By Emilia Paluszek, October 31, 2020

“Attention and focus are also impacted with poor sleep, and people will experience trouble learning and retaining new material, or being increasingly forgetful of previously learned material,” says Alex Dimitriu, MD.

Click HERE for the full article.

Oct 27, 2020. Dr. Dimitriu was published in Psychology Today in an article titled: “I’m Too Anxious to Get Better”

Living with anxiety is like driving a car without shock absorbers: Everything is a big deal, always hurried, easily overwhelmed, and rarely happy. Some people don’t understand that life doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some useful tips I’ve gathered over years of working as a psychiatrist:

“I feel terrible, but also really good sometimes. Wine helps!”

Anxious people are terrible at helping themselves. An interesting part of my work is seeing people with anxiety who don’t think they have anxiety. The thought of “needing help” makes anxious people more anxious. They are often determined to not show weakness (even to themselves) and to just to push forward with business as usual.

Click HERE for the full article.

October 23, 2020 by Lesley Chen

Tension headaches: You’ve likely had at least one tension headache in your life, as it is the most common form of headaches, although its exact causes aren’t clear. “Tension headaches are associated with stress and muscle tension and often are felt like a band-like pain in the back of the head,” Alex Dimitriu, MD, a double board-certified physician in psychiatry and sleep medicine and founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry & Sleep Medicine, told POPSUGAR.

Click HERE for the full article.

By Dominique Michelle Astorino, October 19, 2020

“Dreams can always be affected by what is on your mind by day and before sleep,” agrees Alex Dimitriu, M.D., double board-certified in psychiatry and sleep medicine and founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry & Sleep Medicine. “Without a doubt, having sexual feelings or thoughts about someone, or some fantasy can certainly come up in your dreams. The mind does work through feelings and rehearses for future events and encounters when you sleep — especially during REM (dream) sleep.”

Click HERE for the full article.

By Julia Malacoff, October 11, 2020

Enter: Stress hormones. “Stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and even dopamine can be elevated during periods of stress, and they can remain elevated for some time, even after the stressor is gone,” says Dr. Alex Dimitriu, a board-certified doctor in psychiatry and sleep medicine. So once you get riled up about something — work, family issues, a pandemic — it can be hard to physiologically “come down” from that stressed state.

Click HERE for the full article.

By Jessica Migala, Oct. 01, 2020

Plan a transition period between awake time and going to bed. “Your brain needs to slow down to shift gears, and too many people try to be super productive to the last minute,” says Alex Dimitriu, MD, a dual-board certified doctor in psychiatry and sleep medicine in Menlo Park, California. If worries tend to spiral before bed, Dr. Dimitriu recommends journaling. “It’s common to be flooded with thoughts at bedtime, but if you sit and work through them [rather than avoiding them by filling the space with scrolling on your phone], these thoughts tend to get better in 20 or 30 minutes,” he says.

Click HERE for the full article.

By Jessica Migala, September 29, 2020

Your body was built to deal with anxiety as soon as you open your eyes in bed, says Alex Dimitriu, MD, a dual-board certified doctor in psychiatry and sleep medicine in Menlo Park, California. “In the morning, [the stress hormone] cortisol is elevated, and you have more adrenaline and an elevated heart rate. That’s what wakes people up,” he explains. But for some people with anxiety, that physiological response becomes psychological and symptoms are far worse in the morning than any other time of day. Lack of sleep or going to bed late the night before tends to make morning anxiety worse, says Dr. Dimitriu. The circumstances of the day can also accentuate symptoms. “Lateness can really make people anxious,” he says. It can make you feel scattered as you scramble to make up for lost time all day.

Click HERE for the full article.