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Stress less: Keys to a calmer existence

Psycological Health, Uncategorized

Stress less: Keys to a calmer existence

2013-10-02

By Francesca Castagnoli, Health.com

It’s one of the greatest ironies of life: We’re too frantically busy to deal with the stuff that makes us feel frantically busy — the to-do’s that overwhelm us, the clutter that eats up our homes, the niggling personal and professional issues that preoccupy our minds.

Tackling them might feel like a someday project, the kind you’ll get around to when you have the time. Right.

The key to a calmer existence, experts say, is finding bite-size, everyday solutions for stressors and releasing what we can, be it physical or psychological clutter.

“When you start to let go, your life lightens up because you have less to think about and less to maintain,” says Geralin Thomas, a professional organizer in Cary, North Carolina. “You finally feel in control.”

The payoffs don’t end there — you can sharpen your focus and even lose weight, too. These are the strategies that will ease your load and let you enjoy life a lot more.

Clear your schedule

As we juggle it all, we’re often fueled by an I-can-do-it! sense of pride. But we might be deluding ourselves, suggests a study in the Journal of Communication that found that people misperceive the emotional high they get from multitasking as productivity.

And we’re not even as good at it as we may think. Another study, published in Psychological Science, revealed that women’s ability to keep track of several tasks at once dipped significantly during ovulation, when estrogen levels are high (and can mess with brain function).

Technology sometimes hampers us more than it helps, adds Laura Vanderkam, author of the book “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think.”

“Time speeds by when you’re on your smartphone e-mailing,” she says, “even if you’re really not doing anything important.”

How to lighten up:

Suss out time sucks. For one day, every couple of hours, note down exactly what you just did, including things like “Read Facebook updates for a half-hour” or “Scanned catalogs for 15 minutes after opening mail,” says Vanderkam. “You start to see the time periods that you’re not using as well as you’d like.”

Stop the auto-yes. “Everyone lives in an optimistic world and thinks that if we say yes we will find the time, but the truth is we are in denial,” says Julie Morgenstern, one of the top organization and productivity experts in the country. Instead, experiment with saying, “Let me think about how I can do that,” says Morgenstern. “This way you can step back and evaluate if you really can do what is being asked.”

Have a plan. “Most people’s to-do lists actually create fatigue, because they don’t clarify how, exactly, they are going to handle Mom’s birthday, so tasks feel bigger than they are,” says David Allen, a productivity expert and author of the best-selling book “Getting Things Done.” Take a second to jot down how you’ll tackle something. Feel better already?

Just do it. Allen regularly tells clients to follow his Two-Minute Rule: If something can be done in two minutes, go ahead and get it done. Explains Allen, “It will take you longer to look at it again than it would take to finish it the first time you think of it.”

Reconsider rewards. Carefully examine your commitments, says Morgenstern, and decide which ones energize you — and which deplete you. For the tasks that send your misery Geiger counter off the charts, pinpoint whatever reward you get from them and find a better way of scoring it.

One client of Morgenstern’s wasn’t really enjoying volunteering for the PTA because it took time away from her kids, but she kept at it because she thought it showed her children she considered school important.

Ultimately, she switched over to running the occasional fun class activity and giving her kids more hands-on help with homework. “These things took less time,” Morgenstern notes, “and she and her family got more out of them.”

Health.com: 8 reasons to make time for family dinner

Clear your clutter

Dusting, mopping, vacuuming: That’s easy. Getting rid of all the junk you have to dust, mop and vacuum around? Not so much.

“Giving things up is tough because it’s not so clear-cut when they’re no longer useful,” says Morgenstern, author of the book “Shed Your Stuff, Change Your Life.” You don’t stop wearing jeggings on a Tuesday at 4 p.m.; you just gradually stop doing so, even as they languish on a hanger.

The thing is, those pile-ups of possessions can create anxiety; a study at UCLA found that just looking at clutter elevated women’s stress hormones (although, no surprise, the men’s cortisol levels remained unchanged).

Motivation to get going on cleaning house: You may look better, too. As Thomas points out, “One big change I see in clients who have de-cluttered is weight loss. Once they have shaped their environment, they’re ready to shape up themselves.”

Health.com: 7 steps to organizing clutter

How to lighten up:

Think small. “We know from research that little acts of neatness cascade into larger acts of organization,” says Christine Carter, a sociologist at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. Forget about organizing the entire kitchen; focus on, say, the plastic containers taking over your cabinets.

“With random de-cluttering, there’s always more that you can do,” notes Thomas. “When one category is tackled, there’s definitely an end point.”

Be a regular. Perhaps you dedicate, say, 10 minutes a weekday to an organizing project. Or you commit to doing a couple of hours for a few weekends in a row. The point is, be consistent and attentive; turn off your cell phone and schedule child care.

Thomas does a weekly “Trash Eve” de-clutter: “The garbage in my neighborhood is picked up on Wednesdays, which makes Tuesdays the night I make an easy supper and clear the decks!”

Decide what’s treasure and what’s toss-able. Ask yourself just one question before you start purging any collection of stuff, recommends Morgenstern: “If everything was stolen, what pieces would I go out and buy the very next day?” There you go — the costume jewelry, canned goods and linens you truly want and need.

Pre-arrange pickups. About 40% of people who purge never manage to get the stuff out of their homes, per a poll of 23,000 people on Morgenstern’s website. Avoid becoming a hoarder statistic by scheduling a pickup before you start to clean your house. Try salvationarmyusa.org, goodwill.org or excessaccess.org, a not-for-profit that connects people with local schools and charities in need of specific goods.

Health.com: Secrets to a healthy (happy!) home

Clear your mind

It’s not just that we have a lot to keep track of — it’s our DIY mentality, says Dr. Orit Avni-Barron, director of Women’s Mental Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “I hear women say, ‘My husband is so great, he helps me,'” as if our partners are our sous chefs instead of co-cooks.

Another issue: Women worry twice as much as men, research shows. “Worrying impairs concentration and memory,” says Robert Leahy, director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York City. “You can’t tend to the present and worry about the future at the same time. It’s overwhelming.”

Health.com: 9 things to stop worrying about

How to lighten up:

Pop annoying thought bubbles. Psychologists talk of the Zeigarnik effect, named after a Russian shrink who realized that a waiter could more easily recall incomplete orders than served ones. The follow-up study showed that people are 90% more likely to remember undone tasks than those they completed. “Tell your brain when you’ll get a task done,” says Carter. “It kills the worry loop.”

Control what’s possible. “When we don’t know how something will work out, we worry to get certainty,” says Leahy. Yet one study at Penn State University found that 85% of things people fretted about had neutral or positive outcomes. To quell anxiety, throw yourself into what you can accomplish — say, writing the introduction to the PowerPoint document instead of ruminating on the presentation. “You’ll feel good about the present and put other thoughts on pause,” says Leahy.

Be hands-on. Weed, knead dough, do a craft, says Dr. Gayatri Devi, associate professor of neurology at New York University. “When you think about something tangible, you stop thinking about the theoretical.”

Grade perfection on a curve. “We have reached a tipping point in perfection. People are realizing we can’t do it all at the level that we used to,” says Morgenstern.

That means you, sister! Start with the obvious: Divvy up more responsibilities with your partner, even if he does them differently. And try Morgenstern’s Minimum, Moderate, Maximum strategy: Decide what level of effort you can give tasks (and get away with). As she says, “You may be surprised to find that everything works out OK.”

Fewer Drugs Being Prescribed to Treat Mental Illness Among Kids

Psycological Health

Fewer Drugs Being Prescribed to Treat Mental Illness Among Kids

2013-10-01

By

?As rates of behavioral disorders like attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety rose among children, so did concerns about treating them with psychotropic drugs.

From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, the number of young children on psychotropic drugs, which include anti-depressants, stimulants, mood stabilizers and anti-anxiety agents, increased by two- to three- fold. Some drugs, including several ADHD medications, have been approved for use in children ages six to 12, while others have not studied long term in younger patients.

But in a new study published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers report that psychotropic drug treatments among children is stabilizing, according to data from a national sample of more than 43,000 kids between the ages of two and five. These drug prescriptions peaked between 2002 and 2005, and leveled off from 2006 to 2009.

While more refined guidelines for diagnosing mood and behavioral disorders among children may explain some of the change in medication use, more stringent warnings about the potential risks of psychotropic drugs on youngsters probably also played a role. In the mid-2000s, the Food and Drug Administration started adding its strictest black box warning to alerting doctors and patients to the serious risks these treatments could pose for children and adolescents. For those reasons, more pediatric groups advise doctors to start their youngest patients on behavioral therapies first, before relying on medications to treat their symptoms. “Our findings underscore the need to ensure that doctors of very young children who are diagnosing ADHD, the most common diagnosis, and prescribing stimulants, the most common kind of psychotropic medications, are using the most up-to-date and stringent diagnostic criteria and clinical practice guidelines,” the authors conclude.

However, some recent research showed that more than one in five specialists who diagnose and recommend treatment for preschoolers with ADHD turn to drug therapy first, either alone or in tandem with behavior therapy. But it’s not because these pediatric specialists think that the drugs are more effective or aren’t concerned about the long term effects of the medications. That study also revealed that drug approaches may be the only practical or accessible ones to some parents, since behavior-based methods require a lengthy time commitment and can be costly.

Currently, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) supports behavior therapy as the first strategy for treating preschoolers diagnosed with ADHD, and suggests that medication should be used only if the behavior therapies were unsuccessful. That approach, pediatric experts hope, will continue to direct psychotropic medications only where they are needed.

The Drama of the Anxious Child

Psycological Health

The Drama of the Anxious Child

2013-09-30

Childhood anxiety is on the rise at every level, from fear of monsters under the bed to severe anxiety disorders

When I was first studying psychology, thirty years ago, I learned that about 10-20% of children are born with a temperament that is highly reactive to anything new and unfamiliar. Some of these children go on in life to be anxious, timid, or shy (or, as we shy people like to say, “slow to warm up.”) A much smaller number of children, about 1-5%, were diagnosed at that time with a full-fledged anxiety disorder.

Nowadays, there are still 10-20% with that reactive temperament, but the number of children with a diagnosable anxiety disorder has skyrocketed, up to 25% according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A report from the National Institutes of Health adds, “There is persuasive evidence from a range of studies that anxiety disorders are the most frequent mental disorders in children and adolescents….” These new numbers must be viewed skeptically, of course, because of the trend towards looser and broader definitions of mental illness. Many commentators have linked this trend to the influence of pharmaceutical companies on diagnosis and prescription patterns.

Despite these caveats, however, I believe that childhood anxiety is indeed on the rise at every level, from fears of monsters under the bed to phobias and panic attacks to severe anxiety disorders.

Last year I gave a lecture on childhood anxiety to parents at a public elementary school. I heard about children who couldn’t be in a different room from their parents, even to use the bathroom, children who were too afraid of the water to swim or even take a shower, and children who were too afraid of making a mistake to function well in the classroom.

Of course, these were parents who chose to attend a lecture on childhood anxiety, but many teachers have told me that they now have a number of highly anxious children in every class. What struck me most in this group was that none of these children was in therapy, and none had received an “official” diagnosis of an anxiety disorder (though I did give out a few business cards).

In my practice I have seen more and more children who have too much social anxiety to go to school, too much stress about grades to enjoy life, and too much separation anxiety to achieve independence as they grow older. My colleagues report the same rise in fears, worries, and anxieties.

What’s going on?

Anxiety is an alarm system—we need a little jolt of it so we will look both ways before crossing the street, but we also need an all-clear signal when the danger has passed. I think our constantly wired world has drowned out the all-clear signal. We hear instantly about every disaster, and we are bombarded with graphic images that repeat on a loop—first onscreen and then in our minds.

Another way to think of anxiety is as a simple formula: Add up all the things that cause us stress, and then subtract all of our abilities to cope. The net result is our anxiety level. This formula makes it clear why childhood anxiety is on the rise. Schools are more competitive and stressful, children are more overscheduled, parents are worried about finances and safety, and our society is based on a win-lose model, where only a few children will be able to succeed. Meanwhile, coping mechanisms are disappearing: Children don’t get enough time outside, either experiencing nature or running around in their neighborhoods. Children don’t spend nearly enough time doing “nothing,” enjoying the downtime necessary to process all their new experiences. Instead, they are desperately engaged in a drive to never be bored. I think many parents have put themselves—and their children—into an anxiety-producing corner. They want their children to be academically successful and always happy and creative and socially/emotionally intelligent. It’s an impossible demand, and the inevitable result is anxiety and burnout.

In order to change this, we first need to look to ourselves. What are we doing to manage our own anxiety? I have lost count of the number of parents who tell me they don’t pressure their high-strung children. Let’s get real. I’ve been observing a strange mix of avoidance and pressure in today’s parents. They say things like, “You don’t have to swim (or go to birthday parties, or play soccer) if you don’t want to,” but at the same time they are distraught about their child not having a best friend or the right playdates in kindergarten.

As parents, we need to focus on the opposite of worry, anxiety, and fear. In terms of the body, that means relaxation, physical activity, roughhousing, and outdoor time. In terms of overprotectiveness, that means letting children have adventures that are scary, fun, and safe. In terms of specific phobias, the opposite is a gentle nudge towards facing the feelings and overcoming the fears. And for us parents, the opposite of worry is trust: trust in the power of development, trust in the resilience of children, and trust that the world is a good and safe place for our children to grow up.

Why you shouldn’t go to work sick

Behaviour

Why you shouldn’t go to work sick

2013-09-26

By Dr. Jennifer Shu, Special to CNN

he average adult gets a cold about two or three times a year, with each one lasting up to a week, or sometimes longer.

Staying home from work every time you are sick could add up to a lot of missed days. In fact, it has been reported that up to 40% of lost time from work is due to the common cold, totaling about 23 million missed days per year.

Even though it can be tempting to go to work while you’re sick, here are some reasons why you are better off staying home:

You’ll get other people sick

Germs can spread from direct contact with a sick person or his or her secretions (such as from handshakes or touching shared objects like doorknobs). Some viruses can live on the skin or other surfaces for at least a few hours and continue to infect others.

In addition, viruses can spray a few feet following a cough or sneeze. Especially in the earliest part of illness, when you are most contagious, stay home if you work in close quarters with other people or if you handle food.

It’s also important not to go to work if you work with young children, the elderly or people with weak immune systems. The relatively minor illness you experience may cause more severe symptoms in these groups of people.

You’ll be less productive

It is hard to know the exact financial and physical toll that an illness takes on an individual or employer. Sure, you’ll be more productive than if you stayed home and didn’t do any work at all, but you may not be as sharp or efficient when suffering from a cold.

It may take longer to recover

Pushing yourself and working too much in the early stages of illness may actually prolong your recovery time. Studies have shown that lack of sleep can weaken your immune system and make you more susceptible to colds.

Conversely, getting enough sleep can boost infection-fighting cells and antibodies so you can get well faster. Do yourself a favor and stay home and rest.

Ideally, we would all be able to rest and recuperate during a cold. If that’s not possible, see if you can work from home so at least you won’t spread your germs.

If you must go to work, try to keep your distance from others, wash or sanitize your hands often, and cover coughs and sneezes with a sleeve or elbow. You can also cover with a tissue but be sure to throw it away immediately and then wash your hands.

Disinfect touched objects such as phones, doorknobs, and computer keyboards, and consider avoiding sharing items such as pens.

Why Videos Aren’t the Best Way for Kids to Learn

Uncategorized

Why Videos Aren’t the Best Way for Kids to Learn

DVDs and educational programs on TV have a growing place in helping young children to learn. But there’s new evidence that they may not be as effective as old fashioned conversation.

Even before birth, children hear sounds and words and can babble a variety of noises that will eventually coalesce into into language. “Before nine months of age, a baby produces a babble made up of hundreds of phonemes from hundreds of languages,” Elisabeth Cros, a speech therapist with the Ecole Internationale de New York told TIME in April. “Parents will react to the phonemes they recognize from their native tongues, which reinforces the baby’s use of those selected ones.”

It’s that dynamic interaction between the infant and her caregiver — a back-and-forth that static videos and television programs can’t provide — that is critical for efficient language learning. And a group of researchers from the University of Washington, Temple University and the University of Delaware explain why.

The scientists studied 36 two-year-olds who were randomly assigned to learn verbs in three different ways. A third of the group trained with a live person, another third learned through video chat technology like Skype, and the final third learned by watching a pre-recorded video of a language lesson from the same person.

Their results, published in the journal Child Development, showed that kids learned well in person and in the live video chat, likely because both scenarios allowed for an interaction between the child and the teacher, allowing the youngsters to be more responsive and therefore retain more from their experience. The children using the recorded videos, by contrast, did not learn new vocabulary words by the end of the 10 minute learning and testing task.

The findings confirm previous work that connected live conversations with better vocabularies among young children, but add another layer of understanding about why one-on-one interactions are so important to a developing brain. Nerve connections responsible for language building requires repetition and reinforcement, which can help to strengthen the correct and appropriate words or sounds and discard extraneous or inappropriate ones. It’s not that educational programming or DVDs are harming young minds; it’s more that they aren’t maximizing the infants’ ability to absorb and learn and pick up words and verbal skills more efficiently. So parking a child in front of screen for a few minutes isn’t going to hamper his ability to talk, but interspersing those videos with some one-on-one time engaging  in conversation could help to speed along the learning process.

@acsifferlin

Alexandra Sifferlin is a writer and producer for TIME Healthland. She is a graduate from the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism.

Why New Mothers Stop Breast-Feeding

Behaviour

Why New Mothers Stop Breast-Feeding

2013-09-24

While nearly all mothers start breast-feeding their newborns, about half stop after a few weeks. The latest study explains why.

A team of researchers conducted over 2,700 interviews with 532 first-time mothers multiple times after they gave birth, starting 24 hours after delivery and ending at 60 days postpartum, about their breast-feeding choices. They report in the journal Pediatrics that women who worried from the start about their ability to nurse their infants were more likely to switch to formula sooner than those who didn’t have these concerns.

By the third day after delivering, over half of these women were worried about their babies’ ability to latch on, while 44% were concerned about breast-feeding pain, and 40% about their capacity to produce enough milk to nourish their infants.

Continue reading Why New Mothers Stop Breast-Feeding →

5 tips for recovering from emotional pain

Psycological Health

5 tips for recovering from emotional pain

2013-09-19

By Guy Winch, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Guy Winch holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and has a private practice in Manhattan. He is the author of “Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt, and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries.”

We sustain psychological injuries such as rejection and failure as we go through life just as often as we do physical injuries. But while we have access to ointments and bandages to treat cuts and sprains, we have no such tools to treat emotional pain.

In my book, I discuss the impact of seven common psychological injuries on our emotional well-being — rejection, failure, guilt, loneliness, rumination, loss and bouts of low self-esteem — and offer science-based treatments that ease the pain, accelerate healing and minimize long-term risks to our mental health.

Continue reading 5 tips for recovering from emotional pain →

Eat Better and Stress Less: It’ll Make Your Cells (and Maybe You) Live Longer

Behaviour

Eat Better and Stress Less: It’ll Make Your Cells (and Maybe You) Live Longer

For the first time, researchers show how a plant-based diet, stress management and other lifestyle changes may lead to longevity.

It’s not quite the Fountain of Youth, but it may be the river that leads to it. In a paper published in the journal Lancet Oncology, scientists found that a small group of men who made changes in the way they ate and handled their emotional needs showed longer telomeres in their cells.

That’s exciting because previous research suggested that telomeres, which are protein and DNA-based complexes that cap the ends of chromosomes, regulate the aging of cells. Each time a cell divides, a section of telomeres erodes, and, like a burning candle wick, when telomeres are exhausted, so is the life of the cell.

Continue reading Eat Better and Stress Less: It’ll Make Your Cells (and Maybe You) Live Longer →

How much sex is considered exercise?

Sexual Health

How much sex is considered exercise?

2013-09-18

By Jay Williams, upwave.com

Editor’s note: upwave is Turner Broadcasting’s new lifestyle brand designed to entertain the health into you! Visit upwave.com for more information and follow upwave on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram @upwaveofficial.

(upwave.com) — When I think of the ultimate sex workout, I picture the scene from “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” where Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie throw each other around their kitchen for an hour. Unfortunately, not every sexual experience is quite that… well, high-intensity. But how many calories do we really burn in the act?

The rumor: A bout of sexual activity can burn between 100 and 300 calories

Continue reading How much sex is considered exercise? →

Teens gaining healthy habits, but not enough

Behaviour

Teens gaining healthy habits, but not enough

Efforts to increase healthy habits in American teens may be making an impact, according to a new study. Adolescents are moving more, eating better and watching less TV than they used to, and researchers say obesity rates in this group may finally be stabilizing.

The study results come a little more than a month after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it was seeing signs of progress in the fight against childhood obesity, especially in low-income families.

Continue reading Teens gaining healthy habits, but not enough →