Will Baum, LCSW

From the Recommended Reading page, a couple of titles worth highlighting:  The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety and  The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression, a matching pair of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) workbooks.

Instead of trying to take on and eliminate difficult thoughts and feelings, ACT encourages accepting them and getting on with what’s most important to you.  Identifying what’s most important to you is a big component of the approach.

For a reading-free sample of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, try one of the audio exercises linked here.  A whole sidebar full of free ACT audio and worksheets awaits at Live Mindfully.

A history, from Scientific American:

[Season's of a Man's Life author] Levinson felt that midlife crises were actually more common than not and appeared like clockwork between the ages of 40 to 45. For Levinson, such crises were characterized primarily by a stark, painful “de-illusionment” process stemming from the individual’s unavoidable comparison between his youthful dreams and his sobering present reality. For most men, life moves so swiftly that, by the time you look back at what’s happened, you realize you’ve already suffered an irreparable loss of chance and opportunity. This life review causes depression, anxiety, and “manic flight,” a sort of desperate, now-or-never fumbling to experience the pleasures one has long denied oneself and an escape from stagnation.

(via MindHacks)

From Slate:  Girls don’t start out more anxious than boys, but they usually end up that way.

When it comes to our preconceived notions about women and anxiety, women are unfairly being dragged through the mud. While women are indeed more fretful than men on average right now, this difference is mostly the result of a cultural setup—one in which major social and parenting biases lead to girls becoming needlessly nervous adults. In reality, the idea that women are “naturally” twice as anxious as men is nothing more than a pernicious illusion.

Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges (NYT):

[R]esearch suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health. People who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic. Preliminary data suggest that self-compassion can even influence how much we eat and may help some people lose weight.

From The Mindful Way Through Anxiety–or, rather, from the book’s website–some audio mindfulness exercises.  (The promo material at the beginning of each ends quickly.)  More where these came from on the site.

Mindfulness of Breath

Mindfulness of Sounds

Mindfulness of Emotions and Physical Sensations

Mindful Observation of Self-Critical Thoughts

WebMD reports on a new study: Anger Increases Pain in Women.  Treatment–in this case CBT–shown to help.

Treatment effects were significant, showing positive differences in pain, fatigue, and functional disability, and in anxiety and negative mood, the researchers say. “Our results demonstrate that offering high-risk [fibromyalgia] patients a treatment tailored to their cognitive behavioral patterns at an early stage after the diagnosis is effective in improving both short- and long-term physical and psychological outcomes,”

Kids who really don’t want to go to school addressed in When a Doctor’s Note for a Student Doesn’t Help (NYT):

The first time I realized I was complicit in school refusal, I didn’t even know the term. It was about a decade ago, and my patient was a boy who seemed to be spending his whole first-grade year sick with one thing or another…

Yoga, meditation, pets, nature, and 15 other mood helpers.

Meditation Can Improve Brain Function (PsychCentral)

15 Ways to Help Treat Depression Naturally (WebMD)

New study finds new connection between yoga and mood (ScienceDaily)

Do Pets Help with Depression and Stress? (WebMD)

The Psychology of Nature (Wired)

PsychCentral:  More College Students with Depression, Anxiety

More college students are grappling with depression and anxiety disorders than they did a decade ago, according to research presented at the annual conference of the American Psychological Association. And with greater diagnoses of depression and anxiety has come a related rise in the number of college students on psychiatric medications.

And here’s “Anxiety Treatment – Therapy”: