Eat Your Brain CD
"A 'must hear' inspirational story of a successful navigation of depression, panic and anxiety, including essential points on the importance of nutrition in achieving optimal brain health."
CD Download»Protecting Your Joy
Protect Your Joy & Don't Quit on .Me were established to share information & resources to help people build their resilience to negative stress. From the ‘worried well’ to the severely depressed there are things that each of us can do, to help ourselves through these difficult times.
Chronic Stress, Depression, Panic and Anxiety
I am almost finished a book about building resilience to stress, predominately to help people who have things like depression, panic and anxiety or I guess are in that area of chronic prolonged stress. It’s based on my experience of about ten years ago, when I went through these conditions, and how I got out of them. I was a business analyst for one of the big four banks, and my world came crashing down around me very very rapidly. I think at the time I had no idea what was going on and then as things unfolded, it turned out I had quite severe depression. I think that I have had episodes in the past, but not realised what it was, probably quite a typical story. But at the time I felt very much like there was nothing I could do that would make any difference. I think that you go through the denial, then acceptance and well I guess its chemical or it's genetics so therefore I might as well just get used to my lot in life. Then not being one to just sit around I'd just get frustrated at my inaction or becoming reliant on other things, like medication. So I started a program to lose weight, because I had stacked on a whole bunch, at the time I was on a high dose of antidepressants and was making quite bad food choices. Anyway so started a bit of a I wouldn't call it a fitness kick, maybe a ‘burn’ to lose some weight so that I could lessen the self-loathing, and that was the beginning of the beginning really. I started focusing on nutrition, movement and had a look in to on meditation... I had a look at John Kabbat-Zinn's work out of the US couldn't get my head round mindfulness. I just couldn't stop the mental chatter enough to get a hold of that. I really liked Yoga meditation and went to a few chants and thoroughly enjoyed that. Then started looking at very some very basic goal setting and things like reflective journaling just getting all of the stuff out of my head. Collectively, all of these things started to make a huge difference; the meditation, the movement, the nutrition, managing my focus, until gradually I got enough traction to pull myself through. So the book is about my journey, that coupled with interviews with subject matter experts in these relevant fields – half of them would cringe if they knew I referred to them as that, but they have all been very influential in my taking certain steps along the path. That’s what the whole journey through depression and mood disorders is about, as far as I can make out, taking one small positive step after another. Building on your strengths and having the courage to work on your weaknesses.