Ms. Pooja Naik

Being confident is a very essential quality for all human beings, irrespective of their age or profession. Boosting up your confidence level will not only make you feel good about yourself but will also help you to keep your feet firmly on the ground ,no matter what situation you have to encounter in your daily life. Self -confidence also helps you to create a very good impression of yourself and gives you an edge over others, especially when you are trying to seek a job or representing your company or educational institute.

The following are eight proven ways to bolster your level of confidence:

1. Think positively. Positive thinking can help you see the better side of every situation you confront. Thus, it can increase your confidence level.
2. Being prepared to face new challenges in life and accepting those challenges is another crucial step for improving your level of confidence.
3. Volunteer for different causes and activities. You may consider volunteering for social causes or you may also volunteer for different activities at your workplace or institution. This is a very important step for boosting up your confidence.
4. Try to visualize your success. If you can see it before your eyes, you can achieve it too. Imagining yourself as successful will automatically elevate your confidence level.
5. Find out the true purpose of your life. This will add meaning to your life and thus, can increase your confidence to a whole new level.
6. Connect with others more often. Staying alienated most of the time can bring down your confidence level. The more you connect, the more confident you will become.
7. Never underestimate yourself and your abilities. Have a strong belief in who you are and what you are capable of. This can make you more confident.
8. Try to stay fit and healthy. As we all know health is wealth. Being healthy and fit always will make you feel good about yourself and will thus enhance your level of confidence.

Along with the aforesaid tips, remember to smile always. A bright face will automatically make you appear more confident to others.

As a parent, we all love our children deeply, and most of us will agree that these days parenting is very demanding and exhausting instead of pleasurable and joyous process. What has changed? It is not that children are any different. The difference is in the environment around them with stronger social influences; and this also affects the way we parent. In today's more democratic and egalitarian world; 'Do as I say and not as I do' style of parenting does not work. But, 'I will do as I see you doing' phrase from kids define our parent-child relationship.

With change in social environment and influence, our strategies for correcting their behaviour and impart discipline has to undergo adaptation! When there are so many confusing and conflicting signals reaching out to our kids from their environment, whether we like it or not, we are still their role models.

How positive parenting style will help?

The core principle of positive parenting is to accept your child as an individual. We are in a democratic society and family is a small yet important part of society. Democracy does not mean allowing disrespectful and irresponsible behaviour; rather to effectively help kids change their behaviour and create harmonious and cooperative relationship with them. It also means that we as a parent need to learn to think, act and react in a different way.

Through positive parenting, you will learn respectful disciplining methods, which would work better than demanding compliance. Through these principles and tips, you will get your child to listen without screaming, nagging, reminding or evoking rebellious behaviour. More importantly, this is all about building stronger relationship with your children and nurture them through early childhood to teenage years as they become independent, responsible, capable, kind, happy and successful young adults.

Tips to get you started:

1. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity, including children.

2. When your kid misbehaves, instead of shouting or hitting, control your anger and respond in a calm and respectful way. Calmer but firmer tone and lower voice, yet not giving into their repeated demand, is much more effective as a discipline tool compare to nagging.

3. Understandable that you have a lot on your plate, such as work, managing and keeping the home in order, managing meals and other outside responsibilities, kids sports or extracurricular activities, family obligations and so on. It is easy to get lost in all these 'have to do' activities. Parenting shouldn't be just one more task to deal with. Reconnecting with your parenting goals and aspirations periodically will help take the stress out of it and add fun into it. Spend some time daily (10 minutes will do as well!) to just listen and enjoy your child (without correcting them or giving them suggestion to improve!).

4. Let your love for them be the driving force. Shift your internal conversations from 'have to' to 'want to'. As you do enormous things for your child each day, think how you are supporting their ambitions. How you are helping them become independent and strong. How you are nurturing qualities like compassion and deep listening by extending yourself.

5. Give promises and keep them. As your children grow, they need much more than your words to trust and rely on you. Keeping your promises, letting them know if you need to change the plan, taking their opinion in appropriate matter will go a long way.

6. Seek to understand and do not impose yourself on your child. Especially when they are in their teenage, as a parent, you have a lot of worries, you are afraid of them making mistakes and of course you want to protect them from vices. Listening to them while keeping your focus on genuinely understanding them is the only way to go, when they know you understand them and they can trust you, the street between both of you turns two way street! They will be open to your wisdom and suggestion when they are at the cross road.

7. Last but not the least, 'be a role model'. Don't preach. If they see you disrespecting others, they will not respect you. If they see you hooked on your smart phone; that is their license to keep theirs in front of their eyes 24/7. If you are hooked in front of the TV till late night and haven't picked up a book in last 6 months. Advice about reading is going to fall on dumb ears. In short, be the change you want to see in your children.

8. Have family nights at least once in a week, play cards, board games or go for a walk together. Talk and listen. Just be there and listen without judgement and criticism, without thinking about how to correct them. Just enjoy each other's company and see how they are changing their opinion about you. Positive parenting doesn't mean you will never have problems in your family. You will? if you are alive and growing family. Positive parenting style will open up the avenues to keep communication alive; it will open your children to your influence. Isn't it something that we all wish for!!

Do you have a habit of getting too anxious about minor matters? Is your severe anxiety hampering the smooth functioning of your daily life? Is anxiety giving you headaches, causing insomnia and making you paranoid? All these conditions imply that you are suffering from anxiety disorder. There are several types of anxiety disorders with various symptoms, and there are effective treatment procedures for curing them as well.

Signs and symptoms of severe anxiety/ anxiety disorder: The signs of anxiety disorder vary from person to person, but one common major symptom is severe fear, tension and worry even in petty situations.

Emotional symptoms:

The common emotional symptoms except fear and tension include the following:

1. Feelings of great apprehension or a dread feeling
2. Problem with concentration
3. Feeling overly tensed
4. Always anticipating the worst in any situation
5. Feeling restless and irritable
6. Watching out for danger signs in everything
7. Feeling mentally blank

Physical symptoms:

Anxiety is much more than being just a feeling and several physical symptoms are observed as a result of the body's response to severe anxiety. The most common physical symptoms are as follows:

1. A pounding heart
2. Excessive sweating
3. An upset or dizzy stomach
4. Enhanced urge for urination and diarrhea
5. Breathing problems
6. Muscle tension
7. Feeling twitches and tremors
8. Severe headache and excess fatigue
9. Sleeplessness or insomnia

Coping with severe anxiety:

In order to cope with anxiety disorder, you should follow these tips:

1. You should connect with other people as being lonely or isolated may trigger your anxiety. Meet friends or join support groups. You should share your feelings with a loved one to ease the anxiety.
2. You must start undertaking relaxation techniques such as mindfulness meditation, progressive muscle relaxation or deep breathing. These help in reducing your anxiety and make you feel relaxed.
3. Regular exercise and work out is a natural stress buster and relieves anxiety. Practice different types of exercises strictly every day.
4. You must get sufficient sleep as lack of sleep boosts your feelings of anxiety and tension. You should get nine hours of undisturbed sleep every night.
5. You should reduce your intake of alcohol and caffeine products, which worsen your anxiety.
6. You must train your mind to stay calm. The habit of needless worrying must be brought under control. You can undertake strategies such as creating a worry period, challenging the thoughts of anxiety and accepting uncertainty in life.

The self-help strategies for coping with severe anxiety can be quite effective. In some cases, fear and anxiety attacks become very severe and cause great distress in a person's life. In such cases, professional help is required. Certain behavior therapies can be undertaken for eliminating severe anxiety.

Anxiety often leads to the development of phobias. An unreasonable fear of being in social situations is known as social anxiety or social phobia. People suffering from such a phobia may be afraid of specific social settings like public speaking or generic social events such as eating with others or using public telephones.

They are afraid that they will embarrass themselves or be humiliated in front of others. Being in such a situation can often build up into a panic attack. In many cases, the person himself is aware that his fear is irrational but cannot overcome it. Hence, here are a few tips to overcome social phobia:

1. Relax: The first thing you need to do is learn to relax. People with phobias often anticipate them and stress themselves out before the situation can present itself. Being anxious heightens sensitivity and worsens your response to a social situation. Hence, before stepping out or meeting someone, take a deep breath and relax. Instead of focusing on the stressful situation, think about something in the future like getting home to a nice cup of tea.
2. Test yourself: Make a list of the situations that you are afraid of and anticipate the level of anxiety you think it would cause. Then test this hypothesis by putting yourself in the situation. For example, if you fear walking into a crowded room, try doing it once. You may find that you cope with the situation better then you anticipated. Keep a record of these hypothesis and test results.
3. Practice doing what scares you: Some situations may scare you too much to dive straight into them. In such cases, practice what you would do if you were in such a situation by yourself or with someone you trust. Run the situation in your head and imagine what you would do if it were actually happening.
4. Look around: Social awkwardness is often caused by imaging that people can read your thoughts and thus focusing on them rather than the people you are talking to or the space you are in. Train your mind to notice things around you and be aware of your situation. Focusing outwards can lower your anxiety and enhance your ability to hold a conversation with people. To make this a habit, whenever you walk into a room, make a mental note of three things in the room.
5. Ask questions: An easy way to shift focus from yourself to people around you is by asking questions. When you ask someone a question, listen to their response and if you still aren't comfortable talking about your own views, ask another related question. This will not give your mind time to dwell on any negative thoughts and can even increase your social circle.

Anorexia is one of the most common eating disorders plaguing a large section of today's youth. Anorexia is one such condition which arises as a psychological ailment and then culminates as serious physical manifestations. One of the most prominent preconditions of anorexia is the severe dissatisfaction with your body. The desire to lose weight constantly reigns supreme in your mind. So much so, that all that you can permit yourself to eat and all that you can't preoccupies your mind entirely. This extensively impairs your social life and threatens your potential in all other aspects of life. This undermines your health and self-confidence tremendously and inflicts a distorted body image complex upon your psyche. 

Under the spell of anorexia, you tend to dread even the slightest weight gain and consequently, it builds a sense of self-disgust in you. It can be an extremely stressful and harmful physical condition, gravely affecting your moments of joy and happiness. Drastic diets, excruciating exercising or using laxatives and diuretics could be some of the most common leeways into anorexia. The terror which looms around your weight gain will disable you from acknowledging how thin you are or for that matter, appreciating the body that you have. This may not only jeopardize your normal body functioning but also subjugate you to acute emotional distress and depression. What is worse is that anorexia works in such insidious ways that in most cases, one doesn't even realize the existence of the problem. The first and foremost step to recovery is to avoid anything and everything that may trigger the condition. Other recourses that one may take have been enlisted below.

1.        Realizing the difference between dieting and anorexia
 Anorexia often indicates deeper problems like depression and insecurities and the eating disorder simply emerges as a consequence of the same. Dieting does not entail an austere denial of food to self or completely throttling all of one's hunger pangs. Fulfilling the basic nutritional needs of your body as against starvation is the first step to recovery.

2.        Seeking advice from well-wishers
If your loved ones seem perplexed about your health conditions, know all of it is well founded. Learn to acknowledge the furzy body images that afflicts you and take proactive steps towards combating them. Share your problems with your trusted ones and learn to adopt a healthier way of living. Join some productive engagement that will keep your mind off such baseless weight obsession.

Life is full of challenges. We all have our own ways of dealing with stress and strains of life. But, a strong sense of resilience can make you different from others. Winners don’t do different things, but they do it differently. That’s what you need to keep in mind. While there are hundreds of strategies to deal with stress, you need to learn the best ones to increase your sense of resilience. The more resilient you are, the better is your chance of succeeding in life. Your power of resilience is like an armour that will guard you in the battlefield of life. Here’s all that you need to know about how to become more resilient. From personal tragedies to occupational hazards, you will be able to deal with everything under the sun by following the tips below:

1. Acceptance towards change: It is important for all of us to accept a simple fact that life is dynamic in nature. Nothing in our lives is permanent. Situations and events change in our lives, bringing occasional bliss or sorrows. Therefore, if you realize the fact that change is an indispensable part of life and be a little flexible, you will automatically become more resilient.

2. Be realistic: You must have a realistic outlook towards life. Don’t let your mind be preoccupied with fanciful ideas or build castles in the air. Realism and pragmatism are the fundamentals to a healthy living. If you have a pragmatic mind and understand the real problems in life, you will not lose hope too soon. Therefore, you will be more resilient than others as you have already prepared yourself for the worst things in life by understanding the reality.  

3. Control your emotions: It has been often noticed that when scuba divers drown, they are still left with enough oxygen in their tanks. It is because they have pulled off their oxygen masks at the time of danger. Researchers believe that most of us, when in danger, lose our senses and start panicking. This worsens the situation and aggravates the problems in our lives, destroying harmony and peace. Therefore, a person with better sense of resilience has better control over his emotions as well. Don’t freak out or panic at the time of danger or get depressed over an issue for long. You must have a fighting attitude in life and be prepared to face the worst.

4. Be a good communicator: It is quite true that most of our problems can be sorted out by communication. If you maintain proper communication with people and yourself and keep all channels of communication open, you will have solutions to various problems in life. This boosts your confidence and sense of resilience.