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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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13 Mar 2023
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How to Turn a Beach Day Into a Transformational Experience—For You and For the Earth

The sky was a classic California cloudless blue. The light, February soft. The sea breeze, easy, fragrant, and chilly. The waves, mellow laps against the rocky arch at the Natural Bridges State Marine Reserve, about 75 miles south of San Francisco.

As the students, bundled up in hoodies and beanies, gathered in this classroom without walls, I wondered if they were seeing this beach day as time off, a brief vacation from their usual university programming, rather than a taste and a reminder of their birthright and their most important work as human beings in these times.

My childhood-friend-turned-illustrious-professor had invited me to give a guest lecture for his class at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We grew up in Caracas, playing in the branches of juicy mango trees and in the turquoise waves of the Caribbean. I said yes right away since it was Rasmus Winther asking—and also because of the name of his course: Blue Humanities. The undergraduate class merges science with the more philosophical disciplines to explore how we might effect positive change on our troubled oceans. Such an outcome will, of course, require the efforts of many, so with my brief 90-minute visit, my intention was to add my little droplet to this great current.

My Droplet

The droplet I chose to offer—a guided practice on how we might deepen our relationship with nature—is what I see at the very core of the widespread restoration and regeneration we are longing for. All of our wildest dreams: reef restoration, biodiversity renewal, deplastification, dam removal, climate resilience, water cleanliness, overcoming our petroleum addiction, exercising kindness toward wildlife, rematriation—all of this—is an ordinary, expected, natural outcome of our commitment to be in respectful, reciprocal relationship with the Earth.

Just like with human relationships, the more respectful we are with each other, the better things go for all of us. But collectively, we have become so critically estranged from the natural world that it’s common to struggle with the basics of what “intentional relationship with nature” even means.

For starters, our entire physiology is made to be outside, but people in the U.S. spend 95% of their lives indoors. Even students who are working toward Earth-centered careers or professionals in environmentally oriented jobs often spend most of their time in buildings and on computers away from, and out of direct relationship with, the very nature they are interested in protecting and restoring. In this sense, much of the personal and planetary dis-ease that we are experiencing stems from this normalized condition of humans living in captivity.

That’s why I wanted to help the circle of students on this stunning shore of the Pacific get a lived experience of the root of the matter. I wanted to facilitate a space for them to re-member, to start to reconnect with and repair their own personal vital relationship with nature—an intimate relationship that has endured for hundreds of thousands of years of human history before this brief and recent detour. I offered them an initial taste for how we might begin on this journey, so that we might come to unleash the vast potential for healing that is ours to bring forth.

The first signs of personal healing came quickly for the students. Their reflections ranged from simple to serious to soul stirring. One noted that they felt lighter. Another said they need to be by the ocean more. “I feel that who I am is affirmed by nature, and that I am held and accepted,” wrote one student.

By the end of the session, the students reported the following:

  • 96% felt significantly calmer
  • 96% experienced significantly more clarity
  • 96% were significantly able to wake up a sense of love for nature

These numbers, while anecdotal, are consistent with the results I have seen from doing similar practices with hundreds of people from around the world. And the more calm, clarity, and sense of connection with nature you experience, the more conscious, creative, and courageous you become in engaging with the otherwise seemingly overwhelming work at hand.

That’s why these days I prioritize helping people develop their own personal, daily, nature-centered well-being practice, based on their lifestyle, interests, aspirations, heritage, and spiritual tradition. This way, they can then apply it to their own area of work, from child-raising to scientific exploration, farming, teaching, policymaking, art-making, and beyond, in a way that will be more meaningful and authentic for them.

Accessible for All

The simple example of nature practice I shared with the students is something you can do on your own, with your beloved, or with a group of friends, colleagues, or little ones. You can do it in public without anyone even knowing it. You can deepen your relationship with nature on your terrace, in your backyard, on the neighborhood park bench. You can adapt it to be done from a hospital window or in a prison courtyard.

Doing it before school or work would be a beautifully irreverent and rebellious thing to do: to remind yourself that this is our most important work as human beings, rather than something that is done after our jobs or homework or housework are complete, and only then if we are not yet completely weighed down by exhaustion.

In many years of studying with the Dalai Lama, he taught me that when it comes to developing a personal well-being practice, consistency is key. It’s better to do 10 minutes a day than an hour on Friday. So, if you don’t have much of a regular practice at all, start with 10 minutes per day. Stop before you want to; give yourself the sensation of wanting more. That will make it more likely that you will come back the next day. After a week or so, reward yourself with a few more daily minutes until you are consistently practicing 25 minutes per day.

That 25 minutes, while a small fraction of the overall day, would increase the average outdoor time of an American by a meaningful 50%. And because it’s so physically pleasurable, emotionally comforting, mentally calming, and spiritually satisfying, chances are that it could inspire you to take further steps in restoring this vital relationship.

As I write this, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just released its bleakest report to date on the emotional state of our young people. As a mother and future ancestor, I can’t think of anything more important or urgent to teach and model for our next generation of Earth guardians and water protectors than nature practice.

An Example of Nature Practice

Here are simple instructions you can follow.

  • To start, get clear on your intention. Why are you outside? Why are you taking the time to do this practice? Why are you interested in deepening your relationship with nature? It may be something to do with calming yourself down, getting unstuck with a thought pattern that is tormenting you, or healing your relationship with the ocean.

Rather than making it an intellectual exercise, notice what is alive for you in this moment. Let yourself revel in that sense of purpose and commitment welling up in you.

  • Then, receive consent. One of the foundational gestures of respect you can offer to the land (and to the ocean) is to request permission to enter the space. Native Hawaiian Kumu Mikilani Young emphasized this for me one time when we were doing a prayerful walk across the Golden Gate. She says it’s like knocking on a friend’s door and waiting to be invited in, rather than barging in. Pay attention and wait until you feel welcome.With the students, we waited in the parking lot, quietly attuning to a sense of being welcomed. Some felt it in a cool, gentle breeze, others heard it in the birdsong. I saw a couple of monarch butterflies fly over us. We attuned individually until we had a consensus of feeling welcome to proceed down to the beach..
  • Now, awaken your senses. Your senses are the foundation of how you relate to nature. The problem is that indoors, we don’t really have much use for our senses, and so they become numbed. We don’t really need our eyesight other than to see our screen or the person in front of us. We don’t use our hearing other than for our earpods or for the person speaking to us. Indoors, we don’t want to feel too hot or too cold. We actually prefer not to feel anything at all. Or smell anything either. Tragically, the more your senses are numbed, the more you are estranging yourself from the natural world.

So, as we enter the core of the practice, I invite you to find a comfortable position and find stillness with a soft, open-eyed gaze. One by one, slowly ask yourself these questions: What do I feel on my skin? What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I taste? What do I see? Attune to the nature around you through your senses, as if you were stretching out your hand to a long-lost friend. Repeat for a few rounds and then release the questions to simply attune.

  • Next, follow the trail of beauty. Nature offers you myriad examples of how to “walk in beauty,” as my Diné (Navajo) teacher Wally Brown says. In this practice, we are developing greater familiarity with one of the most basic ways that nature relates to us: the language of beauty.

Find stillness and notice what aspect of beauty is calling your attention. Is it the way the light is dancing on the sand? The way the baby seagulls are playing with the waves? The sensation of the sun below your bare feet? Engage (within reason, of course) by going toward the beauty, and as you approach it, let it be a mirror for you. Behold yourself in that mirror and notice what it is reflecting about you. Enjoy. Then, repeat for a few rounds.

  • To end, dedicate the goodness. To close your practice, consider any benefits that you have received. Dedicate any calm, clarity, courage, etc. to the benefit of all beings for generations to come. Try to transition with grace, in order to extend the quality of your practice into the rest of your day.

 

Ultimately, nature practice is about rediscovering what’s important to you, and then building a nature-centered system of rituals and routines, like this one, around those priorities, so that they can infuse every aspect of your life, from your relationship with yourself, to your relationship with others and your relationship with the Earth.

We know that transformational change comes from making courageous decisions.  In our wild pursuit of innovation, how poetically absurd is it that one of the most courageous decisions that we are being called to make is to prioritize quality time at the beach!

 

 

Original article here

04 Mar 2023
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How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain

 

The Neumayer III polar station sits near the edge of Antarctica’s unforgiving Ekström Ice Shelf. During the winter, when temperatures can plunge below minus 50 degrees Celsius and the winds can climb to more than 100 kilometers per hour, no one can come or go from the station. Its isolation is essential to the meteorological, atmospheric and geophysical science experiments conducted there by the mere handful of scientists who staff the station during the winter months and endure its frigid loneliness.

But a few years ago, the station also became the site for a study of loneliness itself. A team of scientists in Germany wanted to see whether the social isolation and environmental monotony marked the brains of people making long Antarctic stays. Eight expeditioners working at the Neumayer III station for 14 months agreed to have their brains scanned before and after their mission and to have their brain chemistry and cognitive performance monitored during their stay. (A ninth crew member also participated but could not have their brain scanned for medical reasons.)

As the researchers described in 2019, in comparison to a control group, the socially isolated team lost volume in their prefrontal cortex — the region at the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, that is chiefly responsible for decision-making and problem-solving. They also had lower levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that nurtures the development and survival of nerve cells in the brain. The reduction persisted for at least a month and a half after the team’s return from Antarctica.

It’s uncertain how much of this was due purely to the social isolation of the experience. But the results are consistent with evidence from more recent studies that chronic loneliness significantly alters the brain in ways that only worsen the problem.

Neuroscience suggests that loneliness doesn’t necessarily result from a lack of opportunity to meet others or a fear of social interactions. Instead, circuits in our brain and changes in our behavior can trap us in a catch-22 situation: While we desire connection with others, we view them as unreliable, judgmental and unfriendly. Consequently, we keep our distance, consciously or unconsciously spurning potential opportunities for connections.

Loneliness can be difficult to study empirically because it is entirely subjective. Social isolation, a related condition, is different — it’s an objective measure of how few relationships a person has. The experience of loneliness has to be self-reported, although researchers have developed tools such as the UCLA Loneliness Scale to help with assessing the depths of an individual’s feelings.

From such work, it’s clear that the physical and psychological toll of loneliness across the globe is profound. In one survey, 22% of Americans and 23% of British people said they felt lonely always or often. And that was before the pandemic. As of October 2020, 36% of Americans reported “serious loneliness.”

Introduction

But loneliness doesn’t merely feel bad: It takes a toll on our health. It can lead to high blood pressure, stroke and heart disease. It can also double the risk of Type 2 diabetes and raise the likelihood of dementia by 40%. As a consequence, chronically lonely people tend to have an 83% higher mortality risk than those who feel less isolated.

Organizations and governments often attempt to help with loneliness by encouraging people to go out more and by setting up hobby clubs, community gardens and craft groups. Yet as the neuroscience shows, getting rid of loneliness isn’t always that simple.

A Bias Toward Rejection 

When neuroscientists from Germany and Israel set out to investigate loneliness a few years ago, they expected to find that its neural underpinnings were like those of social anxiety and involved the amygdala. Often called the fear center of the brain, the amygdala tends to activate when we face things we dread, from snakes to other humans. “We thought, ‘Social anxiety is associated with increased amygdala activity, so this should also be the case for lonely individuals,’” said Jana Lieberz, a doctoral student at the University of

Bonn in Germany who was part of the research team.

However, a study that the team published in 2022 revealed that although threatening social situations trigger more amygdala activity in people suffering from social anxiety, they do not have that effect on lonely people. Similarly, people with social anxiety have diminished activity in the reward sections of their brain, and that does not appear to be true for lonely people.

“The core features of social anxiety were not evident in loneliness,” Lieberz said. Those results suggest, she said, that treating loneliness simply by telling lonely people to go out and socialize more (the way you can treat a phobia of snakes with exposure) will often not work because it fails to address the root cause of the loneliness. In fact, a recent meta-analysis confirmed that simply providing lonely people with easier access to potential friends has no effect on subjective loneliness.

The problem with loneliness seems to be that it biases our thinking. In behavioral studies, lonely people picked up on negative social signals, such as images of rejection, within 120 milliseconds — twice as quickly as people with satisfying relationships and in less than half the time it takes to blink. Lonely people also preferred to stand farther away from strangers, trusted others less and disliked physical touch.

This may be why the emotional well-being of lonely individuals often follows “a downward spiral,” said Danilo Bzdok, an interdisciplinary researcher at McGill University with a background in neuroscience and machine learning. “They tend to end up with a more negative spin on whatever information they receive — facial expressions, texting, whatever — and that drives them even deeper into this loneliness pit.”

Faults in the Default Network

Bzdok and his colleagues conducted the largest studies to date looking for signatures of loneliness in the human brain — studies involving about 100 times more subjects than any prior ones, according to Bzdok. They used data from the UK Biobank — a biomedical database that contains the brain scans of about 40,000 residents of the United Kingdom, along with information about their social isolation and loneliness.

Their results, published in 2020 in Nature Communications, revealed that the brain’s loneliness hot spot nestles within the default network, a part of the brain that activates when we are mentally on standby. “Until 20 years ago we didn’t even know we had this system,” Bzdok said. Yet studies have shown that activity in the default network accounts for most of the brain’s consumption of energy.

Bzdok and his team showed that some regions of the default network are not only larger in chronically lonely people but also more strongly connected to other parts of the brain. Moreover, the default network seems to be involved in many of the distinctive abilities that have evolved in humans — such as language, anticipating the future and causal reasoning. More generally, the default network activates when we think about other people, including when we interpret their intentions.

The findings on default network connectivity provided neuroimaging

evidence to support previous discoveries by psychologists that lonely people tend to daydream about social interactions, get easily nostalgic about past social events, and even anthropomorphize their pets, talking to their cats as if they were human, for example. “It would require the default network to do that too,” Bzdok said.

While loneliness can lead to a rich imaginary social life, it can make real-life social encounters less rewarding. A reason why may have been identified in a 2021 study by Bzdok and his colleagues that was also based on the voluminous UK Biobank data. They looked separately at socially isolated people and at people with low social support, as measured by a lack of someone to confide in on a daily or almost daily basis. The researchers found that in all such individuals, the orbitofrontal cortex — a part of the brain linked to processing rewards — was smaller.

Last year, a large brain-imaging study based on data from more than 1,300 Japanese volunteers revealed that greater loneliness is associated with stronger functional connections in the brain area that handles visual attention. This finding supports previous reports from eye-tracking studies that lonely people tend to focus excessively on unpleasant social cues, such as being ignored by others.

A Deep, Uncomfortable Craving

And yet, although lonely people may find encounters with others uncomfortable and unrewarding, they still seem to crave connection. The late John Cacioppo, a University of Chicago neuroscientist whose research earned him the nickname “Dr. Loneliness,” hypothesized that loneliness is an evolved adaptation, similar to hunger, signaling that something has gone awry in our lives. Just as hunger motivates us to look for food, loneliness should drive us to seek out connection to others. For our ancestors on the African savanna, whose survival probably depended on having ties to a group, that social impulse might have been a matter of life or death.

Recent brain imaging data supports the idea that loneliness is that deeply rooted in our psyche. In one study, Livia Tomova, a research associate in neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, and her colleagues asked 40 people to fast for 10 hours, then to have their brains scanned while they looked at pictures of mouth-watering foods. Subsequently, the same volunteers had to spend 10 hours alone — without phones, email or even novels as surrogates for contact. Then they had a second brain scan, this time while looking at pictures of happy groups of friends. When the scientists compared the brain scans of these individuals, the brain activation patterns from when they were hungry and when they felt lonely were remarkably alike.

To Tomova, the experiment underlined an important truth about loneliness: If just 10 hours without social contact is enough to elicit essentially the same neural signals as being deprived of food, “it highlights how basic our need to connect with others is,” she said.

Bigger Brains and More Friends

Recent studies also appear to confirm an evolutionary theory called the social brain hypothesis, which proposes that a busy social life is linked to bigger brains. The idea originated as a theory about how brains might have changed through evolution, but the larger brain size seems to emerge directly from life experiences too. In general, nonhuman primates in captivity that live in larger social groups or share spaces with more cage mates have larger brains. More specifically, the primates have more gray matter in their prefrontal cortex.

Humans are not much different, research suggests. A 2022 study found that elderly lonely people often have atrophy in parts of the brain including the thalamus, which processes emotions, and the hippocampus, a memory center. These changes, the authors suggested, could help explain links between loneliness and dementia.

Of course, the chicken-and-egg question about all these findings is: Do differences in the brain predispose us to loneliness, or does loneliness rewire and shrink the brain? According to Bzdok, it’s not currently possible to solve this puzzle. He believes, however, that the causality may point both ways.

Primate studies and the results of the Neumayer III polar station experiment show that experience and social environment can exert a powerful influence on the structure of an individual’s brain, hard-wiring the changes that loneliness can cause. On the other hand, studies of twins have shown that loneliness is partly heritable: Almost 50% of the variation in individuals’ feelings of loneliness can be explained by genetic differences.

People suffering from chronic loneliness are not irretrievably locked into those feelings by nature and nurture. Studies show that cognitive therapies can be effective at reducing loneliness by training people to recognize how their behaviors and thought patterns hinder them from forming the kinds of connections they value. And better interventions for loneliness and social isolation should be possible.

Take a recent study in which Lieberz and her colleagues looked at the brain activity in people playing a trust-based game. In the brain scans of lonely people, one brain region was far less active than in social people. That region, the insula, tends to activate when we examine our gut feelings, Lieberz explained. “That might be a reason why lonely people have problems trusting others — they cannot rely on their [gut] feelings,” she said. Interventions that target trust could therefore be part of a solution to the catch-22 of loneliness.

Another idea is to encourage synchrony. Research shows that one key to how much people like and trust each other lies in how closely their behaviors and reactions match from moment to moment. This synchrony between individuals can be as simple as reciprocating a smile or mirroring body language during conversation, or as elaborate as singing in a choir or being part of a rowing team. In a study published a year ago, Lieberz and her colleagues showed that lonely people struggle to synchronize with others, and that this discordance causes the regions of their brain responsible for observing actions to go into overdrive. Coaching lonely people in how to join in with the actions of others could be another strategic intervention to consider. It won’t cure loneliness by itself, “but it may be a starting point,” Lieberz said.

And if all else fails, there could be new chemical therapies. In one experiment conducted in Switzerland, after volunteers took psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, they reported feeling less socially excluded. Scans of their brains showed less activity in areas that process painful social experiences.

While interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy, promoting trust and synchrony, or even ingesting magic mushrooms could help treat chronic loneliness, transient feelings of solitude will most likely always remain part of the human experience. And there is nothing wrong with that, Tomova said.

She compares loneliness to stress: It’s unpleasant but not necessarily negative. “It provides energy to the body, and then we can deal with challenges,” she said. “It becomes problematic when it’s chronic because our bodies are not meant to be in this constant state. That’s when our adaptive mechanisms ultimately break down.”

 

 

Original article here

27 Feb 2023
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Why the simple life is not just beautiful, it’s necessary

The good life is the simple life. Among philosophical ideas about how we should live, this one is a hardy perennial; from Socrates to Thoreau, from the Buddha to Wendell Berry, thinkers have been peddling it for more than two millennia. And it still has plenty of adherents. Magazines such as Real Simple call out to us from the supermarket checkout; Oprah Winfrey regularly interviews fans of simple living such as Jack Kornfield, a teacher of Buddhist mindfulness; the Slow Movement, which advocates a return to pre-industrial basics, attracts followers across continents.

Through much of human history, frugal simplicity was not a choice but a necessity – and since necessary, it was also deemed a moral virtue. But with the advent of industrial capitalism and a consumer society, a system arose that was committed to relentless growth, and with it grew a population (aka ‘the market’) that was enabled and encouraged to buy lots of stuff that, by traditional standards, was surplus to requirements. As a result, there’s a disconnect between the traditional values we have inherited and the consumerist imperatives instilled in us by contemporary culture.

In pre-modern times, the discrepancy between what the philosophers advised and how people lived was not so great. Wealth provided security, but even for the rich wealth was flimsy protection against misfortunes such as war, famine, disease, injustice and the disfavour of tyrants. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, one of the richest men in Rome, still ended up being sentenced to death by Nero. As for the vast majority – slaves, serfs, peasants and labourers – there was virtually no prospect of accumulating even modest wealth.

Before the advent of machine-based agriculture, representative democracy, civil rights, antibiotics and aspirin, just making it through a long life without too much suffering counted as doing pretty well. Today, though, at least in prosperous societies, people want and expect (and can usually have) a good deal more. Living simply now strikes many people as simply boring.

Yet there seems to be growing interest, especially among millennials, in rediscovering the benefits of simple living. Some of this might reflect a kind of nostalgia for the pre-industrial or pre-consumerist world, and also sympathy for the moral argument that says that living in a simple manner makes you a better person, by building desirable traits such as frugality, resilience and independence – or a happier person, by promoting peace of mind and good health, and keeping you close to nature.

These are plausible arguments. Yet in spite of the official respect their teachings command, the sages have proved remarkably unpersuasive. Millions of us continue to rush around getting and spending, buying lottery tickets, working long hours, racking up debt, and striving 24/7 to climb the greasy pole. Why is this?

One obvious answer is good old-fashioned hypocrisy. We applaud the frugal philosophy while ignoring its precepts in our day-to-day lives. We praise the simple lifestyle of, say, Pope Francis, seeing it as a sign of his moral integrity, while also hoping for and cheering on economic growth driven, in large part, by a demand for bigger houses, fancier cars and other luxury goods.

But the problem isn’t just that our practice conflicts with our professed beliefs. Our thinking about simplicity and luxury, frugality and extravagance, is fundamentally inconsistent. We condemn extravagance that is wasteful or tasteless and yet we tout monuments of past extravagance, such as the Forbidden City in Beijing or the palace at Versailles, as highly admirable. The truth is that much of what we call ‘culture’ is fuelled by forms of extravagance.

Somewhat paradoxically, then, the case for living simply was most persuasive when most people had little choice but to live that way. The traditional arguments for simple living in effect rationalise a necessity. But the same arguments have less purchase when the life of frugal simplicity is a choice, one way of living among many. Then the philosophy of frugality becomes a hard sell.

That might be about to change, under the influence of two factors: economics and environmentalism. When recession strikes, as it has done recently (revealing inherent instabilities in an economic system committed to unending growth) millions of people suddenly find themselves in circumstances where frugality once again becomes a necessity, and the value of its associated virtues is rediscovered.

In societies such as the United States, we are currently witnessing a tendency for capitalism to stretch the distance between the ‘have lots’ and the ‘have nots’. These growing inequalities invite a fresh critique of extravagance and waste. When so many people live below the poverty line, there is something unseemly about in-your-face displays of opulence and luxury. Moreover, the lopsided distribution of wealth also represents a lost opportunity. According to Epicurus and the other sages of simplicity, one can live perfectly well, provided certain basic needs are satisfied – a view endorsed in modern times by the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’. If correct, it’s an argument for using surplus wealth to ensure that everyone has basics such as food, housing, healthcare, education, utilities and public transport – at low cost, rather than allowing it to be funneled into a few private pockets.

However wise the sages, it would not have occurred to Socrates or Epicurus to argue for the simple life in terms of environmentalism. Two centuries of industrialisation, population growth and frenzied economic activity has bequeathed us smog; polluted lakes, rivers and oceans; toxic waste; soil erosion; deforestation; extinction of plant and animal species, and global warming. The philosophy of frugal simplicity expresses values and advocates a lifestyle that might be our best hope for reversing these trends and preserving our planet’s fragile ecosystems.

Many people are still unconvinced by this. But if our current methods of making, getting, spending and discarding prove unsustainable, then there could come a time – and it might come quite soon – when we are forced towards simplicity. In which case, a venerable tradition will turn out to contain the philosophy of the future.

 

Original article here

24 Feb 2023
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Misophonia: how ‘sound rage’ destroys relationships and forces people to move home

As a teenager, I remember being moved almost to tears by the sound of a family member chewing muesli. A friend eating dumplings once forced me to flee the room. The noises one former housemate makes when chomping popcorn mean I have declined their invitations to the cinema for nearly 20 years.

I am not proud of myself for reacting like this – in fact, I am pretty embarrassed – but my responses feel unavoidable. It is probable that I have misophonia. According to a forthcoming scientific paper from King’s College London, so do 18% of people in the UK.

Otherwise known as “sound rage”, misophonia is “a decreased tolerance to certain sounds” says Dr Jane Gregory, a clinical psychologist at the University of Oxford who co-authored the paper and counts herself among the 18%.

Sound triggers are usually repetitive, she says. It is not about “the volume of the sound or necessarily the acoustic pattern”, but what it means to the observer. Eating sounds are most commonly reported, closely followed by so-called throat sounds. (Gregory is driven spare by the sound of pigeons.)

“Chewing, crunching, snorting, sniffing, throat clearing, nose whistling, heavy breathing,” rattles off Dr Zach Rosenthal, who runs the Centre for Misophonia and Emotion Regulation at Duke university in Durham, North Carolina. “These are all relatively ordinary everyday things that people need to do, but in people with misophonia they are experienced as highly aversive.”

That “aversive reaction” can take the form of physical changes such as increased muscle tension or heart rate, or emotional responses such as irritability, shame and anxiety. It brings on a fight, flight or even a freeze response where, according to Gregory, “you get a really strong adrenaline reaction and it tells you that you’re either in danger or you’re being violated”.

Only about 14% of the UK population are aware of misophonia, according to the King’s College London paper. Perhaps one of the reasons, Gregory suggests, is simply that it is hard to talk about. “You are essentially telling someone: ‘The sound of you eating and breathing – the sounds of you keeping yourself alive – are repulsing me.’ It’s really hard to find a polite way to say that.” Maybe the movie Tár will help: its protagonist, played by Cate Blanchett, has an extreme reaction to the sound of a metronome.

Theories about how misophonia develops are exactly that. “A lot of people say they had always been a little bit sensitive to sound, but then they remember a certain time when it suddenly got a lot worse,” says Gregory. Rosenthal says it typically presents itself in late childhood or early teens and is often associated with family members. “People ask me all the time: ‘Why my family? Why my parents?’” The explanation feels comfortingly logical: “You’re not blaming, you’re not judging – you were probably just around them the most.”

You might have clocked a sibling eating baked beans, say, then once you have noticed it your brain begins to look out for it. Rosenthal describes the whirlpool: “It starts to be aversive and then I pay more attention to it, and then the more attention I pay to it the more I notice it, and then the more I notice it the more aversive it becomes …”

The impact can be severe. Gregory knows of relationships that have ended over misophonia; she has encountered people who have moved several times to escape triggering neighbours. Others must pick careers based on where they can work without being bothered by sounds. “If you don’t get any respite from it, you can get desperate,” she says.

Strategies might help, however, such as introducing background noise when eating. Gregory’s husband, who knows better than to eat Monster Munch at home, can tell if she is bothered by a sound, because she will suddenly call out: “Siri, play Taylor Swift!”

Sometimes the best option is to walk away. Gregory suggests then “slowing down your breathing, or just giving your mind a little job to do”, such as playing a game for a minute. By the time you re-enter the room, the sound might be gone, or you might feel better equipped, “because you know what’s coming”.

She also recommends “opposite action – this idea that sometimes the more we avoid something or block it out, the more harmful it feels to us. In CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy], we do the opposite of what you feel like doing.” In this vein, she tries to fight her instinct to glare at her husband, gazing adoringly at him instead: “It’s a way of tripping up your brain and saying: remember that you love this person, remember that you’re not actually in danger.”

I make a note to try this the next time I hear someone eating scrambled eggs.

 

 

Original article here

29 Jan 2023
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The Science of How Your Body Ages

Ask people what they think they’ll look like in 25 years, and chances are they’ll mention how their parents looked at that age. And while genetics certainly play a part, research shows there’s more to the story. Only about 30% of what we see as aging is inherited, explains John Rowe, M.D., Julius B. Richmond Professor of Health Policy and Aging at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

When you look specifically at things above the neck — like cognitive function, vision, and hearing — that number goes up to about 50%. “People feel there’s some intrinsic clock playing out a program in their body that they don’t have influence over,” says Dr. Rowe. “It’s just not true.”

Yes, good news: We have real control over how our bodies age. Aging is happening on a cellular level at every moment, so for a long and healthy life, it’s vital to stay on top of the changes within your body and your mind. For a better understanding of these shifts through every decade, we talked to the experts.

In Your 20s

In our 20s, we’re generally at the peak of physical health. In several ways, our bodies are still on the upward curve of development — even our menstrual cycles maybe more regular than in our teens! — and our brains and bones are growing to their full potential.

Brain

Your brain is changing well into your 20s, says Shanna Levine, M.D., a New York City–based internist working in private practice for Goals Healthcare. Research has shown that your prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for factors like inhibition, high-level functioning, and attention — continues growing until around age 25.

POWER UP: It’s never too early to prioritize brain health! Keep your noggin sharp through the decades with these brain-boosting tricks:

  • Plan to volunteer. One study found that giving back, even for less than two hours a week, could slow cognitive decline — likely because doing so promotes social connection and mental engagement, which research has proven can help stave off dementia.
  • Study a new language. It may be easier to learn one when you’re young, but studying another language at any age can “promote thinking skills, increase mental agility, and delay the aging of the brain,” found one study. Plus, if you take group classes, you get the social benefit.
  • Learn to play an instrument. Even if you don’t see yourself as musically inclined, give it a shot. In one study, people 60 and over showed improvement in cognitive functions after just four months of piano lessons.

Bones

By the time you’re 18, you already have up to 90% of your peak bone mass, including strength and density. However, you’re still adding more mass than you’re losing (that changes around age 30). While the amount you develop is primarily based on set factors like race and gender, about one-quarter of it is determined by things you can control.

POWER UP: Exercise regularly, get enough calcium in your diet (about 1,000 mg per day), limit alcoholic beverages, and don’t smoke.

In Your 30s

Many people see this as their best decade. During our 30s, we’re likely getting more settled in our careers and families, and according to one study our happiness levels are still actively increasing. This is also when making real lifestyle changes can help stave off long-term issues.

Metabolism 

You may notice that it takes extra effort to shed pounds. This is because of a slower metabolic rate — it can start to decline in our 20s and continues to decrease by 2% to 3% every 10 years. The reason you likely won’t realize that until now: This is also when we start losing muscle mass (3% to 8% per decade after age 30). This metabolic shift may translate into an increase in body fat around your middle. While you might be annoyed about how your jeans suddenly fit (or don’t), the deeper belly fat around your organs (called visceral fat) is more of a concern— it can increase your risk of things like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure.

POWER UP: Eat healthfully and start a regular exercise routine; it’ll help build muscle mass, which gives your metabolism a boost.

Skin

Seeing new fine lines and wrinkles in the mirror? You can blame decreasing collagen and elastin levels. And cell turnover slows after your late 20s, so skin can look dull and tired without extra exfoliation. Our Beauty Lab recommends adding a facial peel to your weekly routine. This is also when damage from past unprotected sun exposure can start to rear its ugly head.

POWER UP: Prevent future sun damage by wearing SPF 30 or higher every day — even if you’re not hitting the beach or the pool.

In Your 40s

Everything seems to come together when you hit your 40s. While your family life and career are likely at a high point, caring for aging parents and planning for the future can make it a stressful time.

Eyes

Struggling to read the restaurant menu? Eyesight begins to weaken at this age because of changes in the eyes’ focusing ability. But you won’t see the more profound consequences for two more decades, says Dr. Levine.

POWER UP: Focus on your diet. “Just one cup of kale has more than a whole day’s worth of the carotenoids zeaxanthin, lutein, and beta-carotene, which help shield ocular tissue from harmful UV damage and may also reduce your risk of developing cataracts,” says GH Nutrition Director Jaclyn London, M.S., R.D.

Height

“Every 10 years after the age of 40, we lose about half an inch of height” because of changes in bones, muscles, and joints, says Dr. Levine. But talk to your doctor about any rapid height loss — it could be a sign of osteoporosis.

POWER UP: Get exercise. There’s no way to fully stop shrinking, but a study found that people who did so regularly could cut the height they lost almost in half. This was true even for those who became moderately active only after 40 (compared with those who never exercised regularly and those who ended their activity as they got older).

In Your 50s 

As your children head off to high school and college, now is when you think about how you would like to spend your time. Whether you focus on a new hobby, a volunteer project, or a career change, this decade is all about starting to concentrate on your own wants and needs.

Hormones

The big health story during this decade? Menopause. It hits some women in their 40s, but the average age is 51. Menopause is diagnosed when you haven’t had your period for over a year — and when your ovaries stop producing estrogen, the effects can be challenging both physically and emotionally. The classic symptoms include hot flashes, insomnia, mood swings, and even anxiety or depression — but not all women will experience every one of these.

POWER UP: Keep cool! While there hasn’t been much research on supplements and herbal remedies, some women have found that black cohosh eases hot flashes; one study showed that listening to relaxing music or practicing slow-breathing exercises could reduce their frequency. For many women, the end of periods — and cramps, bloating and PMS-ing — is something to celebrate!

In Your 60s

Welcome to a new concept: freedom! Whether it’s thanks to becoming an empty nester, being newly retired, or just shaking off societal expectations, it’s all about you from now on. Here’s to prioritizing your mental and physical well-being!

Hearing and Vision

Along with declining vision, hearing loss is an issue: One-third of Americans in their late 60s and early 70s have hearing loss. And after 75, half of us will have difficulty hearing.

POWER UP: Ask for help, especially since this can be socially isolating. Today’s hearing aids are often more discreet than previous models, so don’t hesitate to talk with your doc about whether you’re a candidate. Only 30% of adults 70 and older who could use them ever have, reports the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Bones

Women are at higher risk of developing osteoporosis (about one-quarter of women age 65 and older in the U.S. suffer from it, versus less than 6% of men) because of rapid loss of bone density during and after menopause.

POWER UP: Take a proactive approach and get screened regularly for bone disease. You can help lower your odds of it by starting an exercise plan with weight-bearing movements (like walking, hiking, jogging, climbing stairs, weight training, and even dancing) and making sure you get enough calcium and vitamin D.

The Future of Aging

Somewhere between early adulthood and middle age, a compound in your cells called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) begins a gradual decline. NAD+ helps power hundreds of metabolic processes and keeps a group of proteins called sirtuins active. You want them to stay active, since they can contribute to overall health and longevity.

Leonard Guarente, Ph.D., director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at MIT and chief scientist and cofounder of Elysium Health, discovered their role and importance. He says sirtuins are the “guardians of health maintenance” in cells.

While experts are able to make some generalizations about growing older, it’s a different experience for everyone. “People are very diverse in terms of their aging rates, and the level that one person hits by age 50, another may not hit until 60,” says Morgan Levine, Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at Yale School of Medicine.

Biological Age

This is why many researchers also talk about biological age, a measurement focusing on biological markers that show how your systems are actually aging. “About 68% of people will have a biological age within five years of their chronological age, but you can also find individuals who are 10 years older or younger,” she explains.

You can’t stop aging, of course, but lifestyle choices make a real difference. And research is focusing on what else can be done. “People want to play an active role in their own health maintenance,” says Dr. Guarente. He and his team at Elysium Health are looking to develop a test that will let people find out and monitor their NAD+ levels.

True Age 

The hypothesis is that NAD+ levels are a better measure of aging than chronological age. And in theory, knowing them would help people make profound changes. “Successful aging is not the imitation of youth,” says Dr. Rowe. “Making yourself look better on the outside won’t impact what’s going on inside.” At the end of the day, it’s internal functions that actually matter for our health and life span.

 

 

Original article here

23 Jan 2023
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Why some people can’t tell left from right

 

It can seem like an almost childish mistake, but a surprising number of adults confuse left from right and scientists are only just starting to understand why.

When British brain surgeon Henry Marsh sat down beside his patient’s bed following surgery, the bad news he was about to deliver stemmed from his own mistake. The man had a trapped nerve in his arm that required an operation – but after making a midline incision in his neck, Marsh had drilled out the nerve on the wrong side of his spinal column.

Preventable medical mistakes frequently involve wrong-sided surgery: an injection to the wrong eye, for example, or a biopsy from the wrong breast. These “never events” – serious and largely preventable patient safety accidents – highlight that, while most of us learn as children how to tell left from right, not everyone gets it right.

While for some people, telling left from right is as easy as telling up from down, a significant minority – around one in six people, according to a recent study – struggle with the distinction. Even for those who believe they have no issues, distractions such as ambient noise, or having to answer unrelated questions, can get in the way of making the right choice.

“Nobody has difficulty in saying [something is] front and back, or top and bottom,” says Ineke van der Ham, professor of neuropsychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. But telling left from right is different, she says. “It’s because of the symmetry, and because when you turn around, it’s the other way around, and that makes it so confusing.”

Left-right discrimination is actually quite a complex process, calling upon memory, language, visual and spatial processing, and mental rotation. In fact, researchers are only just beginning to get to the bottom of exactly what’s going on in our brains when we do it – and why it’s much easier for some people than others.

“Some individuals can tell right from left innately, just can do it without thinking,” says Gerard Gormley, a GP and clinical professor at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “But others have to go through a process.” In an effort to understand what happens in wrong-sided medical errors, Gormley and his colleagues have conducted research on medical students’ experience of making left-right decisions and examined the process.

“First of all, you have to orient right from left in yourself,” he says. When the answer doesn’t come instantly, participants described various techniques, from making an L shape with their thumb and index finger, to thinking about which hand they use to write, or strum a guitar. “For some people it’s a tattoo on their body or a piercing,” Gormley says.

Then, when figuring out which side is someone else’s left or right, the next step is mentally rotating yourself so you’re facing in the same direction as the other person. “If I’m facing you, my left hand will be opposite your right hand,” says Gormley. “That idea of mentally rotating an object adds an extra degree of complexity.” Other research shows that people tend to find it easier to judge if an image shows a left or right hand by imagining their own hand or body rotating.

Research published by Van der Ham and her colleagues in 2020 found that around 15% of people rate themselves as insufficient when it comes to identifying left and right. Almost half of the four hundred participants in the study said they used a hand-related strategy to identify which is which.

The more asymmetrical someone’s body is – in terms of writing hand preference, for example – the easier they find it to tell left and right apart

The researchers used something called the Bergen right-left discrimination test to dig deeper into how these strategies work. Participants looked at pictures of stick people either facing toward or away from them, with their arms in various positions, and had to identify their highlighted hand as their left or right. “It seems simple, but it’s kind of frustrating if you have to do a hundred of these as quickly as you can,” says Van der Ham.

In the first experiment, the participants sat with their hands on a table in front of them. “There was a very clear effect from how this little stick figure was positioned,” says Van der Ham. “If you were looking at the back of the head, so it was aligned with you, people were a lot faster and more accurate.” Similarly, when the stick person was facing the participant but had their hands crossed, so their left hand was on the same side as the participant’s left hand, people tended to do better.

“That tells us that the body really is involved in this,” says Van der Ham. The next question was whether participants were using cues from their body at the time of the test to identify left and right, or referring to a stored idea of their body instead.

 

To answer that, the researchers repeated their experiment, but this time tested four different scenarios: participants sat with their hands either crossed or uncrossed on the table in front of them, and had their hands either visible during the test, or covered with a black cloth.

But the researchers found that none of those changes influenced test performance. In other words, participants didn’t need to actually see their hands in order to use their own body to distinguish right from left.

“We haven’t completely solved the issue,” says Van der Ham. “But we were able to identify our bodies as being a key element in identifying left from right, and that we consult our body representation as we have it in a more static way.”

In Van der Ham’s experiments, the boost in performance that came from being in line with the stick person was more pronounced in people who said they use a hand-related strategy to tell left from right in their daily lives, as well as in women generally. The researchers also found that men tended to be faster in responding than women, but the data did not back up previous research showing that men perform better overall in left-right discrimination tests. 

Exactly why people differ in their ability to tell left from right isn’t clear, though research suggests that the more asymmetrical someone’s body is (in terms of writing hand preference, for example) the easier they find it to tell left and right apart. “If one side of your brain is slightly larger than the other, you tend to have a better right-left discrimination,” says Gormely.

But it could also be something that we learn in childhood, like other aspects of spatial cognition, says Van der Ham. “If kids are in charge of finding the way around, if you just let them walk in front of you for a couple of metres and make the decisions, those are the kids that ended up being better navigators,” she says.

Research by Alice Gomez and colleagues at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France hints that left-right discrimination is something that children can pick up quickly. Gomez designed a two-week intervention programme, delivered by teachers, designed to increase five-to-seven-year-olds’ body representation and motor skills.

When they were tested on their ability to locate the correct body part on themselves or a partner – their right knee, for example – after the programme, the number of left-right discrimination errors were almost halved. “It was very easy for us to increase the abilities of children to be able to locate the [body part] on the basis of the name,” says Gomez.

One reason for this might be that the children were taught a strategy – to think about their writing hand – for when they couldn’t remember right and left. The programme’s focus on children’s own bodies is another possible explanation, especially as other research shows that an egocentric reference frame is key when we make left-right decisions.

In a typical classroom, children might label body parts on a diagram rather than their own bodies, because the latter is more time-consuming and difficult to assess for a teacher, says Gomez. “It’s very rare that they will have the time to be egocentric,” she says.

While there are plenty of everyday scenarios where knowing left from right is important, there are some situations where it’s absolutely critical. Brain surgeon Marsh was able to put right his wrong-sided trapped nerve surgery – but a surgeon removing the wrong kidney or amputating the wrong limb, for example, would have devastating consequences.

Medicine is not the only field where left-right errors can make the difference between life and death: it’s possible that a steersman turning the ship right instead of left was a contributing factor in the sinking of the Titanic.

But while some people have to put in more effort to judge left and right, everybody has the ability to get left-right decisions wrong, says Gormley. He hopes that more awareness of how easy it is to make such a mistake will lead to less stigma for those who need to double check their decision.

“As health care professionals, we spend a lot of time labeling spatial orientations: proximal, distal, superior, inferior, but really pay no attention to right or left,” he says. “But actually, of all the spatial orientations, that is the most challenging.”

 

 

Original article here

14 Jan 2023
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The Mind Gym: Five Ways to Make Exercise a Pleasure

For most of my adult life, exercise was an ordeal. Even mild workouts felt grueling and I left the gym in a fouler mood than when I’d arrived. The very idea of the runner’s high seemed like a cruel joke.

As a science writer investigating the mind-body connection, however, I was surprised to discover many psychological tricks that can turn the pain into pleasure. Putting these simple tips to the test, I now happily burn between 6,000 and 7,000 calories a week with high-intensity interval training, 5km runs and yoga. What was once a torment is now the highlight of my day.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s the science behind the five strategies that I found most transformative.

1. Let music be your pacemaker

Choosing the right music for a workout can be as important as picking the right playlist for a party, with ramifications for your enjoyment and your performance.

The benefits are not only found in motivational lyrics – though there’s no doubt that upbeat tracks can infuse you with positive feelings that can help to drown out the sensations of fatigue; when you are lost in the music, you simply forget how hard you are working out.

There are also some physical benefits. Loud, high-octane music also increases our “physiological arousal”, resulting in a faster heart rate that will deliver more oxygen to our muscles. And research by Costas Karageorghis, a professor of sport and exercise physiology at Brunel University London, shows that we naturally synchronise our body’s motion to the underlying rhythm. This reduces any energy-wasting irregularities in our movements and results in more efficient use of our muscles.

If you want to make the most of the pacemaker effect, the tempo of the music must match the type of exercise you are trying to perform. If you are taking a step for every beat, around 170-180bpm (such as Roar by Katy Perry) would be right for a high-intensity run. For energetic cycling, you might want something slower, such as Dangerous by David Guetta ft Sam Martin, at 92bpm.

2. Ignore #fitspo posts

Scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, you’ll come across countless “fitspiration” accounts offering pictures of perfect pecs and tight torsos – a portrait of what might be possible if you only follow the right regime. Such images might seem like a sensible source of motivation, a way of focusing your mind on what you want to achieve. But a study led by Ivanka Prichard at Flinders University, Australia suggests these accounts can lead to a less rewarding workout.

The participants first scrolled through a set of 18 images. Some saw supposedly motivational photos related to fitness, such as before-and-after shots depicting a body transformation. Others saw travel photos of attractive locations. They then took to the treadmill for a 10-minute workout. Far from encouraging the exercisers, the #fitspo images had a negative effect on their mood and increased their rating of “perceived exertion”, so that they found the activity more tiring than the people who had seen the travel snaps. This seemed to be tied to lower body satisfaction – the sight of the fitness gurus had left them feeling less attractive and more concerned about their weight and shape, which put a downer on the whole experience.

3. Reframe the pain

If you are just getting started on a new fitness regime or simply having a bad day, it’s very easy to interpret feelings of fatigue as a sign of failure. The heart thumping hard in your chest, the burning of your lungs, the aches of your limbs – your body seems to be yelling at you to stop exercising. The sensations may even trigger cycles of catastrophic thinking, in which you start to exaggerate your discomfort – “this is awful”, “I can’t take it”, “I’m never going to get fit”.

Psychological science suggests that these thoughts will only amplify your distress – which may, of course, discourage you from continuing your workouts in the future. To avoid this fate, you can practise “cognitive appraisal”. This could involve taking a deliberately dispassionate view that avoids negative interpretation; you might try to passively observe the feelings without judging them. You might even try to see discomfort as a sign of progress – that you are successfully pushing your body to the max.

Studies show that these small changes in mindset can soften the sense of physical distress and the perceived exertion of exercise. Through the mind-body connection, they could even activate a beneficial “expectation effect” – akin to the placebo effect – that alters the physiological response to the exercise. One experiment by Prof Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin found that reframing muscle aches as a positive signal can ramp up the production of the brain’s endogenous cannabinoids and opioids, natural analgesics that could mask the strain.

4. Engage your imagination

Many athletes swear by the power of visualisation. American swimmer Michael Phelps, for example, imagined each event in exquisite detail. “I can see the start, the strokes, the walls, the turns, the finish, the strategy, all of it,” he wrote in his autobiography, No Limits. “Visualising like this is like programming a race in my head, and that programming sometimes seems to make it happen just as I imagined it.”

Sports science seems to back this up: the use of mental imagery can improve the accuracy of our movements, and even our overall strength. Studies show that people who spend a few minutes each day visualising the lifting of heavy weights see bigger strength gains than those who did not practise an imaginary workout. The mental rehearsal is thought to boost the nerve signals sent from the brain to the muscles, increasing the force you can exert when you finally visit the gym. This technique can be especially useful in minimising the loss of strength while recovering from injury.

5. Use temptation-bundling

For many of us, the biggest battle is getting to the gym in the first place when there are so many other activities vying for our time and attention. It’s much harder to summon the willpower to put on your trainers when you might be curled up on the sofa with a trashy novel.

If this is an issue, you can try temptation-bundling, which involves packaging the things you don’t want to do with one of your guilty pleasures. The technique was developed by Prof Katy Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania, who gave people iPods loaded with four addictive audiobooks to enjoy while they worked out. The simple strategy increased their gym attendance by 29% over the following seven weeks.

So dust off your trainers. With each of these strategies nudging you towards your fitness goals, you may find soon find yourself making substantial gains with very little pain.

 

 

 

Original article here

05 Jan 2023
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Six Ways To Create Inner Peace And Confidence In The New Year

We all want to feel inner peace. We look for it throughout our entire lives, as being at peace allows us to dream and to actually follow those dreams. When we are at peace with ourselves, we are more understanding and loving towards others, we are able to embody the concept of being One, and therefore we create deeper and more meaningful connections with family, friends and people in general.

Confidence is very important, too. When we have confidence in our inner self, we are more prepared to take risks to advance, and we feel focused and motivated to face challenges. Confidence is believing in our own abilities and skills to do what we want and need to do in order to achieve a good quality of life, not only in the physical world, but also in the spiritual realms of existence.

I want to share a few ways of creating inner peace and confidence in this new year. Just by committing to one of these suggestions, you will see transformation happening in your soul and body.

  • Change habits

We are all attached to habits that in the long run do not allow us to advance in our inner self journey. In this sense, observing one self in order to identify a few of those habits is advisable. A good way to do this is to sit down in silence and review your daily habits one by one, being very honest with yourself.

Once you have identified those habits you want to change or completely delete from your life, start with the process of substitution. Go little by little and be realistic, which means doing what you are prepare to do, without overwhelming yourself, because implementing new habits should be easy. If you are going to get stressed trying to make a lasting change, not doing it at all is better. Your emotional and mental health come first.

 

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” ~ Ghandi

 

  • Start a daily meditation practice

Meditation has been found to have numerous scientific benefits. For example, it reduces stress, improves concentration, boosts creativity, and increases happiness. Meditation affects our mental health in a positive manner, decreasing anxiety and depression, improving sleep, and enhancing self-awareness

The benefits of meditation touch our physical being as well. Research shows that it helps lower blood pressure, thereby improving cardiovascular health and strengthening our immune system.

There are numerous types of meditation. However, when starting it is better to follow guided meditations, as this kind of meditation allows us to understand what we are really doing and to enter into the practice with ease. And don’t overwhelm yourself! Set an achievable time, like 5 to 10 minutes per day, to start. Once you have learned to meditate for this length of time comfortably, you can increase it.

 

“The energy of the mind is the essence of life.” ~ Aristotle

 

  • Cultivate a positive attitude

A positive attitude has been linked with increased happiness, health and success in all areas, including the spiritual realm. Make an effort to be more positive this year. This does not mean you should avoid negative thoughts and feelings. Instead, acknowledge them and aim to elevate yourself by seeing them in another light. Find solutions from there.

 

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” ~ Marcus Aurelius

 

  • Practice living in the now

Making a conscious effort to focus on the present involves attention. We have to control our attention, observe where we are placing it and bring it to the now. It is normal to think about the past or the future, but remember that the past is gone and the future never really arrives, we always live it in the present. Sense, live and enjoy every moment of your day. Try this approach and see what happens.

 

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 

  • Practice gratitude

Gratitude is a powerful feeling, because, for me, it is love in action. Make it a habit to focus on the things you are grateful for, big and small. You could start a gratitude journal, which I am doing this year. I have created my own journal and my aim is to write in it every day. You can also take a few moments each day to reflect on the things you are grateful for.

Science has proven that feeling and expressing gratitude impacts our emotional and mental health in a positive way. In fact, the HeartMath Institute has discovered that, “Gratitude releases a powerful, self-rewarding feel-good neurotransmitter in the brain.” Furthermore, they have measured the heart rhythms of people when they feel gratitude and appreciation, and the results show a coherent rhythm: in other words a coherent heart.

 

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

 

  • Get organized

While this advice might not seem to be “spiritual”, nourishing our inner self requires discipline, will and order. Organisation in certain areas of our lives brings us joy and a sense of freedom.

This same idea should be applied to our spiritual practices, meaning that it is important to create a routine and ways of tackling such practices. For example, every morning I start my day with a short meditation and connection to the Source exercise, then I say a few decrees and I end with a short positive visualisation of the activities of the day.

Our external life needs organisation, too. One of the things I do the first month of the year is reorganise my closet, and any place at home in need of order. By doing so, I am creating space not only in my physical surroundings, but in my mind and in my heart. I encourage you to get rid of anything that bothers you and is only collecting dust. Organisation is liberation!

 

“Organization is what makes the impossible possible, the easy easy, and the difficult manageable.” ~ Zig Ziglar

 

 

About the Author:

 

Veronica Sanchez De Darivas is Chilean-Australian, now living in the UK and a proud mother of teenage twins. A spiritual awakening teacher, bestselling author, pineal gland (third eye) activator and Certified Instructor for the Cyclopea Method, Veronica is currently the only instructor in the world teaching the Cyclopea Method in English.

 

 

26 Dec 2022
Comments: 0

In Praise of Doing Nothing

 

In the 1950s, scholars worried that, thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time.

Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor notes, Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society.

It’s probably not unrelated to the fact that instant and constant access has become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.”

It disturbs our leisure time, our family time – even our consciousness.

Over the past decade, I’ve tried to understand the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies, a topic I examine in my book “The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times.”

In this 24/7, “always on” age, the prospect of doing nothing might sound unrealistic and unreasonable.

But it’s never been more important.

Acceleration for the Sake of Acceleration

In an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health, why does daily life seem so overwhelming and anxiety-inducing?

Why aren’t things easier?

It’s a complex question, but one way to explain this irrational state of affairs is something called the force of acceleration.

According to German critical theorist Hartmut Rosa, accelerated technological developments have driven the acceleration in the pace of change in social institutions.

We see this on factory floors, where “just-in-time” manufacturing demands maximum efficiency and the ability to nimbly respond to market forces, and in university classrooms, where computer software instructs teachers how to “move students quickly” through the material. Whether it’s in the grocery store or in the airport, procedures are implemented, for better or for worse, with one goal in mind: speed.

Noticeable acceleration began more than two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution. But this acceleration has itself … accelerated. Guided by neither logical objectives nor agreed-upon rationale, propelled by its own momentum, and encountering little resistance, acceleration seems to have begotten more acceleration, for the sake of acceleration.

To Rosa, this acceleration eerily mimics the criteria of a totalitarian power: 1) it exerts pressure on the wills and actions of subjects; 2) it is inescapable; 3) it is all-pervasive; and 4) it is hard or almost impossible to criticize and fight.

The Oppression of Speed

Unchecked acceleration has consequences.

At the environmental level, it extracts resources from nature faster than they can replenish themselves and produces waste faster than it can be processed.

At the personal level, it distorts how we experience time and space. It deteriorates how we approach our everyday activities, deforms how we relate to each other and erodes a stable sense of self. It leads to burnout at one end of the continuum and to depression at the other. Cognitively, it inhibits sustained focus and critical evaluation. Physiologically, it can stress our bodies and disrupt vital functions.

 

 

For example, research finds two to three times more self-reported health problems, from anxiety to sleeping issues, among workers who frequently work in high-speed environments compared with those who do not.

When our environment accelerates, we must pedal faster in order to keep up with the pace. Workers receive more emails than ever before – a number that’s only expected to grow. The more emails you receive, the more time you need to process them. It requires that you either accomplish this or another task in less time, that you perform several tasks at once, or that you take less time in between reading and responding to emails.

American workers’ productivity has increased dramatically since 1973. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. While productivity between 1973 and 2016 has increased by 73.7 percent, hourly pay has increased by only 12.5 percent. In other words, productivity has increased at about six times the rate of hourly pay.

Clearly, acceleration demands more work – and to what end? There are only so many hours in a day, and this additional expenditure of energy reduces individuals’ ability to engage in life’s essential activities: family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development.

It’s a vicious loop: Acceleration imposes more stress on individuals and curtails their ability to manage its effects, thereby worsening it.

Doing Nothing and ‘Being’

In a hypermodern society propelled by the twin engines of acceleration and excess, doing nothing is equated with waste, laziness, lack of ambition, boredom or “down” time.

But this betrays a rather instrumental grasp of human existence.

Much research – and many spiritual and philosophical systems – suggest that detaching from daily concerns and spending time in simple reflection and contemplation are essential to health, sanity and personal growth.

Similarly, to equate “doing nothing” with non-productivity betrays a shortsighted understanding of productivity. In fact, psychological research suggests that doing nothing is essential for creativity and innovation, and a person’s seeming inactivity might actually cultivate new insights, inventions or melodies.

As legends go, Isaac Newton grasped the law of gravity sitting under an apple tree. Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy relaxing in his bathtub, while Albert Einstein was well known for staring for hours into space in his office.

The academic sabbatical is centered on the understanding that the mind needs to rest and be allowed to explore in order to germinate new ideas.

Doing nothing – or just being – is as important to human well-being as doing something.

The key is to balance the two.

Taking Your Foot Off the Pedal 

Since it will probably be difficult to go cold turkey from an accelerated pace of existence to doing nothing, one first step consists in decelerating. One relatively easy way to do so is to simply turn off all the technological devices that connect us to the internet – at least for a while – and assess what happens to us when we do.

Danish researchers found that students who disconnected from Facebook for just one week reported notable increases in life satisfaction and positive emotions. In another experiment, neuroscientists who went on a nature trip reported enhanced cognitive performance.

Different social movements are addressing the problem of acceleration. The Slow Food movement, for example, is a grassroots campaign that advocates a form of deceleration by rejecting fast food and factory farming.

As we race along, it seems as though we’re not taking the time to seriously examine the rationale behind our frenetic lives – and mistakenly assume that those who are very busy must be involved in important projects.

Touted by the mass media and corporate culture, this credo of busyness contradicts both how most people in our society define “the good life” and the tenets of many Eastern philosophies that extol the virtue and power of stillness.

French philosopher Albert Camus perhaps put it best when he wrote, “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

 

 

Original article here

19 Dec 2022
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How “Good Will Hunting” Changed Men’s Mental Health for the Better

Brian was just a kid when he first saw the movie Good Will Hunting and wasn’t thinking about therapy or his mental health. The 29-year-old engineer was mostly just fascinated by stories about repressed geniuses and Matt Damon’s background story of being a Harvard dropout. He also thought it was pretty rad that the original script was intended to be a spy-thriller.

All of that combined appealed to his sixth-grader sensibilities when he saw the film broadcasted on cable seven years after it was released — so much so that the story of a guy who went to therapy to avoid jail time is still one of his favorite movies.

It wasn’t until he began struggling with anxiety and symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in his early twenties that Brian even thought about going to therapy. He was checking his locks and the stove 10 times before leaving the house, and then one night when he was coincidentally watching another Matt Damon spy movie, The Bourne Identity, his buddy gave him an edible that was too strong and he had a complete breakdown.

“I went for a walk and started having all these intrusive thoughts,” Brian tells me. “I found a therapist the next week.” After his first few sessions, Brian started to realize how much his favorite movie shaped his expectations. “Therapists kind of guide you to the answers rather than try to solve things for you,” he recalls. “The therapist is more or less trying to help him find his own way.”

Counselor and life coach Sam Nabil recalls seeing Good Will Hunting in 1997 when it first hit theaters. He didn’t realize at that moment that he wanted to work in the mental health field, but in retrospect, it steered him in that direction. And like Brian, the movie gave him a sense of what the therapeutic process was really like.

“It didn’t reinforce the idea that going to therapy magically cures all their dysfunctions,” Nabil explains. Rather, Good Will Hunting showed how complex, uncomfortable and intense real introspection can be, even with the help of a mental health professional and a genius-level IQ. The movie may not have convinced men to go to therapy directly, but it gave a lot of guys a reference point for how the process might go once they got there on their own.

Of course, not every guy is expecting to get choked by their therapist for disrespecting their dead wife, like Damon’s character Will does at his first appointment with Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams. But even in scenes that are obviously exaggerated by Hollywood, it shows “how therapy can easily become a pissing contest, especially when unprocessed trauma calls the shots and makes intimacy feel like the silliest and scariest thing in the world,” clinical psychologist Michael Alcee says. In other words, it gives guys an idea of how therapy might feel at its worst — like you’re up against a wall and can’t breathe.

 

 

Alcee, who also saw the movie in 1997 at the age of 20, remembers being intrigued by the therapy scenes years before he decided to become a psychologist. “This model of men sharing in strength and vulnerability together in the process of therapy was very revolutionary,” he notes.

Not every guy who is a fan the movie is convinced that Good Will Hunting represents therapy accurately. To Noam, who saw the movie on cable when he was 10 and has been in therapy for depression on and off since his teenage years, Will and Sean’s exchanges were not like any of his therapy sessions. “Therapy, in my experience, is boring. It’s work. It’s not usually thrilling or exciting or hilarious,” Noam, a 31-year-old academic studying philosophy, says. “Few therapists are as charismatic as Robin Williams.”

Casey, a professor of psychology at a local community college, echoes similar critical sentiments. As much as the movie “rocked my world on many frequencies,” it also made him feel more let down by the therapeutic process in real life. “The movie may provide some very unrealistic expectations for the rate of growth Will experiences. It doesn’t happen that quickly,” Casey notes, with some hope. “I’m always looking for my Robin Williams of therapy.”

At the same time, Casey connects with the movie to this day and credits it with getting him interested in the field of psychology. Hoping to become a therapist himself one day, Casey recently got a tattoo on his ribs of the math equation Will was completing at MIT because of how much the movie affected him. “It spoke to me in a way that made me feel, just, kind of seen,” he says.

Noam agrees: “It’s a mixed bag, but I love it.” For instance, by today’s standards, the movie may present a limited, hyper-masculine view of therapy, where men only get help when it’s court-ordered.

But for 1997, Noam suspects the movie did a lot for men’s mental health that they needed. “It’s not hard to make the case that the movie expresses a kind of toxic masculinity in addition to sensitive masculinity,” he says, but it was crucial to show men talking about their feelings in this way, even if it was not entirely realistic. “The ways it depicted men as emotional and able to connect with one another, not in contrast to their masculinity but as an expression of their masculinity, has had a real, positive impact.”

Jay didn’t think the therapy scenes were that important to the movie when he first saw the movie when he was 17. “For like a decade after release, I saw this as a movie about Will’s relationship with his friends and Skylar more than anything else,” the 41-year-old who works in tech sales tells me. But after starting therapy to work on his own relationships over the past three years, he recently re-watched the movie after a trip to the bench Damon and Williams sat on. That was when something finally clicked. Your move, Chief.

As much as the movie meant to him initially, like many people, “I didn’t think therapy was the answer, I thought it was a small part,” Jay says. Now that he’s talking to a therapist, “I see why I was so drawn to the movie. I needed to unburden, I needed someone to tell me that it’s not my fault, instead of hanging onto so much for so long.”

Even after the tragic manner in which Williams lost his life to suicide in 2014, the movie remains an essential touchpoint in many men’s internal work on themselves. On top of that, the loss of musician Mac Miller, who died of an accidental overdose in 2018 and sampled dialogue from the movie on with song “Soulmate” have made men “realize that mental health struggles are, indeed, real and in need of addressing,” Nabil says.

These tragedies have “emphasized that having insight into how you should handle and manage your mental health is far different from actually feeling it and experiencing all that it comes with,” Nabil adds. “To men and their mental health, the loss of an icon known to make people laugh and entertain reinforced their tendency to keep it all in and be quick-fixers.”

As men continue to die by suicide and experience substance abuse at disproportionately high rates, it’s apparent that they need more than platitudes like “It’s not your fault.” But as Jay felt that day visiting the bench, sometimes that phrase is a good place to start, no matter how cheesy the movie may make it seem over 20 years later. To this day, it’s Brian’s favorite movie to quote with his therapist, who he still sees regularly. “I say it to my friends all the time,” Brian says.

It might be difficult to imagine a psychologist saying that to a client in earnest, but to Alcee, it’s even harder to avoid it. “It can actually be a quite important and useful sentiment to convey to clients, especially those who have been abused and had to internalize abuse as their own fault,” he explains. “But the phrase probably can sound trite because it was used in the film and took on a life of its own like any famous line.”

And while he tries to rephrase the same sentiment in sessions when it’s necessary, sometimes the quote slips out. But ultimately, he knows it’s not his fault.

 

 

Original article here