I’ve gotten this question many times over the last couple years and only recently do I have a complete answer. Like everyone else, getting trusted information from what’s available online has been a bit frustrating. Even at psychiatric conferences, I felt some of the answers from my colleagues seem to conflict. There’s still a lot of unanswered questions but I feel it is important to share where things are at in tracking this nationwide trend.
In psychiatry, we usually think of energy as a way to describe how we are feeling mentally and/or physically. For example, depression tends to be associated with less energy, while mania is associated with increased energy. However, we can also look at energy in a big picture kind of way. The physical world and our bodies appear through the eye of nuclear physics to be a latticework of energies, in which the body is surrounded and permeated by an energy field which carries information.
Contrary to popular wishful thinking, most of us still need about 8 hours of sleep a night which translates to 25 years of our life asleep. We live in an increasingly 24/7 society where sleep is not a priority and can be regarded as an unnecessary diversion of time that could be better spent elsewhere.
“Here’s proof that you have a mental illness: Have you ever been in love? And then realized at a later point in time that your beliefs and feelings about that other person had no basis in reality?” so said David Granirer at a recent mental health conference where he spoke about using comedy to confront mental illness and its public stigma.
Has there ever been a behavior, urge, or thought that you may have enjoyed but felt you could not control that effects your life or bothers you? These behaviors could include gambling, stealing, sexual behavior, compulsive shopping, fire-setting, Internet use, overeating, hair pulling or skin picking.
