Health and medical information

The working-through process may at first seem difficult and confusing, but it isn’t. Some people can feel daunted and overwhelmed by the amount of effort needed. It is worth it. Everything which is required from us during the working-through process will be given back to us in the sheer joy and total freedom of recovery.

The working-through process is the same for everyone. The only difference is our personal threshold to stress. Some people may have reached the point where they cannot tolerate even the smallest stress. Other people may have a higher threshold to stress, but it is still low enough to trigger fearful thoughts.

The time it takes people to recover will vary. The individual threshold to stress comes into account, but the amount of effort and discipline we put into our recovery is most important.

The first attack was the result of either a build-up of stress or a major life stress. In other words, the anxiety and/or attack happened when we reached the limit of our individual threshold to stress. This doesn’t mean we are weak. It simply means we have reached our limit to stress, just as most people will reach their limit to stress at one point or other in their life. Continual worry about the symptoms of anxiety and attacks only increases our stress and lowers our threshold to it.

As we begin the working-through process it is helpful if we have an understanding of how low our threshold to stress is and how high our anxiety is.

If our threshold to stress is now extremely low we may not be able to tolerate even the smallest daily stress. Our threshold to stress would be zero, while our anxiety level would be ten. At level five we would be able to tolerate the daily stress/es, but would find our anxiety level rising if there is a break in our normal daily routine. At level ten we would be able to deal with almost any stress without becoming anxious.

The working-through process means working to increase our threshold to stress back to normal levels, while decreasing our anxiety level.

It’s no use just hearing or reading about panic anxiety management skills. We have to practise them. There have been occasions when we say we’re not getting any better, and nothing has changed. If we are not getting results it usually means we are not practising enough, or even not practising at all!

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All people have biological cycles that govern their days and nights. Called “Circadian Rhythms,” these rhythms include sleeping, waking, hunger and changes in body temperature and hormones throughout the 24 hour day. The timing of these cycles is linked to the ability to fall and stay asleep instance, as we fall asleep there is a drop in our body temperature. We wake up as it starts to rise again.

Research shows that there is a natural tendency to stretch tow twenty-five hour cycle. Events in our daytime schedules—mealtime, bedtime and time of rising—serve the purpose of re-setting the cycle to fit the 24-hour day. You can probably see this happening, to a small degree, on M morning after you allowed yourself to go off your usual schedule during the weekend. This is also the experience of “jet lag”—when the event experience don’t fit with your biological clock.

Most people don’t have trouble maintaining a twenty-four hour cycle. But for children whose sleep cycles have strayed, this is asking

Sometimes we ask children to go to sleep when their bodies are not ready the sleep cycle. A child would understandably be grumpy and hard to live if his rhythms were not in sync with the clock of his world.

John just can’t seem to get to bed at a decent hour—we always battle bedtime. When he was eleven months old he wasn’t ready to go to bet 11:00 pm. We gradually got it down to 9:00 pm. Then at a year and ñ we noticed it had crept back up to 10:00 pm.

Biological rhythms influence sleep in several ways.

It may be necessary to purposefully take control of your child’s sleep if they have gotten off kilter.

Daytime routines are important to maintain biological rhythms an resulting sense of well-being.

If you implicate biological rhythms as a part of your child’s sleep pro changes need to be made in gradual increments so that a shift of cycles can occur smoothly.

When your child is sleeping better and more regularly, you can expect a happier child.

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To find out which cause applies in your case your doctor should check for other symptoms. For example, if you are coughing yellow or green phlegm it is probably infection. If you are coughing blood, it could be cancer or blood clots on the lung. If you feel more short of breath when lying flat than when sitting or standing, your heart is probably not working properly. If you or your doctor can hear whistling sounds with your breathing, you probably have some partly blocked bronchial tubes-

Often your doctor will be able to tell the cause just by taking your history, examining you and arranging a chest X-ray, but sometimes other tests, such as a lung scan, may be advisable.

Once the cause is found, it may be possible to correct it. For example, pneumonia could be treated with antibiotics, clots on the lung with drugs to thin the blood (anticoagulants) and anaemia with a transfusion.

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