BEAUTY KLINIC

You hear a lot about the power of gratitude. On paper it makes sense, right? If you’re grateful for things then you begin to focus on what you have rather than focus on what you don’t have. However, when things are tough and life is full of challenges, it can be tough to keep gratitude at the forefront of our minds.

Why Gratitude is Important

Gratitude changes your perspective on the life that you’ve been given. When you have gratitude in your life you:

Look to others, and their faults and mistakes as blessings. Blaming no longer exists. Rather than to look at what you lost or what you don’t have, you simply look at what you do have and go from there.

View others with an open heart rather than a closed heart. This means that you feel compassion for others regardless of whether you have anything in common with them or not. A life filled with compassion is a happy and abundant life.

You will feel less judgmental of others. Gratitude enables you to see past people’s mistakes, and your own, and be grateful for their strengths.

Feel merciful towards others who are not in their best place or have not reached a place where they can look at the world from a place of gratitude.

Look at what you do have and be grateful. Concentrating on the positives in your life attract more positive energies. How is that? Whatever you cultivate in your life will begin to grow. If you want a good life, change your focus.

Gain Gratitude Abundance in your Life

Use a journal to record the things in your life that you are grateful for. Identifying your blessings makes you aware of them. We don’t give enough thought to such things and usually take them for granted. Think about the breaths you take each day and the food you get to eat when you are hungry. What about the people who make your life great and the pleasant surroundings you life in? Once you learn to recognize them, you’ll be amazed at how they begin to outnumber your challenges.

Practice gratefulness. You won’t become an expert overnight but with practice you will see a difference in your attitude and your life. Instead of going to sleep feeling weighed down, you can use that abundance of gratitude you have developed to sleep well and wake up unencumbered by worry.

Use gratitude in your everyday life. Some people develop rituals to make it easier to develop a gracious spirit. Wear gratitude jewelry get routine massages; spend time with friends; meditate you can also use your journal. Whatever brings you positive thoughts can be incorporated into your routine.

Help another person. We find deeper meaning in our lives when we make someone else’s life better. Volunteer with the homeless, give to charity, or do something nice for a stranger every day.

Clear out anything in your life that weighs you down. Attract more gratitude by removing negative people and attitudes that detract from your gratitude abundance.

Gratitude abundance is waiting for you to reach out and embrace it. The choice is yours, invite it in and change your life.

“New Year’s resolutions” and “better health” tend to go hand in hand. Whether the goal is get rid of unwanted weight, stop smoking, drink less, or choosing to eat healthier, many of changes people want to make are about living a healthy life. If you want to stick to your resolutions, there are a few key things you may want to do about two weeks before you are set to start.

Know your goals: Of course, your long-term or final goals are important? What are your short-term goals? Many people forget about short-term goals, which are essential to accomplishing your long-term goal. Losing 20 pounds in four months is a great long-term goal, but it can be daunting day after day.

Consider short-term goals for getting for losing those 20 pounds in four months. They can include eating two servings of fruit and three servings of vegetables a day for the first few weeks. After those three weeks, you can add increasing cardio exercises by six minutes each session for the next four weeks. With shorter goals you are, in essence, chopping the long-term goal into smaller more achievable goals, thus increasing your chances of actually losing those 20 pounds.

Know your weaknesses: If something near you has even a small chance of keeping you from attaining your short or long-term goal, get rid of it. Throw it away, relocate it to another person’s home, or drive an alternate route (if it’s a store/restaurant) to avoid it altogether. Don’t bother trying to see how strong you are by tempting yourself. It’s easier to admit your faults and keep them as far away from you as possible!

Substitute your weakness with something that will make you stronger. For example, buy some flowers, instead of your favorite fattening treat. Put them all around your house as a reminded of how good you are doing at reaching the long-term goal.

Get a support system: A support system is a good way to stay motivated because you will not want to let the people down who are holding you accountable. Enlist family members, friends, or even an internet health site as a part of your support system.

Keep a journal: A journal is a good way to gauge what you are doing through your journey towards accomplishing your long-term goals. Write down your feelings as you accomplished your day-to-day tasks. Ask yourself is you encountered any pitfalls and determine how you can avoid them in the future. Write down thoughts about your goals or life in general, being as upbeat as you can when recounting your experiences. As your week ends, read your journal from the page one to the most recent date to help you start the coming week inspired and ready to go.

To remind yourself of your goals, get a calendar for the New Year, two index cards, a marker, and a pencil. The first thing you need to do is write down your long-term goal on the index cards with the marker. Pin or tape one card next to the calendar on the wall and the other card on mirror in your bathroom.

On your calendar, write down the date that you want to accomplish the goal by and circle that date with a marker. Next take the pencil and jot the short-term goals on the calendar and circle those dates as well. You also want to write down all the basic daily things you will do (details of workout session, meal plans, water amounts, etc.), to reach your long-term goal in whatever organizer, notebook, etc., you use to write down important dates.

Applying these tips will help you reach your goals towards living a healthier life! Be sure to celebrate all your successes, big or small, and if you mess up a little, don′t give up. Get back on the road again.

After the many years I spent under the cloud of impending doom suffering from a severe long episode of major depression I believe they were the worst and the best in my life.

Allow me to explain and please don’t think I am under the influence of something because I am not, never been. Those years were indeed the worst but when I finally started getting and feeling better I came to realize that I came out stronger and more “philosophical″ so to speak.

You may wonder “yeah right”. But please believe me, after feeling so bad and desperate for not seeing results according to my wishes (you know, one wants to get better NOW or BY YESTERDAY), I had some time to think about life and its intricacies.

It’s strange how much time I wasted trying to figure out why and why me?, but when I started focusing on what could I do to get better?, things started to change for the good, slowly but changing nevertheless.

Major depressive disorder (also known as clinical depression, major depression, unipolar depression, or unipolar disorder) is a mental disorder characterized by a pervasive low mood, low self-esteem, and loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities. Persons dealing with major depression want to do nothing and stay in bed all day.

The term “major depressive disorder″ was selected by the American Psychiatric Association for this symptom cluster under mood disorders in the 1980 version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) classification, and has become widely used since.

The general term depression is often used to describe the disorder, but as it is also used to describe a depressed mood, more precise terminology is preferred in clinical and research use.

Major depression is a disabling condition which adversely affects a person’s family, work or school life, sleeping and eating habits, and general health. In the United States, approximately 3.4% of people with major depression commit suicide, and up to 60% of all people who commit suicide have depression or another mood disorder.

The diagnosis of major depressive disorder is based on the patient’s self-reported experiences, behavior reported by relatives or friends, and a mental status exam.

There is no laboratory test for major depression, although physicians generally request tests for physical conditions that may cause similar symptoms. The most common time of onset is between the ages of 30 and 40 years, with a later peak between 50 and 60 years. Major depression is reported about twice as frequently in women as in men, although men are at higher risk for suicide.

There is no way to fully understand why things happen the way they do, but when facing life challenges, face them head on and with faith, trust and help from family, friends and health care professionals or alternative practitioners.

I still have a long way ahead of me, I know. But I trust that if I ever face another episode of major depression, chances are I will be more prepared physically and mentally.

The biggest lesson of all, to ask for help. You don’t have to face your depression all by yourself. This mental illness is tough enough to do so. Seek help and support.

It’s so easy to get overwhelmed during these stressful times we are living in. The skill of combating stress is one that we can learn to achieve a heightened quality of life. A very effective way to battle stress is with cognitive redirection as well as focusing on positive aspects of our lives instead of negatives. By acknowledging any good fortunes in our lives, while not allowing problems and setbacks to take over our outlook on life is a simple, yet important way to deal with any stress we may encounter.

Many times it’s just easier to be ungrateful about the things we do not have instead of being grateful for the positive things we have been dealt or what we have achieved. These positive parts of our lives are often overlooked and taken for granted until some sort of disaster hits. All too often we can forget about having a roof over our heads, a warm bed and even a hot shower. Once we can identify those things for which we have to be grateful for, we have the perfect exercise for positive thinking, and it could actually change our feelings towards stress as well as balancing out the related effects.

The causes of stress can be related to many different factors however its definition is as a state where an individual is not in balance with his or her surroundings. We have knowledge now that the dissimilation between body and mind is of limited usefulness. Any type of trauma to the body can also affect the mind, just as negative thoughts can affect the body. Experiences of a stressful nature which prompt negative emotions can directly have an affect on body chemistry. In response to threat and stress, the production of hormones and other chemical substances, including adrenalin and cortisol is taken over by the body.

Fortunately the opposite also applies. A calming environment and positive thoughts can combat the physical and mental effects of stress. By taking a little bit of time out every day to concentrate on the positive - even as little as five minutes - you can separate yourself from the causes and effects of stress.

Problems can hang over the things going well, leaving a shadow and distorting perceptions. By learning to recognize those gifts of good fortune can drastically change our perspective. For example, we panic about uncompleted work instead of giving ourselves a pat on the back for our achievements. Especially in situations where stress is of a prolonged nature, it could develop into patterns of automatically jumping to negative conclusions. By focusing on those things that make us happy is quite the technique for disrupting that negative pattern of thinking, and thus reducing stress. It can even give our immune system a boost!

When you are stressed or tense, it may start out looking like quite a bit of hard work to identify those things you are grateful for. Practice and patience will provide you with the ability to take the time to smell the roses so to speak. At first it may be a case of hindsight being 20/20 but with time it will become automatic.

While training yourself to recognize the many reasons you have to be grateful, the amount of time you spend taking things for granted will lessen dramatically. Seeing that flower blooming will trigger the recognition for seeing the reasons for celebration. As this appreciation integrates into your daily routine and functionality you can, and will discover how this process will reinforce positive thinking as well as your capacity to deal with stress.

Hope and depression. They seem to be opposite but it is possible to have hope that you will overcome depression.

Lets rephrase that, it is imperative that you maintain hope about your future and that you will get better.

I know from experience, I have dealt with depression my entire life. Once thing I found out is that, although is quite difficult and sometimes impossible to have hope or aspirations while you are depressed, it is the only gift you can give yourself. Please don’t despair.

Hope, don’t lose it and don’t allow anybody to take it away from you. Hang on to it as your life saver.

Hope is what saved me and kept me alive. Even during my darkest moments, although excruciating at times, I learned that the hope of getting better and enjoying a full life was the main reason for me to keep living and therefore fighting to get better.

If you are a religious person, pray and keep faith. Spirituality has helped millions of people to overcome difficulties, including illnesses.

Speak to a priest, pastor, spiritual counselor, a doctor or a close friend. The main thing is not to close yourself up to the world. Please allow me to give you an advice here. Withdrawing is a “safe” place when depressed, but in the long run it makes the road to recovery slower and painful. It took me years to get this.

I know, speaking of your problems is not easy, especially if you are a parent, spouse or the main provider in your family. Our culture has created the wrong belief that mental illness is something you can just brush up and move on.

How many times we’ve heard, “you are just depressed, get over″. If everything were as easy as that. But you and I now how painful it is to live with the cloud of depression hanging over our heads.

How blurry everything looks when depressed and how the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness don’t go away no matter how hard we try. This is where hope and faith come in.

Although impossible to comprehend, don’t try to find explanations as to why are you depressed and why is this happening to you. That is a road to nowhere, instead focus your attention and efforts on getting better and overcome this terrible mental illness.

There is a way out of depression and you are not alone. I am here for you because I know what it is to be depressed and how lonely one feels.