Special Report: The Brain
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You can control your emotional wellness

ost of us can choose behavior that will make our lives and emotions smoother. If you are predisposed to anxiety or depression, then stress, anger and isolation can worsen matters.

Luckily, experts recommend several strategies that can help you be happier and more productive:

• Express yourself. Talk over your feelings with a friend or a counselor - even just yourself. Studies show keeping a journal can help you vent your feelings and better analyze your options.

• Identify stresses. Most people acknowledge the big stresses in their lives. But subtle stresses - a minor marital miscommunication, an ambiguous work assignment, a child's school problems - take a toll. Acknowledge these tensions, so you will be able to act to solve them.

• Balance challenge with success. If you set goals for yourself that are too easily met, you'll miss out on feeling triumph after working hard to meet a challenge. On the other hand, goals set impossibly high lead to frustration and feelings of failure. Strive for difficult-but-doable.

• Get recharged. Few people can work non-stop without suffering burnout and plummeting productivity. You get more accomplished in the long run if you learn how and when to "recharge your batteries." Pace yourself and schedule breaks during the day. On weekends, relax. Learn the value of vacations.

• Exercise to counter cortisol. Your body releases "fight-or-flight" hormones such as cortisol during high stress. These trigger an accelerated heart rate and other changes that scare us into a state of high alert. Aerobic exercise is a great way to constructively channel such hormones. Some studies suggest that regular exercise can soften depression and anxiety, relax muscles, even induce a "runner's high" exhilaration via the release of endorphins.

• Don't drown your sorrows. Although alcohol temporarily blunts the effects of stress hormones, it typically leaves you feeling worse than ever because it depresses the brain and the nervous system. One study looked at people who consumed one drink a day. After three months of abstinence, their scores on standard depression inventories improved.

• Analyze your anger. In his new book, Life-Skills, Duke University behavioral medicine researcher Redford Williams, M.D., recommends asking yourself four questions before deciding to act on your anger: Is the matter important? Are your feelings appropriate? Is the situation modifiable? When you balance your needs with others', is acting on your anger worth it? Only if you answer "yes" to all four questions should you act: problem-solve, assert yourself or consciously accept the situation.

• When your anger isn't a signal to act, deflect it. When those four questions net one or more "no" answers, defuse your hostility: Reason with yourself, meditate, distract yourself or tell yourself "Stop!"

• Cultivate the relaxation response. Yoga, meditation, progressive muscle relaxation and biofeedback allow people to exert sometimes astonishing control over their reactions to stress. Try this next time you feel stressed out: Inhale a deep breath through your nose and hold it for five seconds. Slowly exhale through your mouth as if blowing out a candle. Let your shoulders droop forward as you exhale, and visualize stress leaving your body. Repeat this several times whenever you find yourself angry or tense.

  By Jim Thornton
  Thornton received a 1998 National Magazine Award for health reporting.