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*One of the public service purposes of this blog is to promote understanding of proper mental health. Incidents like the Newtown shootings made us realize that we have a responsibility to be educated about mental health, to make sure professional help is accessible to us and to help others get it. Guest blogger Ryan Rivera writes today about an issue I see frequently discussed in women’s blogs: anxiety.

Anxiety has become a buzzword among conversations. It has become synonymous with stress and the feeling you want to explode because things are not working. The Anxiety Disorders Association of America indicates that women are more vulnerable to anxiety. There are a lot of women who have been battling anxiety for years now. Experts agree that anxiety cases are becoming more common and that untreated anxiety can get worse over time.

Is anxiety on a roll?
What is anxiety all about? Why so many women are suffering from it? Anxiety is normal and part of every human’s reservoir of emotions. It helps people recognize problems and a need to solve it. Anxiety, in its positive form, can help you focus and perform at peak levels. In some case, however, it can be debilitating. It becomes a health threat when it lasts longer than it should or begins to muddle a person’s life. Stress and anxiety are perfect bedfellows that can wreak havoc to almost all aspects of life.

How prevalent is it?
A 2005 study reveals that generalized anxiety disorder is more prevalent in women. Anxiety is more likely to affect individuals who belong to middle socio-economic status. In most cases, anxiety sufferers are those who have been separated, divorced or widowed. Research suggests that anxiety has links with genetics. It becomes apparent when a person is under stress. If left untreated, anxiety symptoms may become serious.

What are the symptoms?
The symptoms most often develop around the age of 22 but it is not clearly understood why. Anxiety suffers often seen to avoid common activities such as shopping or even driving. Often, they may be either unable to sleep or sweating profusely. And, because the symptoms of anxiety often resemble symptoms of other diseases, some people are being misdiagnosed. They find themselves undergoing treatment not aimed at ending anxiety and its root cause. Anxiety is generally detected around 9 to 12 years from the onset of the symptoms. Worse, only a handful of sufferers get proper medical attention. Part of the problem is people are afraid to seek professional help because of the social stigma of being labeled as insane.

What causes women to be anxious?
Let’s face it. The world is not as safe as it used to be. Fear has clouded people’s minds. Uncertainties drive people’s anxiety in turn manifests physically. Experts believe a shift in cultural values is a main factor in the rise of anxiety cases. Women are more aware of their feelings and get more emotional. Unhealthy diet and poor nutrition are also factors making the body less able to cope with anxiety.

Experts believe women may be born to worry. Women’s brains seem to be wired to emphasize past experiences when encountering new situations. The female brain is also thought to use different brain circuits to learn from stress than the male brain, which may make women more susceptible to stress-related illnesses.

Where can anxiety sufferers find help?
If you suspect you are suffering from unmanageable anxiety, the first step is to seek the help of the family doctor first. A competent doctor can detect if you need treatment for anxiety or some other disease. Further treatment can be given by a mental health professional once anxiety is properly diagnosed.

What kind of support do anxiety sufferers need?
Support is important against anxiety. Significant others, family and friends should learn more about anxiety. Encourage the sufferer to seek treatment. Never criticize people for relentless worrying and give positive feedback for healthy behavior. Set specific and realistic goals. Never assume you understand what the sufferer is experiencing. Always lend a caring ear to what the sufferer has to tell you.

Most mental health professionals recommend family-based anxiety treatment. The challenge can be daunting. It is important to remember that with treatment, people with anxiety can live fulfilling lives with successful careers.

About the Author:
Ryan Rivera used to suffer from anxiety attacks for seven years. He now dedicates his life to writing articles that will help people with anxiety, stress, panic attacks and depression. You can read more of his writings at Calm Clinic.

When a tree falls in the woods it DOES make a sound and when a blog goes quiet, people notice!

I really don’t mean to keep taking these long absences from writing my blog but life just keeps happening to me (thankfully) and lately I have ended up doing a lot of unexpected projects, adjusting to a slightly different schedule for our family this fall and mostly doing lots and lots and lots of thinking.

Part of my thinking this month has been about this blog. I enjoy writing it very much and if nothing else, it is a historical record for my children to know what life was like for me. I hope that it also serves as a resource for people facing organizational challenges in their own lives or at least a bit of humor and entertainment watching me trying to struggle to organize mine. Sometimes it takes an enormous amount of effort to write this blog (like sorting through zillions of vacation photos and trying to put into words what will be a treasured memory for our family) but mostly it is equal parts of fun and challenge and something I really look forward to doing.

During my long hiatus, I have been shocked to hear that people actually missed my writing! What?! With all that is out there to read and entertain on the internet, why would anyone even notice? For some reason, my husband ended up being the bearer of all these tidings. He would often come home to report, “I was talking to ____ and he/she wants to know when you are going to finish writing about our road trip.” For all of you who sent these inquiries, bless you! You have warmed my heart immensely.

So for the organizational aspect of this post, I wanted to post about what to do when you get completely off track, like me trying to keep up with my blog. For me, it has been helpful to just stop for a bit, take a total break. (I do apologize for stranding my readers in a hotel in small town Illinois for such a long while, however. Perhaps you had abandoned hope of ever seeing the end of the journey.)

One of my profound thoughts during my break was that often we are organizing our own lives in exactly the right way for the circumstances we are currently facing, even though we may feel like we are disorganized or not reaching the right goals. While not writing my blog, I started a new homeschool year with my eldest daughter, started a new preschool year with my youngest daughter, did actual organizing projects for my own home (shocking!), jotted down ideas for numerous future blog posts, celebrated the loss of two teeth for my eldest child and the arrival of one for my youngest (is this a net loss of one tooth?), spent time with visiting grandparents and even scoured a large part of my house in a much-needed fall cleaning. It may be that writing the blog was not the “right” way to spend my time this month.

Then I struggled to determine a) whether to come back to the blog at all, b) how to come back and c) how to avoid a blogging void in the future. It is tempting to want to appear completely planned and ordered in how you conduct your life or business but the truth is that a full and interesting life often has too much going on to be able to control it to that extent. No matter how much we button down one area of our lives (like our housekeeping or work productivity) something else always suffers for lack of attention (health, sleep, stress level, relationships, finances, nutrition, exercise, etc. etc. etc.). Being an organized person means sometimes letting go of organization and knowing how to pick up the mess later.

As for me, my plan is to finish up my road trip first. That posting series is obviously of interest to many but more importantly, it is personally important to me to have a record of that journey. Once done, I am going to experiment with a change in format. While I generally start with a monthly theme, I am not sure this format is serving me well.

I like how monthly themes organize my blog, make it easier to summarize and easier for someone to jump in and pick up on the conversation without too much effort. On the other hand, it doesn’t really reflect how I (or anyone else for that matter) live life. It is a rare person who isn’t continually juggling one task to the next (home improvement disaster today, emergency involving a loved one tomorrow, business crisis the next day, etc.). The more realistic format would be lots of random posts on all kinds of things as they arose. But it is harder for readers to pick up on a blog written in this style, would force me to get out of my head faster and onto the blog and puts a premium on keeping up with the posts.

So for October, I am going to try a crazy blend of both styles. There will be a theme: Organizing for School Success (important to me as a homeschooling mom) but also a lot of random posts on other things too. I have a lot to catch up on.

If you are reading this month, I would really appreciate your feedback at the end of the month on whether you like or dislike this new format.

I am glad to be back with you and thanks for hanging around! Now, back to the road!

On my to do list this month was to listen to and review Marcia Francois’ eCourse: “Break Out of Overwhelm,” which was provided as a gift with purchase of her new book, Live Organised.

My month has continued to be jam-packed with critical tasks and the feeling of “overwhelm” is definitely there. It was even a bit overwhelming to think about listening to a seminar on coping with being overwhelmed! I knew that the seminar would likely require me to do something and I just wasn’t sure I even had the energy to do that.

However, since I committed in writing on this blog that this was one of my goals, I decided to just get started. It was late one evening and I thought I would just put the audio on and replay it later if necessary.

To my great surprise, this audio course was not overwhelming, was easy to comprehend, had a lot of interesting things to say and had easy steps to start the de-stressing process. It is just over an hour long.

While I won’t go into detail about what is in the seminar, here are the topics I found most interesting:

• 3 organizing personalities (how to tell which one you are, what to do to focus yourself for each type)
• The first super-simple thing you should do when you are feeling overwhelmed
• How to decide which expert sources you should consult for organization, time management, etc.

I started following her advice and I have to say it is working already. No, things are not perfect and I still have far too much to do but I do feel more control over my life and more calm.

A few things I learned from this experience that are not actually in the seminar are:

1) If you are seeking meaningful change in your life/organization/productivity, etc., get in the habit of reacting to good information (making a plan, asking a question, etc.) rather than just passively reading or listening. I am guilty of this too. If you subscribe to Ramit Sethi’s emails for example, he is always asking you to do something with his information. I believe that is really the key to seeing change. It doesn’t matter whether you “know” the information; what matters is whether you “use” it.

2) Marcia Francois is a fearless delegator, which makes her quite unique. I am curious to learn more about her delegating methods.

3) Professional/life coaching is something we should all think about doing. Today’s workplace simply doesn’t have time to help us become better at our jobs, move up to better things, identify knowledge gaps or help us plan for upcoming employment shifts. But just because the workplace doesn’t give it to us doesn’t mean we don’t need it. If you don’t take the time or have the skills yourself to sit down and think about your goals and talents once or twice a year, hiring someone to help you do it is a great idea.

What is the first thing you do when you feel overwhelmed? Have you benefitted from coaching? Please share in the comments.

"Children from school No. 2 in the Italian district Terrace nr. GeneSt. Many of these children spend their summer vacations in the canning and fruit picking settlements where their parents go to work during the season." Feb. 8, 1910, Buffalo, N.Y. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

As you may have noticed, I missed posting entirely last week! I have not yet recapped April and May nor given you a theme for June.

I don’t know if that has ever happened before in my 2 years of blogging. There is nothing wrong just overly busy. Our home remodeling project has required more of my time than I was planning for and we then had to add on top of that several birthday parties, ballet rehearsals and life in general. It was just too much.

At this time of year, I imagine many parents are in the same boat. While one might imagine that having a summer “off” would be great and relaxing, in practice I don’t think very many parents have time to think in summer, much less relax. Why is it so busy?

For some parents it could be the adjustment to a new schedule. During the school year, things are certainly always busy but there is a predictable routine to it all. Now that school is out (or nearly out), simple things are about to change for many parents. For example, you might be used to making a quick grocery run sans kids in about 20 minutes. The same trip with children might take an hour. It takes more effort to clean and tidy the house when more people are about and more time needs to be spent preparing meals, doing laundry, and driving to activities. Summer vacations consume a lot of time, money and effort. Summer camps and classes do too.

In our homeschooling household, summer isn’t really time off but rather an important part of our academic year. It is one of the few times of year when homeschooled students have the opportunity to mix in with other children so for us that means extra effort to socialize and drive to activities and classes. It is also time to start planning curriculum for the fall.

So, after you tally up all the extra demands on your life, it’s no wonder things are busy in summer.

How can you reduce your stress in this situation?

Honestly, all I can answer here is that I don’t know and that if you find out, please tell me! Organization certainly helps but sometimes there isn’t even time to organize. On this point, I am turning to a professional for help, namely Marcia Francois, whose new book Live Organised just came out.

This is on my June reading list. I bought Marcia’s book when she was offering a special promotion where you could get a copy of her eCourse “Break out of overhwhelm.” (If you didn’t know, Marcia is South African and I love her use of the English language.) If anyone needs to “Break out of overwhelm” right now, it is me!

So for June, on my blog I am going to cut myself a bit of slack. My blogging goals are to:

• Post random odds and ends about things I am organizing in our life lately.
• Finish up my gardening and summarize the garden-related posts from the last two months.
• Read and review Marcia Francois’ book and eCourse.

Thank you for reading and sticking with me. Curiously, I think it might be helpful both to myself and to you to keep blogging during the busiest times of my life as that is the time when we really need to put our organizational strategies to the test.

Do you forecast a hectic or relaxed summer for yourself and/or your family? Please share in the comments.

"Officers' quarters mock-up. Closet open." (1959) Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

"Mrs. Cecil Rhodes, residence at 100 E. 65th St., New York City. Closet" (1944). Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

If your life was like mine in September, it was busy and perhaps a bit frantic.  Unfortunately, the bad news is that life for the next few months is only likely to get busier and busier as we head into the holiday season.

A quick list of things to do includes:

1)      If you celebrate Halloween, decide on/order/make costumes and purchase treats.  Pencil in all the fall festival/Halloween-themed events on your calendar.  Perhaps you may want to make a Halloween tulle wreath like I showed last year.  (My task for today is to hang mine from last year on my door.)

2)      Get informed about the candidates standing for election in your city/county/state and make plans to vote on November 8.  Vote411.org is a great website for this information.

3)      Start thinking about your Thanksgiving dinner generally and/or travel plans.

4)      Start thinking about your Christmas or other holiday activities and/or travel plans.  The folks at organizing blog 100 Days to Christmas remind us that there are 81 days and counting.

5)      Plan for end-of-the-year business activities.

That’s a pretty big list to add on to all the everyday life things going on at the moment!  Take heart that even professional organizing coaches are getting a bit overwhelmed.  Stever Robbins, the Get-it-Done Guy, posted a question on his blog: How do you deal with fundamental overload?, confessing that he too is a bit overscheduled at the moment.

So what can you do to feel a bit saner?

Schedule Time for Relaxation and Rejuvenation. Kacy Paide of The Inspired Office suggested in her weekly newsletter that it is time to mark out time on your calendar for the important things so they don’t get lost in the holiday  rush.  In her case, Kacy was penciling in yoga classes.

Appreciate Yourself. Don’t beat yourself up for what you are not getting done. Recognize what you are achieving and give yourself credit.

Keep up your organizing efforts. Even if you only have 5 minutes here and there, keep up your organizing work.  You may feel frustrated that you are not able to finish anything but know that every 5 minutes of progress you make is reducing your stress and moving your goals forward.

This month at Ruly, we are going to focus on clothing and closets.  Yes, we have done this before, but this time we will come back to revisit some new aspects of this topic.

In the Washington area, we tend to have schizophrenic changes of seasons.  The transition from summer to fall is always hard to judge…one day it’s hot and the next it’s rainy and freezing.  Sometimes it is warm all way into November!  This makes the closet organizing tough.  You can’t pack up all those summer clothes and you still need the winter clothes available.  If you have space, you can keep all of your clothes out and just move from one side of the closet to the other.  If you don’t have space, you have to do the best you can shuttling between closet and storage boxes.

The organizing this month will stay fairly simple to keep stress levels low.  We are going to focus on how you can streamline your closet to the essentials of good fashion.  Of course, you are going to have to take all of my advice with a grain of salt and adapt it to your own tastes, body type, profession, climate and budget.  I look forward to learning from you what you consider to be the basics.

Check back tomorrow for our first installment of Ruly fashion essentials!

HACKBERRY, La. – 2nd Lt. Angela K. Fry hugs her cousin Stephanie G. East, of Hackberry, La., after East and other family members were rescued from flood waters by the Louisiana Army National Guard after Hurricane Ike. Fry knew her family was there, but lost phone contact with them before discovering the Guard had brought them ashore to safety. The Eros, La., resident is a member of the 528th Engineer Battalion, 225th Engineer Brigade in Monroe, La. (U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Rebekah L. Malone, 225th Engineer Brigade Unit Public Affairs Representative). From the Flickr Creative Commons.

Every time you go through an emergency situation, you learn a little bit more about survival tactics, physical and mental.

After the recent back-to-back earthquake and hurricane events, I learned that after the initial danger of a disaster has passed, you need to take a moment to relax, to celebrate life, to appreciate that things could have been worse, to recognize that you are fine and to realize that people are tough and that life goes on. You can’t just go from emergency situation back to “normal” without passing through this transitional state for at least a brief moment.

After the earthquake and aftershocks, it took several days of normalcy to remember that the earth isn’t always going to shake violently at unexpected times and that this only happens once in a while (hopefully!). Some things that helped me cope after the earthquake:

1) Check-ins from family and friends. About an hour after the earthquake, I received a nice phone call from a neighbor who just wanted to check that we were OK. Later, phone calls poured in from family members as well. It’s a simple but meaningful gesture that helps you realize that you are safe and that there are many people out there who care. The act of repeating your situation over and over again sometimes can desensitize you to the situation and help you start to view it more objectively as well.

2) Stress Management. While it is true that the east coast earthquake was relatively insignificant in terms of physical damage, it definitely caused a lot of stress. Sometimes you need to take a moment to acknowledge that you are stressed out, afraid or overwhelmed and process what happened rather than pretend that it all was no big deal.

3) Humor. Humor is a complex coping tool. At the right moment, it is incredibly helpful but at the wrong moment, it trivializes the situation and can be offensive. Once you have calmed down, the use of humor is very healing. It was so helpful to read hilarious Facebook messages from friends who had been in the earthquake and who can forget the famous lawn chair photo.

Many of the same coping mechanisms applied to our hurricane recovery. However, the biggest help was that after the hurricane, we had a sunny, beautiful day. It was such a relief to see good weather and sunshine to signal that the danger had passed.

The human mind is tough but it works overtime in disaster situations. Taking a moment for rest and relaxation is important. It is also important to recognize that others you work with or depend upon may need this stress relief time for themselves. If you are an employer, for example, give your employees some time off to go home, hug their loved ones and recover before asking them to get back to work.

How do you destress after a traumatic event like an emergency situation? Please share in the comments.

"Pumpkins....and it is not even halloween!" Photo by Roger Price. From the Flickr Creative Commons.	Christmas at Barnacles, Photo by Barnacles Hostels. From the Flickr Creative Commons.
Baku in Christmas. Photo by Sefer Ibrahim. From the Flickr Creative Commons.	"Christmukkah." Photo by Marissa Mullen. From the Flickr Creative Commons.
Thanksgiving table. Photo by Ryan Dickey. From the Flickr Creative Commons.	"office christmas party group photo." Photo by Andrea Allen. From the Flickr Creative Commons.

Here we are at the start of another new month and it is generally the time to announce a new theme.  As I was thinking through the themes I had planned for October, November and December, however, I realized that soon (and perhaps already) general holiday busy-ness/craziness is coming.  So, rolling with the punches, I am going to loosen up my themes for the next three months.  There will still be three themes but I am going to mix and match them together as needed.  We will mix fun things with the things that just have to get done.

The three general themes are: emergency preparedness, holiday celebrations and entertaining.  So, by the end of 2010, I aim to help you prepare at a basic level for the most common emergency situations while enjoying your holiday celebrations with less stress and more joy.

To kick off the month, I want to talk for a moment about holiday stress.  I can hardly believe that on October 4 this topic is even necessary but if laid-back me is already feeling some of the stress, I assume other people must be as well.  It’s the subtle cues that are throwing me off….the radio announcements about Christmas events, the displays in stores, the people who already have their Halloween costumes and are visiting the pumpkin patch.

Did you know, for instance that the folks at Organized Christmas already started their Christmas preparations August 29?  You can attempt their Holiday Grand Plan calendar now but you are already a month behind!  You have even missed their sister site, 101 Days to Christmas which started September 15.  Does reading this get your blood pressure rising?  Do you worry that everyone else must know something you don’t?

While being prepared is a good thing, there is such a thing as being too prepared.  Too much preparation breeds perfectionism, ridigity and oddly enough, stress!  Yes, the stress you are trying to avoid by planning ahead can sometimes increase with too much planning.  How?  Perhaps you are becoming frustrated that other people are not also planning ahead like you are.  Last-minute changes/emergencies?  What a disappointment!  You’ve been planning this for months! Perhaps you are making things excessively complicated because you tell yourself that you need to spend three months on something instead of one week, a day or a few hours.  Perhaps once the big day finally arrives you are so tired of celebrating that particular holiday that you just want it over with (or you are preoccupied with whatever is the next holiday/to-do item) rather than just savoring the moment.

What is overplanned to one person is last-minute to another.  Your priority is to do what makes YOU happy taking into account the needs of the people closest to you.  If everyone else around you plans 8 months in advance, you might have no choice but to begin at least some of your holiday decision-making in April.  If they all wait until the last-minute, your best course might be to simply announce what your plans are as soon as you know them.  If you can be flexible, you might invite people to join you and have one plan for last-minute arrivals and another for last-minute cancellations.

It might help you to look at the holiday worksheet I posted last year to plan out how much time/money you will likely need to get through the holidays.  Thinking about your higher level life goals a la Stever Robbins may also be appropriate here.  Focus in on what is most important and put all the other activities in the “optional” column.

Once you have in your head the plan that makes YOU happy, then step back, relax and let everyone else do what makes them happy.  Perhaps the person Christmas shopping in July really enjoys starting that early.  If so, let them have it!  I won’t start until after Thanksgiving.  And both of us can have a wonderful holiday!

I thought a few personal anecdotes would bring home the diversity of holiday preparation strategies out there:

“Rule #1 of being a crafty chick: NEVER volunteer your services for the holidays.

My room has turned into freaking Jo-Ann Fabrics after offering up knitted accessories for Christmas gifts.”

–Brittney in Chicago, “Never Again: The Christmas Saga (To Be Continued),“ Standards Are For People Who Have Options blog, October 4, 2010

“I have officially declared that THIS year is the year of “handmade Christmas” and got all excited and started making IMMENSE plans. I mean, we are talking EPIC.

And thus I have begun.

Please spare me the discussions of,  ”But it is October!” and the infamous, “You’ll have a two-week-old at Christmas!”

I KNOW! That is why it is vital that I have already begun my preparations. DUH!”

–The Ing Family blog, “Christmas Part II,” October 4, 2010

“About a decade ago, I was the perfectionist Christmas fairy. I started mailing out cards before Thanksgiving. I made dozens of batches of rolled-out sugar cookies, so that I could choose the most symmetrically shaped ones, scraping off the excess frosting with the back of a spoon to keep it all smooth. And I spent so much money on gifts for everyone I had ever met —just to make sure I didn’t miss one — that I mostly ate rice and beans all of January. . .

The thing is — I didn’t really enjoy those Christmases past, when I gave my spirit to the season so entirely that I nearly passed out. It all felt so obligatory. . . .”

– Shauna James Ahern a.k.a. The Gluten-Free Girl, “Quiet on Christmas Eve,” December 24, 2007.

So, whatever you decide to do (or not do) about your holiday preparations this year, I hope that Ruly can be a place of refuge for you where you can get some fun ideas, some organizing help and useful advice, and some motivation and share your own projects, to-do lists and stories.  If I start stressing you out, please let me know and if you have any suggestions or specific questions you would like to see addressed, please let me know in the comments or drop me a line at info@beruly.com.

Breathe. Relax.  Enjoy October!