| Resources for Love, Life and Relationships |
 |
|
|
| In This Issue:
|
|
|
|
Welcome to the June 2004 Issue:
Thank you for your feedback those of you who have written or told me how interested you are in the articles. This month, I am continuing info about food and also about the Curves phenomenon. Another topic dear to my psychologists heart is treating depression. Depression is tough but it can be tackled effectively but it takes a lot of work. I also wrote a short piece on alcoholism after I gave a offered a ride to someone and did not realize, until they were in my car, how drunk this person was.
If you have experienced a positive change in your life, and you would like to see it in print, tell me about it. If your experience will encourage someone else to make a change for the better, I will include it, space permitting. Please note when personal stories are used, I change all identifying data.
Last but not least, I have included a short piece based on a fascinating book I have been reading about the miracle of hearing and shared neural function.
I hope you enjoy this months edition. At the end of the e-zine there is a forwarding button if you want to send it on to your email list. Meanwhile, contact someone and tell them you care. Loneliness is more common than you would believe.
Depression is the Pits
* If you sit on a cushion your weight will depress it. When you have weighty things on your mind, these depress your mood.
* Sometimes, you do not think anything is particularly "getting you down" but you feel "down." This gradual descent into depression when nothing seems particularly wrong with your life, may be the result of missing the social stimulation and connection that we need for healthy emotional functioning.
* Sometimes a horrible event hits you so hard, it knocks you "down." Once down, you don't have the means to "get back up" again so your mood remains depressed.
* And sometimes you may come from a family where depressed or negative attitudes are familiar and pervasive. You may have learned the behaviors and attitudes that characterize low negativity and depression without even realizing it.
Whatever the cause of your depression, to eliminate it, you need to stimulate and generate positive energy. If you generate positive energy in every aspect of your life you will eliminate depression. To do this, you may need to learn new skills and how to eliminate negativity.
Physical Energy
When you feel depressed, exercise is often the last thing you want to do. As long as that feeling rules, you lose out. You have to force yourself as in, "No dinner till I've walked ten [you can start with 2] blocks," or, "No elevator ride unless I smile." Physical stimulation works to regenerate your energy banks. Do it: it helps.
Social stimulation
When you feel depressed, you don't want to be around anyone because you are miserable yet research from the 60s showed that infants that lacked social stimulation failed to thrive. [John Bowlby: Child Care and the Growth of Love]. Adults fail to thrive when they lose important relationships because of death, divorce, a career move or worse. The answer: build your social and personal connections. When you socialize, make the effort to be "up," otherwise called "fake it till you make it." It beats rehearsing how miserable you are.
Spiritual life
There is something about a place of worship that seems to preclude dwelling on negative feelings. Try reading the words of hymn especially those about the miracle of life and the value of meaning. Also talking to a pastor/rabbi/mullah/guru may create that sense of belonging and develop spiritual meaning both of which act as anti-depressant.
Environmental Stimulation
When you can't be bothered doing things because you are depressed this may develop into a vicious cycle. Too depressed to clean = becomes so messy it is depressing. Just clean one thing each day: the sink; the bedroom; your closet; your shoes; your purse/wallet. As cleanliness and order emerge you create a positive cycle: a nice place helps you feel better = feeling better motivates you to keep a nice place.
Relationships
Probably one of the best things to do, if you have sympathetic friends, is to ask them to tell you to quit when you start ruminating about your miseries. You can't expect to feel better by focusing on what's wrong or how awful you feel. You feel better by finding solutions to your problems and learning how to be positive. Make the effort to match the livelier mood of your friends, rather than have your friends lower their mood to yours.
Final Thoughts
Depression is miserable. Pleasures recede, life is flat, empty and you don't have the energy to care. Depression is a low mood. It takes effort to get mood up again. Yes, there is often a natural process of recovery but anti-depressant medications [which don't change mood directly but work by improving brain function], and psychotherapy have been shown to be the most effective combination for facilitating recovery from this insidious eater of happiness. If you feel depressed for more than a week, get help fast. The sooner you treat depression the easier it is to shift it.
Once an Alcoholic, Always an Alcoholic?
Let's face it, we drink because it produces a pleasantly relaxed effect and while wines, beers and other drinks vary a great deal, at their best, they are delicious. Alcohol in moderate quantities produces a "feel good" experience. Problems often arise when alcohol becomes an escape from "feel bad" experiences.
Genetics and physiology play their part in the development of alcoholism. Basically, an alcoholic brain has created a "short cut." Non-alcoholic drinkers can choose to stop drinking alcohol before they compromise their behavior or do something risky. Alcoholic drinkers' brains "short cut" past this discriminatory function. When you risk getting a DUI [which means your faculties are legally impaired to the point of being a danger to others on the road], or when you have indiscriminate sex [and put yourself at risk for date rape, unprotected sex or STDs] your drinking is bypassing that discriminatory function.
Is everyone who drinks destined to become an alcoholic? The quick answer is no. BUT, if you have blood relatives who are alcoholics your risk is greater. If you drink to get drunk, your risk is greater. If you turn to alcohol to cope with loneliness, sadness, anger or other negative emotions, the greater your risk of becoming an alcoholic drinker. Alcoholism is "needing" to drink or drinking in order to "deal with" your problems. After one drink the brain may still be in control, even after two; but after three drinks, if you are an alcoholic, the brain is outnumbered and the drinking pattern will run its course until the person sleeps it off.
Why can't alcoholics drink safely? Because once that "short cut" is established it does not go away. You have it for life. Even after years of sobriety, having just a single alcoholic drink can reopen the "short cut" and "needing" or craving the next drink.
Advanced alcoholism has many detrimental effects. It disinhibits which means emotions and behaviors emerge strongly when you have less ability to control them. It can be unpleasant to be sober around someone whose anger, depression, panic, self-pity, aggression, boorishness, sexual sloppiness or lack of consideration, is fuelled by booze. If you are losing friends because of your drinking, take care. This may be a real danger to your emotional survival: we need our friends and families.
If you feel an "urge" to drink, you may an alcoholic. Do you need a 12-step program? Not necessarily. If you can easily ignore the urge and cease drinking, have a good temper, good sober friends, a successful family life and enjoy your work, you are in good shape. But if you are lonely, feel like a failure, have an anger management problem, feel depressed or have a mood disorder; 12 step programs are a place to make new friends, develop sober social skills, connect with a mentor and get emotional support. AA and Rational Sobriety telephone numbers and meeting times can be researched on line or via the phone service.
Food is Easy: It's Saying No that's Hard!
I grew up waiting for strawberry season after five or six months of eating the same five winter vegetables with a limited supply of meat and mashed potatoes and a ration allowance of two ounces of sugar per person per week for all sweet needs. You have no idea how good those first strawberries used to taste. Now food is easy. There is no waiting. Out of season foods are available courtesy of the airline industry and the money to buy them, in season foods are plentiful. And as I have noted before, the amount of calories available is reputed to be 3900 per day when our physical needs are around 2000 a day for females and not that much more for guys.
When you know all there is to know about nutritional needs, you exercise and you still gain weight its about eating habits. How do you say no to all the delicious choices out there? If you are someone who can't say no, try telling yourself to wait. Overeating can be an impulse disorder problem: as in no such thing as one cookie. I go to a class where cookies are served. One cookie = five cookies, no cookies and I am fine.
Breaking an "eating outside of meal times" habit is tough. The easiest step is to delay after you feel the impulse to eat more. Look at the clock and pick a time and tell yourself you will wait until that time before you eat again. For example it is 7.35pm, tell yourself you will wait till 8pm before you have any more. When you can delay a half hour increase the delay to an hour. When you can delay that long you can wait till breakfast.
You can also floss, brush and mouthwash immediately after dinner and tell yourself you don't want to eat or you will have to do it all over again. Finally, start to think of snacking as an impulse control problem that you can learn to manage. It's not about hunger; it's about breaking a bad habit. You may find this helps.
Did you know? Self Mutiliation.
Did you know that when people are so miserable they cut themselves this is not to attempt suicide, it is because physical pain stimulates production of the brain's opiates. People [often teenagers] cut as a way to end the emotional prison they feel trapped in. Treatment helps cutters find more effective and less damaging ways to cope with difficult feelings.
Got Curves?
Evon Scott and Paulene Young in Oakland do. Why? Because they share a concern for their heavier sisters in need of appropriate exercise. They greet their clients by name, with warmth and respect, and celebrate their improving health. Their Curves Club in Downtown Oakland is are attracting heavier women who might feel intimidated in other gyms.
Evon and Paulene have twenty women members over 300 pounds and a lot more who weigh in the upper 200s. If shame or embarrassment about your shape [or lack of it] has kept you out of more traditional gyms: you can feel safe in these supportive and well-run clubs where there are no mirrors, no spandex and no makeup. Evon and Pauline are even known to help a couple of their heavier women get on and off the machines--but not for long: they have some members who have lost 20-30 pounds in a few months. And, it's not just weight either; they lose inches too. The best gain is that they reduce their danger of diabetes, osteoarthritis, cardiovascular disease and stroke.
The hallmark of the Curves is a circle of hydraulic exercise machines that adjust to each woman's strengths and speed. Which machine do you use? ALL of THEM for 30 seconds each: enough time for 7 to 10 repetitions. Each machine exercises two muscle groups and they are arranged to alternate using the upper and lower body. There is a recovery space between each machine for stretching and the music is great: a variety of upbeat rhythm from Gospel to Motown, Country and Western to Big Band.
Talk about variety! It's fun, action packed and stress free plus the spirit of camaraderie is infectious. In traditional gyms, people mind their own business; they even watch TV while they slog away in sweaty isolation on single machines for minutes at a time. On the Curves circuits, women see each other in the circle, talk, get to know each other, forge friendships and cheer each other's efforts.
There has been a recent controversy about the pro-life stance of the Curves originator. This is America and people who have profits can spend them however they want. I think that if you are pro-choice and overweight, it is better to stay healthy and stay alive to battle for your pro-choice beliefs than die of obesity even if it mean using a place where a small portion of the profits go to the opposition. But you have to make your own mind up.
It really does not matter where you exercise; what matters is the importance of maintaining you health. The Curves attraction is that by using a circuit set up where there are no mirrors or negative judgments; members are able to enjoy a group atmosphere of support and enthusiasm ... and that's priceless.
Your Brain: The Miracle of Hearing
When you listen to a voice or an orchestra, you are detecting sound waves via your eardrums, which are about the size of your first finger nail. Your ear channels the vibrations from the air down the ear canal to the eardrum which transmits this complexity of vibrations into your inner ear where nerve endings emerge like a mass of green grass on an uncut lawn and wave in response to the transmitted vibrations which stimulates the nerves to fire messages to the auditory centers of the brain. Do you realize that your ear can distinguish the individual unique patterns of voices you know, instruments in an orchestra and differentiate the sound you want to pay attention to, from other sounds that are simultaneously being transmitted to your brain
The book, Beethoven's Anvil by William Benzon, explores the phenomena of music in our culture. If you are intrigued by the miracle of how your brain works, this is a fascinating book to read.
Briefly, when two or more people make music together, "they share the same pattern of neurological activity... when a third is listening, three folks share the same pattern ... if a whole village is listening and dancing, then the whole village is enacting a single pattern of shared neural activity even though they are physically distinct individuals with distinct nervous systems ... because they are all attuned to the same pattern of sound."
If you like going to hear the symphony in person or dancing in a crowd, it's because by doing so, you are experiencing shared neural activity and an experience of neural belonging. This shared neural patterning also explains why when applause occurs, a mass of disparate people individually coordinate their clapping without any instruction or direction into a single rhythm. Amazing, when you think about it.
Next time you hear an orchestra marvel at the fantastic capacity of the ear to differentiate vibrations that are invisible to us. When you next hear applause, listen to how, within one or two claps, thousands of people align themselves into the production of a single pattern!
|
|
|
|
| Copyright Sylvia Mills, June 2004. Articles may be reproduced providing they are reprinted in full with attribution to the author and e-zine. Please click on the link Topica provides to forward this copy to your email list. Sylvia Mills, Ph.D. 870 Market St., Suite 1220, S.F. CA 94102 |
|
|
| |
