I went to the doctor recently and was told, “you’d be surprised how many people are medicated”. When you consider the amount of people that drink, at times heavily, the number grow higher. I consider alcohol a form of self-medication similar to Prozac and Paxil. The question that strikes me is, why? Why are people requiring such high levels of therapy, medication and means to release stress?

I don’t think anyone can argue the simple point of, before Paxil and Prozac existed, no one took them. Pretty straight forward. So what did people do before these things were invented? I have the theory that they didn’t do anything, they didn’t need to. The human of today is not the human of yesterday. People didn’t have as much things to worry about as we do today. News was what the last person who came through town told you. Today, you can’t get away from news alerts about storms that happen 3000 miles away. Every hour of waking life is filled with TV, Internet, work, hobbies, etc. Even the games we play can be stressful. I’ve played a few that almost felt like work to accomplish anything.

One thing is for certain, people in today’s world have many times more stimuli than those before. Work, television, the Internet, we are bombarded by ‘noise’. Our brains are processing more than the brains of 200 years ago. It’s simply true. People 200 years ago didn’t have the Internet. They had the local pub or the family room. They talked, they interacted, they socialized face to face.

So what does that mean? What can we do about it? Anything? Should we just accept the fact that we are pushing ourselves and take the medication to help? I think the bottom is, the amount of stress we subject to ourselves due to life in the 21st century is more than the human body was meant to handle.

That said, we seem to be dealing with it alright. The average life expectancy is higher than it ever has been for the average person.  Is it all a facade though? Are we living better or just longer? Sure we go to the doctor, have clean drinking water, sanitized living conditions, and under those conditions the human body can live to a ripe old age. But are we living any better?

I like to craft my opinions around my own life. It’s the only thing I really have authority on. I myself work all day long. I work in the IT industry and have both a full time 9-5 job as well as do consulting on the side. l am constantly plugged in. I have this blog and several other websites I maintain. I check the Internet constantly for the latest news on software design and development and SharePoint related issues. But I don’t have the high levels of stress that others have.

I realized at my last place of employment that stress is just bad. It will eat you up and spit you out. So much so that I cut my commute in half, found a more relaxing position that was still interesting and realized the art of ‘not caring’.

What? Not caring? How can you not care? Easy. Just don’t do it. Now, that’s not to say don’t do a good job or don’t care so much you give up. It means, don’t care as much as you do about your family about you job, or the news, or the Internet. Having many lots of different stimuli isn’t going away anytime soon. We have to find a way to deal with all that stimuli. Some may use some type of technique like I have, don’t invest 100% in everything. Do a good job, do a great job, give 110% but don’t care so much about it that you’ll have night terrors. Others will take a medication that will biochemically counter act the stress levels in our bodies and tell our bodies to calm down. Which, honestly, I don’t find to be a terribly bad thing. If it helps, if it has a genuine reason, why not. Truth is, we are putting ourselves through hell and need to balance it out. If you need to meditate, not care as much, take something to help with the stress, do it. Our bodies weren’t meant for the stresses we put it through, it’s ok if it needs a help in dealing with things.

This is a primer post for my next topic, Anxiety. I have it and have suffered from panic attacks. I plan on posting some of my experiences and methods I’ve used to deal with it. Medication, meditation, relaxing more, I’ve tried many things. My next post will go over those things in the hopes it can help others.

We all have emotions. We all have all emotions in fact. Everyone gets happy, sad, angry and depressed. It’s part of being human. What is also true is that most people are generally happy, sad, angry or depressed. When approached with new situations, people will handle this situations generally with a similar mind set. If a person that is mostly happy most of the time, they will more times than not, be happy. It sounds simple doesn’t it? People that are angry most of the time are angry most of the time. The bigger questions is why? Because they, we, are wired, currently, to be so.

How we are built

What are emotions anyway? They are just chemicals. Complex combinations of chemicals flying around our brains. When we stub our toe an impulse is sent to our brains telling us that something has happened, something drastic. A sudden sharp pain has occurred somewhere. Our brains instantly activate the fight or flight paradigm. With our stubbed toe, we instantly get a feeling of anger and frustration. Sometimes we kick the chair over or throw the kid’s toys to the side of the room. Our brains have very quickly identified the situation as harmless and begin to shut things down. But, the release of chemicals has already occurred, and the anger we have may linger.

Now, imagine if our brains are wired in such a way to release that chemical more than the average person. What happens? We’re angry a lot. We approach most situations with that primary emotion of anger. We drive to work and yell at people. We get into fights with family and friends. When our team loses the game, we throw things.

Anger isn’t the only emotion at work either. This runs the whole gambit. Love, hate, sadness, happiness, and everything in between. I’m sure you have heard the expressing “they wear their heart’s on a sleeve”. But, as with all things dealing with people, no one answer is ever the only answer. We are just too complex for that.

Factors that play in

There are many factors that play into this. I am not saying that someone that is principally angry will never show some other emotion, it’s just not likely. Someone that is happy all the time does get angry. But, if you notice, they do so to a lesser degree. Someone that is angry all the time, does get sad. But it too is to a muted degree.

Life changes can influence our emotions as well. If you are a generally happy person, but you are placed in a high stress and highly confrontational job, you’re principal emotion may begin to change. We will modified ourselves to fit our surroundings. It’s a survival technique. Even though you were always happen at 20, you may be always angry at 40. The point here is what the principle emotion is at this given moment in your life. It won’t change day to day but may over a longer period.

Identifying your Primary Emotion

How can you tell what your emotion is? It’s very hard for people to see things about themselves. I’ve found that doing an objective exercise can help tremendously. Close your eyes and imagine you are some other person. Maybe someone you are a fan of, maybe a total stranger. Now, imagine this new person runs into you at the store, at work, on the street. Make it a real event, meaning a time that actually happened to you. Take a look at yourself, how are you acting? Do this many times for many past experiences you have. Are you generally behaving kindly, lovingly, angrily? If so, that’s it. You’ve just found your primary. This shouldn’t be very difficult to identity, the difficult part comes later.

And if you happen to see yourself acting in a combination of ways, that’s OK. There are no rules here. You may have one or two or three emotions that are at work. Each tugging a little to be the primary that you fall back to.

Identifying in others

What may help you identifying this in yourself is doing so in someone else. Take a look at your co-workers, friends, family. Are some generally happy, comical, sad, angry? Once you begin looking you begin seeing. Once you can see it in someone else, you can begin to see what yours is in you.

Changing the program

OK, so, you’ve figured out that you are generally behaving as if you were happy. Great! Happiness is the one of the better emotions to be your primary. What if you are generally angry? Sad? Are you locked into this forever? Not at all! The first step to any change in ourselves is identifying how we are now. You can’t very well change yourself if you dont’ know what you are changing yourself from. Most people focus on where they are going but don’t have a solid idea of where they are now. How can you know where to go if you don’t know where the starting line is?

Changing, though normally very hard, can be very easy if you do it in small manageable chunks. Don’t expect to wake up tomorrow and be happy all the time. Do try to wake up tomorrow and approach situations from the perspective of being happy. I don’t mean to fake happiness, I mean, imagine a time in your life when you were happy, and choose to feel that way now. Find something small in your day. Your kid’s smile, your dog’s wagging tail, your favorite TV show, a good meal, a pint at the pub, anything. If you want to strive to be more positive, make that your primary focus.

You know what all the emotions feel like, most people have experienced all of them. Pick one you like, and say to yourself, today I will be happy. Smile all day long, do the things that you did when you were feeling that emotion last time. Reward your behavior with positivity. If you find yourself slipping back into some other mindset, wake yourself up and say NO. We discipline or pets, kids, admonish our friends and family, why not ourselves?

Bottom line, we all have one way we generally behave. But it is not set in stone. Find your mindset, choose if you like it and if not, find a new one. It can be very easy simply because whatever you choose, happy, glad or even aggressive, you’ve probably already felt it at one point in your life and know how to feel it again. Now you just have to make a conscious effort to do so. Good Luck!

It’s strange how life unfolds for us. We are bombarded, or at least when I was growing up we were, with the notion of the nuclear family. Father, mother, siblings, grand parents, and done. I’ve had several friends that had that experience and I’ve had several friends that grew up as I did, in a multi-family environment. I say multi-family in the sense that no members of my dad’s side really communicated with my mom’s side. It wasn’t that they didn’t get along, they just had no reason to talk.  For me growing up in that environment, it really was two families. Two separate dynamics. One had a patriarch and one a matriarch. One had an educated, killer instinct mind set, one had a down to earth, salt of the earth feel.

So what, right? I had two families and that’s that. Close the book and end the blog. Well, the point really isn’t that I had two, the point is for all those that will have two, or more, in the future.  Couples still get divorces in this day and age. Children will still grow up in non-nuclear family situations. What about those situations where parents are fighting to keep a family together with the thought it’s best for the child. Is that really the best solution? Should parents force themselves to remain in a failing marriage just to keep the nuclear family together?  I think the answer is no.

Kids are very intelligent. They can perceive and pick up on even the subtlest of cues. If two parents are together, and miserable, that will translate to the children. How it will manifest is anyone’s guess, but it will put stress on everyone.

Should couples stay together for the kids? No. Absolutely not. Will it be hard on the children? Yes. The younger they are the harder it will be. But the question is will it be better to end things and spare them of the hardships that a troubled marriage will bring or bare with the relationship and trust in the nuclear family.

Even though my family was two. Even though my mother wasn’t with my father, I still ended up OK. I have an advanced degree, a good job, good salary and own my home. And yes, success is the benchmark. Why did I end up ok? Because my father and mother still parented me, even though they weren’t doing it under the same roof.

Co-Parenting in a divorced family is a somewhat new concept I believe. Even though the parents have decided to not be part of each other’s lives, they will always be part of their children’s lives. Coming to the agreement to no longer be married is no less important than coming to the agreement of how to parent a child. Agree to terms. Agree to responsibilities as parents. Communicate with your children what is going on at every step. They may be young but they are very intelligent.

Bottom line to this. Do what is right for you. Do what is right for your children. That does not mean subjecting yourself to 18 years of misery just so your children live in the same house as both parents do. You love your children, tell them that, shower them with it, agree to parent them with your ex and they will turn out just fine.

Just my two cents.

I have always wanted to share some of my experiences with others in the hope that it may help some. I also wanted to guide this site to be somewhat of a personal growth and development website. I plan on doing that but telling of my own life experiences, things I’ve done, mistakes I’ve made, and roads I’ve gone down and what I’ve found when I have. In some cases those roads were great ones, others they were dead ends and still others were just train wrecks.

So, with that said, I thought I would spend this first post talking about family. Mine is going through a tough time right now. My grandmother is ill, well, not ill, she’s 96. When you get up there that far it’s hard to bounce back from problems. About five weeks ago she went to the hospital with her heart beating too fast. The doctor said she needed to check in and slow her heart rate down. She walked into the hospital on her own steam but was wheeled out in a chair unable to walk. Now, I don’t mean to bad mouth the hospital, they are trying their best of course, but they gave her too much sedatives, a Dr. told us, and a large cocktail of drugs for her heart and other general aliments. Three weeks on your back, at 96, with too much sedatives takes it’s toll. She wasn’t able to walk when they discharged her, and hasn’t since. That was about 2 weeks ago. Last night she was admitted again because she said she couldn’t breath or swallow. She’s fine now though, still in the hospital, but can breath, swallow and is generally ok.

The bigger issue really is how an elderly or sick family member can both bring a family together and tear it apart at the same time. I’ve experienced both cases. When my father died, which i’ll go into in another post, the family came together and bonded during his illness. Now, however, it seems that my mother’s side of the family, it is my mother’s mother that is ill, is breaking apart. It’s sad for many reasons. My Grandmother surely sees it, and maybe feels guilty for it, I certainly don’t like seeing my family fight, but there’s so little that I can do about it.

I’ve chosen to do the only thing I could. Be supportive at all times, do not let myself get pulled into the fighting, do not take sides at all, offer comfort at all times. That’s very hard to do of course when you happen to agree with one side or the other. But, regardless if you do, there must be a balancing force in the equation. Even if someone is doing something egregious and terrible, is it really worth it to fight about it while a family member dies or is terribly ill? I’m sure some think it is, but I feel it puts extra strain on an already strained situation.  If you have ever found yourself in such a situation, how did you handle it?  What is the best way? Or is there even one? Every situation is different, every family is different, when such times come upon a family, I think its best to focus on that person, be there for each other, hold off on the fighting as best you can and remember all the good times you’ve had a family.

G. A. Miller