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Mood & Mental Health

Three of the major challenges to our mental health today are stress, anxiety and depression. Fortunately, there are many simple steps we can take in our daily lives to regain a sense of balance, feel better about ourselves, and live calmer, more satisfying lives.

Stress
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Depression
Stress

We all experience stressors at many points throughout our lives. It's practically unavoidable. What we can control is how we react to them. Stress can best be defined as an individual's mental and physiological response to a particular event, behavior, place or person. While it isn't always easy to find effective ways to manage the daily stressors we face it is important to try to find healthy ways to manage stress. When we cannot, we often feel its damaging impact through anger, depression and a multitude of health problems.

Here are some facts about how stress impacts our lives:

Stress has been linked to all the leading causes of death, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, accidents and suicide.
Almost 90 percent of all visits to primary health care providers are due to stress-related problems.
Nearly one-half of all adults suffer adverse effects from stress.
It is estimated that 1 million Americans miss work due to stress-related complaints.
Workplace violence has been attributed to stress. Homicide is the second leading cause of fatal occupational injury.

There are some situations that inherently rate high on the stress scale: divorce, death of a child or spouse, illness, a move or a change of job. But each of us has the ability to manage most stressful situations by altering the way we respond to them. It is impossible to manage or control all the people, events and places in our lives that place demands on us, and any attempt to do so causes our stress level to go up. We would be better off learning to accept those situations we can not change and to manage how we deal with stress by understanding the phenomenon...