Lifestyle Choices

Living in a large city is not always safe. Wherever large numbers of people are gathered together, there is always some risk of infection. During an epidemic it is easy for disease to spread quickly from one person to another. The more dense the population, the greater the danger.

Out in the country the risk of infection may be somewhat less. The protective forces of nature often help to prevent disease. Many germs are destroyed by the heat of the sun and by the drying effects of the wind. The cold days of winter may also help to eliminate some harmful bacteria. But a few germs may still be there after the snow has melted. This is more apt to be true where the winters are short and relatively mild. (more…)

Do you physically act out your dreams? Injure yourself and/or your bed partner? Fly out of bed and have frightening dreams? People with REM sleep behaviour disorder actually attempt to act out their dreams. They kick, punch, leap and run from bed, often injuring themselves and/or their bed partners.

One case in England resulted in a man shooting his new bride to death while he was dreaming of being pursued by gangsters.

We usually can’t act out our dreams. During REM sleep a part of our brain keeps us from moving our arms and legs, although we can still breathe and move our eyes. REM sleep, in essence, is characterized by a highly active, dreaming, brain in a “paralyzed” body. When the normal movement-inhibiting mechanism fails, some people, usually men over the age of sixty, may develop REM sleep behaviour disorder and be able to act out their dreams. The risk of developing REM sleep behaviour disorder increases with age, and men are more likely than women to develop it. (more…)

Persistent bed-wetting, sleep enuresis, is considered a disorder after the age of five. It occurs in all sleep stages, and daytime bladder control can be normal. While the prevalence of bed-wetting in childhood decreases with age, about 3 per cent of adolescents between the ages of twelve and eighteen continue to wet their beds.”

Bed-wetting has a hereditary component. Approximately 77 per cent of children whose parents both wet their beds as children are bed wetters themselves.’ A congenitally small bladder, bladder infections, allergies, obstructive sleep apnoea or metabolic or endocrinologic disorders may be predisposing factors. Contrary to popular belief, bed-wetting is almost never emotionally or psychologically caused; less than 1 per cent of bed^-wetting has an emotional source.” (more…)

ALL YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT A CONTINENTAL QUILT

Acontinental quilt almost eliminates bedmaking. A good continental quilt (or duvet) can be the equivalent of at least three blankets and can cost and weigh considerably less than conventional bed clothes.

You’re supposed to make the bed only using a bottom sheet and a quilt cover, but I use two sheets traditionally and keep the quilt in its special case until spring cleaning time comes round.

You may want to know the difference between an eiderdown and a continental quilt and whether you can use a double bed eiderdown as a single quilt? No, not efficiently, because the eiderdown is tightly packed and crushed down and there are no air pockets to trap the warm air round you, as does the quilt, on the same principle as a string vest. (more…)

I’ve read a lot about women who serenely cope with the three roles of full-time working woman, wife, and mother. However, I’ve never actually met one. All the ones that I know feel inadequate.

Going back to work after having children is a practical and emotional problem and both are interdependent. You risk worrying about them when you’re at work and about work when you’re at home, and end up being happy in neither situation.

Two requisites for a working mother are stamina and an understanding family Sympathetic they may be until it comes to your interests versus theirs, but they still want their evening meal on time and they don’t want to hear about the bus queue which made you late. (more…)

Women hate being efficient in the home. Lists and routines simply do not fit into the pink-check-gingham.. and-lace mental picture of the soap opera mother, which so many of us were brought up to be. When you become a working mother with any luck you will get twice as much out of life, but you can’t run your house as if you weren’t working. A working mother has to work faster and more efficiently in the home. She has to be twice as reliable outside it because people expect her not to be.

I have evolved my own system, which I slowly slip away from, but it pulls me back to reality at regular intervals, and heaven knows what I would be like without it. (more…)

There are obvious disadvantages to a child in having a working mother but there are less obvious advantages. Children with working mothers certainly don’t suffer from smother-love — over-fussing. They learn to be realistic, independent, responsible and sometimes stoical, no mean preparation for the toughness of life.

Your children risk having a mother who’s not permanently on tap for them but who is likely to have a younger outlook and be more tolerant and open to new ideas (although I did hear myself saying to my older son during that craze, `I don’t know how you can walk on those high heels’). (more…)

Full-time or part-time shop assistant: Hard on the feet but can be more interesting than office work if you like meeting people. Part-time work is often easier on Saturdays.

Stocking shelves in supermarkets, to prepare for the next day, is one example of evening preparation work. Ask the manager of your local supermarket if there’s anything going.

Welfare workers are largely women. Child care officers are needed (training from one to three years necessary) so are youth club workers, youth employment officers, young people’s advisers (being married is a qualification and it’s possible to do as little as thirteen hours a week work). (more…)

Training: If you have had training you can probably find job opportunities through your professional body or through reading or advertising in your professional journal.

Assuming that you haven’t had any training prior to marriage and aren’t coping with pre-school age children, what is available? Most women are unskilled. Only 6 per cent receive any further training when they leave school. However, there are suitable training courses for `mature students’, the official description of any woman over twenty- three. You can exploit a talent which you already possess and are practising in your home (sewing or cooking) or be trained by a firm who wishes to employ you, or at one of the many courses at a local technical college. Generally what is difficult to acquire isn’t really the training, or even the job, but the determination to forget embarrassment, laziness or shyness — and go out and get it. (more…)

You can only be medically examined to support your statement with your consent. Rape is very difficult to prove medically. What does a doctor look for? Evidence of semen in the vagina and on clothes, as well as evidence of internal and external trauma, such as lacerations. You can telephone a friend or relative from the police station, and normally they would be allowed to telephone you back.

See a doctor: After you have informed the police go, or get someone to take you, to a hospital or doctor. You have three worries : (more…)

By ’single’, I mean a woman who is unmarried, divorced, separated, or whose husband is temporarily absent.

Sexual aggression from a stranger may take the form of:

1. Obscene telephone calls.
2. Frottism (such as being rubbed up against in a crowded train or bus).
3. Indecent exposure (such as showing genitals to little girls in a park).
4. Letter threats to rape, maim, or kill.
5. Odd burglaries involving violation (such as urinating on the bed) or the theft of fetish objects such as frilly knickers or black suspender belts.
6. Peeping Toms.
7. Unintentional rape (sometimes called ‘going too far’).
8. Attempted rape.
9.  Rape.
10. Child molestation.

(more…)

Make your own decisions: Althoughspecialists may be useful to analyse asituation and suggest solutions, theycannot run your life for you. Onceyour choices are clarified, use yourcommon sense to make your owndecisions. Then force yourself to bepessimistic, to look for the snags inthe arrangements and face them.

Don’t opt out because you don’tunderstand your position. Make your adviser explain it all again until s you do understand it, and so can be b responsible for deciding which path e you want to take. Be prepared to be f responsible for your own decisions. y Life is a risk. Nothing is certain inthis world and there is no guaranteed le security, financial, intellectual or d emotional. Security lies in your own st self-reliance to deal with the problems of life. You will make some right decisions and some wrong ones. Pay the penalty for the wrong ones, cut your losses and start again. (more…)

Trends in scent are all very well, but no woman selecting scent for herself should give too much consideration to them. When choosing a scent, remember that it should be an extension of your own personality. Select it as you would a piece of music to complement how you feel or what you want to do while wearing it. Here are a few basic guidelines for choosing.

1. Go shopping alone; friends can influence you wrongly either by telling you what you want to hear or by giving an opinion about what they like for themselves. Your scent is the most personal of all your purchases.
2. Shop for scent only when you are in a good mood. One’s judgment about the subtleties of fragrances can be severely clouded by fatigue or by being in a bad mood.
3. Don’t wear scent when you are going to buy some. It will only distort your judgment.
4. Give yourself enough time. Choosing scent is not something to sandwich between buying bedspreads and meeting friends for lunch. (more…)

When discussing the effects of the study carried out in America, Keys and his colleagues said: ‘Food in all its ramifications became the principal topic of conversation, reading, and daydreams for almost all… subjects.’

The first change that became obvious for the women in my study was that they became preoccupied with food.

As women, in a society where we are expected to shop, cook and provide food for our families, food already plays a central role in our lives. It becomes a way to show love and affection to our dependants and a way to ask for love from those we are dependent on. If we provide dinner for our husbands when they come home from work (even if we ourselves have been working!) it shows that we appreciate that they have been working hard (and, it suggests, even harder than us) and that we recognise how much they do for us. Children learn from a very early age that eating their mother’s food makes her feel positive and valued. They also learn that to refuse her food is rejecting her love and will make her anxious and upset. We think about food in terms way beyond the limitations of feeling hungry and needing sustenance. (more…)

Stress during labour

Childbirth can be a time of intimacy, excitement, wonder and openness. It can also be a time of fear and pain, sometimes in a place that is forbidding and lacking in warmth. There may be all kinds of left-over feelings, which are usually repressed. First of all, the birth hurts you — it is quite natural for some women to be angry about this. Secondly, you may resent the way your delivery was handled. Unfortunately, the case history above is not an isolated example. I have heard of so many similar and worse cases that it sometimes makes me feel ashamed of my profession as a doctor. The resentment is usually related to lack of consultation on decisions. Medical interventions are sometimes carried out (for instance, routine episiotomies, injections to speed up the birth of the placenta) without any explanation of side-effects. If the side-effects occur, the natural reaction is anger, but this is often repressed, with the explanation that the doctor knows what is best. It is this attitude of the patient handing over authority to the doctor and the doctor taking assumed authority over another’s life that may lead to later feelings of resentment. Some women have told me they felt like a nonentity, going through a process that was designed by the hospital to maximize speed and efficiency. Others have told me that it felt like being taken over by machines and fingers. The residue of resentment may go very deep and is usually repressed, with a resultant depression of spirits in general. (more…)

Depression is very common in a mother after the birth of her child. Some mothers notice depression only at this time and at no other time in their lives. The reasons why depression is so much more common soon after giving birth are bothcomplex and conjectural, but can be conveniently divided into two groups: physical stress and emotional/psychological stress. Depression after childbirth generally takes one of three forms: maternity blues, postnatal depression, or post-natal psychosis.

These usually start two or three days after birth. You may quite suddenly get weepy and irritable, and then just as suddenly, you are out of them. They are very common and do not usually lead on to any longer-lasting depression.

This occurs after about 10 per cent of births. It may start soon after birth or it may start after an initial few weeks of happiness and high spirits. It is a common experience to feel more emotionally vulnerable for four to six weeks after giving birth —you feel more open and sensitive to everything. This period of greater openness is often remembered with pleasure, but sometimes, after four to six weeks, the physical and emotional demands of looking after a child twenty-four hours a day begin to get a mother down, and you may feel grey and exhausted for many months or even a year or more. A minority of mothers will go into a more severe depressive process which occasionally lasts years. (more…)

FAMILY QUARRELS

Quarrels between husband and wife or between parents and children can create an atmosphere that is tense or depressed. There may be many reasons for the quarrels. A husband may strongly resent the fact that his mother-in-law has come to live with his family, or a wife may hate spending every Christmas with her husband’s family; both may repress the anger, in an attempt to avoid hurting their spouse’s feelings. Children of unstable marriages may become depressed when they see their parents fighting— they bottle everything up rather than risk adding to the fraught atmosphere.

Some families, in an attempt to stop the quarrelling, repress all emotional reactions. When you walk into such a household, you can feel the repression in the atmosphere, and it seems that it would be a relief if someone would say what they really felt. But within your own family, it is usually much harder to see what is happening. You may have had the experience of bitter battles in the past leading nowhere, and decided it was a better policy to keep quiet. Eventually the quietness becomes a way of life, and you hardly even notice the feelings you have underneath. Although many families survive in this depressed fashion, the quality of life is inevitably lowered. (more…)

Depression is about twice as common in women as it is inmen. There are probably many reasons for this, and some of them are connected with marriage. Recent research points out that married women more likely than married men to feel unhappy; to have are feelings of inadequacy; to have difficulty in sleeping; to fee apathetic or inert and to behave in a passive way; to have bouts of depression, and to have symptoms of mental ill- health in general. Unmarried women, on the contrary, tend to have better mental and physical health than both unmarried men and married women.

Men, on the other hand, tend to have better mental health when married than when not married. Unmarried men in the United States have a suicide rate twice as high as married men. Men who lose their wives are usually more prone to depression than women who lose their husbands, and men tend to remarry as soon as possible. Though it may not seem like it on the surface, the man may be more dependent than the woman, even though he may not play an obviously dependent role. He is more likely to get depressed when the marriage is over or when his conventional role as sole or main bread-winner is upturned. He may feel inadequate and helpless if he realizes that his spouse can and does manage well without him. (more…)

One of the most important things to a child is parental warmth and continuity. In his studies on children Bowlby, a British child psychiatrist, showed how a stable relationship with the parents created a feeling of security and a stable base from which to explore. A threat of loss of this security caused anger or fear, while actual loss of a parent or main care-giver caused a loss of interest if the child did not believe that the parent was coming back. Studies on institutions where children are kept with inadequate and inconsistent care show a distinct change in the behaviour of children in the second six months of their lives. Continual crying becomes replaced byan eventual indifference to adults, and a baby would “lie or sit with wide open, expressionless eyes, frozen, immobile face and a far away expression as if in a daze”. Such babies did not babble or coo and felt stiff and wooden when picked up. (more…)

It is easy to become accustomed to a certain way of living, so much so that sometimes you forget that you actually do havethe freedom to change it. You don’t have to eat three meals a day, watch television in the evenings or stay all day at home with the children. You don’t have to live with your mother- in-law, your parents or even your spouse. It is your life and you have the freedom to choose how you want to live. This may seem obvious, but it is sometimes difficult to act on your freedom because:

• You are too depressed to act. Sometimes it is a good idea to wait for the slightest upswing in your mood and then act, make yourself act.

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