Mental Health Blog in Santa Monica

How to Fight Depression

When we feel sad or blue about something, we say that we’re depressed. But when we’re depressed and drained of all drive to do anything about it, then we have depression. Depression is a medical condition that affects over 20% of people at one point or another in their lifetime. The odds are that sometime in the future you or someone close to you will encounter depression. So it’s important to know what to do. We’re very fortunate these days to have medications that deal well with depression, but they don’t do the whole job. And if you follow my advice on how to fight depression, you may not even need them. Fighting depression might seem impossible to someone who is depressed.

Coping Strategies as Psychological Defenses

When we get hit with a piece of bad news, it can stress us out and make us feel anxious, sad, angry, or ashamed, sometimes in ways that we’re not even aware of. Some of these feelings can be outright overwhelming or unacceptable. Whoa! Imagine you’re a wealthy woman who discovers her husband married her for her money or a high school football star slowly realizing he may be gay. Yikes, that’s why we use defenses. Defense is another name for coping strategy, especially one that we use automatically, without thinking about it at all. Immature (or childlike) defenses numb the pain by keeping us oblivious to our uncomfortable feelings and often involve denial, rewriting, and acting out. People can deny

Tips for Better Sleep

If you suffer from insomnia, don’t just reach for a pill. Try these tips for better sleep. Minimize noise, light, and excessive temperatures when you’re sleeping. Try using an eye mask, earplugs, white noise maker, air filter or air conditioning. Consider using a weighted blanket. They have been shown to be especially helpful for anxious sleepers. Establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time that offers 7-8 hours of sleep. Getting too little sleep during the week and catching up on the weekend can disrupt your body’s natural rhythms. Put yourself to sleep. Establish a relaxing bedtime routine like you would with a child. Read or watch a bedtime story, rather than talking, typing, playing a video game, or being physically active.

Inner Compass: Tuning In To Your Feelings

As we learned in my last post Inner Compass: Your Feelings Point the Way, emotions can help us make choices by giving us a vital compass that tells us where to go and who to get involved with. If we follow the directions of our inner compass, then we can make choices that feel authentic, enthusiastic, and sustainable. But being guided by your feelings isn’t as easy as it sounds. First of all, we can’t choose our feelings. And secondly, those feelings often turn out to be childlike, animal-or at least mammal-istic. Because of that, I often refer to a person’s deepest feelings as their Inner Child. Some people have trouble tuning into their inner feelings and some don’t. For most

Inner Compass: Your Feelings Point the Way

Emotions can help us make choices by giving us a vital compass that tells us where to go and who to get involved with. If we follow the directions of our inner compass, then we can make choices that feel authentic, enthusiastic, and sustainable. Imagine the difference between a life full of “I’m doing this because I want to” vs. “I’m doing this because I should.” But being guided by your feelings isn’t as easy as it sounds. First of all, we can’t choose our feelings. Sorry, folks, it’s terrifying but true: We have to play the hand we’re dealt. Try as you might, you can’t choose to like women instead of men. You can’t choose to be excited by

Inner Compass: Emotions

Emotions are feelings that represent an instinctive state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances or relationships with others. Stress, or pain, is a signal that something is wrong, and it comes in many unpleasant but helpful flavors. Pleasure is a signal that something is right, and it also comes in many flavors. These flavors are all the various emotions we human beings experience. They help us make choices and give us a vital compass that tells us where to go and who to spend time with. Emotions aren’t always obvious, and sometimes we can feel two or three at the same time. So whenever anything big happens in your life, it’s good to ask yourself, “How am I feeling about this?” The

Drinks, Drugs, Complicated Coping Strategies

In contrast to my post about Ten Great Coping Strategies, today I’d like to talk about a glass of wine and other coping strategies that can be very comforting and useful in moderation but can cause whole new problems in excess. Remember there are two fundamentally different ways to deal with stress in our lives: 1) direct strategies that help us master the problem at hand 2) indirect strategies that help us stay emotionally balanced in the meantime. In my last post, I suggested ten of these indirect coping strategies for folks to explore. Today I’ll discuss some others, ones that you may have even stumbled upon yourself, but these come with a caution. Pursuing them to excess can lead

Ten Great Coping Strategies

Today I’d like to talk about the range of things that people do to cope with stress, and specifically those tough realities that just aren’t going to go away no matter how hard we try. Let’s look at the many ways people seek “the serenity to accept what they cannot change,” and maybe you’ll get some ideas that might work for you. The next time forces in your life swirl out of control and make you anxious, sad, or angry, you may want to consider one of these ten strategies. Take a Time Out: Excuse yourself from whoever or whatever is upsetting you and take some time to catch your breath, identify your feelings, change your focus, regroup and take

What to Do About Stress

Like pain, stress is a signal that something is wrong or that something needs to be taken care of, and it comes in many forms, from worry and fear to sadness, guilt, boredom and more. Though some people prefer to stay oblivious to stress and just drink more or shop more—and I do appreciate the beauty of both—it’s best to acknowledge your stress, so you can figure out where it’s coming from and how to best cope with it. “Coping” is the word most people use for dealing well with stress, as opposed to excess drinking, shopping, eating, or video games, which we shrinks would refer to as poor coping. In my experience, good coping begins by identifying the source

Stress: It’s Like Pain

I find mental health to be very similar to physical health, and in fact two parts to the same big picture of you and how you are living your life. From a physical standpoint, when we’re out being busy and active, we expose ourselves to many hazards. To name a simple few, we may wear ill-fitting shoes, stub our toes, get stepped on by other people, or inadvertently step on them. All these can cause real pain and sometimes significant injury. From an emotional standpoint, life has a different set of hazards, which we in mental health call stressors. Whether it is suddenly being left by boyfriend, passed over for a well-deserved promotion, or facing serious new responsibilities, these stressors

Dr. Adam Cotsen

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