be banished at the outset if you’re aware of the problem and seek active help. Some people turn to good friends and close family members for support and guidance while others seek psychiatric care. Yet others feel that they can get rid of depression by keeping busy and focusing on all the positive aspects of their life. And for some people, writing a journal or blogging about their feelings makes it easier to cope with feelings of hopelessness and depression. Writing is a sort of catharsis because:

• It allows you to express what you feel in words: If there’s no one to talk to or if you feel that no one would understand, you can always take to putting down your feelings on pen and paper, or if it’s your blog, on keyboard and screen. Expressing your feelings and emotions in any kind of way is a catharsis, a cleansing of your mind and soul. You feel much better after you’ve poured out all that’s on your mind. And when you take to doing this regularly, it becomes a coping mechanism that helps keep depression at bay.

• It allows you to connect to others with similar problems: When you express your feelings on your blog, it helps you reach out and connect to others with similar issues and problems. Sharing your pain with them and helping them in return makes you feel much better in due course. There are also times when you feel that your problems are insignificant when compared to that of others, so you automatically start looking at the positive aspects of your life and chase away the blues.

• It brings comfort and support: An outpouring of feelings and emotions is bound to bring in support and comfort from many quarters. People who are regular visitors to your blog and those who have just stopped by offer sympathy and encouragement that work wonders in getting you back on track.

• It keeps your mind occupied: And finally, your blog keeps you occupied and prevents your mind from focusing on the negative aspects of life that are the cause for your depression. As you get better, you move to writing about other things, mostly about how you’re trying to overcome your problems and how much progress you’ve made. You’re doing something worthwhile, and this sense of achievement goes a long way in beating depression and keeping it away forever.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Abby Nelson, she writes on the topic of Masters in Counseling     She welcomes your comments at her email id: abby.85nelson<@>gmail<.>com.