Depression is a problem that affects millions of Americans each year, and many more people are not aware that they may be suffering from it. Fatigue, loss of interest in usual activities, malaise, problems eating and sleeping - these all characterize forms of depression.

Here’s some tips on how to fight depression:

1. Recognize that depression may be what you’re experiencing, and decide to deal with it instead of avoiding it; stay open to feedback from friends or loved ones about what they’re seeing from you.

2. Seek out the help of a trained professional. Talk with your doctor, or seek out a psychiatrist or mental health nurse practitioner who can talk with you about a possible antidepressant medication. You may also benefit from talk therapy, or counseling, to deal with the underlying issues associated with your depression.

3. Get active: engage in moderate physical exercise daily to reduce depressed feelings. This can be difficult when you feel fatigued or disinterested, but it helps.

4. Get Vitamin D/get outdoors: vitamin D helps fight depression.

5. Take Omega-3 fatty acids, either in liquid, capsule or food form (cold water fish). Talk with a physician or a nutritionist about what’s right for you.

6. Get support from friends, family, people close to you.

7. Journal your feelings regularly to see what may be the source of your depression, if there are events or people that trigger your depression.

8. Ask yourself if there are things happening in your life that need attention, or if you are not getting any major needs met in your life at the time. Sometimes, situational depression can be a result of events that stoke depression.

There is help from depression, and some of these tips may assist your recovery. Seek our support from those closest to you, and ask for help from professionals who care.

When we’re not living in our heads - in the regrets of the past and in the hopes for the future - we’re living safely in the present moment of our lives. Nothing too special, just being at peace with what is unfolding moment to moment. It’s what ‘is’.

Losing ourselves in our minds is an o.k. place to be while planning or daydreaming, but to get lost there and forget that the presence that we are - who we really are underneath it all - is there, waiting for us to attend to it.

Our work, relationships, thrills, and pain often reside in the past or the present. We fixate on things, people and experiences that are unfinished for us, and become resistant to moving on. People become emotionally frozen in time, and find it impossible to live presently. They forget about the very breath right under their noses.

With guys, who tend to go to their heads to solve problems, it becomes more difficult for them to tune in emotionally. Not being able to tune in emotionally, we fixate and circulate in our heads, trying over and over to fix our problem or dilemma, but never really getting anywhere.

Learning to live more in our lives - in the present moment - reduces some of the illusion and fantasy we carry with us. Sometimes this takes the help of a professional counselor or therapist, who can help unearth the frozen emotions. When we can learn how to develop emotional intelligence, tune into our bodies for the information we need to fix ourselves, and stop overusing our heads to figure it all out, I think we can start to develop the presence we need for greater happiness and more fulfilling lives.

(Taken from “Mentality” for men monthly newsletter, October edition. Sign up at www.phoenixmenscounseling.com)

The compromising of trust is such an infectious and widespread problem, especially in intimacy and relationships. Distrust corrodes relationships, breaks down friendships, prevents career advancement and creates a schism within ourselves that widens over time.

In intimacy, the number one problem I hear women discussing is how they don’t trust their guy. They may be holding onto distrust from past incidences, or they may be reacting to things that you’re doing to stoke that distrust today. But the barriers that distrust creates block real intimacy, sexual connection and the chance to deeper and strengthen a relationship or marriage.

There are a myriad ways in our culture to erode that trust: other women, a sexually repressive culture, divorce, excessive behaviors and addiction. In our culture, men are taught to stuff their feelings and emotions, which automatically both magnetizes us to those “erosion behaviors” and sets the stage up for distrust to come.

Questions to consider in the building of trust:

• Are you a man people can trust and rely on?
• Do you make a practice of doing what you say, when you say it?
• Would others say you compromise their trust at times? How so?
• How do you deal with others emotions? Can you listen and accept them when others are down and need support?
• Do you focus your emotional or sexual energies on other women, and not your wife? (e.g. thinking about other women, excessive masturbation, pornography, even flirting with other women)

A theme that I refer back to is the idea of values vs. behaviors. Are you practicing what you preach? Are your deeper values producing behaviors in the world that line up and are consistent? If not, what prevents them from mirroring your values?

Values could be anything like these:

• You see a vision of a strong and healthy relationship in your life, which may be different from past relationships
• You believe in truth and honesty, and seek to communicate those values through your behaviors
• You want people to know, like and trust you - do you give them reasons to do that?

If you’re in a relationship now, or would like to be, I’d invite you to open this discussion up with your wife, girlfriend or partner. Talk about the insecurities that come up, and the blocks or potential threats to building that trust. If you want to build more trust, ask your partner how you could go about doing that if you suspect your relationship could benefit from more trust.

Without a rudder, it becomes really difficult to steer our boat. We get tossed about on the seas, swing this way and that. The sense of direction is lost, and our journey is haphazard and without focus momentum.

Finding purpose — whether that be in our relationships, work, play or friendships — is outfitting your boat with a rudder. Actions and behaviors become intentional, and they become filled with a focused purpose. No longer are we just victims of circumstance or of our own lives.

Many people without that purpose, without that inner knowing, enter and exit situations within their lives in a very indiscriminate way. Without purpose, we are left to our impulsive mind to take over. And often times, that impulsive mind makes decisions for us that are not aligned with our deeper and truer purpose. We get into relationships that we look back on and think, “That was really not good for me in the long run.” we take jobs that we don’t really want to take, and spend money in places that we don’t really mean to.

Developing purpose is like bringing a high-powered laser into the equation. We have a very powerful tool in which to create a focus and energy to direct towards those people, places, and experiences that will enhance our sense of purpose, and fulfill those ideas about how our lives should be led, which makes us happier.

Connecting to that purpose — not just identifying it — is just as important. Learning how to connect regularly to that which brings us purpose is critical to our success and our happiness. Creating a regular relationship with those things that bring us purpose reinforces our sense of purpose and continually teaches us how to spend our precious time, energy and resources. What’s just as important is to identify those roadblocks and barriers to finding our purpose, which in some cases, can be just as much of a pursuit as going directly after our purpose.

Conflicts get fueled when one partner unconsciously reacts to the other partner’s behavior, and then the snowball starts. It accumulates, picks up speed, and, before you know it, the snowball is mammoth and careening down the mountain towards an imminent destruction of whatever lies in its path. Let’s work on ways to keep the snowball palm-sized.

1. When one person is angry or upset, watch your reactions. Are you able to be aware of your emotions and your tendencies to make the situation worse? What do you traditionally do or say, or, rather, what would your partner say that you do to contribute to their reactivity. If asked, what would they experience you doing to them that fans their flames, so to speak?

2. Be present to the feeling, not the thoughts, that arise in your body. 99.9% of the time, relationship partners speak from the head, which, for guys, is “natural and normal”, yet makes it all worse. When you’re angry, are you really angry? What does your body have to say about it. Are you heating up - in your chest, in your stomach, in your head? Stay with that feeling, and try to not figure out why it’s there. Stay in your body, and speak from wherever in your body is heating up. It’s a more direct experience of what’s going on, instead of talking from your head and messing things like you’re used to.

3. Take a breath. Hug your partner. Throw a joke into the mix (not one which might hurt your mate). The idea is to de-fuse the situation, and stop the snowball from careening down that mountain. If you can reset, start over, and depressurize from all that accumulated negative energy you both have helpd to create, you’ll have a better perspective on the argument. Most of the times, couples forget what they’ve been arguing about in the first place, and lose themselves in the details. So, breath, step out of yourself for a second, and stay present without avoiding your partner.

Try these tips to help you fight fair, and have more productive conflict. The fact that you want to argue with awareness says you care about the relationship, and even if those things don’t work, they will the next time. With persistence, keep going, and keep trying.

They may not have fangs and live in coffins, but you know the type: those people who, when you walk away from a conversation with, it leaves you feelings drained, depleted and angry - almost like you had the blood sucked out from you. These so-called “emotional vampires” are there to instictually stun you, drain your essence and leave your carcass in their wake.

What to do? How to fend yourself? It takes a little more creativity than just wrapping a garlic bulb necklace around your neck, so let’s talk about what to do.

It all kind of depends on the type of a relationship. Emotional vampries can range from your social vampire at a party, to the best friend vampire who drains you over the course of years. Maybe you know both types, and maybe you fall prey in both ways.

Learning to disengage from the person, and to say ‘no’ is the first step. There are classy ways of making yourself “extinct”, especially at parties. A quick excuse, or the old “pick and roll” (finding another victim, introducing them to your new vampire acquaintance, and then sliding out of the way) will work at a party.Kindly (and gently) stepping out of a conversation with that person, as to not hut their feelings, yet keep you protected behind your forcefield, is essential to taking care of yourself.

On the other hand, having a close friend who is avmpire is trickier. I would suggest that you have an honest conversation about your feelings, and admit to them that you feel invisible, drained and unimportant when you talk with them won’t hurt anybody. Being able to create airtime for yourself is taking care of yourself, and pushing back against the torrent of words is tricky but not impossible. Also, setting boundaries about what is talked about in conversation is important: telling your friend that you don’t want to talk about a certain topic anymore, or that you feeling uncomfortable or are confused about what they want from you, are good segways to changing the conversation.

These are quick fixes, but standing up for yourself and for getting what you want take some time. Be patient with yourself, try and try again, and know that you can’t count on people changing - you can just change your own perspective and how your engage with that person.

Getting men into counseling is sometimes one of the harder aspects of counseling. Men who will commit to the process are sometimes resistant to get help until the problems have accumulated to the point of breaking - often the 11th hour.

One of the problems that men experience is a failure to diagnose the problem as it is accumulating. It’s hard for anyone to be able to be fully aware of what the problem is, when we’re in it. Our perspective is pretty skewed when we are in the midst of our own problem, yet for men, it’s difficult to ask for help, which compounds the problem.

Taking the first step to ask for help is half the solution. Just getting into talk with a therapist or counselor is a great start, but making the commitment to come in on a regular basis is just as important. At times, especially for a guy in a relationship, they think that having a “good week” with their wife or girlfriend means that they can quit counseling. Not true. Just because the week might go well, which is good, doesn’t mean that men have their relationship problems solved. Sometimes, the counseling work in do with men in Phoenix, Arizona, is deeper than than, and requires more time commitment.

A lot of time, it’s the wife or girlfriend who initiates the first step to get counseling for their guy. Then, the guy will come in, often times as a couple. Women often are the initiators to getting help to fix or save their relationship, but not always. As the traditional caretakers, I often talk with women who are more outwardly concerned about preserving their marriage than their guys are.

Men work very successful in therapy when it is solution-focused, and there are skill-building exercises and homework for them to do. They feel most successful when those things produce results in their relationship, which spurs them on to continue with the counseling process.

I thought that this article could relate nicely to the article on “yes men.” It’s about getting what we really want with our lives, and our jobs.

Can you see yourself not at your job in six months? Are you experiencing that dread, that low level chronic dissatisfaction that starts to snowball into anger and general irritability?
I’ve totally been there. I used to let “life” happen to me, meaning that I would kind of wait it out, for that “right” moment or opportunity to come in and whisk me away. Guess what. It didn’t happen.

I had to come to the conclusion that, in order to be happy in my work, I had to take the bull by the horns and start to activate. The hardest part, for me, was taking responsibility and ownership for the fact that I am the only author or my life, and other people, situations, and job settings were merely the supportive or background players. It was up to me to start to make the leap over time.

So, with that in mind, if you are not enjoying your current job and want to get out, consider these 5 questions to help:

1. Consider happiness/money formula: Can you live with the money, or is the money getting old and you want some “soul satisfaction”? Is the money all that great, that you sacrifice other things, like your time, happiness, relationships, stress, whatever?
2. What can you really see yourself doing for work? (This is a tough question, so sit with it). If you’re not doing what you really love doing, then what keeps you in your current job, and how does it keep you? A lot of times, guys I counsel don’t know what they want, but they just get attached to the suffering in their current lousy job. If you found your passion, what would that look like? Sketch out that plan on paper, and share it with someone close.
3. What resources will you need to start to put your plan into action? Money? Time? Family/friends/partner support? A new resume? A vague sense of what you really want to be doing? More education? There are lots of possible resources that you might need, and the trick is to identify them and get them down on paper.
4. What are the pros and cons to staying in your current job? List them out. Do a massive brainstorm to list out every possible factor that contributes to your happiness or misery, and then weigh them against each other. Rank them according to importance.
5. Lastly, what are the barriers to your professional “end zone”? Look closely and carefully now. What walls, fences, blockades do you put up in front of yourself mentally, that end up undermining your own success? This is a harder question, so I want you to sit with it for longer. Sometimes, we don’t even know how we keep ourselves imprisoned. Sometimes we play the victim. Sometimes we make excuses. Sometimes we wait for the world to happen, like me.

With these 5 questions in mind, start to consider making the change that you’ve wanted and thought wasn’t possible. Start to “live your bliss” and do the work that you were meant to do, and the world was meant to have you do.

Are you the type of person who, when it comes right down to decision making time, pushes aside your own desires and needs to meet everyone else’s? Do others say you’re you just too damn nice?

“Yes Men” are in abundance just as much as women who can’t say ‘no’, and this may be you. Being unable to say ‘no’ can happen to you anywhere: at home, at work, with your family or friends.

The basic idea is this: you succumb to the fear of not saying ‘no’ by saying ‘yes’ when you don’t really want to. Saying ‘yes’ is easier, and allows you to not deal with the fear of saying ‘no’.

By saying ‘yes’ all of the time to people and situations that we really don’t want to, we collude with our fear of being abandoned and rejected by others. When we say ‘yes’ when we don’t mean to, when we’re doing what others want us to do, we lose our spines by not standing up for ourselves. By being “yes men,” we become “less men.”

Learning to take a stance and say ‘no’ is important for our growth as men, and as people, partners, employees, sons, etc. To learn to assert oneself and to understand that saying ‘no’ is actually practicing self-care, we start to look at our dilemma through a more positive lens. To continue to say ‘yes’ when you don’t mean it, it’s not honoring yourself.

When we stay true to ourselves, we can compassionately learn the difference between what we want, which is good for us, and what we don’t want, and how to communicate to others that difference. When we’re confused about what we want, we allow others the opportunity to exploit that indecision, and then we give up and hand over our power to others.

When we know what we want, others respond accordingly. I know we fear taking a stand, but it actually works in reverse. People and situations bend towards us, as opposed to other way, when we know what we want, communicate it and act upon it. Taking stand won’t kill anyone, so, as the mystic Bob Marley once said: “Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights.” I’m sure ol’ Bob would support your efforts.