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Pre-Surgery Blues and Jitters

Rick Wirtz — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:42:00 -0400

Surgeries come in two flavors, elective and non-elective, and both can be the source of significant worry and, at times, depressive thoughts and feelings. Regardless of the type of surgery (elective or non-) the reality is that there is almost always something wrong with our body or the promise of something that might go wrong in the future if something isn’t done now.Depending on the site of the surgery, the impact on our daily...

Nagging Worries and Racing Thoughts – 4th and Final Part

Rick Wirtz — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:51:00 -0400

There are lots of cognitive therapy techniques that are used to combat worries that just can’t be shaken, so I will only mention just a few more of them that are really very easy for most of us to use. As we all know, anxiety and worry are all about the future. They are about things that have not yet happened and often never will and yet we torture ourselves...

Nagging Worries and Racing Thoughts – Part 3

Rick Wirtz — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:28:00 -0400

As I said last week, solutions and strategies for the nagging worries and racing thoughts can be placed in one of three categories – environmental interventions, cognitive / behavioral interventions, and physical / physiological interventions. Environmental interventions are just what they sound like, changes in your living environment. Last week I spoke...

Nagging Worries and Racing Thoughts – Part 2

Rick Wirtz — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:27:00 -0400

So, the worries and racing thoughts have you, huh?! Well don’t feel bad, you are not alone and there is actually some predictability to when you are most likely to be troubled by them, as mentioned in last week’s blog. That predictability allows you to identify some strategies that work in the situations that arise most often. So, lets map out a strategy to give you a fighting chance to overcome the worries and racing...

Nagging Worries and Racing Thoughts

Rick Wirtz — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:19:00 -0400

Being diagnosed with a serious illness, particularly one that is life threatening is almost always accompanied by anxiety and worry. Lots of questions fly through your head. Will I survive this? What happens next? Can I endure the treatments? How will my family be affected? And on and on and on… Fortunately for most of us, the worry begins to diminish as answers to the many questions become available. Sometimes that comes in the form...

Personality and Cognitive Changes That Accompany Disease and Treatment

Rick Wirtz — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 08:38:00 -0400

Serious illnesses and the treatments for those conditions can have many effects on us. They may limit us physically in lots of obvious ways based on the nature of the illness and the types of treatment. We usually expect those and are not too troubled by them because they are fairly common or because we’ve been told to anticipate them by the medical team. However, sometimes those changes can involve our personality and/or our mental...