Hamilton Anxiety Scale - Questionnaire
On a scale of 0 to 4, with 0 being "there is no problem" and 4 being "the situation is disabling to you", how do you rate yourself for each of the following symptoms of anxiety.
Symptom Rating Scale (0 = No Problem, 4 = Disabling)
Anxious Mood
1. Worries _____
2. Anticipates worst _____
Tension
3. Startles _____
4. Cries easily _____
5. Restless _____
6. Trembling _____
Fears
7. Fear of the dark _____
8. Fear of strangers _____
9. Fear of being alone _____
10. Fear of animals _____
Insomnia
11. Difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep _____
12. Difficulty with nightmares _____
Intellectual
13. Poor concentration _____
14. Memory impairment _____
Depressed Mood
15. Decreased interest in activities _____
16. Anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure) _____
17. Insomnia (inability to get restful sleep) _____
Somatic Complaints: Muscular
18. Muscle aches or pains _____
19. Bruxism (clenching and grinding teeth) _____
Somatic Complaints: Sensory
20. Tinnitus (ringing in ears) _____
21. Blurred vision _____
Cardiovascular Symptoms
22. Tachycardia (abnormally rapid heartbeat) _____
23. Palpitations (noticeably rapid, strong, or irregular heartbeat) _____
24. Chest pain _____
25. Sensation of feeling faint _____
Respiratory Symptoms
26. Chest pressure _____
27. Choking sensation _____
28. Shortness of Breath _____
Gastrointestinal symptoms
29. Dysphagia (difficult or painful swallowing) _____
30. Nausea or Vomiting _____
31. Constipation _____
32. Weight loss _____
33. Abdominal fullness _____
Genitourinary symptoms
34. Urinary frequency or urgency _____
35. Dysmenorrhea (painful menstruation) _____
36. Impotence (inability to achieve an erection) _____
Autonomic Symptoms
37. Dry mouth _____
38. Flushing _____
39. Pallor _____
40. Sweating _____
How Did You Act As You Completed This Questionnaire
41. Fidgety _____
42. Had Tremors _____
43. Paced Around _____
Once you have completed the Hamilton Anxiety Scale questionnaire, total up your score.
0-17: Normal
18-24: Mild anxiety
25-29: Moderate anxiety
30 +: Severe anxiety
No matter your score, if you feel any of the symptoms outlined on the Hamilton Anxiety Scale, there is help available. I strongly recommend that you try Gary Craig's Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT to get rid of anxiety and start taking back control of your health and your life today.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Learning How To Stop Worrying is a Matter of Understanding Risk Management Better.
Life is full of risks! If you are a worry wart, then learning how to stop worrying is simply a matter of gaining a better understanding of risk management.
Effective risk management is usually thought of as a business skill, but it can be used just as effectively in your personal life. Risk management and the skills involved with learning how to stop worrying go hand in hand.
Just like in business, personal risk management involves six basic steps. First you take the time to plan for risks. Then you identify what those risks may be. Third, you analyze those risks, quantitatively, to determine their severity. Fourth, you analyze those risks qualitatively. Fifth, you decide how you will respond if the risk occurs. Sixth, you monitor and control the situation so that you are ready when and if the risk occurs.
If you don't believe that this is all there is to learning how to stop worrying, please know that these six basic steps to effective risk management form a part of an internationally recognized problem solving business model and this model is used by corporations all over the world. In fact, it's considered to be the global standard for risk management. I learned about it from the Project Management Institute in the US. The book is called "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge."
Consider a personal life challenge like going on a hike with a couple of kids. You could just throw caution to the wind and go for the hike and then you will be at the mercy of the risks that are out there. By living life this way, you create a very reactive situation. In other words, you are simply forced to react as things go wrong or right as you really have left yourself no other alternative. If your goal is to learn how to stop worrying so that you can reduce your stress level, then this model is not a good one.
Living reactively will create all the right conditions for constant worrying and even obsessive worrying. As a poorly managed situation, such as a wilderness hike with children, begins to fall apart, the effects of worrying are felt by everyone involved. For someone who wants to know how to stop worrying, this model is a really great way to set yourself up for failure and because of the potential safety risks, the failure could be a big one.
However, a hike is not usually something that is a regular part of life and so may not be a great example. Let's consider something that is a part of daily life and that is just getting through the day. If you are reactive and have no plan or systems in place for managing a day, then you will be forced to be at the mercy of whatever the day throws at you. It's a perfect recipe for constant, obsessive worrying.
Conversely, if you develop a few systems, such as a to do list or some support systems for how you will handle each routine thing that happens in the day, then you will not be caught off guard when life just happens. This will free you up to be better able to respond effectively to occurrences that are out of the ordinary. Since day to day life will not be so stressful, you will have more energy to be able to deal with anomalies. As you become better at risk management in day to day life, you will also naturally be better at risk management when crazy things happen.
Being a good risk manager is not really something you do once in a while; it's more a way of being. If you use effective risk management skills in every area of your life, then the need to worry disappears because you feel like you have a lot more control. Basically, if you want to learn how to stop worrying, then becoming an effective risk manager is definitely a habit you want to pick up.
Effective risk management is usually thought of as a business skill, but it can be used just as effectively in your personal life. Risk management and the skills involved with learning how to stop worrying go hand in hand.
Just like in business, personal risk management involves six basic steps. First you take the time to plan for risks. Then you identify what those risks may be. Third, you analyze those risks, quantitatively, to determine their severity. Fourth, you analyze those risks qualitatively. Fifth, you decide how you will respond if the risk occurs. Sixth, you monitor and control the situation so that you are ready when and if the risk occurs.
If you don't believe that this is all there is to learning how to stop worrying, please know that these six basic steps to effective risk management form a part of an internationally recognized problem solving business model and this model is used by corporations all over the world. In fact, it's considered to be the global standard for risk management. I learned about it from the Project Management Institute in the US. The book is called "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge."
Consider a personal life challenge like going on a hike with a couple of kids. You could just throw caution to the wind and go for the hike and then you will be at the mercy of the risks that are out there. By living life this way, you create a very reactive situation. In other words, you are simply forced to react as things go wrong or right as you really have left yourself no other alternative. If your goal is to learn how to stop worrying so that you can reduce your stress level, then this model is not a good one.
Living reactively will create all the right conditions for constant worrying and even obsessive worrying. As a poorly managed situation, such as a wilderness hike with children, begins to fall apart, the effects of worrying are felt by everyone involved. For someone who wants to know how to stop worrying, this model is a really great way to set yourself up for failure and because of the potential safety risks, the failure could be a big one.
However, a hike is not usually something that is a regular part of life and so may not be a great example. Let's consider something that is a part of daily life and that is just getting through the day. If you are reactive and have no plan or systems in place for managing a day, then you will be forced to be at the mercy of whatever the day throws at you. It's a perfect recipe for constant, obsessive worrying.
Conversely, if you develop a few systems, such as a to do list or some support systems for how you will handle each routine thing that happens in the day, then you will not be caught off guard when life just happens. This will free you up to be better able to respond effectively to occurrences that are out of the ordinary. Since day to day life will not be so stressful, you will have more energy to be able to deal with anomalies. As you become better at risk management in day to day life, you will also naturally be better at risk management when crazy things happen.
Being a good risk manager is not really something you do once in a while; it's more a way of being. If you use effective risk management skills in every area of your life, then the need to worry disappears because you feel like you have a lot more control. Basically, if you want to learn how to stop worrying, then becoming an effective risk manager is definitely a habit you want to pick up.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Does Repressed Anger Plague You In Your Adult Life?
Do you suffer from serious repressed anger and other repressed emotions? Most people don't remember the first three years of life and so are not aware if those years were spent building up a store of repressed anger and other repressed emotions.
Dr. Gabor Mate is a medical doctor who works with drug addicted patients in the downtown core of Vancouver, British Columbia's East side and he is also the author of an excellent, bestselling book called, "When the Body Says No, The Hidden Costs of Stress."
In his book, Dr Mate goes to great lengths to show the medical consequences of emotional stress and repressed anger. It seems that when we are born, the brain is not yet fully developed and so the environment, to which we are exposed in those first three to five years of life, has a huge impact on us, as the brain completes its development. What's really interesting is that, according to Mate, the human being is one of the only animals in nature that is born without a fully developed brain.
Given this fact, parents have to be extra careful, to ensure that the environment, to which a baby is exposed in those very early years, is not highly stressed and the parent must be very emotionally present during that time period. If not, the child will develop a behavior pattern of serious repressed anger and other repressed emotions as a way of coping with that early childhood trauma.
Many, who read this, would think that Dr. Mate is speaking of parents who are addicts or who are abusive, but he is not. Of course, people with these dramatic problems, certainly do not make great parents, but unfortunately, Dr. Mate is not limiting this problem of repressed emotion to these extreme examples.
Emotionally unavailable and highly stressed parents could simply be a family with two working parents. In other words, the stressful environment does not have to be extreme, in modern terms. The outcome of even a moderately stressed environment is that the child learns, very young, to repress emotion and bottle it all up inside.
On the surface, you might think this is just the way it is and kids need to toughen up, but it seems there is a consequence for highly stressed kids that occurs much later in life.
Dr. Gabor Mate's book primarliy focuses on the links between repressed emotion and chronic disease. Stressed kids that make it to adulthood are far more likely to develop a serious chronic degenerative disease than children who grow up in low stress homes with emotionally available parents.
So, what's a child to do?
Well, it's not so much that the parents can do anything. Often it's far too late for the parents to fix the problem, since the kids have usually long since passed those early childhood years. Rather, the solution lies in the adult child learning how to release all that repressed emotional stress.
Many of us live in denial that we had troubled childhoods and so we deny, as adults, that we have problems that need to be addressed. We simply suffer the consequences and struggle along because there seems to be a social stigma attached to the idea of a rocky childhood. And yet, most of us had one.
It seems to me that a better solution would be for everyone to simply accept that life was stressful when we were young and that we all suffer from varying levels of repressed emotion.
In most cases, it's not a family's fault if both parents had to work or if the single parent must work. This was and is the socio-economic model of our North American society. Rather than try to find someone to blame, live in denial and be upset all the time, it seems wiser to just assume we all have repressed emotion that needs to be released and deal with it.
The only question that really remains, if you follow my logic, is how do you release that repressed anger and other repressed emotions and solve the problem of emotional stress, without spending a fortune on counselling and without popping millions or antidepressants. Something must be done, though, because living in denial and letting chronic disease take over has completely overwhelmed our medical systems in North America.
The first step, in solving this massive problem, is acceptance, and the second step is to find a tool to use that is 'low to no cost' that can get the job done, effectively and efficiently.
Thankfully, one such tool does exist and it is very powerful. The best tool, I have ever found, for just this purpose is EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). No other counselling tool is more suitable than EFT.
My best recommendation is don't let repressed anger and other repressed emotions, that developed when you were a baby, continue to take you down the path to chronic degenerative disease. Stop that process now by using EFT to release all that emotion and start taking back control of your health and your life today.
Dr. Gabor Mate is a medical doctor who works with drug addicted patients in the downtown core of Vancouver, British Columbia's East side and he is also the author of an excellent, bestselling book called, "When the Body Says No, The Hidden Costs of Stress."
In his book, Dr Mate goes to great lengths to show the medical consequences of emotional stress and repressed anger. It seems that when we are born, the brain is not yet fully developed and so the environment, to which we are exposed in those first three to five years of life, has a huge impact on us, as the brain completes its development. What's really interesting is that, according to Mate, the human being is one of the only animals in nature that is born without a fully developed brain.
Given this fact, parents have to be extra careful, to ensure that the environment, to which a baby is exposed in those very early years, is not highly stressed and the parent must be very emotionally present during that time period. If not, the child will develop a behavior pattern of serious repressed anger and other repressed emotions as a way of coping with that early childhood trauma.
Many, who read this, would think that Dr. Mate is speaking of parents who are addicts or who are abusive, but he is not. Of course, people with these dramatic problems, certainly do not make great parents, but unfortunately, Dr. Mate is not limiting this problem of repressed emotion to these extreme examples.
Emotionally unavailable and highly stressed parents could simply be a family with two working parents. In other words, the stressful environment does not have to be extreme, in modern terms. The outcome of even a moderately stressed environment is that the child learns, very young, to repress emotion and bottle it all up inside.
On the surface, you might think this is just the way it is and kids need to toughen up, but it seems there is a consequence for highly stressed kids that occurs much later in life.
Dr. Gabor Mate's book primarliy focuses on the links between repressed emotion and chronic disease. Stressed kids that make it to adulthood are far more likely to develop a serious chronic degenerative disease than children who grow up in low stress homes with emotionally available parents.
So, what's a child to do?
Well, it's not so much that the parents can do anything. Often it's far too late for the parents to fix the problem, since the kids have usually long since passed those early childhood years. Rather, the solution lies in the adult child learning how to release all that repressed emotional stress.
Many of us live in denial that we had troubled childhoods and so we deny, as adults, that we have problems that need to be addressed. We simply suffer the consequences and struggle along because there seems to be a social stigma attached to the idea of a rocky childhood. And yet, most of us had one.
It seems to me that a better solution would be for everyone to simply accept that life was stressful when we were young and that we all suffer from varying levels of repressed emotion.
In most cases, it's not a family's fault if both parents had to work or if the single parent must work. This was and is the socio-economic model of our North American society. Rather than try to find someone to blame, live in denial and be upset all the time, it seems wiser to just assume we all have repressed emotion that needs to be released and deal with it.
The only question that really remains, if you follow my logic, is how do you release that repressed anger and other repressed emotions and solve the problem of emotional stress, without spending a fortune on counselling and without popping millions or antidepressants. Something must be done, though, because living in denial and letting chronic disease take over has completely overwhelmed our medical systems in North America.
The first step, in solving this massive problem, is acceptance, and the second step is to find a tool to use that is 'low to no cost' that can get the job done, effectively and efficiently.
Thankfully, one such tool does exist and it is very powerful. The best tool, I have ever found, for just this purpose is EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). No other counselling tool is more suitable than EFT.
My best recommendation is don't let repressed anger and other repressed emotions, that developed when you were a baby, continue to take you down the path to chronic degenerative disease. Stop that process now by using EFT to release all that emotion and start taking back control of your health and your life today.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Social Withdrawal Is Hard to Identify In Today's Coccooning World.
In psychology texts, social withdrawal is identified as a dysfunctional behavior. There are many conditions and diseases, which could be identified, if a patient exhibits the symptom called social withdrawal.
One of the most obvious conditions, of course, is high stress levels. Our bodies are hardwired with a fight or flight mechanism for dealing with stressors and if the flight aspect of this protective feature is used too often, a medical professional would probably say that you have moved into a somewhat unhealthy arena.
While needing occasional downtime is considered a healthy coping solution, extreme social anxiety leading to full withdrawal from society would be considered bad. The most extreme version of this problem is called agoraphobia, in which, the anxiety sufferer is terrified to leave home for even a few minutes.
However, in modern times, it may be very difficult, indeed, to identify a person who may have progressed to an unhealthy state because it is so easy to function very well without ever leaving your house. It makes me wonder if our high-stress world has not created more agoraphobics that we realize.
Marketing guru, Faith Popcorn, named this phenomena "coccooning", nearly 30 years ago. More and more companies are designing products and services that allow people to never have to leave their homes. You can have an online business, work online, shop online, and even go to school online. You would never know if someone was just being normal or if they were actually needing medical help.
It is becoming very hard to know whether a person is doing a good job of self-care by making sure they have enough alone time or "me" time or if they are afraid of the world and hiding out from all the stress.
If you think you or someone you know may be suffering from the early or advanced stages of social withdrawal, resulting from severe stress in your life, make sure you get some help because even though the world can be a big scary place, there are many tools out there to help improve coping abilities.
For example, you can use EFT or Emotional Freedom Techniques to help manage stress so that you don't feel the need to hide and then you can enjoy a full and abundant life.
The EFT Technique could really go a long way to helping you deal with irrational stress levels so that social withdrawal does not become necessary.
A specific set up phrase to use to begin tearing down that stress mountain is as follows:
"Even though, my stress level is out of control and I feel so frustrated all the time, I truly love and accept myself and all my feelings."
OR
"Even though, I have way too much going on in my life right now and I feel out of control, I deeply and completely accept myself."
Then for the reminder phrase, you could just say, "stress is out of control" or "way too busy to think straight".
So with that tool available, let's hope we can all get stress under control and stop feeling that extreme social anxiety and social stress. It's always a sad thing when a person begins to feel so helpless that he or she moves into full social withdrawal.
One of the most obvious conditions, of course, is high stress levels. Our bodies are hardwired with a fight or flight mechanism for dealing with stressors and if the flight aspect of this protective feature is used too often, a medical professional would probably say that you have moved into a somewhat unhealthy arena.
While needing occasional downtime is considered a healthy coping solution, extreme social anxiety leading to full withdrawal from society would be considered bad. The most extreme version of this problem is called agoraphobia, in which, the anxiety sufferer is terrified to leave home for even a few minutes.
However, in modern times, it may be very difficult, indeed, to identify a person who may have progressed to an unhealthy state because it is so easy to function very well without ever leaving your house. It makes me wonder if our high-stress world has not created more agoraphobics that we realize.
Marketing guru, Faith Popcorn, named this phenomena "coccooning", nearly 30 years ago. More and more companies are designing products and services that allow people to never have to leave their homes. You can have an online business, work online, shop online, and even go to school online. You would never know if someone was just being normal or if they were actually needing medical help.
It is becoming very hard to know whether a person is doing a good job of self-care by making sure they have enough alone time or "me" time or if they are afraid of the world and hiding out from all the stress.
If you think you or someone you know may be suffering from the early or advanced stages of social withdrawal, resulting from severe stress in your life, make sure you get some help because even though the world can be a big scary place, there are many tools out there to help improve coping abilities.
For example, you can use EFT or Emotional Freedom Techniques to help manage stress so that you don't feel the need to hide and then you can enjoy a full and abundant life.
The EFT Technique could really go a long way to helping you deal with irrational stress levels so that social withdrawal does not become necessary.
A specific set up phrase to use to begin tearing down that stress mountain is as follows:
"Even though, my stress level is out of control and I feel so frustrated all the time, I truly love and accept myself and all my feelings."
OR
"Even though, I have way too much going on in my life right now and I feel out of control, I deeply and completely accept myself."
Then for the reminder phrase, you could just say, "stress is out of control" or "way too busy to think straight".
So with that tool available, let's hope we can all get stress under control and stop feeling that extreme social anxiety and social stress. It's always a sad thing when a person begins to feel so helpless that he or she moves into full social withdrawal.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Are You the Parent of an "Orchid" Child?
Are You the Parent of an "Orchid" Child? Orchid Children are Highly Reactive to Stress and Need The Right Kind of Support.
By Anne McIlroy, Science Reporter
From The Globe and MailPublished on Friday, Feb. 05, 2010
They are called “orchid children,” highly sensitive youngsters who are vulnerable to behavior and learning problems if they live in a stressful environment, but nevertheless can outperform their peers if they come from a supportive home.
Research published Friday bolsters a new theory that there is a positive side to traits and genes associated with susceptibility to emotional problems and cognitive deficits.
It recasts those vulnerabilities as potential strengths, and says they can help children excel, given the right kind of care and attention.
Read full article
By Anne McIlroy, Science Reporter
From The Globe and MailPublished on Friday, Feb. 05, 2010
They are called “orchid children,” highly sensitive youngsters who are vulnerable to behavior and learning problems if they live in a stressful environment, but nevertheless can outperform their peers if they come from a supportive home.
Research published Friday bolsters a new theory that there is a positive side to traits and genes associated with susceptibility to emotional problems and cognitive deficits.
It recasts those vulnerabilities as potential strengths, and says they can help children excel, given the right kind of care and attention.
Read full article
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Beat Oxidative Stress by Neutralizing Free Radicals with Healthy, Natural Chocolate.
Stressful lifestyles and unhealthy food leads to massive free radical production in your body...
Free radicals lead to oxidative stress or free radical damage...
Oxidative stress or free radical damage leads to serious chronic degenerative disease...
The mega-antioxidants in healthy chocolate neutralize free radicals...
Fewer free radicals equals less oxidative stress or free radical damage...
Less oxidative stress or free radical damage means reduced risk of disease...
Eat healthy chocolate today to fight disease!!!
Get Healthy Chocolate Now!
Free radicals lead to oxidative stress or free radical damage...
Oxidative stress or free radical damage leads to serious chronic degenerative disease...
The mega-antioxidants in healthy chocolate neutralize free radicals...
Fewer free radicals equals less oxidative stress or free radical damage...
Less oxidative stress or free radical damage means reduced risk of disease...
Eat healthy chocolate today to fight disease!!!
Get Healthy Chocolate Now!
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