A recent article on Huffingtonpost talks about how mindfulness can help us slow down and enjoy life… we new that.

Further Reading:

1. Mindfulness does Google
2. Guess Who Is Using Mindfulness Now
3. The Power of Breath – Media’s New Find

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Stress sells. It is certainly selling iPhone apps. The iTune store has 19 apps beginning with the word stress. Our holistic health guru Deepak Chopra, MD has his own stress app called Stress Free. NPR’s story, Therapist In Your Pocket talks about how therapists are using phone apps to help their patients in ways other procedures weren’t before the apps.

These apps take two prevalent phenomena – stress and phone apps and puts them together. These apps make being aware of stress and releasing it, fun and easy. When you have a technology assisting you, what was hard to remember and do, becomes automatic and cool.

These apps certainly beat becoming sick from stress or taking drugs to reduce stress.

What are your favorite apps for stress?

Further Reading:

1. Stress Manage Comes to the iPhone

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What institution would you expect to be the last to adopt mindfulness-based stress reduction? My answer would be the US military. Well, it seems they are on the way to using it to help their soldiers and Marines.

A post on psychcentral.com describes a recent study, “University of Pennsylvania researchers found mindfulness training, or MT was associated with improvements in mood and working memory…. The study found that the more time participants spent engaging in daily mindfulness exercises the better their mood and working memory, the cognitive term for complex thought, problem solving and cognitive control of emotions.”

The military is seeing mindfulness as building “mind fitness.” As anyone who has done mindfulness meditation knows, your mind not only becomes more relaxed, it performs better.

Imagine what would occur if mindfulness was as common as calisthenics. Because it works and it is cheap, I expect we will see continue adoption of mindfulness throughout our institutions.

Where have you seen mindfulness adopted?

Further Reading:

1. Mindfulness Stress Reduction via the Internet
2. Mindfulness Bibliography
3. Mindfulness does Google

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Stress along with other irritants causes inflammation.

The excellent post by Mark Hyman, MD describes how all forms of irritation create the natural response of inflammation. As he points out, the problem is not the acute inflammation, such as a sprained ankle. The problem is the subliminal, constant irritation that causes in some way most of all our chronic illness. Cardiovascular disease with its C-reactive protein is proving to  be one of the best examples.

You take the irritant away – the inflammation leaves – then the disease leaves. It can be that simple.

What are your irriations that you will remove?

Further Reading:

1. We Are Now in “Extreme Stress”
2. Is Stress Real, Is Fibromyalgia Real?
3. Stress and Colds

Here is an excellent video by Gina Trapani the founder of a great blog – Lifehacker. The video is a short course on why not to multitask. The magazine Fastcompany produced this video and blog post on the downsides of multitasking. Bottom-line, it produces stress trying to keep your focus on two or more items simultaneously. Don’t do it.

Further Reading:

1. Mindfulness does Google

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What are we doing to our kids? A recent NPR story does a thorough job of laying out how drugs are now given to kids that are not behaving as we wish.

Since the mid-1990s, the number of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder has increased a staggering 4,000 percent.

Yes, I do have a charge about the proliferation of drugs to treat children. May be it is because if I was a child today I would be given these drugs. When I was growing up in the 60’s I had many of the symptoms these kids have. Yet I was fortunate – there was no diagnosis or drugs for my problems.

My parents being good parents did what they could; they took me to speech, reading any other specialist that could help. I don’t recall any helping. I do recall feeling the love and support from my parents. There is a good chance today they would be taking me to a psychologist for elaborate tests to evaluate what would be the best drug. As the above story points out, we have gone beyond Ritalin – now the drugs of choice are anti-depressants hyper kids.

Healing ADHD

I cured my severe Asperger’s Syndrome, dyslexia and ADHD through natural means when I was a young adult. If I could do it as an adult and I have seen many children do it when their parents focused on removing the stress from their kids, others can do it.

I had an 11-year-old boy this week for a client. The day after his first session his mother reported the child was markedly better. It is that simple for most of these kids – just release the tension and their body does rest.

For a better sense of how something this simple is possible, I encourage you to read some of the other posts on this blog.

Please, let’s take our kids off these drugs. I know you want to do the right thing. I know his or her behavior is disruptive. However, there are less toxic, safer and more effective solutions. Drugs at best suppress, they don’t heal.

Further Reading:

1. The Truth about ADHD and Its Drugs
2. Finding a New Solution to Depression and ADHD
3. The Power of Breath – Media’s New Find

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Stress affects us in many ways. One common way is it puts us into a pattern of being a victim, persecutor or rescuer. In three recent posts, I discussed how this Drama Triangle works and how to not be at the effect of it.

Learn how to see it happening with yourself and others. Learn how to remove yourself from the drama and how to heal it so you are not vulnerable to it in the future. We all fall prey to the drama; I know I do. Awareness and some simple tools can make a huge difference.

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We all are trying to squeeze more production out of our limited resources. Computers can increase or decrease our production and our stress. A new study out says visual reminders are more a distraction then an aid.

Rather than having a visual reminder, create an audio reminder. Your mind is less interrupted with the audio, so you are less stressed trying to regain your focus.

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Deepak Chopra, MD wrote a recent article about new research showing our faith in antidepressants is ill founded. He writes about a study from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine that states, “More than half the people who take antidepressants for depression never get relief. “

These researchers found molecular evidence that counters the prevalent dogma that stress is generally a major cause of depression. Specifically, their research more than questioned two beliefs/lies:

Lie #1: Depression is directly linked to stress.
Stress is not causing depression because the genes related to stress are “totally different from those related to depression.”

Lie #2: Depressed people have chemical imbalances in their brains.

Depression doesn’t come from the imbalance of Neurotransmitters, but from the formation and functioning of neurons. These nerve cells adapt to express depression, meaning a depress person develops more sad and hopeless neural pathways than the happier ones we all would want.

How were sold the lies

In the study published in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers analyzed data from a national survey of antidepressant conducted in 1996 and again in 2005.From – Washington Post article:

Pharmaceutical companies nearly quadrupled their spending on consumer advertising for antidepressants during the period of the study. In 1999, drug-makers spent $32 million on direct-to-consumer advertising; by 2005, this figure had jumped to $122 million. Drug ads lead to increased prescriptions and often overstate the benefits of a drug while downplaying the risks.

Recently we celebrated the 20^th year anniversary of Prozac. For 20 years, we were lead to believe that depression was solely a “chemical imbalance.” It was as if our bodies was a high school chemistry lab experiment – if we add a little more of a certain chemical we would get a different reaction. Now we are finding out that may be the most powerful effect Prozac and other similar anti-depressants had was a placebo effect.

More research and clinical evidence is showing life style changes have a huge effect on preventing and healing depression. Being depress can be a normal part of life. Staying depressed is not normal. We don’t need to treat depression with drugs, we need to address what causes ongoing depression.

Mindfulness stress reduction has proven to be a powerful prevention and healing for depression, as well as nutrition, mild exercise, bodywork, acupuncture and other holistic techniques. It is about time we all start using common sense and start questioning the marketing hype of drug companies. I have seen people completely cure themselves of depression and related symptoms with never taking a drug. Let’s do research on that!

Let us know what you feel. What are your experiences with these drugs?

Further Reading:

1. Finding a New Solution to Depression and ADHD
2. Is Stress Real, Is Fibromyalgia Real?
3. The Truth about ADHD and Its Drugs

For those who want to include “direct the national healthcare agenda toward a health-oriented, integrated system, ensuring all people access to the full range of safe and regulated conventional, complementary, and alternative healthcare professionals” go to The Integrated Healthcare Policy Consortium (IHPC).

This organization is getting Congress to include holistic health in our healthcare reform! Let’s support them in the campaign to transform our healthcare system.

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