Healthy Lifestyle Bloggers

Thanks to Bronwyn Thompson at Health Skills, not only for linking to my site but also for drawing to my attention a study published in the European Journal of Pain: Fibromyalgia pain and its modulation by hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestion: An fMRI analysis by Stuart W.G. Derbyshire, Matthew G. Whalley and David A. Oakley. Functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) is a brain scanning technique which uses changes in the magnetic properties of parts of the brain to measure brain activity. Fibromyalgia is a condition involving widespread and chronic pain.

The study used the “dial” technique which I talked about in Pain management part 2: Imagination techniques last week. The experimenters selected participants for the scanning phase of the study who showed high scores on a standard scale of hypnotic ability and reported the ability to adjust their pain, using the imaginary “dial”, by 6 points or more (on a 10-point scale). This was a total of 13 patients, all female (women are nine times as likely as men to be diagnosed with fibromyalgia). All 13 were scanned 4 times each, twice with and twice without hypnosis, with the order varied between participants. They were signaled by taps on the foot to either turn the dial as low as possible, to the middle range, or as high as possible.

photo credit: Matt McGee

The researchers found that in the hypnosis condition the participants’ ability to turn the dial down was significantly greater, and that their self-report of perceived control over their pain was significantly higher when hypnotized, though there was still an effect of suggestion while not hypnotized (that is, they did not require a formal hypnotic induction to be able to affect their pain levels, but it helped). There was also a significant difference in the activation of a number of brain regions between the hypnotized and non-hypnotized conditions. The researchers point out that these were differences of degree rather than kind, that is, that some areas were more strongly activated and others less strongly activated in one condition versus the other, but the general pattern of activation was the same between the two.

As is so often the case with hypnosis studies, the sample is small and the results need to be replicated more widely before we can generalize them with confidence. Also, the participants in the study were carefully selected and were unusually hypnotically responsive (since the point of the study was primarily to study the brain activation - the hypnosis was a means to an end). However, we can say that here is a study which shows a measurable difference between the use of a hypnotic induction and the same suggestions without an induction, and also validates the effectiveness, for at least some people, of using the “dial” technique for pain control.

Technorati Tags: hypnosis, hypnotherapy, pain, pain management, fibromyalgia, research

This is the 101st post on this blog - and it’s a guest post. Enjoy!

In the mad scramble to lose weight and get fit, people are reduced to trying any method to get those excess pounds off their waists and hips; they don’t care if it’s by hook or crook, all they want to do is just lose weight. But what people don’t realize is that the whole purpose of losing weight is defeated when you try to shed those unwanted pounds in unhealthy ways like undergoing surgery, taking weight loss drugs, succumbing to anorexia or bulimia or looking to supplements instead of nutritious food to sustain you when you starve.

Getting fit is an aspect of being in good health; if you’re fit, it follows that you’re healthy. So the best way to lose weight is the old-fashioned way – by following a regular exercise routine and eating the right amounts of the right kind of food. Sure, it’s a long and winding road that goes on and on before you can even set your sight on the target, leave alone reach it, but it’s a road worth taking.

When you lose weight the way it’s supposed to be lost, you look much healthier and younger. There is such a thing as being too thin – you need to be healthy and exude that glowing look. If you use exercise and diet to lose weight, your skin is healthy and more supple, and this makes you positively glow with good health. You’re also stronger and have more stamina and energy to go about your daily routine without feeling tired and worn out.

The hardest part of following a strict diet and rigorous exercise routine is not in getting started, it’s in staying the course. And here’s where your willpower comes into play. If you feel like throwing in the towel a few days after you’ve started, push yourself to go a few days more. Set a goal for yourself before you start and keep your eyes focused on it at all times. Some people find it useful to set smaller goals to attain in the pursuit of the larger one, and when each milestone is attained, they find it helps to reward themselves. This helps them to concentrate on the task at hand and not give up after they’ve begun their journey.

Remember, when you stop exercising and throw away your diet after a few weeks of following them just because it’s too tough or because you’re not seeing the results you wanted soon enough, you’re giving up all that hard work for nothing. Because when the feeling to get fit overcomes you again sometime in the near future, you’ll have to start from square one again. So set your mind to the task, and achieve your goal of getting fit and staying that way.

By-line:

This article is contributed by Sarah Scrafford, who regularly writes on the subject of nursing degrees. She invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: sarah.scrafford25@gmail.com.

Sorry, I made the beginner’s mistake of upgrading my WordPress plugins and then going away for four days, so the blog portion of the site has been down. Should be fixed now.

I need to learn that WordPress plugins often break when you upgrade them.

Here’s an interesting study in the Journal of Neuroscience. That link is to the highly technical abstract; physorg.com has a much more digestible version which tells you what the experiment actually was.

They got some rats addicted to cocaine, and got them to associate the turning on of a light with the drug. They also gave them tasks which they learned would turn on the light and give them cocaine.

What they then did was to give the rats a drug which interferes with a brain chemical involved in storing memories, and activate the “cocaine” memory by turning on the light (but without giving the rats any cocaine). Because when we retrieve a memory it then gets stored afresh - which is why our memories change over time, especially if we revisit them frequently - this reduced or even stopped the behaviours in the rats which they formerly used to get cocaine.

Why I find this interesting is that hypnosis can interfere with memory too. You need a reasonably deep state, but it is quite possible to do, for some people at least. I normally don’t do it, since there usually isn’t a good clinical reason to do so, but this certainly sounds like one.

How I might use this is to get someone to recall their “triggers” for an unwanted behaviour, thus activating the memory, and then suggest forgetting the behaviour. Because they’re sitting in a chair in my office, they won’t actually be eating or smoking or whatever it is, so this, in theory, should work the same way as the scientists’ drug did on the rats.

Nicotine, in particular, sinks its hooks into you partly by working with parts of the brain that are concerned with learning and memory. I have a couple of smokers coming tonight. If I can get them deep enough I might try this out.

Technorati Tags: addiction, memory, triggers, hypnosis, hypnotherapy

This is a follow-up to Pain management part 1: Attention techniques.

Attention is not the only drug-free way to manage pain. Imagination is also very powerful. I know of at least five imagination techniques which can all be highly effective in managing both acute (sudden, severe) and chronic (long-term) pain.

First is direct imagery of the pain. This technique works either in or out of hypnosis. You begin by closing your eyes and imagining the pain in terms of other sensations, translating it into visual, auditory or kinaesthetic terms. For example, you might imagine it as red, spiky, a grinding noise, high-pitched, or rough.

photo credit: peasap

Now that you have that clear in your imagination, you can change the imagined sensation and this will in turn change the pain sensation - since both sensations are taking place in your mind, they’re equally modifiable by your mind, and linking them together helps you believe that. You might, for example, imagine the pain shifting from red to blue, or spiky to smooth, or lowering in pitch or loudness, or smoothing out its texture.

This is quite a good technique for unexpected pain.

The second technique is what I call the Switchboard. This uses imagery to remind you that you do have control over your own perception of pain. It involves imagining a switchboard, or something like a sound engineer’s mixing board or some other kind of control panel - anything where there are dials, sliders or switches. You then imagine using these to turn your pain down (and also up - you can experiment with turning it up as well to demonstrate to yourself that you have control). This probably is taught best under hypnosis, as it requires focused attention and a certain amount of reduction in immediate reality checking, but it can be used in the usual alert state once learned. You can use a numeric scale, usually 1-10, as an easy way to refer to the different levels.

photo credit: surroundsound5000

The Switchboard can be used for a great many other issues apart from pain. I’ve used it with a man who was experiencing hunger pangs as a side effect of antidepressants, and with another man who wanted to reduce his emotional response in certain circumstances so that he could retain dignity in a responsible public position. Both have found it helpful. I’ve also seen a video of Gil Boyne, the distinguished American hypnotherapist, using it with a man who had Parkinson’s tremors. He was able to dial the tremors down to the point that they were undetectable, and up to where they were extremely marked.

The Switchboard is usually a temporary strategy. You usually can’t turn the dial down to 1 and leave it there indefinitely. It’s a way of being able to cope when you have to. However, with the man with the hunger pangs I used a slightly different metaphor, saying that his brain should adapt to a lower level of sensitivity, treating the signal as if it were much less “loud”, and this seemed to work for him.

Glove anaesthesia is the third method. How this works is that you first imagine your (non-painful) hand growing progressively numb, and then “transfer” the numbness over to the part of the body that is or will shortly be in pain by touching it with the numb hand. In a hypnotic state, where logic is dreamlike, this makes perfect sense, and most people can do it.

This is a good technique to use for pre-operative anaesthesia (actually analgesia, strictly speaking, since you can still feel other sensations, just not pain). It can be used, for example, to numb the jaw for dental work.

photo credit: Conor Lawless

The fourth method is to displace or replace the pain - either move general pain to a localized area (and possibly shrink it), or replace it with another sensation such as an itch or a tingling feeling. This has been used successfully with cancer patients in long-term pain as well as with women giving birth.

The fifth method is to displace the person, rather than the pain, which is similar to the attention techniques. During my training I saw a remarkable film of a woman having a Caesarian section with only hypnotic analgesia. Her relaxing, pleasant activity was playing the piano and singing, and the surgeon, who was also the hypnotist, got her thoroughly involved in a hallucination that this was what she was doing during the operation. She was actually singing aloud, and her hands were moving as if on the keys of a piano, happy as a lark while the surgeon made a 20cm incision in her abdomen and removed her baby. There was very little blood, because she was relaxed and calm. The film was, judging by the clothes and hairstyles, from about the early 60s, and in order to get the (black and white) film to come out, strong, hot lighting was used in the operating theatre. The surgeon had given a suggestion of a pleasant temperature, though, and when he asked her later - not prompting her answer - she said that she had been pleasantly cool.

photo credit: Torley

Obviously, this woman was an excellent hypnotic subject, able to involve herself thoroughly in her imagined activity, and this is the key to success with pain relief using the imagination. If you find that you become easily involved in a movie, TV programme or book or a daydream, these techniques should work well for you.

Technorati Tags: pain, pain management, pain relief, pain control, techniques, drug-free, natural pain management, mental techniques, hypnosis, hypnotherapy, imagination, suffering, anaesthesia, analgesia

(I originally added this as an edit to the end of my previous post on the Close Up feature on hypnotherapy for smoking cessation, but I’m moving it to its own post for the benefit of my subscribers.)

As a follow-up, I see that ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) have come out expressing “concerns” about the Close Up feature on hypnotherapy for smoking cessation. Their concerns are twofold: firstly, that the success rate of 65% was exaggerated, and secondly, that people would spend a lot of money giving up via hypnotherapy when subsidised nicotine replacement therapy is available much more cheaply.

Concerning their first point, they cite a recent study in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research which found a 12-month cessation rate of 20% for hypnotherapy (versus 14% for behavioral counselling). What they don’t mention is that in this study, as well as hypnotherapy for one group and behavioral therapy for the other, nicotine patches were also used for all participants, so if this study shows anything it shows that hypnotherapy was more effective than behavioral counselling and that NRT was not more than 14% successful, even if the behavioral therapy was doing nothing whatsoever.

Also, they’re not comparing apples with apples. Methods of hypnotherapy vary widely, and not all are equally effective. I don’t know what methods the doctor on the Close Up programme uses in his three sessions, or what methods the experimenters in this study used in their two sessions (unfortunately the journal concerned is one of those that doesn’t make its most recent issues available online, even to academic institutions, so I can’t use my student login to Massey University Library to get the details). It’s even possible that the nicotine replacement therapy interfered with the hypnotherapy and made it less effective - because there was no non-NRT group in the study, we can’t tell, not based on this one study, anyway.

Regarding ASH’s second concern, I obviously have a biased sample, since by the nature of the case the people who come to me to give up smoking by hypnotherapy don’t include any people who have successfully and permanently given up smoking by nicotine replacement therapy. I only see the ones who have tried it and found it ineffective for them, or who don’t want to use a drug to help them give up using a drug. But there are plenty of people in both camps.

Most people who seriously want to stop smoking are not unaware of NRT, in my experience. Many have tried it and found it doesn’t work for them - particularly those who don’t smoke heavily. Patches contain a lot of nicotine and the dose is often too strong for a light smoker. I have even had a client tell me that he gave up briefly with NRT and when he went back to smoking he smoked more, because he’d got used to a higher level of nicotine in his system.

Other people think (quite rightly, in my view) that the basic idea of NRT is flawed, that nicotine is a major part of the problem and so nicotine (even in a different, less harmful form) is not the solution.

It’s going to be interesting when I go on the Heart Foundation smoking cessation practitioner course later this month. NRT is key to their approach, though obviously not the whole of it or I wouldn’t be going on the training - I’m hoping to learn things which I can apply to helping my clients who don’t want to use NRT, or have found it ineffective. I think a multimodal approach is best, which is why I don’t just use hypnotherapy in my sessions.

Technorati Tags: smoking, smoking cessation, hypnosis, hypnotherapy, stop smoking, NRT, nicotine replacement therapy

I was out last night, so I couldn’t watch it when it was broadcast, but I’ve just caught up with the Close Up current affairs programme feature on hypnotherapy for smoking cessation. (TVNZ very nicely makes it available on the net - I’m not sure for how long.)

It’s a good, positive story featuring a Wellington doctor who primarily uses hypnotherapy. His course is three sessions at $120 each, which he claims is 65% successful versus 15% for single-session hypnotherapy. This is arguable. It depends, really, on what is in the session. The man that was followed for the piece - one person, so not necessarily representative - stopped smoking after the first session, you’ll notice.

Being journalism, and television journalism at that, it wasn’t in depth at all, but it’s nice to see a positive story on hypnotherapy. Anecdotal stories are not at all scientific, of course, but even if they encourage people to realize that there are options out there, they’ve had a positive effect. Different therapies work for different people, after all.

As a follow-up, I see that ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) have come out expressing “concerns” about the piece. Their concerns are twofold: firstly, that the success rate of 65% was exaggerated, and secondly, that people would spend a lot of money giving up via hypnotherapy when subsidised nicotine replacement therapy is available much more cheaply.

Concerning their first point, they cite a recent study in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research which found a 12-month cessation rate of 20% for hypnotherapy (versus 14% for behavioral counselling). What they don’t mention is that in this study, as well as hypnotherapy for one group and behavioral therapy for the other, nicotine patches were also used for all participants, so if this study shows anything it shows that hypnotherapy is more effective than behavioral counselling and that NRT was not more than 14% successful, even if the behavioral therapy was doing nothing whatsoever.

Also, they’re not comparing apples with apples. Methods of hypnotherapy vary widely, and not all are equally effective. I don’t know what methods the doctor on the Close Up programme uses in his three sessions, or what methods the experimenters in this study used (unfortunately the journal concerned is one of those that doesn’t make its most recent issues available online, even to academic institutions, so I can’t use my student login to Massey University Library to get the details). It’s even possible that the nicotine replacement therapy interfered with the hypnotherapy and made it less effective - because there was no non-NRT group in the study, we can’t tell, not based on this one study, anyway.

Regarding ASH’s second concern, I obviously have a biased sample, since by the nature of the case the people who come to me to give up smoking by hypnotherapy don’t include any people who have successfully and permanently given up smoking by nicotine replacement therapy. I only see the ones who have tried it and found it ineffective for them, or who don’t want to use a drug to help them give up using a drug. But there are plenty of people in both camps.

Most people who seriously want to stop smoking are not unaware of NRT, in my experience. Many have tried it and found it doesn’t work for them - particularly those who don’t smoke heavily. Patches contain a lot of nicotine and the dose is often too strong for a light smoker. I have even had a client tell me that he gave up briefly with NRT and when he went back to smoking he smoked more, because he’d got used to a higher level of nicotine in his system.

Other people think (quite rightly, in my view) that the basic idea of NRT is flawed, that nicotine is a major part of the problem and so nicotine (even in a different, less harmful form) is not the solution.

It’s going to be interesting when I go on the Heart Foundation smoking cessation practitioner course later this month. NRT is key to their approach, though obviously not the whole of it or I wouldn’t be going on the training - I’m hoping to learn things which I can apply to helping my clients who don’t want to use NRT, or have found it ineffective. I think a multimodal approach is best, which is why I don’t just use hypnotherapy in my sessions.

Technorati Tags: hypnosis, hypnotherapy, smoking, smoking cessation, quitting smoking, stopping smoking

Many people live with unnecessary pain which can be relieved naturally, without drugs, using simple mental techniques. This is the first of two posts about some of those techniques.

Pain is, of course, a warning. It’s the body’s alarm system, and before you decide to switch it off or reduce its volume you should consider whether it is warning you about something you need to act on, or whether you are already aware of the issue and don’t need further warnings.

photo credit: flattop341

But given that you’ve decided that you already have the information that the pain is conveying, and you’re already doing everything you can about addressing the cause, your first option to relieve it is by using your attention.

There are two kinds of attention techniques for relieving pain. The first, which is more applicable for milder pain, is dissociation, and the second, for more severe pain, is association.

These techniques apply to emotional pain as well as physical pain, by the way. We give these two phenomena the same name because they do have many similarities. Pain is not just a sensation, but a perception, and the pain control techniques I’m about to discuss work by shifting that perception. This is just as applicable for emotional pain as for physical pain.

photo credit: the half-blood prince

Dissociation Techniques
Dissociation techniques are aimed at removing your attention from the pain by placing it on something else. This could be your environment; positive thoughts or memories; or a meditative strategy such as repeating a word with each breath. I’ve posted before about using the Relaxation Response Practice as an emotional management technique; it’s just as applicable to pain management. The principle here is that by distracting yourself from your perception of pain and focusing on another perception or activity, you reduce your experience of pain.

Unfortunately many of us use dissociation techniques which involve taking in substances that are not healthy for us - various forms of drugs including alcohol and tobacco, excessive or unhealthy food, or whatever your particular choice may be. This isn’t necessary. You have all the resources in your own mind that you need to achieve dissociation, and if you practice, they will be just as effective as those other distractions, without the health drawbacks (or the financial cost). Dissociation using something harmful to your body is simply compounding the problem, not solving it.

photo credit: Norma*Iriz*

Association Techniques
With strong pain, dissociation techniques are too difficult - you can’t distract yourself from the pain because it is too intrusive. It demands your attention. So in association techniques, you give it that attention.

Again, I’ve written before about how attention is necessary for life change and a simple mood control technique using attention. The underlying idea of association techniques is that you pay attention to the pain but shift your perception of it, from something that you are immersed in to something that you are aware of. in other words, you shift your perception from subjective (”I am feeling pain”) to objective (”this part of my body is feeling pain”), and attempt to remove the “suffering” aspect from your perception.

“Suffering” implies that you are subject to the pain, that it is overwhelming you, that you are being swept along by it. A metaphor I use with my clients for emotional management, which is just as valid for associative pain control, is that of standing beside a road watching the traffic. You watch the cars go past, back and forth, but you yourself are not in a car, being carried along the road; you are standing still, observing. If you find you have jumped out into the road and got into a car and are being driven away to somewhere you don’t want to go, you simply choose to get out again and go back to standing beside the road and watching.

photo credit: Dan Kamminga

The cars in this metaphor are thoughts and feelings and sensations. Being in the car is being carried along by the experience of these things. Being beside the road is simply observing their occurrence.

There are two possible ways here of being “I”. There is being “I” who is being carried along, who is suffering, who is feeling pain and feeling emotions and thinking thoughts, and there is being “I” who is watching and observing as if these things were happening to someone else. The mental trick is to shift from the suffering “I” to the observing “I”.

In the next post, I’ll talk about pain management through imagination techniques.

Technorati Tags: pain, pain management, pain relief, pain control, techniques, drug-free, natural pain management, mental techniques, attention, dissociation, association, emotional management, emotional pain, suffering, awareness, meditation

Thomas Edison famously gave the formula for genius as “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. You might argue with those proportions, but it’s certainly true that very few people have succeeded at anything on their first try. Read about any really famous author. Almost certainly, they faced multiple rounds of rejections before their book was finally published.

photo credit: x-eyedblonde

Partly because of work I’ve been doing with clients recently, and partly because of a book I’m reading, I’ve been thinking about the topic of perseverance. The book is The Beck Diet Solution: Train Your Brain to Think Like A Thin Person by Judith Beck. She’s a prominent cognitive therapist - one who works on people’s thinking patterns - and the daughter of the founder of cognitive therapy.

She has some good things to say about perseverance. She talks about “strengthening the resistance muscle and weakening the giving up muscle” - in other words, mentally reinforcing and practicing perseverance, instead of practicing being defeated by challenging circumstances.

photo credit: SuperFantastic

That’s important for losing weight, because it’s a long-term process, and many people have practiced giving up on it for years. It’s also important for stopping smoking or making any other change in your life, particularly one which chooses not to act on an immediate desire for a longer-term, higher goal.

Perseverance is a mental skill. By practicing it, we strengthen our ability to do it. And like any skill, initially we’re not all that good at it. I remember learning to drive. I got my father so worried that I was going to crash his car during the lessons that he sent me to a driving school. (And I still did subsequently crash his car; I think most teenagers do.) But now I’m a good driver, because I didn’t stop driving.

The difference between someone who perseveres and someone who doesn’t can be the thoughts that you have when you get it wrong. If, when you don’t stick with your planned change, you think, “I’ve failed, OK, that’s it, I might as well give up completely,” you’re right, you have failed. But if you think, “I didn’t do what I planned to do, OK, treat that as a learning experience, let’s start again and get it right this time,” sooner or later you will succeed.

photo credit: mahalie

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, because before you reach the point of doing it well you are going to have to go through a period of doing it badly.

Now, I would argue with some of Judith Beck’s phrasing. She suggests using thoughts such as “I shouldn’t eat this” or “I’m not supposed to eat this on my diet”. Switching therapeutic models for a moment to Transactional Analysis, what that’s doing, in my view, is “hooking the not-OK child”. It’s taking us back to being a child considering doing something that we will be punished for, but want to do. I prefer a more adult phrasing: “That doesn’t serve my goals.” Because ultimately, perseverance is about valuing our goals enough to tolerate the difficulties we encounter on the way to them. I am a thin person, and the way I think that keeps me thin is, “If I eat that I won’t feel well later on, however good it tastes now. I just don’t want to do that.”

photo credit: Izzard

In order to get long-term benefits, you need to tolerate temporary unpleasantness or unfulfilled desire for a short-term benefit, and to let go of those feelings. If your mind is filled with rage, disappointment and distress because you are not getting a reward right now, just back up for a moment, step back from those feelings, and look at them. Recognize the little kid throwing a tantrum in the supermarket because a parent just said “no” to getting a sweetie? Now turn your attention to the adult goal that you have set for yourself, and enter into the satisfaction of taking a step towards fulfilling it.

So, in summary:

1. Perseverance is a mental skill.
2. You get better at it with practice.
3. It’s essential to complete any significant change, life challenge or project.
4. You will get things wrong sometimes.
5. Whether you will persevere often comes down to whether you see a mistake as the end or a new beginning.
6. Keeping your goals in mind will help you to persevere when things are difficult.
7. Let go of negative feelings about short-term frustrations and invest in positive feelings about long-term gains.

I have a poem by Clarissa Pinkola Estes pinned up beside my desk. It says in part:

Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down, refuse to stay down.

That’s the best short definition of perseverance I know.

Technorati Tags: perseverance, diet, cognitive therapy, personal change, behavior change, attitude change, goals, gtd, motivation

We may be able to add HIV to the list of health conditions positively affected by mindfulness meditation.

A small, randomly controlled, single-blind study run by David Creswell and colleagues at UCLA is about to be published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity. It measured the decline of CD4+ T lymphocytes, immune system cells which typically decline as HIV progresses, in a group of 48 HIV-positive adults who were assigned randomly to either an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction seminar programme or a 1-day stress reduction education seminar.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was pioneered by John Kabat-Zinn and described in his book Full Catastrophe Living. It adapts traditional Buddhist meditation techniques to the purpose of stress reduction. Because it is a standardized programme, consisting of guided exercises in class and practice at home, it gives reproducibility to scientific studies performed with it. Included in the programme are body awareness, mindful stretching, sitting meditation, and mindfulness in daily life
practices. These are thought to make participants more able to deal effectively with stress through greater awareness.

Participants in the study were medically assessed before and after the treatment by doctors who were not aware whether the participants were in the treatment (meditation) or control group. Statistical methods were used to confirm that the groups were comparable and that other factors, such as the use of antiretroviral medications, were not responsible for the observed differences. The participants were screened beforehand, and those with an AIDS diagnosis, hepatitis, a psychiatric disorder, illicit drug use, infection, low levels of stress, or an existing mind-body practice were excluded.

What the research group found was that the meditation group were significantly less likely to have declined in their immune system status compared with the control group, and that there was a correlation between the number of classes attended and the strength of the effect.

This is a small study, and larger studies are needed to confirm that the effect exists, but because mindfulness meditation is a cheap intervention (you can teach it in a group, and no drugs or other expensive materials are involved), there is a reasonable likelihood that these studies will be done.

The intervention is also simple and, like other non-drug interventions, safe and without harmful side effects.

Technorati Tags: non-drug therapy, mindfulness, meditation, HIV, stress, immune system

This is the second of two posts on improving your interpersonal life. There’ll be more in the future, so if this is an interest of yours, please subscribe.

This little practice is short enough that you can do it in the shower, while waiting for a bus, while having breakfast, or in any of the many other interstices of everyday life. It is simple enough that you should be able to memorize it easily, or write it out on a small card to carry with you.

It is deliberately phrased so that it can be used by people of any, or no, spiritual background or belief. Although most of its inspirations came from the Christian tradition, including the Lord???s Prayer, there is nothing in its language, content or structure which restricts it to members of that tradition or any other.

1. The Intent:
???I want to listen
to what is highest and best,
to all people,
to everything that exists,
to my own body and my true self,
so that I may understand and love more deeply.???

2. The Five Gladnesses: ???I am glad that??????

3. The Three Annoyances: Choose three people (perhaps one from the media, one from your past and one from your present) who annoy you. Think about why they annoy you. For each, say: ???[person???s name] annoys me because he/she??? just like me.???

Extra credit: Express a wish, hope, intent, affirmation or prayer for positive change which covers the people who annoy you and yourself, and addresses the issue that annoys you: ???I hope we??????, ???May we??????.

4. The Welcoming: Observe any negative feelings that arise. Welcome each by name: ???Welcome, [feeling]???. Breathe in and hold both the breath and the feeling for a moment; then let them go.

5. The Desire: ???I want to use these practices throughout this day and throughout my life.???

Commentary

1. The Intent sets the tone of the practice; you are listening in order to understand and love.

Substitute ???God??? for ???what is highest and best??? if that language works better for you. Or not, if not.

2. The Five Gladnesses can be Five Thanks if you prefer. (Credit: Marcus Borg, in his book The Heart of Christianity.)

There is research around this; Improved Lives cites a study by Martin Seligman and colleagues which found that a similar exercise was the most effective of several exercises they studied at increasing happiness and reducing depression. The point here is to set a positive tone, to recall what is good about your life. Don???t feel restricted to five if you can think of more.

The underlying psychological principle is that when you are in a particular mood, you tend to recall memories which match that mood. It works the other way, too; if you deliberately summon up memories that are linked to a particular emotion or mental set, you tend to get the mood along with the memory.

3. The Three Annoyances is the challenging part, and the heart of the practice. If you don’t do any of the other parts, do this.

This exercise was developed out of a phrase in Arjuna Ardagh’s The Translucent Revolution by a couple of friends of mine. There is a debt to the Gestalt tradition here as well.

photo credit: JelleS

What you are doing here is to acknowledge that what annoys you in others does so because it is an alienated aspect of your own behaviour that you prefer not to own. Possibly, too, it is something you wish you could do but feel you don???t have permission for, or can???t do as much as you want to because the other person is doing it ??? for example, they may be drawing attention to themselves, so you can???t have that attention.

The mere act of appending ???just like me??? begins reintegration, the recovery of your projections. Even more so if you can express a positive hope for yourself and the people who annoy you. Then, you become responsible to change. It???s likely that if you start to change ??? or even just admit that the behaviour is yours also ??? the other people will start to annoy you less, even if they don???t change.

My wife used this with a very irritating and toxic colleague, and found that their relationship improved out of all recognition.

You can group several people who annoy you for the same reason together.

Examples:
???A and B annoy me because they want attention, just like me. May we get the security we need so that we can let go of wanting to be the centre of things.???
???B annoys me because she doesn???t listen, just like me. May we learn to pay attention to other people.???
???C annoys me because he???s negative and destructive, just like me. May we find positive ways to express our criticisms.???

4. The welcoming practice is based on the Welcoming Prayer, developed by Mary Mrozowski in the Centering Prayer tradition founded by Thomas Keating. I’ve written about it, and the brain science behind it, in more depth before under the title One Simple Step Towards Managing Emotions.

5. The Desire opens the practice out into the rest of your life.

You are developing ways of dealing positively with life, and by doing the practice in the context of everyday life ??? in the shower or at the breakfast table ??? you set yourself up to use the parts of it at the times that they become relevant. It isn???t locked away in a special ???spiritual??? category, outside of normal life.

Give it a try. I think you’ll be surprised at the results.

Technorati Tags: transformation, personal change, personal development, personal transformation, managing emotions, interpersonal skills, practice, positivity, positive psychology, personal growth, mood congruence, annoyances, projection

In the news: Microsoft founder Bill Gates and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg have pledged $375 million USD to a program which will fight smoking in the developing world, particularly India and China.

As smoking declines in the West, tobacco companies are turning their attention to Africa, Asia and South America, where laws on public smoking and cigarette advertising are not as restrictive and where, in some cases, rising incomes make for an attractive potential market. Bloomberg and Gates want to encourage those countries to toughen these laws and tax tobacco, by funding anti-smoking groups working with the governments.

Learning from other people’s mistakes is cheap wisdom. Let’s hope that these initiatives win out against the marketing of the tobacco giants and spare the developing world huge health and social costs for easily preventable diseases.

Technorati Tags: smoking, tobacco, anti-smoking

I’m planning to do an entire series on improving interpersonal skills, based on Daniel Goleman’s book Social Intelligence, but I’ll have to find time to finish reading it first. In the meantime, to round out my Health Behaviors series, I’ll do a couple of posts on simple techniques for improving your ability to get on with others.

photo credit: Joyseph

Why is that part of a healthy lifestyle? Well, one of the factors often found when investigating longevity and good health is social support. People who have good, supportive relationships, on average, have healthier as well as happier lives. Even having a pet is associated with better health in many studies.

Now, cause and effect aren’t established. It may be that healthy, long-lived people also have other characteristics which cause them to enter good relationships. But I can think of plenty of reasons why getting on well with others would be good for you - starting with improving your stress levels - and so here’s the first of two suggestions for exercises to improve your relationships.

Like many of the techniques that are achieving wider currency these days, this is a Buddhist practice. It’s known as compassion meditation.

photo credit: alicesoup

Here’s one simple form of the exercise. Close your eyes, and start out by imagining a person that you already have positive regard towards. As you think of them, set your mind to wish them well. Not through a series of verbal thoughts (although that can work, it has its limitations), but simply having an attitude of desiring that they be free of suffering and enjoy a positive state. Love them, in other words, but do so consciously and deliberately.

When you have done this successfully for a while, it’s time to move to step 2. This time, choose a person towards whom your feelings are neutral: not strongly positive, not strongly negative, they’re just someone you’re aware of without any particular feeling pro or anti. Now generate towards them the same attitude of love, compassion and positive regard that you did for the person towards whom you already have some positive feelings.

When you feel you have mastered this phase of the exercise - and not before - you can move to step 3. Step 3 is, you probably have guessed, to pick a person whom you don’t like and generate the same positive feelings towards them. If you’re taking these steps over several sessions, begin each session with the easy person, the person who you already like, then move to the neutral person, and finally to the person you dislike.

The final step, for adepts, is “pure compassion” meditation, in which you focus unlimited compassion and loving-kindness towards all living beings without specificity or distinction - sometimes called nonreferential compassion.

Some scientists wired up compassion meditators to various brain scanning machines, and this is what they found, as reported in Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (previously reviewed here).

photo credit: Tsch??ff

Brain areas concerned with maternal love, empathy, and a desire to act (presumably, to relieve the sufferings of others) are among those which increase in activation. Brain areas which are active in sadness and anxiety are damped down.

And the effects increase the longer you meditate. Experienced compassion meditators have highly integrated brains, with strong connections from their prefrontal lobes (which are involved with thinking things through and deciding) to the amygdala (which activates fear and anger reactions). This means that they have greater control over their emotions. Their brain activity also shifts in the direction of the left prefrontal cortex (associated with happiness), away from the right prefrontal cortex (associated with unhappiness, discontentment and extreme vigilance).

If you met someone who was cheerful, warm, able to deal well with their negative emotions, empathetic and caring, wouldn’t you want to be around them more? So would I.

photo credit: moonjazz

For Further Reading
A news report on a recent study into compassion meditation (by some of the scientists featured in the Begley book), and the study it refers to.

And Healing With Awareness has more and different exercises for cultivating compassion.

Technorati Tags: compassion, meditation, self-improvement, interpersonal, skills, technique, improve relationships, empathy, emotion, emotional control

Well, the end date I set for my weight gain goal - my 41st birthday - has passed, and it’s time to look over the results and reflect on the process and on what comes next.

If you’ve read this whole series, you may recall that when I originally planned this change process in late March, I had three phases in mind.

• Phase 1: regain some weight I had lost. I completed this around 5 May.
• Phase 2: Gain additional weight to take me up to the bottom of the “normal” range.
• Phase 3: Gain still more weight to give myself a safety buffer.

Each phase involved gaining 5kg.

At the time, I hoped to complete all three by my birthday in early July, but it became obvious that I wouldn’t sometime in late May or early June, and I revised my target to be the completion of Phase 2 by then instead.

While it’s important to persevere with your goals, it’s just demotivational if you are chasing goals that you know are unrealistic, so it’s also important to be flexible. The direction of change and the fact of progress are more important than the actual numbers anyway.

Now as you can see from my graph on FridgeGraph, I plateaued out at 60kg around the middle of June and didn’t gain any more weight. That’s still an overall gain of 8kg in 3 months, which is about 15% of my starting body weight, so when you look at it like that it’s nothing to be disappointed in.

Because my approach combined a diet planned by good nutrition principles with strength-building exercise, the weight gain has been healthy, and I am definitely more muscular than I was. (I’m still not a large guy, of course, and you wouldn’t notice a lot of muscle looking at me, but I can get the tops off jars now, and I certainly feel different.)

At this point I probably should say something about supplements and why I didn’t use them. Many, many sites on the Internet, plus probably your local gym, will attempt to sell you “bulking supplements” if you want to put on weight. There is no scientific evidence that most of them are at all effective, and at least some of them are actively unhealthy. Nor do you need to go on a high-protein diet. Muscle is built out of protein, it’s true, but there is only so much protein that your body needs for this purpose, and it’s not a large amount. Any additional protein is broken down and used for energy, so you might as well eat carbohydrates instead - keeping the overall balance of protein, carbs and fat within the recommended guidelines for distribution of these nutrients. (Depending where you live, these will vary slightly; the NZ guidelines are 15-25% of energy from protein, 20-35% from fat and 45-65% from carbohydrates).

photo credit: Schilling 2

If you’re planning to gain weight, the key thing is that your energy input must exceed your energy output (the same as if you want to lose weight your energy output must exceed your energy input). It’s not rocket science. If you’re eating a balanced diet - of food, not supplements - which gives you all the nutrients you need for your height, weight, age and gender, and is giving you the appropriate amount of energy for your weight goals, and in addition you’re doing the right exercise for your goals, you’re doing it right.

How do you figure out how much energy (and what nutrients) you need, and translate these into food terms? Go to nutritiondata.com and get a free account. It’s quite easy to use, and although it’s not perfect it works pretty well to help you get from your current diet to one that will suit your needs. I gave a more detailed explanation in my post “Eat as if you were the weight you want to be“.

So, that’s the assessment: 8kg, a good result, achieved in the right way, happy with the process. Now, what next?

I’m getting bored with the dumbbell exercises, and it is a good idea to switch your exercise programme round every so often. My current plan is to look into Pilates and other similar exercises that I can do with the equipment we already have (a Swiss ball and some resistance straps). The goal here is to maintain my fitness, improve my posture and keep the door open for further weight gain, without chasing it as a specific goal for a little while.

My diet is in good shape (I just completed an assignment for my nutrition class through Massey University which told me as much), and I have got used to eating more and taking in more energy than I was doing before. I’m going to continue doing so.

Two things I want to stress to people who are thinking about weight change (in either direction).

One is to think carefully about your motivations.

Are you trying to meet some ridiculous, impossible and probably unhealthy ideal promoted through airbrushed, surgery-enhanced and half-starved models or steroid-abusing bodybuilders? If so, get a grip on your imagination and learn to appreciate the body you have. I have a wonderful wife who loves me. Neither of us are the “ideal” body shape, and we never will be. That doesn’t matter.

photo credit: bettyx1138

Are you trying to meet a psychological need through a physical change? If so, realize that changing your body may or may not change your self-perception, so it’s probably easier to work on the self-perception directly. Go to a good counsellor, psychologist or hypnotherapist who will help you to discover what it is you are really looking for and find ways to meet that need from your own extensive resources. Or read a book such as the old classic Psychocybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who realized that many of his patients were not helped by changing their body shape because what they needed to change was their thinking, and developed a method for doing this.

Or are you trying to enhance your physical health to support your total quality of life? In that case, don’t focus on weight. Weight is not the issue. Focus on health. Eat nutritiously and for nutrition and the amount of energy you need; exercise for health and vitality and improved quality of life. Let the weight take care of itself. Use it as a measurement, perhaps, but it’s not the true goal; it’s a way of keeping track.

The other thing I want to say to people planning to change their weight is that changing anything about yourself permanently involves a permanent change in your thinking and behaviour. This should be so obvious I don’t even need to state it. But how many people each year spend a fortune on fad diets that knock the weight off quickly and then, when they can no longer handle the complex restrictions, the calculations or the missing nutrients (because most fad diets don’t provide all the nutrients your body needs), rebound to their previous weight or greater?

Well, to answer my own rhetorical question, 95% of people who use diet products experience no net loss and a third to two-thirds of dieters end up heavier than they were after one year. That’s a crazy failure rate. With a failure rate like that, something in the process has to be fundamentally flawed, and in my opinion it’s this: The changes are not sustainable and are not presented as something that needs to be sustained.

Take a look at my health behaviors and change techniques series for more discussion of these issues. And I’ll continue to talk about my personal progress here now and again; I think it’s motivational to hear about other people’s struggles and triumphs.

Technorati Tags: weight, weight loss, weight gain, diet, nutrition, exercise, personal change, motivation, change techniques, supplements

Recovery effects - also known as withdrawal symptoms - are the physical and psychological effects that some people experience when they stop smoking. Here are some suggestions (expanded from my free smokefree brochure) on ways to deal with these effects.

photo credit: Hazel Motes

Smokers’ bodies adapt to being regularly poisoned when they start smoking. (This is why the first few cigarettes are usually so disgusting - the adaptation takes a few exposures for the brain to be fooled into thinking the experience is positive and override the body’s protests). When they stop, the body adapts again and goes through a “detox” for about 1-2 weeks. During this time some people notice irritation, anxiety, depression, trouble concentrating, sleep difficulties, coughing, sore throat, constipation, or the desire to eat more.

To deal with this:

1. Breathe deeply to help your lungs clean out.

Since some of the “alertness effect” of smoking comes from the extra oxygen gained by breathing in when you inhale, this is also one of the suggestions for giving up. Deep breathing has many physical benefits for anyone, not just an ex-smoker.

2. Drink less coffee, tea and caffeinated soft drink (including energy drinks), and more water and fruit juice.

photo credit: emdot

Nicotine reduces the effect of caffeine, so you don’t need as much when you’re not smoking. If you continue to drink the same amount you will probably get jittery, even anxious, and you may attribute this to the fact that you aren’t smoking (which is true, in a way, but indirectly). Dropping your caffeine consumption should help. Drinking coffee is also frequently a smoking trigger, which is another good reason to give up in favour of another beverage.

Water and fruit juice help the detox process. Water, of course, is used to carry toxins out of the body that have been processed through the liver and kidneys. Fruit juice contains vitamins which your body uses to repair itself and to neutralize the charged particles (free radicals) that smoking produces, which are a large part of the carcinogenic effect. Orange juice, kiwifruit juice and other juices high in vitamin C are particularly good for this.

photo credit: Steven Fernandez

3. Eat fruit between meals and at the start of meals to help you detox and reduce your desire to eat sugary foods. Also try sugar-free gum, carrots or celery sticks.

Because a cigarette stimulates your body and shifts it into flight-or-fight mode, it causes the release of sugar into your blood. This is why ex-smokers often find themselves craving sweet things; their bodies have become used to the regular lift in blood sugar and are asking for it. If you provide it in the form of fruit, not only is the sugar absorbed over a longer period (because fruit sugar has to be processed through the liver, and because the dietary fibre in fruit delays absorption), but it is accompanied by vitamins and minerals which will help your body to recover.

One woman I spoke to gave up smoking entirely by eating oranges. Peeling the orange gave her something to do with her hands, eating the orange gave her something to do with her mouth, she was getting a blood-sugar lift, the vitamin C was helping her detox, and the time she spent peeling and eating the orange allowed any cravings to pass off. Buying a bag of mandarins or oranges is also cheaper than buying a pack of cigarettes, in most places.

4. Move around if you feel cravings, anxiety or anger. Exercise will increase your oxygen flow, distract you, and help your body throw off the poisons.

photo credit: Ernst Moeksis

See my previous post 7 benefits of exercise I can believe in for the full list of benefits from exercise, including stress management, improved mood and lessened addiction risk.

5. Do something else with your hands if you’re restless.

Peel and eat an orange, for example. Or knit, use prayer beads, tinker with something mechanical, whittle, screw and unscrew nuts on and off bolts, whatever works for you. If your hands are busy they can’t be taking out a cigarette and lighting it.

6. Change your routine so that you don’t fall into old habits.

Many practitioners treat smoking as a habit more than an addiction, and its link to other habits is part of what you need to break. Paying attention - not being mechanical about your day - is one important way to shift this, and so is planning the change in advance. There’s more in my blog article Why it’s hard to change habits, and how you can change them anyway, and both of these, and more, are in my free PDF ebook Change Techniques.

7. Notice what’s happening with your body, mind and emotions. Let the feelings come and then let them go. They will usually only last a few minutes.

photo credit: paul goyette

This is, again, about paying attention. If you’ve ever spent much time around little children you will know how they will become louder and louder until their mothers pay attention to them. Your emotions are much the same. Change Techniques includes several simple techniques for emotional management, and this is one of them: learning to simply notice the feelings and let them go.

For at least some people, a behaviour like smoking is a way to avoid paying attention to distressing emotions. If you’re ever to be free of the behaviour, you need to have the courage to face the emotions - you will find that you can do it and it’s really not as bad as you may have thought. This realization then sets you up for even more success in life.

8. Think about your reasons for stopping. Think of nicotine as the poison it is.

Another good way to deal with an automatic behaviour: think about it. And a good way to change it is to think about it in a new way. If you find yourself smoking, ask yourself: What am I doing? Why would I do this? What can I do instead?

9. Talk or write about how you feel. Putting feelings into words reduces their power.

photo credit: JeanPierreG.

I wrote about the brain science behind this in One simple step towards managing emotion, which is also included in the free Change Techniques ebook. Basically, by using words you shift the activation of your brain away from feeling the emotion (and being driven by it to habitual behaviour).

10. If you start again, stop again. Perhaps try a different method of giving up ??? there are several.

Falling down is not failure. Falling down and not trying to get up again is failure. Many people need multiple attempts to stop smoking - it is