excerpt from The Smart Student's Guide to Healthy Living

After a long day of classes, the late shift at work, or just experiencing the mayhem of your dorm hallway, you retreat to the quiet sanctuary of your room. As you climb into your bed, wrap yourself in the sheets and attempt to fall asleep, you suddenly remember that you have a biology quiz tomorrow and you haven’t opened the book yet. As you climb out of bed, you tell yourself, “Missing and hour of sleep won’t kill me,” and you study longer. You nail the quiz and feel fine. But as those nights of short sleep become the norm rather than an occasional thing, you begin to see the effects. You begin to feel drained and tired all day. Of course, there will be nights when you will sleep less, whether it is after a big concert or when you’re studying for finals. But chronic sleep loss adds up to being more than tired and grouchy. Lost sleep can cause problems like these:

Excerpt from Grieving Mindfully

Suffering can bring you to a place of profound mindfulness about your relationships and your spiritual beliefs.  In the context of grief, the person, and by extension the relationship, can be your spiritual teacher. Being aware of how your loved one lived, what his or her role was in your life, and how you are experiencing the loss of that person can turn your grief journey into a vehicle for your spiritual growth. Without this person's presence in and loss from your life, you would not have this unique opportunity to appreciate life and love, and seek out personal growth.

Using the pain of loss as a spiritual teacher, you begin to cultivate a sense of gratitude toward what you are feeling and experiencing. The intense emotional pain of your grief may still hurt. However, as you experience grief mindfully, allowing yourself to feel the twists and turns of the spiral staircase, the triggers and changes in your relationships, and your own personal development, you may eventually come to realize, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, perhaps even physically, that your capacity to grieve - and your capacity to love - are interconnected.

Excerpt from The Binge Eating & Compulsive Overeating Workbook

Two disturbing trends in the modern diet are also contributing to our culture’s food issues: our reliance on packaged prepared foods high in partially hydrogenated fats and the extensive use of high fructose corn syrup. These trends, along with a lack of physical exercise, have resulted in the current obesity epidemic in our country.

Excerpt from Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

In my work with people with bipolar disorder, I have found it quite common that they know very little about their illness. Often this is because receiving such a diagnosis can be overwhelming, and people frequently don’t know what questions to ask to best help themselves....

On the other hand, perhaps you are a person who accepts the diagnosis, but you don’t have an accurate understanding of what it means. You might be unsure about what bipolar symptoms are, what might be symptoms of a separate, co-occurring disorder such as anxiety, and what is “normal” and completely unrelated to any disorder. This knowledge is extremely important in order for you to learn what you need to do to prevent relapses (the recurrence of symptoms) and to cope with manic, hypomanic, and depressive episodes. To help you understand what form of the illness you have, I have outlined the current categories of the illness below, as defined by the DSM.

Excerpt from Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

Part 2 answers:

• What Is Depression?
  
  
• What Is Mania?
  
  
• What Is Hypomania?
  
  
• What Is a Mixed Episode?
  
  
• What Is Psychosis?

Excerpt from Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar disorder is a biological illness that causes unusual shifts in your mood, level of energy, and ability to function in different aspects of your life. This illness used to be called manic depression, because it was thought that people with the illness would fluctuate only between episodes of highly elevated, euphoric moods and episodes of major depression. More recently, doctors have realized that the illness is not quite that black and white—that there are many moods that actually occur on a spectrum. Rather than just experiencing episodes of depression or mania, people with bipolar disorder can in fact experience various moods and symptoms that fall in between these two extremes, and this is why the illness was renamed bipolar disorder, implying that symptoms occur on a spectrum between the two poles of mania and depression.

Excerpt from Rage: A Step-by-Step Guide to Overcoming Explosive Anger by Ronald T. Potter-Efron, MSW, Ph.D.

• Rage is an experience of excessive anger.
• Rage is a transformative experience.
• For every total rage, you probably have several partial rages.
• You may often have near-rage episodes as well.
• Not all rages look alike.
• Another way to divide rages is by the threat that each rage addresses.
• If you are a rager, you aren’t the only one in the world with this problem.
• Rages can be prevented.
• Each kind of rage needs to be treated a little differently.

by guest blogger Susan Albers, Psy.D., author of 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food

It’s likely that an ordinary walk would be a helpful activity to substitute for stress eating. But you might want to try taking a mindful walk. Not only will this get your mind on something other than food and steer you out of the kitchen, it will also help you to calm down and center yourself.

Excerpt from Biting Anorexia: A Firsthand Account of an Internal War by Lucy Howard-Taylor.

My name is Lucy Howard-Taylor. I am eighteen years old. I have starved myself silent. I have slipped through people and out of sight, into black. Rigid at night from fear, curled against another day, I fell: unmoved by the landing.

But this is not the exposé of an individual. This is a chronicle. Of anorexia. Of depression. Of you and me, perhaps. And a stumble back into the light.

Excerpt from 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food: Mindful Practices for Finding Relief, Comfort & Calm

If you aren’t sure whether you want to eat because you’re truly hungry or because your emotions need calming and soothing, do a quick self-check before starting to eat. Ask yourself if any of the following statements describe your hunger. Then add up how many times you agree with these statements. Observe whether you agree with more statements under emotional hunger or belly hunger.

Excerpt from What’s Right With Me: Positive Ways to Celebrate Your Strengths, Build Self-Esteem, and Reach Your Potential

If we look back at our lives with curiosity and kindness, we might be startled at our bravery. Often, we are taken aback by our natural propensity as children to explore what we truly enjoyed.... We are still as brave, creative, and determined.