Beating anxiety with sleep (part 3) alcohol

There are so many reasons why we drink. To celebrate birthdays, weddings, bucks/hens parties, welcome back, your’e leaving, something with dinner, out in town, and it’s a day ending with ‘y’. Over time though we drink more for the last reason, life becomes routine and we associate the good feelings from those parties and social interactions with alcohol, we forget that the experience itself is what was exciting.

What happens when we drink? We get a sudden burst of serotonin release which makes us feel good but after a few drinks the serotonin burst is gone and the levels drop lower than what they were in the first place. Alcohol, nicotine and caffeine can all cause serotonin deficiency (2010 Wasserman, R ) which can lead to:

Depression
Anxiety
Panic Attacks
Insomnia
Irritable bowel
PMS/ Hormone dysfunction
Fibromyalgia
Obesity
Eating disorders
Obsessions and Compulsions
Muscle pain
Chronic Pain
Alcohol abuse
Migraine Headaches

Alcohol consumption can be tied in with lifestyle so in order to make changes you first need to look at your life. What are you doing that you need/want to change? Having a reason to change is important such as your doctor telling you you will die at age 40 or getting arrested for driving under the influence. Perhaps people have told you you have a problem or you have a focus on meeting new people or a new type of people. Generally people don’t change because they want to, more that they have to so the reasons are usually the driving force.

For me I wanted to reduce anxiety and to do that I needed better sleep which is difficult to obtain when you have more than one standard drink in a day and compounded when you drink excessive amounts of coffee and don’t do any exercise. So as I mentioned in the previous posts there needs to be changes in all parts of your life to ensure the best chances of success. Scheduling activities into your evenings which are fun and don’t involve alcohol is key. Things like Yoga straight after work or your favourite sport. Making this a new routine is important as well so you need to be persistent and set yourself up for success not failure. Make sure the variables don’t change such as playing two person sports and your sports partner is unavailable or the sport you play is outside and there is a chance of rain.

Inspirational game designers

Recently I watched an awesome presentation on Ted.com about a game designer who invented a game whilst dealing with acute suicidal ideation after a brain injury. The presentation was interactive and she received a standing ovation after presenting some well known concepts from a different perspective. In another post I will explore Post-Traumatic Growth which I will explore in another post.

At the absolute depth of the suicidal ideation Jane came up with a game to help get her out of the dark place she was at. She created a role playing recovery game called ‘Jane The Concussion Slayer’ which involved bringing a game into real life starting with living her own avatar as Jane the concusison slayer. She started gathering allies to fight with and she mentions this was her way of asking for help. They identified the ‘bad guys’ which was anything that would trigger her symptoms and slow down the healing process. They identified ‘Power Ups’ which were things that could make her feel slightly better like spending time doing things that made her feel good such as exercise and spending time with pets.

In summary the game involves:

Adopt a secret identity
Recruit allies
Battle the bad guys
Activate ‘Power Ups’

As a result of sharing this game online she found that it helped a lot of people who were coping with both physical and mental illness and as a result she designed the game ‘Super Better’. More information about the game can be found here. The game explores 4 types of resilience – mental, physical, emotional and social.

Check out Jane’s Ted talk – The Game that can give you 10 extra years of life -Jane McGonical http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jane_mcgonigal_the_game_that_can_give_you_10_extra_years_of_life.html

Beating anxiety with sleep – Part 2

Drugs

Last month I talked briefly about eating and the ways I got back to eating breakfast and lunch again. I find I am a lot calmer, focused and relaxed. But his was not the case until I got off the drugs! My drugs were caffeine, alcohol, and occasionally cigarettes. All of these drugs work with each other to cause havoc in life, the caffeine keeps you wired, lack of food increases the caffeine consumption, alcohol brings you back down and cigarettes…well they play a much more complicated part:

CC image courtesy of puuikibeach on Flickr

“In one study, investigators asked male smokers to smoke regular or denicotinized cigarettes while performing a progressively more demanding task that was rewarded with the opportunity to drink alcoholic beverages. Under these conditions, participants who smoked nicotine-containing cigarettes worked harder and drank more alcohol than did those who smoked the denicotinized cigarettes (Barrett et al. 2006)”

stolen image from Google

Don’t get me wrong, I love coffee almost as much as this kid loves colouring…but coffee is just one part of the puzzle and in order to reduce anxiety and increase good quality sleep, it was one thing that needed to go.

I was recently at a training event when I mentioned that I had a pocketful of herb cause I don’t do drugs like I used to. When asked about it I explained that I only drink one cup of coffee per day, and that I had a pocketful of herbal tea with me because usually one only finds two varieties of hot drink at a coffee/tea station. She asked me how I went from 10 cups to 1 because the though of giving up coffee made her cringe. I explained the process of moving to a diet where I had three meals per day which had helped me replace breakfast coffee with breakfast food and how that had helped to reduce the cravings for coffee immediately after arriving at work. I think it was Dr Karl who said that you can get just the same good feelings and energy with fresh juice in the morning as you can with coffee, so the juicer came out of the cupboard as well.

There are lots of good feelings associated with coffee at work, the time away from the screen, the conversation in the tea room (coffee room), the not doing any work at all part, and the smell of freshly ground coffee beans slowly rising to the surface of a clean glass plunger! See what I mean? So taking 5 types of herbal tea to work meant that most of that remained (except the coffee smell and joy of grinding) and I keep hydrated which is especially difficult in winter when the heaters don’t work. Staying hydrated is very important when you want to reduce your alcohol content.Next week – Alcohol (Drugs)

For the complete article quoted above see here http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh293/186-192.pdf

Beating anxiety with sleep – Part 1

Earlier this year I made some big changes to my lifestyle in an attempt to live better and feel better. I wanted to get better sleep and start exercising more, sounds easy right? Just go running and you will feel tired then you can sleep. That’s like telling someone to pull their socks up when they are feeling down!
I found that I needed to approach the sleep problem from a few different angles: diet, exercise, drugs and mindfulness.

CC image courtesy of Janieh on Flickr

Part 1 -Diet
Whilst I eat quite healthily I was missing breakfast most weekdays and as a result of being hungry at work I would drink more black plunger coffee. This meant I was always on edge and had trouble focusing on one thing at a time. Furthermore I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep often staying up very late wandering aimlessly in the interwebs. So I decided to start eating breakfast everyday which is a difficult habit to get into as when you start you generally don’t have an appetite. Starting small worked for me by getting youghurts, liquid breakfasts like ‘Up n Go’ and even using a coffee cup for small amounts of muesli. The trick was to eat small amounts each day to get back in the routine, the same approach used for treating some eating disorders. After several weeks of doing this I began to feel hungry in the mornings again and have managed to maintain this for the last 6 months.

Next week – Drugs