The new shop is embedded in this blog, which now has a shopping cart and product tags in the left sidebar.

You can also subscribe to the shop’s RSS feed to receive notification when I add new products.

I made this change for two reasons. Firstly, in the old shop you couldn’t buy digital downloads and physical products in the same shopping cart. Now you can.

But more excitingly, I now have the means to offer coupons for discounts. I already offer discount coupons to people who send me referrals, which can be used either for sessions with me or in my shop, but up until now I had to apply the shop discount manually.

I can also reward my faithful subscribers. To celebrate the new shop, I am embedding a code for a 10% discount throughout the month of November in my blog feed - it’s only visible if you’re subscribed, so if you’re not, why not subscribe now?

I’ll also be offering discounts to the subscribers on my mailing list, so hop on over and sign up to that while you’re about it. For November it will be the same discount as to the blog subscribers, but I’ll be offering more discounts in the future, exclusively to my mailing list members. If you subscribe now, you won’t miss out.

And look out for some exciting new stuff in the shop next year, as I put together my course on Positive Eating.

Oh, by the way, as someone who’s worked in IT support for many years, I know that there may be issues with the new shop, like with anything new. There shouldn’t be - I have tested it - but there could be. If you find something that doesn’t work, please report it to me in the comments on this post or by email. Again, having worked in IT support, I know I need to say this: Please describe what you were doing, what you expected to happen, and what actually happened, including the exact text of any error messages. Just saying “It didn’t work” doesn’t help me to find and fix the problem! Thanks.

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photo credit: MonkeyMyshkin

All going well I should be finished my university study (for the time being, anyway) by February. My plan is to assemble a big pile of books I’ve been meaning to read, some of them off my shelves and some off my wish list, and work my way through them, blogging as I go. So you’ll probably see a lot more book reviews here in the future. I’m not just going to be reviewing the books, though, but reflecting on what I’ve learned from them. The ones I have in mind are hypnotherapy, mind-body and personal integration titles, mostly.

And speaking of personal integration, next year I also want to at least make a good start on a new course which I’m very excited about. The working title is Pulling Ourselves Together, and it’s about integration - within ourselves, between mind and body, and between us as individuals and our total context (sensory, ecological, social and beyond). At the moment I only have the sketch of an idea of how I’m going to approach that, so any ideas (or pointers to resources) are welcome.

I’m going to be assembling a reference team to run ideas past, consisting of hypnotherapy colleagues, friends, and other interested and interesting parties. If you’d like to join that team, either comment or email me (mikerm at hypno.co.nz) saying why you’re interested and what you think you can contribute.

The plan currently is to run two versions of the course, one for men and one for women. As a man who’s always had a lot of female friends and feels comfortable in the company of women, I think I can pull this off, but I will need help from actual women to do so. The male and female experiences of being embodied are different enough, I think, to justify two versions.

Another project for next year is one I’ve picked up and put down a couple of times - a more formalized version of my Positive Eating approach to improved nutrition and weight management, which emphasises deeply enjoying nutrient-rich foods. I’ve had really good results with this, but feel that something that includes more resources and keeps in touch with people better over the long term is going to improve what I’m offering to these clients. There’ll be a CD, a workbook and possibly a DVD to use alongside a number of sessions with me (probably 5 or 6 over a 6-month period). You’ll also be able to buy it as a pack (without the face-to-face component) off the Hypno NZ website and elsewhere. With good results, longer term I’ll be looking at teaching and licensing other already-trained hypnotherapists to use the approach.

I’d also like to do something similar for smoking, putting together a group intervention of best-practice approaches and teaching other people to present it. That may be a little further in the future.

It’s funny - when I started my training I thought I’d find weight issues and smoking the tedious bread-and-butter of hypnotherapy, which I’d have to do because people expected it. But I’ve really got into those two issues now, and I enjoy the depth and richness of working with people in those areas. It’s not just a one-size-fits-all thing by any means, and I want to reflect that by creating some really good, effective resources, building on the successes I’ve had so far.

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If I were Minister of Health (which God forbid), this is what I’d do.

Following indirectly in the footsteps of Singapore, where individuals have their own healthcare account out of which they pay for treatment, I would establish a kind of voucher system of Health Points. Each person would get a certain number of Health Points each year, enough to pay for an average amount of care. They would accumulate if unused - so older people would tend to have more than younger people, after a while. Employee and employer contributions and general taxes would fund the yearly allocation of Health Points.

There would be specified top-up circumstances. If you belonged to some kind of high-risk group, such as the poor, the elderly or children, or particular ethnic groups which have poor health status as compared to the general population, you would get a “targeted top-up”. This would address the issue that people who have least resources are often in most need of health care (and vice versa). Likewise, there would be top-ups if you were diagnosed with diseases which are expensive to treat, or had a disability.

If you had private medical insurance, that would translate into “self-funded top-ups” - which, note, would carry forward into the future as well, so if you lost your insurance for some reason after years of paying in, you wouldn’t end up with nothing as is currently the case.

You could spend your Health Points in a number of ways. Certainly hospitals - public and private - would accept them in payment for treatment. Private hospitals would probably charge more Health Points, making the system market-driven to a certain extent. Doctors, pharmacists, testing clinics, therapists like physiotherapists and massage therapists - anyone who could demonstrate to a panel that there was provable benefit from their therapy and that they were qualified to offer it would be able to register to accept Health Points. Since Health Points taken in from patients or clients would translate into money when you turned them in to the Government, health dollars would go where the consumers wanted them to go. This, of course, would make consumer education quite important and kick off huge marketing battles and arguments about effectiveness. I didn’t say it was a perfect system.

Progressively, you could make Health Points exchangeable for anything that was demonstrated to enhance health. Gyms and sports clubs could accept them. Fruit shops and supermarkets could accept them in partial payment for particular foods.

Of course, you’d need to put careful fraud-prevention provisions in place - I’m thinking some kind of smart card with the end user’s photo, and verification that the end user was actually present for the treatment, etc.

The other end of the system would be the introduction of tax breaks for people who maintained their health. This would involve workplace programs of health testing (coupled with workplace programs of health promotion for employer tax breaks). Self-employed people could visit designated clinics for the health tests - paid for out of their Health Points, of course, since they wouldn’t be using them for healthcare.

This isn’t too unlike voucher systems proposed for education. It introduces a greater degree of market forces than those which operate at the moment in health care, where a few funders (or a single funder, the government) decide where the money goes and consumers have little input. For example, the headlines at the moment in New Zealand are all about the new lab testing company which has been contracted by the Auckland District Health Board to replace their old, long-established provider because the new one promised cost savings. So far, they’re not producing savings but they are producing poor communication, errors, shorter hours and fewer locations. In a system where Health Points went where consumers chose, the second provider could just have started up locations in competition with the incumbent - and would only have won business if it was actually better in the experience of the people who used it, instead of able to convince a committee that it would be better on paper.

On the other hand, this isn’t a pure market-driven scenario either, because I don’t believe health care should be driven solely by economic considerations, or more available to those with more resources when they are usually the ones with least need of it. This isn’t a rationing system, either - it’s a distribution system. It introduces a feedback mechanism so that it becomes more responsive to the people it is set up to serve, rather than to the policies of the government of the day, which are only indirectly a reflection of citizens’ priorities.

I’m sure it’s just as full of holes, and just as open to abuse and ineptitude, as any other way of arranging health care. And of course I have no influence to get it even looked at, let alone adopted. But there it is, for what it’s worth.

Technorati Tags: healthcare reform, vouchers, consumer choice

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I got some very positive comments about the talk and I enjoyed presenting it. Thanks to all involved in organizing the conference and all the attendees.

The keynote speaker was Roy Hunter, and he presented the short version of his Parts Therapy course on the Sunday. I’ve been using a form of parts therapy for a while, but having Roy set it out so clearly and thoroughly was very helpful. I’ll definitely be using his techniques with my clients in the future.

By the way, for anyone who was there who’s interested in my pain management CD (or for that matter any hypnotherapy practitioner), if you email me when you buy the CD I’ll send you the scripts in written form as well.

Technorati Tags: NZHF, Roy Hunter, parts therapy, pain management

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It was very good, and very filling, and I though, “I could make that.” I work at a natural health centre above a health food shop, so when I was down there and spotted some barley, I bought a little bag and cooked it with some lentils and stock.

It tasted just as good and was just as filling as I remembered, and makes an excellent substitute for rice in a wide range of dishes. I’ve tried to like brown rice, but I just don’t, and white rice isn’t very nutritious.

photo credit: Meanest Indian

Barley and lentils, on the other hand, is nutritious, as you can see on nutritiondata.com, where I’ve loaded it up as a recipe. As is often the case when you combine a legume (such as lentils) with a grain (such as barley), it has a good balance of amino acids, with an amino acid score of 92. A score of 100 indicates a “complete” protein. I notice on the link to complementary foods, which would complete the balance, that salmon is featured. That chef knew a thing or two.

I haven’t actually made this with salmon at home, but I’ve made it with scallops and steamed baby broccoli, and with chicken curry with mixed vegetables. You could use it anywhere you’d use rice.

Besides the good protein, it’s also excellent for B vitamins: just 100g of the barley-lentil dish (leaving aside the stock for the moment) gives 21% of the daily value for thiamin, 9% of niacin, 14% of vitamin B6 and 30% of folate. It’s also full of minerals: 26% of the daily value for iron, 12% magnesium, 19% phosphorus, 10% potassium, 17% zinc, 38% copper, an enormous 45% of the daily value for manganese, and 12% for selenium. It has 31% of the daily value for dietary fibre, and no sodium, cholesterol or trans fats. It contains only 0.3g per 100g saturated fat.

And this stuff is cheap! A couple of cups of pearled barley, enough for almost two weeks of meals for one person, cost me $1.50 at an organic health food store (which is usually an expensive place to buy things). Lentils are cheap as dirt. Even using pre-prepared stock, I doubt it costs me $1 per meal.

When you add the stock in, it does add a bit of sodium and dilutes the percentages of B vitamins and minerals per 100g, but it enhances the flavour. (Don’t take that analysis too literally, as the recipe for the store-bought stock I use is almost certainly different from the one on Nutritiondata.) I’ve also tried making it with vegetable stock so that I’m prepared if I want to make it for vegetarian friends, and it works just as well. The particular batch I made was a little dry and crumbly with the vegetable stock, for some reason, so I add a little milk before I reheat it in the microwave.

Overall, an excellent recipe, and I’m glad I stumbled on it. For more on barley and lentils and their health benefits, follow the links to World’s Healthiest Foods (which points out that the pearled barley I’m using isn’t even the most nutritious form, and that barley contains plenty of tryptophan, the serotonin precursor I blogged about recently).

If you use whole barley, of course, it’s even better. I’ve added a recipe for whole barley and lentils. Nutritiondata.com only had “hulled” barley, and I’m not sure if what I’m using is hulled, but it may be. The protein score goes up to 112, and look at those B vitamins - the thiamin has gone to 38%, niacin to 15%, vitamin B6 18%, folate 28%, and riboflavin 11%. Just 100g of this stuff gives you 31% of your daily iron, 25% magnesium, 28% phosphorus, 15% potassium, 22% zinc, 45% copper, 85% of your daily manganese requirement, and 32% of your selenium. Compare that with 100g of white rice (change the selector at the top of the page to 100g) and you’ll see why I’m preferring my “barley dhal”. Plus, it tastes better.

Technorati Tags: recipe, barley, lentils, dhal, rice, stock, nutrition, B vitamins, dietary fibre, minerals

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photo credit: net_efekt

Peptides are made up of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. There are a number of different amino acids, but there are 8 in particular that we can’t make for ourselves out of other amino acids, and we have to take these in through our food. They do get recycled, and if our diet is inadequate we can sometimes get them from the proteins that make up much of our body’s structure, but ultimately we have to eat them or we won’t have enough.

Because the peptides (and other messenger molecules which keep the body’s systems coordinated) are made from them, a lack of one of these essential amino acids is clearly a problem. Normally this doesn’t occur, of course, since they are common enough that any reasonably normal diet should contain all of them in sufficient quantity. Vegetarians have to be careful, though, and there are some subtleties to be aware of.

photo credit: Tina Keller

As an example, I’ll start with tryptophan, which I came across when researching my Sleeper’s Checklist. Tryptophan is the precursor to the neurotransmitter serotonin and the neurohormone melatonin. Melatonin is thought to be involved in regulating the sleep-wake cycle, while serotonin is well known for its role in mood regulation. Antidepressant drugs apparently relieve depression by affecting the levels of serotonin available in the brain. The exact reason why this relieves depression (and why the antidepressant effects take a couple of weeks to kick in, even though the effect on serotonin is very rapid) is not yet fully understood.

Serotonin is also important in the digestive system for regulating the movement of the intestines, and in fact about 8 or 9 times as much serotonin is found in the digestive system as in the brain. In the brain, it modulates appetite, sexual desire, mood, anger and sleep, among other behaviours and drives. A Swedish study has even suggested a correlation between the density of a particular kind of serotonin receptor in the brain and the likelihood of having had a religious experience.

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Since serotonin is made from tryptophan, and we can’t make tryptophan, it’s important to have adequate levels of tryptophan intake in our diet - but it’s not just that simple (things seldom are when neurotransmitters are involved). Two other amino acids, phenylalanine and leucine, “compete” with tryptophan to be transported into the brain across the protective membrane which surrounds it (the blood-brain barrier), so not just the absolute amount, but also the ratio, of tryptophan to these other amino acids is important. Also, in some conditions such as lactose intolerance (difficulty digesting dairy products) or fructose malabsorption, tryptophan is not properly absorbed by the gut. Interestingly, fructose malabsorption has been linked to depression.

photo credit: steffenz

So what foods help balance the books for tryptophan? Bananas, dates, pineapples, plums and nuts are mentioned in one article on nutrition, depression and sleep. However, an editorial in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience tends to minimize the contribution of diet to serotonin levels, though it does note some interesting correlations between levels of American corn or maize consumption and homicide rates in countries around the world (corn being relatively low in tryptophan). That article places more stress on changes in thinking, exercise, and exposure to light as non-drug means of raising serotonin levels (and I’ll talk about those more in future posts).

Not just serotonin levels, but the rate of serotonin turnover, seem to be significant in relation to violent behaviour and suicide. Low serotonin turnover, for reasons as yet not understood, correlates with high rates of these behaviours. So it isn’t just how much you have, but how long you’ve had it, apparently.

I was recently reading about another study correlating consumption low-tryptophan foods with aggression, not at a population level but in individuals. Moeller et al. (Tryptophan depletion and aggressive responding in healthy males, published in Psychopharmacology) found in 1996 that healthy young men, after 24 hours of a low-tryptophan diet and having been given a tryptophan-free amino acid mixture, responded significantly more aggressively a few hours afterwards than the same subjects under control conditions. So feeding aggressive or suicidal people on, for example, Diet Coke and corn chips (high in phenylalanine, low in tryptophan) seems like it would be a bad idea.

I’m not going to do the Usual Internet Thing and make a flat-out statement about how eating such-and-such a food will work a miraculous change in your mood because of its tryptophan content, though. The mechanisms are more complex than that. Diet does contribute to mood, and so eating a well-balanced diet that is well adapted for your particular biochemistry and other circumstances is an important contribution to keeping your bodymind in good order, but it’s just not as simple as eating more tryptophan-containing foods in order to feel better.

For further information, I suggest Nutritiondata.com and the World’s Healthiest Foods website, two excellent sources of information about food and health. (Those links lead to pages directly relevant to tryptophan.)

Technorati Tags: nutrition, tryptophan, serotonin, mood

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There’s a test to evaluate your stress, and there are ten sensible tools for handling it better (also available for iPhone). They are:

1. Connect well with others.
2. Stay positive
3. Get physically active
4. Help others
5. Get enough sleep
6. Create joy and satisfaction
7. Eat well
8. Take care of your spirit
9. Deal better with hard times (coping skills)
10. Get professional help if you need it

All of these are great advice, and I think I have recommended all of them right here at one time or another. I’m planning a short series at the moment on number 7, because I’ve come across a few interesting and little-known facts about how food affects mental functioning. Watch this space. And in the meantime, check out Live Your Life Well.

(These days I probably need to say this: This is a spontaneous recommendation of a website I found. They didn’t approach me and I don’t receive anything for recommending them. I don’t do link exchanges under any circumstances.)

Technorati Tags: positive psychology, stress management

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The obvious problem here is that people are going to their doctors expecting medication, even when medication is not what they actually need, and sometimes doctors give them something to satisfy them rather than argue about it.

The most common thing told to patients is that the medicine they are being given “may help and will not do any harm”. The most common placebo is antibiotics when the problem is viral, not bacterial, which is a concern because it may increase antibiotic resistance in the population (and is also expensive).  But other “placebos” include vitamins and herbal supplements, with the classic “sugar pill” being quite uncommon. Most of the doctors did expect some positive effect from the treatment even though it was biochemically not likely to be effective, and indeed it’s well-known that the placebo effect accounts for up to 30-40% of the effectiveness of medication. In other words, a good third of the effect of medication is in fact the patient’s belief that it will do them good.

The power of the body-mind connection is very interesting, and personally I prefer to use it directly without any window dressing or props. I’m reading a fascinating book at the moment, Candace Pert’s Molecules of Emotion, about her work in discovering the biochemistry which underlies human emotional experience and links the mind and body together into a single system. I’ll be posting more about it once I’ve finished reading it, but in the meantime I leave you to consider: What if these doctors and their patients were open to using mind-body methods directly, rather than going the long way around?

Technorati Tags: mind-body, placebo

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photo credit: POSITiv

Part of the challenge of practicing hypnotherapy is to balance two truths: Hypnotherapy can bring about rapid and significant change, but only regular practice brings about the deepest change.

And regular practice does reliably do this, as Brain Blogger reminds us in Reflections on Plasticity.

Plasticity is a buzzword in neurological circles at the moment. The study of the brain has been thrown into a furore by the relatively recent discovery that even in adulthood our brains are constantly changing their structure in response to the challenges we give them (unless we don’t give them any, of course).

As the Brain Blogger post points out, this is also true of our bodies. Anyone who has kept up an exercise programme for any length of time has seen outward changes to their bodies, but the body also rearranges itself on the inside to meet the physical challenges it encounters regularly, changing how it processes and stores energy, for example.

photo credit: jcoterhals

Anything you’ve been practicing over a long period of time changes your brain (and quite probably your body) to make that practice the most straightforward thing to keep doing, in other words. Which is why when people come to me for help to change, I can’t just stop at helping them to shift their thoughts, feelings and behaviour into a new pattern. I need to give them a way to nurture and sustain that new pattern so that it can fully replace the old one.

The CDs I give people to listen to are part of this, but one of my key tools is a small blue bookmark which sets out two simple practices. I bang on about these all the time (they’re in my book, and they’ll probably be in the next one for that matter). I do this because they work.

The Welcoming Practice is a way of defusing the power of anger and fear in our lives. It’s a practice of paying attention to our negative emotions, pausing, acknowledging them, and then letting them go so that we can decide what to do next out of our whole brain instead of just a part the size of an almond.

photo credit: mynameisharsha

The Relaxation Response Practice is a way of returning our bodies and minds to their rest state on a regular basis. As I teach it, it’s also a way of practicing letting go of thoughts and emotions, so that when we get thoughts and emotions that potentially will drag us off to a place we don’t want to go, we have a mental muscle developed, and a reflex developed, which enables us to let them go instead.

In my first session with almost all my clients, I take them through a visualization in which they let go of the thing they no longer want or need. Thinking about this while writing this post, I need to emphasize to them that it is likely to keep coming back, and for as long as it does, they’re going to need to practice continuing to let it go.

The first letting go is an indication of a long-term intention for change, which brings about a significant shift. The long-term practice is what makes the change permanent. It’s like the difference between a wedding and a marriage.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Technorati Tags: practice, relaxation, personal change, plasticity, development, regular practice, welcoming practice, relaxation response

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I’ll be based there (407A Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn, above the health food shop) on Monday mornings and Saturday afternoons. You can book sessions with me there through their direct number, 376 0174.

I’ll still be seeing people at my own premises in Titirangi on weekday evenings, and you can book directly with me for those sessions.

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