excerpt from The Body Image Workbook

Society’s preoccupation with and marketing of physical attractiveness reinforces the assumption that being good-looking pays bigger benefits than it actually does. The undeniable truth is that being good-looking is sometimes advantageous. However, as the French author Stendhal asserted in his famous essay on love in 1822, “Beauty is only the promise of happiness.” Nonetheless, for many reasons, attractiveness doesn’t keep most of its promises. There are also plenty of reasons why being average-looking or less doesn’t close off opportunities for happiness. To help you challenge Appearance Assumption 1, I want to take a few pages here to explain to you why looks aren’t everything. These are not reasons that I made up; these are facts established by scientific research on the psychology of physical appearance (Cash 1990; Feingold 1992; Jackson 1992).

by guest blogger Jackie Gardner-Nix, MD, Ph.D, author of The Mindfulness Solution to Pain .

There are five stages of sleep. You normally “cycle” through these about every 90 minutes as an adult. Stages 1 and 2 are light sleep: it’s easy to rouse you. Stages 3 and 4 are deeper, slow wave sleep: rousing you is harder and you may be disorientated on waking. The immune system is busy repairing your body from the usual wear and tear of your day in those deeper sleep stages. REM sleep is associated more with dreaming than the other stages. Having no, or too much REM sleep is associated with depression, and antidepressants can change the amount of REM. REM sleep is important for consolidating memory.

excerpt from The Insomnia Workbook

So what should you do in those late evening hours before you start feeling sleepy? Try to engage in relaxing activities for at least an hour before bedtime. This means nothing too stimulating, such as working, answering e-mails, making telephone calls, or anything stressful. Instead, consider meditation, relaxation exercises, stretching or yoga, deep breathing, engaging in quiet conversation with a family member or friend, or taking a warm bath. You might also read a book, listen to music, or possibly watch TV—but not in your bedroom, and only if these aren’t too stimulating. And if you choose to read or watch television before bed and continue having trouble sleeping, you should experiment with doing different activities before bed. It’s important to establish a nightly routine that’s calming in nature, without the pressures and stress that your daytime hours may include. If you find it difficult to unwind and achieve a calm, relaxed state at the end of the day, you’ll find it helpful to start practicing the relaxation exercises in chapter 5. They’ll help you relax your muscles, breathe more deeply, and feel calm. Like so many other things in life, practice makes perfect, so the more you practice relaxing your mind and body, the better you’ll be at it. Relaxation techniques are particularly helpful when you’re having trouble sleeping due to feeling too wound up or on edge. They can help you relax and achieve the calm state necessary for falling asleep both in the evening hours before bedtime and also if you can’t sleep in the middle of the night.

excerpt from Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep

Thoughts, behaviors, and reactions to stress and daily hassles can cause and maintain insomnia. How you think about sleep and what you do to cope with sleep loss appear to play important roles in the insomnia experience. In subsequent chapters we discuss many examples that demonstrate how thoughts and behaviors interfere with sleep. But briefly, relative to good sleepers, people with insomnia have more anxious thoughts and negative emotions just before sleep and on awakening from sleep (Harvey and Farrell 2003). Anxious thoughts and negative emotions promote alertness rather than sleep, and thus can be a factor in insomnia.

excerpt from The Worrier’s Guide to Overcoming Procrastination

One of the most common questions we get as therapists is, “Why do I procrastinate?” In our view, this question reflects the frustration that comes from suffering anxious procrastination. On the one hand, you know what you need to do. But you don’t do it, or you wait until the last minute. And time and again the pattern repeats itself. You feel caught, trapped in a vortex of anxiety, worry, stress, and procrastination. We wrote this chapter to help you begin to answer the question, “Why do I procrastinate?”

We’ll briefly describe these reasons and then you’ll complete a self-assessment test to see which most frequently lead to procrastination for you.

Fear of Failure: The thought of putting in effort and still failing makes you anxious. Instead of trying and failing, you choose avoiding and procrastinating. You might especially fear the disapproval of others and feel that no matter what you do, you’ll come up short.

Fear of Success: The idea of doing well makes you nervous and panicky. You fear higher expectations, greater responsibilities, and undeserved accolades, and these fears lead you to procrastinate.

Low Self-Confidence: You see yourself as incapable in general. You feel you aren’t good enough and don’t possess the traits that others have which allow them to do well.

Low Self-Efficacy: You feel you’re incapable of meeting the specific challenges of a task. You believe you lack the basic skills to get things done and often think, This is too hard. I can’t do it.

Perfectionism: You believe that things should be done perfectly. You might also believe that other people expect perfection from you. As a result, when faced with a task, you become overwhelmed and easily frustrated by your own unreasonable standards.

Difficulty with Uncertainty: It’s difficult for you to face the unknown, and you feel you must know the outcome before you start. However, since everything in life is uncertain to some extent, you get paralyzed by doubt and turn to worry and avoidance to deal with the uncertainty.

Difficulty Making Decisions: You focus more on information gathering than on actually making a decision. This style of procrastination is closely tied to perfectionism, as you feel you must find out everything possible to avoid an error.

Task Aversion: You tend to think about the unpleasantness of a task. Instead of focusing on the outcome or the pleasure of completing a task, you consider only the challenges of it. Once you’ve convinced yourself the task will be truly awful, you avoid it.

excerpt from Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong

What we’re driving at is that the things and situations about which we feel anxiety aren’t anchored in the present moment. If we feel apprehension and alarm about something in the here and now, we don’t refer to it as anxiety. Instead, we call it fear. When you think things are going terribly, horribly wrong, fear is what grips you. And, unlike anxiety, which strives to neutralize ambiguity and is only minimally useful in these days of more or less harmless threats, fear is generally pretty useful stuff.

If you hear shrieks and gunfire coming from the room at the end of the hall, you might decide to go the other way. If you’re at the beach and you see a big dorsal fin cutting through the waves, you might put off going for a swim. If unproductive people in your office are getting fired left and right, you might take special care to meet all your deadlines and complete all your tasks. In all these cases, you’re responding to something in the here and now in a way that might protect you from harm.

In addition to how you might respond to the threat of impending misfortune, there are still other ways you’re likely to respond to things actually going terribly, horribly wrong—to situations where bad things are actively happening to you. And as you might imagine, these behaviors, being even more grounded in the present than fear responses, are even less like anxiety. These vary from automatic behaviors that your body initiates without any thought—as happens when you jerk your hand away from something hot—to reactions that you do think about first, such as pulling your car to the side of the road after you’ve been in a collision. In any case, the fact that you’re reacting to some concrete event taking place in the present moment precludes your experience from being anxiety.

excerpt from 10 Simple Solutions to Worry

Why do worry exposure?

There are several reasons why purposely exposing your self to your worries can be beneficial:

• Confronting your worries allows you to practice using the skills that you’ve learned, such as relaxation techniques or cognitive challenges to distorted thinking.
• Intentionally worrying allows you to practice focusing on one thought at a time so you can habituate to the specific worry.
• Because worry exposure decreases anxiety in response to specific thoughts, you’ll be less fearful when those same thoughts arise spontaneously.
• Avoiding thoughts, or using techniques like distraction, maintains fear and can even cause more anxiety and worry. Directly confronting your worries stops that negative cycle.

excerpt from Little Ways to Keep Calm and Carry On

Oh the nerves, the nerves—the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

—Alderman Cute, in “The Chimes,” by Charles Dickens

Simply said, anxiety is an emotion—but what an emotion it is! Anxiety, like all emotions, has three components: biological (your physical response), cognitive (your accompanying perceptions and thoughts), and behavioral (your actions) (Frijda 1986).

Your body braces for action when the big “A” takes its cue. In a matter of seconds, your body reacts biologically, cognitively, and behaviorally—all in response to a perceived threat. The key word here is “perceived.” As a warning system, anxiety alerts us that something may be wrong, not that something is wrong. When nature’s alarm bell sounds, we need to listen, reflect on it, and determine whether there’s actually a danger or it’s a false alarm.