Mind & Mood
Your mood and your mental health affect every aspect of your life, from how you feel about yourself to your relationships with others and your physical health. There's a strong link between good mental health and good physical health, and vice versa. In the other direction, depression and other mental health issues can contribute to digestive disorders, trouble sleeping, lack of energy, heart disease, and other health issues.
There are many ways to keep your mind and mood in optimal shape. Exercise, healthy eating, and stress reduction techniques like meditation or mindfulness can keep your brain — and your body — in tip-top shape.
When mood and mental health slip, doing something about it as early as possible can keep the change from getting worse or becoming permanent. Treating conditions like depression and anxiety improve quality of life. Learning to manage stress makes for more satisfying and productive days.
Mind & Mood Articles
Meditating for 20 minutes can help people recognize mental mistakes and, perhaps, avoid them in the future, according to a recent study.
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Parkinson's disease is a progressive neurogenerative disease that causes nerve cells (or neurons) in the area of the brain that controls movement to weaken and/or die. While healthy neurons produce a chemical called dopamine, which the brain needs a certain amount of in order to regulate movement, weakened neurons produce lower levels of dopamine. What causes these neurons to weaken is currently unknown.
Some patients with Parkinson's disease also suffer from a decline in norepinephrine, a chemical that transmits signals across nerve endings and controls various functions, such as blood pressure and heart rate.
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Chronic stress causes an increase in certain hormones that can raise your blood pressure.
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When stress becomes more frequent or lingers—what’s known as chronic stress—it can cause excessive strain throughout the body and lead to higher inflammation, higher blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, and sleep disturbances—all factors that contribute to a higher risk for heart disease, heart attacks, and strokes. By practicing certain behaviors, people can train their brain and body not to let chronic stress control them.
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Everyone’s attention tends to wander with age. Certain lifestyle strategies, such as working in blocks of time and practicing stimulating activities, can help people sharpen their focus and improve the brain’s executive function skills, such as planning, making decisions, and paying attention.
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Depressive symptoms that occur only in the winter months may be the result of seasonal affective disorder.
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Many types of trained professionals can help people with mental health issues. For example, psychiatrists can provide medical and psychiatric evaluations, treat psychiatric disorders, provide psychotherapy, and prescribe and monitor medications; psychologists can do psychological evaluations and testing and provide psychotherapy to treat mental disorders, but they cannot prescribe medication. The type of mental health care professional one seeks depends on his or her particular needs, including one’s condition, preferences, and the availability of clinicians in the area.
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Older adults who have trouble recalling past events often chalk it up to “senior moments,” but the problem is a breakdown in their episodic memory. While people can’t reverse the effect of aging on this type of memory loss, certain strategies can help a person learn and retain new information, better access past details, and use that knowledge in the future.
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Being optimistic was associated with a lower risk for cardiovascular events and an early death in a study published online Sept. 27, 2019, by JAMA Network Open.
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If dementia runs in the family, research suggests there are ways to perhaps avoid the same fate. Adopting certain lifestyle habits—such as engaging in regular aerobic exercise; following a healthy diet, like the Mediterranean, DASH, or MIND diet; not smoking; and keeping alcohol intake to no more than one drink per day on average—may offer protection against dementia, delay its appearance, and even slow its progression.
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