Just like exercise, sex also improves your mental health. Regular sex will reduce stress, and anxiety and also make you happier.

Scientific studies have clearly shown that Sex i.e. Penile-Vaginal Intercourse (PVI)  directly correlates with an increase in your mental health. Sex whether  PVI or masturbation is very healthy for you. The benefits of sex are:

• physical
• intellectual
• social
• emotional
• psychological

Let us discuss in more details the emotional and psychological benefits of sex.

How can sex benefit your mental health?

If you are having consensual sex with a partner or having sex through masturbation, it will provide you with lots of benefits for your mental health such as emotional and psychological benefits. Sex is an exercise and provides all the benefits that exercise provide you such as improvement in cardiovascular, weight loss and over a feeling of wellbeing.

Studies suggest that sexual activity (defined as PVI) may correlate with:

• improved happiness with your mental health
• heightened levels of confidence, affection, and love in your relationships
• enhanced sense to understand, and express emotions
• At an advanced age, intimate activity will improve your well-being and capability to think. Research has discovered that sexually functioning senior citizens between 50 to 90 years of age have a better memory compared to their peers. Sexually active senior citizens are also less likely to feel depressed and lonely.
• Confidence booster
• Regular physical activity, with a partner or masturbation, will make you look younger. This is due to the release of the estrogen hormone.

If you have a partner, you must have regular sex with them, and if you are currently single you can gain the same benefits by masturbation.  Unfortunately, society tends to frown upon masturbation. It is a healthy activity.

Remember that there are two types of people, those who masturbate and those who lie that they don’t masturbate.

In conclusion, look after your mental and emotional health by having an active sexual life.

Read our article on Sexual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

All images are courtesy of Pixabay

December is here! It is the wedding season in most parts of the world and also the most beautiful time of the year with Christmas and New Year around the Corner. If you are reading this Blog, it is more likely that you are engaged already or about to be engaged to Your Sweetheart. While the first thing on your mind after you made a decision to commit for life would be to make your Wedding plans about shopping, venue, Cocktail party, Food menu, we urge you to Think about Premarital Counselling as an essential part of the plan too.

What is it?

Premarital counseling is much like planning your honeymoon with a Travel agent. It is quite likely that you can have an awesome honeymoon when you plan yourself too but if you have professional support you can ensure that you are fully prepared about all the challenges and questions that might be lingering in your mind.

Premarital counseling ensures that you have a healthy, strong and stable relationship with your partner. You can identify each other’s strengths and weaknesses quicker and be more prepared to face them than discover and deal with them later when the damage is already done. Premarital counseling focuses on the areas of marriage  that are at the heart of most marital problems like:

• Communication Styles
• Financial Responsibilities
• Core values and beliefs
• Role of each partner in marriage
• Intimacy, Sex, and Affection
• Relationships with the family of origins
• Parenting and Childbirth
• Dealing with negative emotions of your partner
• Quality time
• In-laws and their perspectives
• Life goals of each partner and careers

Major Benefits of Premarital counseling

• You will create mutual resolutions and goals for your marriage by knowing each other’s ideas clearly. When you discuss and know this beforehand, you have your hopes in place.
• You will be able to know specific patterns of your partner like; he/she has a trouble in saving money and you will not go crazy finding out why he does certain things and makes certain irrational decisions.
• You will be able to understand each other’s communication styles and have tools to improve it further. Good communication is the key to a good marriage.
• You will be able to dismiss the cold-feet easily that is very common to most people before a lifelong commitment. Premarital counseling will reassure that you are taking the right step and help you with specific areas that you can improve together.

It is a myth that Premarital counseling will take away all the fun from your marriage. Premarital counseling is important because it will help you ask certain questions that you thought never existed and make you ready to deal with those difficult situations. You will still have all the fun of discovery and learning in your Marriage.

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It is not uncommon nowadays to be attacked online by online bullies. Some mean-spirited people take a lot of interest in expressing their harmful and toxic views. These bullies spend a lot of time online and argue on harmless topics offensively too.

Since curbing your virtual presence is practically not possible in today’s world, here are a few steps you can take to save yourself from the Grind:

Avoid taking the remarks Personally

Although these people make sure that the negative comments have a unique personal touch for you, don’t take it personally. These people have their own issues in personality which often include Psychopathology too. There is a difference between expressing your resentment and tearing someone down completely to make yourself feel better. Understand that the behavior they are showing is about them and not about you.

Stop Indulging with them

When people show their resentment or views in a respectful and civil manner, only then engage with them. When they behave in a bad or disrespectful manner, use the ‘delete’ button. Do not absorb their toxicity. They have the right to express their views and you have the right not to listen to them too. Do not engage in hostility, instead use Mute, block, or delete whenever needed.

Focus on the Positive comments

Research shows that we attend to negative reviews and comments more than the positive ones. Even if the ratio of Negative to Positive comment is 1 is to 100, that one negative comment will bother you. Attend and embrace to the positive responses. You should be open to feedback in a proper manner and not disrespectful or dehumanizing manners.

Breathe

Find out some relaxing downtime for yourself as a part of self-care. Exercise, pray, meditate and take rest to keep things in perspective. Seek emotional support from your inner circle of friends, relatives, parents or spouse. Practice and deal with these situations with grace and Patience.

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The meaning of the word Resilience is to recoil or rebound. Resilience is your ability to come out of difficult times and overcome challenging times. Some people are born more resilient and some are not. However, Resilience can be taught and learned.

The virtue of Resilience will serve you well, once you have become an expert in it. You can always bring up experiences from your past, both emotional and physical to manage your difficult situations. One of the most important ingredients for becoming more resilient is to be more adaptable and flexible. You should be creative enough to imagine more possibilities so that you can expand and grow as a person.

Here are some of the ways you can build your resilience:

Accept Change

You have to accept that everything changes, and you will always be challenged by life by difficult times, obstacles both from outside and within yourself. It is important for you to know at such times that you have the capacity to meet all the challenges you face with confidence and determination.

Stop Your Negative thoughts

It is easier said than done. When you can keep a check on your negative thoughts, you can take positive actions. Negative thoughts will keep you anxious and worried. We generally fear that the worst of our fears will come true and if we think about all the things that can go wrong, we can get a solution. We are often just caught in the cycle of negative thinking and no action.  Break the cycle by shifting your thoughts to a positive or neutral one. Go for exercise, or walk, meditate, pray or engage in a creative activity. Break the loop of the record that plays negative repetitively and know that your thoughts are in your control.

Know your-self

Make a list of your strengths, accomplishments and accolades and do not take them for granted. Acknowledge that your are a sum of all these and you should believe that these qualities will stand with you through crisis and challenges. If you have faith that you will be able to face any challenge, you will!

Be a Solution- finder

Put your situations in perspective. You should learn to see any crisis and difficulty in context to the bigger portrait of Life . Understand and give thought as to  how this situation that you are preoccupied with currently, look in the bigger broader perspective of Life.

Have personal connections

This wil give you the support you need to get through life’s challenges. Have caring and reliable people, who can listen to you, advice you and do not make you feel lonely. These people will be your cheerleaders, supporters, and advocates who raise you when you are Low.

Take care of yourself

You often neglect yourself when worried, stressed and going through rough times. In contrast, it is essential to take more care of your mental and Physical health. Take time to meditate or just sit for 15 minutes when your mind is racing with thoughts and try to see the Reality.

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Diwali is around the corner and all of us are busy cleaning our homes and throwing out Clutter. This is one time of the year when everything sparkles, shines and lights up. Most of you must have experienced the uneasiness of a cluttered kitchen or messy workstation. Clutter builds up a lot of stress and this is now backed by science too that there are some major mental health benefits of decluttering.

Let us find out how decluttering can help:

Concentration is Improved

A study has found out that if you live in a physically cluttered place, you are more distracted and multitask more often. This will result in poor performance and high stress. If you have a cabinet full of organized boxes and stacked documents, you will be experiencing less frustration and improved focus. When you have a better focus, you can tackle all big and small jobs with better efficiency.

You are in a Better Mood

Staying in a cluttered space can make up feel overly irritated because your brain will process this as a situation in which you have a life that is scattered. It makes you feel sad. Decluttering your space will give you a real sense of achievement. A study has also found out that there is a correlation between cortisol levels and the number of objects in your home. The number of objects you have, the more stress you will experience.

Positive self-esteem

When you declutter, you have a lot of portion that you have to donate or recycle. Both these activities of donating and recycling will boost your self-esteem and increase positivity. Organizing and decluttering will also improve you as a person and improve your relationships.

Ignite creativity

In yet another study, it was found that if you stay in a clean and minimalist environment, you can be more creative. When you work in a clean, neat and organized environment, your creative juices start to flow. You can improve skills like writing, music or art more in a decluttered space. You will create a lot of space in your head and there is a chance that you will come out with your next big-idea soon.

Have a better sleep

You will have a problem with sleeping if you sleep in a messy room, more chances are that you will have disturbed and interrupted sleep. Your mind will never be at rest.

Increases Self-efficacy

When you declutter your space,you are making multiple descisions and solving several problems where you have organize your stuff in a specific space. It will test your reasonableness and quick descision making about whether you want to keep or discard an item. This will  make you more confident  in descision making.

If you have a lot of clutter around your home and workspace, most likely you are a hoarder and it is very difficult for you to throw away clutter; But The advantages of organizing and having a clutter-free space outweighs the negatives if any.

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Dysania is also referred to as clinomania; It is a condition in which you find it very difficult to get out of the bed and take that important first step every day. People with Dysania feel tired even after  8-10 hours of sleep on a regular basis and some people experience racing thoughts just to come out of the bed.

Symptoms:

• After a day at work, you want to directly go to bed, without having food or even coffee although you are very hungry.
• You are obsessed with sleep, which is impacting your interpersonal relationships.
• In spite of trying a lot and gathering all of your confidence to make a change in this direction, you are not able to break the pattern. You have tried to change time and again but failed.
• Sleep is always on your mind and you can trade off your quality time with your partner with sleep.
• Sleeping is more than just resting for you. You use sleep to escape your emotional up-downs. Every time you meet with a negative emotion like sadness, loneliness etc you go to sleep.
• You are habitually late for work because you find it very difficult to get out of bed, you have even missed interviews for the same reason.
• You have your best intentions to get out of bed and have an exciting day but any small excuse is good to keep you in bed for a few extra minutes, which eventually becomes a few hours and then days.

Self  Help:

• Have scheduled sleeping hours(ideally 7-8 hours a day)
• Go for a walk however difficult it may seem
• Drink a lot of water to stay hydrated; You will be less drowsy
• Grab a healthy Breakfast so that you can start the day on a good note
• Try to avoid caffeine before your sleep hours.

Seek professional help if these self-help techniques do not provide any relief; It may be necessary to investigate further in order to rule out a primary sleep disorder such as sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome. Talking with your health care provider about strategies to get more restful sleep and minimize side effects from medications can make a world of difference in how you start the day.

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Some of the young men who approach our clinic for counseling are lonely and want companionship and are looking for a lady friend.

The challenge faced by them is two-fold:

• Growing up they were either in single-sex school and didn’t have the opportunity to mix with girls or learn how to form healthy relationships with girls
• Indian media, especially movies made in India show the hero to be a stalker and this stalking leads to the lady falling in love with the hero. Unfortunately, this is only possible in movies as in real life women detest stalkers.

So how does a young man make a lady friend? The following pointers will make it easier for you to meet more ladies.

Be comfortable being alone: Your objective should be to make a good friend and not a girlfriend. Being around women will help you appreciate the conversations and things that they enjoy.

Be helpful: Help a neighbor move stuff, help a colleague with her assignment. Be kind, be generous, but don’t allow yourself to be taken advantage of. Your task is to be honestly generous instead of expecting a return,the consequences will follow if they have to.

Approach lots of girls: Be consistent in having conversations, don’t be shy in saying hello, and also step back if you don’t find her engaging back.

Do not be afraid: Don’t be afraid of rejection. Not every person you meet will want to be your friend.

Don’t make excuses: If you see a girl you find attractive, approach her respectfully. Don’t make excuses for yourself such as “she most probably already has a boyfriend”, “why would she be interested in me”

Have fun: If in your conversation, or interaction you aren’t having fun then please don’t proceed further.

Network: The more people you know, the larger your pool of friends they will have more friends and your probability of meeting more girls will increase

Take care of yourself: If you are well dressed and well groomed half the battle is won.

Giving compliments: Practice giving genuine compliments, don’t give fake compliments but make them genuine and realistic.

Be respectful: Be polite and respectful, don’t use foul language while in the company of girls. Unlike your guy friends, these are girls that you want to impress.

At the end of the day, you are looking to make new friends, and if this friend happens to be a girl and becomes your girlfriend you have achieved in making yourself and this other person happy.

What is a Toxic Relationship?

The foundation of a healthy relationship is mutual admiration and respect, but in a toxic relationship, this severely deteriorates over a course of time. Staying in such relationships for any duration could be unhealthy and quite unproductive. A toxic relationship is not productive for any of the partners.

Signs that show you are in a Toxic Relationship….

• You find yourself mentally, emotionally and also possibly physically drained.
• “Trust” is the major foundation of any healthy relationship. When trust is lost, you must be alarmed that the relationship is not going anywhere.
• Unhealthy and inappropriate Anger is one of the symptoms of a toxic relationship.
• Don’t be a judge for your partner, it could often go in directions you wouldn’t want it to be.
• Communication is the key to a successful relationship, but in a toxic relationship, the partners stop talking to each other.
• Disrespecting each other whenever you get a chance.
• Avoiding each other,  Not supporting each other, and dramatic upheavals

Coming out of a Toxic Relationship –

• Always remind yourself that the person you are with today might not be the right one for you, i.e., He/she might not suit your lifestyle, but he/she might turn out great for someone else and the same applies to you.
• Maybe both the people in relationship settle for a deal that involves minimum contact with each other. Introduce some space. Time always helps to decide, and when you have time completely to yourself it is much better.
• Never underestimate yourself and know who you are. You need to understand what you have to offer in a personal and professional relationship.
• If you are in a toxic marital relationship, share what you are going through with a family member or close friend.
• When you have decided to come out of the toxic marriage or relationship, take all safety measured required so that the other party cannot influence or harm you in any way. The best way to do this is by taking someone in your confidence and maintaining a safe distance. You can also inform local authorities if things seem going out of your hand.

Time to ask for help 

It is always good to work on a relationship that is negative if both of you are committed to making it better.  This is the time when either of you could seek professional help. You might also reach out to a counsellor individually or as a couple to sort out things. As a counsellor would have dealt with such problems before he/she might know the discreet entities that could/would be damaging the relationship beyond expectation. It is always recommended to visit a counselor as that could really help you revive the relationship if there is any scope or part ways if need be.

Read Also Mental Abuse

Post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD is the failure to recover after having a first-hand experience or just witnessing a Life-threatening or terrifying event.

Although the feelings of fear are natural after a Traumatic event and everyone has a range of experiences after the trauma, People generally recover from these immediate symptoms naturally without any help. Some continue to experience these initial symptoms for a prolonged period of time and develop PTSD.  Fear triggers split-second changes in the body to help defend against danger or to avoid it completely. Hence, When you are faced with a fearful situation, your brain goes into the “flight or fight” mode which is to typically protect a person from harm; However, When your body is in this alarm mode, you are under extreme stress. Likewise In PTSD, the person’s brain has these experiences even in a safe environment where they are not exposed to any danger.

 PTSD Symptoms Include 

Intrusive memories

• Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event
• Reliving the traumatic event as if it were happening again (flashbacks)
• Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event
• Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event

Negative changes in thinking and mood

• Negative thoughts about yourself, other people or the world
• Hopelessness about the future
• Memory problems, including not remembering important aspects of the traumatic event
• Difficulty maintaining close relationships
• Feeling detached from family and friends
• Lack of interest in activities you once enjoyed

Avoidance

• Try to avoid thinking or talking about the traumatic event
• Avoid places, activities or people that remind you of the traumatic event

Physical and emotional reaction Change 

• You get easily startled or frightened, hence a change in arousal
• You are on guard for danger
• Self-destructive behavior, such as drinking too much or driving too fast
• Trouble sleeping and consequently poor quality of sleep

Get Help:

After surviving a traumatic event, you might have PTSD-like symptoms at first, like the inability to pause your thoughts about what happened and experience the fear, anxiety, anger, depression or guilt associated with that. Hence, Support from a mental health professional may help to prevent your loved one or you to avoid any unhealthy coping mechanism which often includes Drug Abuse.

Also, read about Substance Abuse

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Agoraphobia is the fear situations where escape could be difficult, or you doubt that you would not receive any help if you are in trouble. It is a kind of Anxiety disorder. Most of the people having this Phobia develop it only after having more than one panic attacks. Hence, you avoid places where you might have had a panic attack in the past or feel that you will get one.

You might worry about Public transportation, Open and large spaces like bridges or parking spaces, Enclosed spaces like stores or movie theatres, crowded places and traveling alone. As a result of these fears you just go to a limited number of places so that you can cut down on the number of panic attacks.

These are some of the Symptoms you might observe in a Person suffering from Agoraphobia:

The physical symptoms

Symptoms are Similar to a  panic attack

• Increase in Heart Beat
• Fast and shallow breathing (hyperventilating)
• Pain in the Chest area
• Inability to swallow (dysphagia)
• Diarrhea

The cognitive symptoms

The cognitive symptoms are generally a result of your thoughts regarding your past experiences of a panic attack.

• You fear a panic attack because it causes embarrassment
• You fear that your heart will stop or you will not be able to breathe
• Fear that you might lose your  sanity
• You have a fear of Losing control in public places

The Behavioural symptoms

• You Avoid situations that could lead to a panic attack, like crowded places, public transport, and queues
• Inability to leave the house for long periods of time
• You need to be with someone you trust when you are going anywhere
• Avoid being far away from home
• Some people are able to force themselves to confront uncomfortable situations, but they feel considerable fear and anxiety while doing so.

Treatment:

All kinds of Phobias can be treated with Psychotherapy. Therefore, Visit An expert to understand, manage and overcome Agoraphobia.

How to manage your Symptoms :

• Have a plan for management and stick to that
• Learn to stay calm in these extreme situations
• Face your fears
• Stay away from recreational drugs and alcohol
• Do physical activity, have a balanced diet, and get enough sleep

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