Mental Health Archive

The daily onslaught of news during the past year has left many people in a steady state of fatigue, resignation, and grief. The symptoms of collective trauma are widespread and familiar, but one merits special attention: numbness, which is one possible response to an overwhelming situation.

Diet, exercise, and sleep work together, and all three can have an effect on our daily well-being and longevity. Sleep impacts our eating patterns, and our eating patterns affect our sleep: lack of quality sleep may make people eat more, and make less healthy food choices, but certain foods contain substances that may enhance sleep.

Crying is a natural response to a range of emotions, but is it good for your health? Crying is an important safety valve: it acts as a safety valve for our emotions, and emotional tears flush stress hormones and other toxins out of our systems.

Too much time together makes for tense moments. Cutting each other some slack and setting ground rules will help.

There's such a thing as too much togetherness at home, no matter if you're with a romantic partner, an adult child, a grandchild, or a friend. "Because of the pandemic, we're frozen in place with people, but we aren't meant to be in the same space all day long," says Dr. Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist with Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

Keeping the peace starts with understanding why you may be getting on each other's nerves. Then you can try following a few rules to get along better.

Over the past year, so many of us have experienced various forms of trauma, and reported mental health symptoms have increased dramatically. But at the same time, people have shown resilience and found small moments of solace, relief, and even joy in life’s simple pleasures — and these moments help.

Empathy helps people get along with others, but the ability to understand another person’s experience comes more easily to some people than to others. However, the capacity for empathy can be honed and improved like any other skill.

The deaths of friends and family members become more common as you age. Here is how to endure the grieving process.

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Most men don't face much personal loss early in their lives. Yet, once they reach a certain age, they will encounter the experience of losing someone important to them — a spouse, a friend, a relative — and the feelings of grief that often follow.

"Grief is a natural response to loss, but it is something that men are not prepared for, and they often struggle to understand how it can affect their lives," says Dr. Eric Bui, associate director for research at the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders and Complicated Grief Program at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

Stress management may reduce health problems linked to stress, which include cognitive problems and a higher risk for Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

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It's not uncommon to feel disorganized and forgetful when you're under a lot of stress. But over the long term, stress may actually change your brain in ways that affect your memory.

Studies in both animals and people show pretty clearly that stress can affect how the brain functions, says Dr. Kerry Ressler, chief scientific officer at McLean Hospital and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Scientists have seen changes in how the brain processes information when people experience either real-life stress or stress manufactured in a research setting. (For the latter, researchers might challenge subjects to perform a difficult task, such as counting backward from the number 1,073 by 13s while being graded.) Either type of stress seems to interfere with cognition, attention, and memory, he says.

Take a moment to think about how you treat yourself when you make a mistake or fail to reach a goal. If you tend to beat yourself up when things go wrong, you, like most people, can use a little more self-compassion in your life.

Forgiving and nurturing yourself seem to have benefits in their own right. Strong self-compassion can even set the stage for better health, relationships, and general well-being. So far, research has revealed a number of benefits of self-compassion. Lower levels of anxiety and depression have been observed in people with higher self-compassion. Self-compassionate people recognize when they are suffering and are kind to themselves at these times, thereby lowering their own levels of related anxiety and depression.