How a Fertile Woman Affects the Way Men Talk

2012-03-19

Men who strike up a conversation with a fertile woman are less likely to match her sentence structure. Researchers say it’s an effort to be “non-conforming” in the quest to land a mate.

Women can be a powerful force, capable of making smitten men do all sorts of things, including adjust the way they talk to more closely match a woman’s speech patterns.

Conversation partners aligning the way they speak is often thought to indicate affiliation between two people. Have a chat with someone who curses liberally, for example, and the likelihood is good that you’ll drop a swear word too. While matching linguistic styles is a documented phenomenon, what’s particularly interesting is that new research shows that higher levels of female fertility are linked to lower levels of linguistic matching from male conversation partners.

According to a study published last month in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers interpret this to mean that men are trying to distinguish themselves in the mating process by being unconventional. What’s more, they don’t seem to even realize they ‘re doing it.

Jacqueline Coyle, an adjunct professor
of human factors and systems at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, followed 123 male undergraduate students who interacted with five female undergraduate students at various points throughout the women’s menstrual cycles. The women, whose menstrual cycles were tracked, weren’t relying on hormonal contraception.

In the study, a man and woman alternated describing a picture to one another. The woman used a script in order to help researchers more clearly see how men’s sentence structure correlated with women’s. Where a woman was in her monthly menstrual was also noted.

The closer to ovulation a woman was in her cycle, the less likely a man was to mimic her sentence structure. “This finding demonstrates that men may use creative or non-conforming language as a means of attracting a potential romantic partner,” says Coyle.

In another study, Coyle flip-flopped the approach and repeated the experiment using 47 female undergraduate students. Women behaved more conventionally: their fertility level did not appear to affect the degree to which they matched their conversation partner’s sentence structure. In other words, the effect seems specific to men.

The research adds to an already significant body of work showing the behavioral effects of female fertility on males. When Coyle was in graduate school at Florida State University, some of her colleagues were investigating how exposing men to the scent of an ovulating woman, for example, affects their perceptions, behavior and even their physiological responses. Coyle wondered whether language might also be influenced.

An argument could have been made for diametrically opposing results. After all, wouldn’t men want to match their conversation more closely to their desired woman’s in order to create feelings of similarity and hence intimacy? “We were very curious to see which way the results would go,” says Coyle. “Many people in the general population may not realize that the effects of a woman’s fertility level go well beyond chocolate cravings, moodiness, and one’s chances of conception.”

Is Your Cell Phone Making You a Jerk?

2012-03-07

Cell phones keep us socially connected, but new research suggests they actually reduce users’ social consciousness. In fact, the study showed that cell phone use was linked to more selfish behavior.

Researchers from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business found that after a short period of cell phone use, people were less likely to partake in “prosocial” behavior — actions that are intended to help another person or society — compared with a control group. For example, after using a cell phone, study participants were more likely to turn down volunteer opportunities and were less persistent in completing word problems, even though they knew their answers would provide money for charity.

The same drop in prosocial tendencies occurred even when participants were simply asked draw a picture of their cell phones and think about using them.

The study involved college men and women in their 20s, but the researchers think the findings would apply to any group.

So why would an innocuous thing like making a cell phone call make a person less giving? The researchers think it has to do with feelings of social connectedness. All humans have a fundamental need to connect with others — but once that need is met, say by using a cell phone, it naturally reduces our inclination to feel empathy or engage in helping behavior toward others. “The cell phone directly evokes feelings of connectivity to others, thereby fulfilling the basic human need to belong,” said study author and marketing professor Rosellina Ferraro in a statement.

Previous research shores up the theory. In October, researchers at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University looked at the effect of social support on people’s attitudes toward others outside of their social circle. The researchers found that those who had a strong sense of belonging to a social circle were more likely to “dehumanize” other groups and more likely to treat them unkindly.

Healthland’s Maia Szalavitz reported at the time:

“[S]ocial connection is sort of like eating. When you are hungry, you seek out food. When you are lonely, you seek social connection. When the experience of social connection is elevated, we feel socially ‘full’ and have less desire to seek out other people and see them in a way that treats them as essentially human,” [says lead author Adam Waytz].

A similar psychology may affect our everyday interactions. “People talk about being overextended, having too many dinner dates, coffee dates, meetings. They feel depleted,” says Waytz. “We think this plays into our findings. Even though you are extremely socially connected, at some point, it comes at the expense of the ability to consider the full humanity of those around you.”

Waytz and his colleagues also noted that when people feel they are included in a social circle, it encourages a sense of exclusivity — a feeling of “us versus them.” That increases our tendency to view those on the outside of the circle as somehow less human and less worthy of receiving our charitable attention.

The authors of the current study further tested people’s feelings of social connectedness stemming from use of other social media like Facebook, and found that they tended to feel more connected after using their cell phones than after using Facebook. “Given the increasing pervasiveness of cellphones, it does have the potential to have broad social implications,” Ferraro said.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/20/is-your-cell-phone-making-you-a-jerk/?iid=hl-main-feature#ixzz1oQrynGiT

Is your boss ruining your weekend?

2012-02-28

Most Sundays last year, Juliet woke up feeling fine. But as the day wore on, she grew more agitated.

“By early afternoon I felt sick with stress and was walking around snapping at everyone. It was my husband who finally figured out that I was dreading going back to work Monday morning. The anticipation was ruining my Sundays.”

Juliet had loved her job until the company where she worked was bought out. The culture of the organization originally built and run by a handful of idealistic scientists shifted overnight.

“The scientists were out, and the incoming CEO and leadership team were these marketing types who set an entirely different tone. The new executives were like these funnels of stress, spreading anxiety throughout the organization.”

Continue reading Is your boss ruining your weekend? →

Are women turned off by stressed-out men?

2012-02-23

Scientists have been trying to confirm what Hollywood has known for decades: Women are often attracted to men with chiseled cheekbones and lantern jaws.

These and other masculine facial features are associated with high testosterone levels, and women seem to know this fact intuitively. Studies suggest that women are especially drawn to rugged-looking guys when they’re in the mood to mate (i.e., when they’re ovulating), while at other times, when they’re more interested in companionship, they tend to prefer a softer, more delicate look—think Ryan Gosling versus Burt Lancaster.

It’s not entirely clear why testosterone-fuelled features are attractive, but some experts have proposed that they’re a sign of a healthy immune system. Testosterone dampens immune function, so a man with high testosterone who’s still standing, the theory goes, is likely to have a stronger-than-average constitution. And he’ll pass those hardy genes on to his offspring, making him an attractive mate choice.

Continue reading Are women turned off by stressed-out men? →

Why do some people never get depressed?

2012-02-01

Confronted with some of life’s upsetting experiences – marriage breakdown, unemployment, bereavement, failure of any kind – many people become depressed. But others don’t. Why is this?

A person who goes through experiences like that and does not get depressed has a measure of what in the psychiatric trade is known as “resilience”.

According to Manchester University psychologist Dr Rebecca Elliott, we are all situated somewhere on a sliding scale.

“At one end you have people who are very vulnerable. In the face of quite low stress, or none at all, they’ll develop a mental health problem,” she says.

“At the other end, you have people who life has dealt a quite appalling hand with all sorts of stressful experiences, and yet they remain positive and optimistic.” Most of us, she thinks, are somewhere in the middle.

But what is this resilience? Is it something we inherit or do we learn it? Can it be traced in the chemistry of the brain? Or in its wiring, or its electrical activity? And if we lack it, can we acquire it?

The answer, regrettably, to all those questions is much the same. We don’t really know. But we’d like to, and we need to. According to the World Health Organization, depression affects just over 120 million people worldwide.

“We think about a fifth of the UK population will suffer from depression at some point in their lifetime,” says Bill Deakin, professor of psychiatry at Manchester University. Worryingly, he adds that more people are getting depressed now than in the past, and that it is beginning to affect younger people.

With the support of the Medical Research Council, Bill Deakin, Rebecca Elliott and their colleagues are peering into the brain, trying to fathom the origins and nature of resilience. They think that a better understanding of it might pay dividends in helping those who lack it.

The subjects of their study are a mixed bunch – intentionally so. Some have suffered bouts of depression, others have not. Some have had more than their share of adverse life events, while others have had an easier time of it.

In knowing where to start looking for the differences that might underpin resilience to depression the Manchester group has the advantage of being able to draw on previous work that has investigated resilience to post-traumatic stress disorder.

This, says Bill Deakin, has pointed them to several relevant features of brain function. They include cognitive flexibility – our capacity to adapt our thinking to different situations – and also the extent to which our brains concentrate on processing and remembering happy, as opposed to sad, information.
Emotional memory

Each subject in the Manchester study has been allocated to one of four groups based on the four possible combinations of high and low life stress, with or without depression. All have given saliva samples from which their stress hormone levels can be measured, and many of them will undergo a brain scan.

A scanning technique much used by brain researchers called functional magnetic resonance imaging allows them to see which parts of the brain are active while subjects are performing specific tasks.

“In one task we give them pictures to look at which are emotionally charged,” says Rebecca Elliot. “They have to memorise them.” Shortly afterward they’re shown these pictures again, with others, and have to identify those they’ve seen already. “This probes emotional memory – how well people remember material which has an emotional component to it.”

The research is not yet complete, so Rebecca Elliott can’t say whether there are distinct differences in brain function between the groups. But there are encouraging hints, such as the correlations she’s finding between the psychological measurements of her subjects’ resilience and how they perform on some of the tests.

“For example, our early data suggest that people who are more resilient are more likely to recognise happy faces and less likely to recognise sad or fearful faces. The more resilient someone is, the better they remember positive words and pictures.”

Precisely how a clinician might eventually use whatever the Manchester research reveals about our brain activity is still an open question. What we refer to as resilience is the outcome of a complex and continuing set of interactions between our genes, our body chemistry, the wiring of our brains, and our life experiences.

But broadly speaking, the hope is that an understanding of the brain activity that underpins resilience might offer pointers towards new treatments, or better ways of using existing ones.
A resilience pill?

Bill Deakin talks of using brain scanning to create what he calls a “neuroscientific profile” of an individual’s problem. This might be used to identify relevant aims and goals in deciding on the best treatment.

A patient may turn out to have normally functioning cognitive flexibility but a tendency to dwell on sad thoughts. “This might allow you to tailor-make a therapy to reduce the likelihood of a further episode of depression,” says Deakin. In the first instance this would most likely be a talking therapy of some kind.

Responding to the suggestion that a drug, a daily “resilience pill”, tailored to our brain activity or chemistry might be a useful development, Rebecca Elliott is cautious. “I suppose this is something that would theoretically be possible,” she says. “Whether people would be willing to take that kind of drug, I’m not sure.”

But whatever the means, finding some way to boost resilience is an ambition well worth pursuing. To be assured of that you have only to compare Aeron’s experiences with those of Pauline, another of the Manchester research subjects.

While out of work, struggling financially, and single-handedly responsible for three children, Pauline had several bouts of depression during which she felt completely isolated. “And emotionally I was very detached. I would come in and sit on my bed and cry. And when it got so bad I didn’t want to be with the children, that’s when I went to the doctor.”

No clinician can yet prescribe what she most needs – resilience. But one day… maybe.

Dating and the challenge of too many choices

If online dating hasn’t led you to your perfect match, perhaps the issue isn’t that you’re too choosy, but rather that there’s too much choice.

There’s no doubt that dating in the 21st century offers a lot of opportunities. Think about your parents’ generation: They grew up with no Internet, they likely stayed in the same town for most of their lives, and they automatically had more in common with the people in that town as a result. Today, women and men are increasingly marrying someone outside of their religion, their ethnicity and their geographic area.

Never in history have we had so many potential partners to choose from – and never have we had so much difficulty choosing. In fact, several recent studies suggest that this explosion of options has made men and women feel more confused and uncertain about finding a partner than ever before.

The challenges of choice was well illustrated in a study in 2000 that looked at people’s buying habits. Researchers asked customers to participate in a tasting of different types of jam; those who sampled the product were given a $1-off coupon. On the first day, the researchers offered a choice of six different jams. On the next, they offered 24 different jams.

People tasted the same number of jams, regardless of the number of available samples. Yet their buying choices varied dramatically: Offered six jams, about 30% of samplers ended up purchasing a jar. Faced with 24 choices, though, only 3% bought a jar.

The conclusion: When given so many choices, people have more trouble making any decision, and this sense of indecisiveness could lead to a cascade of negative effects. In his seminal book, “The Paradox Of Choice,” Dr. Barry Schwartz writes, “Choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis. And in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression.”

The problem could be our quest for perfection. We all want to believe in “The One” – a person that meets every item on our relationship checklist, who’s our soul mate forever. But when you search for perfection, you’re unlikely to find it.

“People who attempt to make the ‘perfect’ choice, whether it comes to buying a car or finding a partner, end up less satisfied, regardless of what or who they choose. That’s because they tend to look for flaws, and become disillusioned with all of their options,” says Andy Trees, Ph.D., author of “A Scientific Guide to Successful Dating.”

Many services also ask you to fill out exhaustive questionnaires about your likes and dislikes. It might seem like more information would help you make smarter choices, but again, that’s often not the case.

The more criteria and qualities you consider for a partner, the tougher it can be to narrow down your choices. In fact, according to a 2006 Pew study of online dating, people generally use Internet sites because they believe that having lots of choices will result in a better match. But research suggests that such increased choices actually have the opposite effect.

There’s evidence that even non-Web-based dating services can suffer from the challenge of choice: A study of people attending speed-dating events, published in the August 2011 issue of Biology Letters, found that they made fewer decisions to date when they attended events with higher numbers of candidates and greater variety. Again, the researchers concluded that people who have too many options will choose nothing.

Although one day someone may indeed invent the perfect algorithm to match two people, no online dating site has yet provided proof that its formula works, regardless of what its marketing department wants you to think.

So how can you harness the power of technology to your advantage? “First, don’t give up on the Internet – it can still be a useful way to meet people,” says Trees. “Understand, though, that you’ll need to take the responsibility to choose your matches. Don’t expect the service to find you the perfect person. Pace yourself and keep a normal dating schedule. Seeing a new person every night of the week isn’t going to increase your chances of romance, just your risk of exhaustion.

“And be patient and realistic. There’s no perfect mate out there, just people that you can enjoy spending a day – or maybe even the rest of your days – with.”
Post by: Ian Kerner Ph.D. – sex counselor

Why gardening is good for your health….

2011-07-11

Gillian Aldrich started growing vegetables in her backyard three years ago, and she’s now working on planting a bed of hydrangeas, butterfly bushes, rose campion, and — her favorite — pale-pink hardy geraniums along one side of her property.

As she digs in the garden, her 8-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son often play around her, sometimes taking a break to dig for worms or pick strawberries.

Instead of watching them, Aldrich is playing, too — “my kind of play,” she says.

“When you sit at a desk all day, there’s something about literally putting your hands in the dirt, digging and actually creating something that’s really beautiful,” says Aldrich, 42, a magazine editor in Maplewood, New Jersey. “There’s something about just being out there that feels kind of elemental.”

Aldrich isn’t the only one who feels this way. Many gardeners view their hobby as the perfect antidote to the modern world, a way of reclaiming some of the intangible things we’ve lost in our busy, dirt-free lives.

The sensory experience of gardening “allows people to connect to this primal state,” says James Jiler, the founder and executive director of Urban GreenWorks, a Miami-based nonprofit that creates garden and park programs for low-income neighborhoods.

“A lot of people [understand] that experience. They may not be able to put it into words, but they understand what’s happening.”

Working in the garden has other, less spiritual rewards. In addition to being a source of fresh, healthy produce, gardening can ease stress, keep you limber, and even improve your mood.

Here are just a few of the ways gardening can benefit your physical and mental health, and how you can start harvesting those benefits for you and your family.

Stress relief

A recent study in the Netherlands suggests that gardening can fight stress even better than other relaxing leisure activities.

After completing a stressful task, two groups of people were instructed to either read indoors or garden for 30 minutes. Afterward, the group that gardened reported being in a better mood than the reading group, and they also had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

“We live in a society where we’re just maxing ourselves out all the time in terms of paying attention,” says Andrea Faber Taylor, Ph.D., a horticulture instructor and researcher in the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Humans have a finite capacity for the kind of directed attention required by cell phones and email and the like, Taylor says, and when that capacity gets used up we tend to become irritable, error-prone, distractible, and stressed out.

Fortunately this “attention fatigue” appears to be reversible. Following a theory first suggested by University of Michigan researchers in the 1980s, Taylor and other experts have argued that we can replenish ourselves by engaging in “involuntary attention,” an effortless form of attention that we use to enjoy nature.

Trading your BlackBerry for blackberry bushes is an excellent way to fight stress and attention fatigue, Taylor says, as the rhythms of the natural environment and the repetitive, soothing nature of many gardening tasks are all sources of effortless attention.

“The breeze blows, things get dew on them, things flower; the sounds, the smells,” says Taylor, herself a home gardener. “All of these draw on that form of attention.”

Better mental health

The effortless attention of gardening may even help improve depression symptoms.

In a study conducted in Norway, people who had been diagnosed with depression, persistent low mood, or “bipolar II disorder” spent six hours a week growing flowers and vegetables.

After three months, half of the participants had experienced a measurable improvement in their depression symptoms. What’s more, their mood continued to be better three months after the gardening program ended. The researchers suggest that the novelty of gardening may have been enough to jolt some of the participants out of their doldrums, but some experts have a much more radical explanation for how gardening might ease depression.

Christopher Lowry, Ph.D., an assistant professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been injecting mice with Mycobacterium vaccae, a harmless bacteria commonly found in soil, and has found that they increase the release and metabolism of serotonin in parts of the brain that control cognitive function and mood — much like serotonin-boosting antidepressant drugs do.

Digging in the dirt isn’t the same as taking Prozac, of course, but Lowry argues that because humans evolved along with M. vaccae and a host of other friendly bugs, the relative lack of these “old friends” in our current environment has thrown our immune systems out of whack.

This can lead to inflammation, which is implicated in a host of modern ills, from heart disease to diabetes to depression.

“By reintroducing these bacteria in the environment, that may help to alleviate some of these problems,” Lowry says.

Exercise

Gardening gets you out in the fresh air and sunshine — and it also gets your blood moving.

“There are lots of different movements in gardening, so you get some exercise benefits out of it as well,” says William Maynard, the community garden program coordinator for the City of Sacramento’s Department of Parks and Recreation.

Gardening is hardly pumping iron, and unless you’re hauling wheelbarrows of dirt long distances every day, it probably won’t do much for your cardiovascular fitness.

But digging, planting, weeding, and other repetitive tasks that require strength or stretching are excellent forms of low-impact exercise, especially for people who find more vigorous exercise a challenge, such as those who are older, have disabilities, or suffer from chronic pain.

As a pleasurable and goal-oriented outdoor activity, gardening has another advantage over other forms of exercise: People are more likely to stick with it and do it often.

“It’s not just exercise for exercise itself, which can become tedious,” says Katherine Brown, the executive director of the Southside Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that supports community gardens and other urban agriculture in and around Providence, R.I. “It’s exercise that has a context, that reinforces the limberness of your limbs and the use of your hands. You’ve got a motivation for why you want to grip. You’re not just gripping a ball, you want to pull a weed.”

Brain health

Some research suggests that the physical activity associated with gardening can help lower the risk of developing dementia.

Two separate studies that followed people in their 60s and 70s for up to 16 years found, respectively, that those who gardened regularly had a 36% and 47% lower risk of dementia than non-gardeners, even when a range of other health factors were taken into account.

These findings are hardly definitive, but they suggest that the combination of physical and mental activity involved in gardening may have a positive influence on the mind.

And for people who are already experiencing mental decline, even just walking in a garden may be therapeutic. Many residential homes for people with dementia now have “wander” or “memory” gardens on their grounds, so that residents with Alzheimer’s disease or other cognitive problems can walk through them without getting lost.

The sights, smells, and sounds of the garden are said to promote relaxation and reduce stress.

Nutrition

The food you grow yourself is the freshest food you can eat. And because home gardens are filled with fruits and vegetables, it’s also among the healthiest food you can eat.

Not surprisingly, several studies have shown that gardeners eat more fruits and vegetables than their peers.

“People who are growing food tend to eat healthy,” says Brown. “The work that we do here with kids demonstrates it on a daily basis, throughout the seasons.”

Studies of after-school gardening programs suggest that kids who garden are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables. And they’re a lot more adventurous about giving new foods a try, says Anne Palmer, who studies food environments as the program director of Eating for the Future, a program based at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health Center for a Livable Future, in Baltimore.

“I’ve watched a lot of cooking and gardening classes with kids,” Palmer says. “It’s amazing how many of them will try things like radicchio or some kind of unusual green that has a pretty strong flavor, like arugula, and they’ll say, ‘Wow, this is good.'”

Not to mention that homegrown produce simply tastes better.

“It’s incomparably more delicious to eat something that’s fresh,” Brown says.

How to get started

You don’t need a big backyard or a green thumb to benefit from gardening. If you have very little space or experience, you can start out with just a few houseplants, or you could even try gardening in containers.

“You can grow a wonderful crop of cherry tomatoes in nothing more than a five-gallon bucket that you’ve cleaned really well and put holes in the bottom of,” Brown says.

For novices who want to learn the basics of gardening, a huge — and somewhat overwhelming — variety of information is available on the Web and in bookstores. But one of the best ways to get started is to meet some other gardeners, who can be found in local garden clubs and community gardens in just about any town or city.

For some great gardening tips, just start up a conversation with one of the gardeners next time you are passing by a community garden.

“Most will love to share their gardening savvy,” Brown says. “That’s a really nice way to start.”

Beware the sleeping pill hangover

2011-06-08

Henry was 80 years old and “tired all the time.” His primary care doc had done a thorough work up. I tested for every sleep disorder known to man and god and found no underlying problem with his sleep quality.

At our initial visit, I had expressed my concern that his hypnotic medication, Clonazepam, could be part of the problem, especially because his dose of 2 mg was rather high for a man his age. He had been reluctant to make any changes to a medication that, from his point of view, had worked so well for him over the years. Now, with all other explanations ruled out, he was ready to try to get off it in order to feel less groggy in the morning.

I tapered him slowly and he had no withdrawal symptoms nor any rebound insomnia. He feels more energetic and less sleepy in the daytime and he only occasionally uses a sleeping aid when he has trouble falling asleep.

This is a scenario that is played out every day in my sleep clinic: the medications that we doctors give to help patients sleep end up making them feel tired and groggy the next day.

Clonazepam (Klonopin) is a common culprit. It belongs to a class of drugs called benzodiazepines. They have been used as sleeping agents for decades. They have many other uses including the treatment of anxiety, seizure and muscle spasm.

In general, these drugs can be very useful sleep aids, but must be used cautiously because they will often cause dependence, tolerance, withdrawal and rebound insomnia if used long enough on a nightly basis. Dependence is fairly self-explanatory and means that a person cannot sleep without the drug. Tolerance means that that the dosage has to be repeatedly increased to achieve the same affect. It is not the same as addiction but is often confused with it.

They can also cause withdrawal which means the emergence of a new set of symptoms that were not present before using the medication. Common withdrawal symptoms include agitation, nausea, sweating and palpitations.

The benzodiazepines can cause rebound insomnia. Rebound insomnia means insomnia that is worse than it was before a patient started the drug. Typically, it lasts only one or two nights.

The problem with Clonazepam in particular is that it has a very long half life. Therefore, it takes a long time to clear the system and its hypnotic and sedating effects can last well into the next day. There can be withdrawal if stopped abruptly, but it is less likely to cause rebound insomnia when compared to shorter-acting benzos.

Besides daytime sedation, any of the benzodiazepines can cause amnesia, sleepwalking and sleep eating. There are studies showing increased fall risk in the elderly, but there is also research showing that untreated insomnia increases falls. There is definite concern that these medications can have multiple deleterious effects in the elderly including memory and cognition problems. As with most medications, the doses should be lower when patients are elderly or have liver or kidney impairment.

For insomnia treatment, it is better to use benzodiazepines that have a medium half life such as lorazepam or temazepam. They will usually help someone get to sleep and stay asleep most of the night without too much hangover effect the next morning.

As with most prescription sleep aids, I recommend intermittent use so that tolerance and withdrawal might be avoided.

Medications such as zolpidem (Ambien) are called non-benzodiazepines but that is misleading because they act on the same GABA benzodiazepine receptors in the brain. They just don’t bind to as many subunits as the traditional benzos which has good and bad effects. One bad effect is that drugs like Ambien have no anti-anxiety properties and most people with insomnia have anxiety either that is fueling the insomnia or as a consequence of the insomnia.

Therefore, if someone has chronic, nightly difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, I recommend CBT-I (cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia). As I have discussed in previous posts, it is the safest treatment and actually the most effective one in the long term.

Why your brain needs vacations

2011-05-25

Mary Kole loves her job, but she’s been feeling like she’s lost the line between “work” and “not work.”

A literary agent for children’s books in Brooklyn, New York, Kole works from home and checks in with clients electronically around the clock — sometimes writers will even call her in the middle of the night with an idea. Stepping outside isn’t exactly relaxing either. “In New York, it’s just subway, office, people, talking, yelling, honking, all the time,” she said. Continue reading Why your brain needs vacations →