Undoing one's burnt-out feeling

Never has shopping become as addictive as when one is clawed by a combination of all psychological factors resulting from bad organisation in the workplace, especially where leadership is faulty and weak. Many workplaces in Sweden, particularly in the health care sector, lose track of their commitments to life caring. So many blundering mistakes even by educated medical people. It gets worse when you add the multiracial diversity factor - people coming from many cultures working together.

Just then, you hit the deepest low of your own well-being and gets advice from a psychologist who tell you to find joy, even for thirty minutes a day. In this state of bad well-being, we have friends - close and real friends who understand the need to let out the steam and will give you the time, their precious time, to listen to you, to comfort you with words of sympathy and even invite you to get out and hit the city. See a movie, like "Sex and the City", and feel the joy Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha felt over love lost, and found again. Or "Mama Mia" with a different cadence to ABBA's undying songs. If you don't cry over how Meryl Streep sang "The Winner Takes it All", then you are definitely a lost case.

A depression attack could find more than thirty minutes of joy in a sea of summer bargains. Take for instance the popular high-end NK department store where sales of named brands fell by 50%. A favorite shop inside NK is Kriss, a Swedish clothing brand that sells women clothes, as women clothes ought to be - feminine and alluring. In these days, there are sprawling shopping malls in every Swedish suburb that compete with what one can finds in the inner Stockholm city.

Take Vällingby for instance. The clothing and accessories are fresher than what one finds in the inner city. K:Fem, which is the latest addition in the mode world has shops for all kinds of wallets. A favorite is "Myself and Friends", "Best of Brands", "Sisters" and "Mango". The summer bargains created a 50 to 70 percent price reduction that made shopping so enticing, so exciting and so sexy. Yes, sexy because there is that element of orgasmic thrill at finding something beautiful and affordable.

But the best thing that happens when one is feeling low is that good friends think creatively to help erase the blues. How about a girls night out on a very pleasant evening when the air is sensual and talking from the heart eases the hurts. Some hurts have not found any closures and they continue to nag the present and future. When one has friends who care to listen, who can talk openly about anything from failed love affairs, to unfinished novels and doctoral dissertation, to new hopes and prospects - if only we allow them to happen, then who really cares about a thirty- minute joy when you can have hours and days of lovely moments.