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November 29, 2011
Zen book brought comfort to couple; meditation could, too
After I wrote in the Statesman last week about a doctor who has a memory disorder that could lead to Alzheimer’s disease, his wife mentioned a book of Zen stories that helped get them over their initial shock and grief.
“It was so precious, and we realized how thankful we were for everything,” said Jo Ann Nash, wife of Dr. Dewayne Nash, 61, who retired last year from Austin Regional Clinic’s Cedar Park location. “We wrapped our minds around that, and I haven’t been weepy since.”
A lot of readers wanted to know: What was the book?
It’s “Zen Shorts” by Jon J. Muth, and one story that especially struck them was “The Farmer’s Luck.”
The book looks whimsical and appears to be geared toward children. The stories are short meditations, according to the author’s note. “The Farmer’s Luck” is a several thousand-years-old story.
One reader wrote that it is interesting what comforts people in times of crisis. To me, it is not surprising that a meditation-related source would be helpful. I have benefited from meditation throughout my life and often see research supporting its mental and physical rewards.
Last week, Yale University put out a news release on a paper several of its researchers had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on meditation.
In their study of brain imaging, they found that the ability of experienced meditators to focus on the moment helped switch off areas of the brain associated with daydreaming, anxiety and various psychiatric disorders, thus increasing happiness levels. It also showed decreased activity in the part of the brain where the buildup of beta amyloid plaques occurs in Alzheimer’s disease, the release said.
“Meditation has been shown to help in variety of health problems, such as helping people quit smoking, cope with cancer, and even prevent psoriasis,” said Judson A. Brewer, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale and lead author of the study.
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June 2, 2010
College kids today are less empathetic, more self-centered
College students today are less empathetic than their counterparts in the 1980s and 1990s, according to new research from the University of Michigan.
The researchers, who presented their findings at a meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Boston, analyzed 72 studies on 14,000 college students over the last 30 years. They found that college kids today were about 40 percent lower in empathy than those 20 or 30 years earlier, according to a news release about the work.
The biggest drop-off in empathy occurred around 2000, the study said.
“Many people see the current group of college students—sometimes called ‘Generation Me’—as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history,” said Sara Konrath, the lead researcher who also is affiliated with the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry.
One explanation could be the rise in social media, including the ease of making friends online and the ability to “just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline,” said Michigan graduate student Edward O’Brien, who worked on the study.
This research kind of messed with my optimism that kids today do so much more community service than when I was in school, even though they are less politically active. At least, I thought, they are volunteering in their communities, and that should be celebrated.
But empathy is important. Why?
Empathy enables a person to be in the shoes of another. It is the gateway to understanding and compassion. People who study the topic say the empathetic person has more successful personal and professional relationships.
You can take a short quiz and test your empathy compared to today’s college kids.
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June 9, 2009
I've got this odd habit ... do I have OCD? Austin author, psychologist weighs in
Austin psychologist Bruce Mansbridge has just published The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Conquering Obsessive Compulsive Behavior, so I called him to chat about the book and figured I’d learn a thing or two about OCD, which affects more than 6 million Americans. I also learned some things about myself.
Here’s an edited transcript of our talk:
How do you define OCD?
It consists of obsessions or compulsions and usually both. Obsessions are unwanted or involuntary, unpleasant thoughts that you can’t keep from coming into your head. But compulsions are things you can control. They are performed to reduce the anxiety of the obsessions. Like to check the lock again, to wash your hands or to replay events in your mind to reassure yourself.
Well here’s a little confession. I’ve got this thing about reading the newspaper from cover to cover, except for sports. If I don’t finish, I keep the paper in stacks around the house. My husband will say, “Why don’t you just recycle these?” I can’t. I’m afraid I’m going to miss something. Do I have OCD?
You have OCD quirks and it’s a really question of degree. On that one you’re a little bit higher than most people.
Do I need help?
I don’t think so, but if it interferes with your relationship you may. It doesn’t sound like it. It’s not like hanging the toilet paper the wrong way, which can be a huge deal for some people.
Toilet paper?
That’s something people can feel very strongly about. They’ll say, ‘If you really cared about me, you would hang the toilet paper right.’ It becomes a moral issue. They’ll say, ‘You won’t do this one little thing for me.’
A little red flag goes up for me when I hear the word ‘just.’ Your husband said, ‘Why don’t you just recycle them (the newspapers)?’ A person with OCD might be offended by that. The person who feels compelled to read the newspaper or wash their hands, knows what to do, and the question kind of hurts because they might agree with the person who is asking. My hunch is a person wouldn’t notice if the newspaper in a stack was missing unless it was a very important news day.
That’s true, so what’s the treatment?
You might want to agree to read only one paragraph in some boring newspaper story and move on. People who take a long time to read often read over and over to make sure they didn’t miss anything. Typically, in this type of treatment, you would … go through a boring article and cover up 10 words and read the story and realize most of the words you covered aren’t going to be crucial to the story. Or let’s say you went on a two-week vacation and just decided to read the stories above the fold on the front page each day and moved on to the next paper. You do it gradually and every time you do, it gets easier. It’s like riding a ferris wheel over and over. After a while, you realize it’s not as scary. It’s the almost magical process: the worrisome thoughts don’t recur as much. The worrisome thoughts are the obsessions.
Aren’t they irrational thoughts, too?
At the heart of worrisome thoughts is some rationality. Like you should wash your hands because you’ve got dirt on them. I had a guy (patient) once who thought if he didn’t fold his shirts the right way, something would happen to his father. Or a guy who couldn’t throw away an envelope because (he thought) there was a baby in it.
Was it a big envelope?
No.
Was he crazy?
He wasn’t schizophrenic, but he had severe OCD. I tell you I love my job. Every week I hear stuff I never heard before.
Tell me a little bit about the book.
The book goes into a little bit about the origin of obsessions. There is a neurological glitch like phantom limb pain, and people get the same feeling that there is something terribly wrong. The anxiety people are feeling is totally real.
Are you hoping someone with OCD could read your book and help themselves?
Yes, someone with the subclinical form could help themselves, like you with your newspapers and me.
You have an OCD problem, too?
I don’t like to see mechanical things under stress. I don’t like to see phone cords all twisted up. It gives me distress. I’ll go to someone’s office and say, ‘Do you mind (if I untwist your phone cord?)’ If I go to the dean’s office, I’ll suppress my urge. (The book is) targeted for people who don’t spend more than an hour a day on their obsessions or compulsions. I know a woman who got up at 5:30 in the morning, washed the sheets she slept on and spent the whole day cleaning and went to bed at midnight.
I’m glad I don’t have that problem.
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June 5, 2009
Treat depression by going 'primitive,' researcher says
A new book on depression by a clinical psychologist at the University of Kansas claims that the stress of modern life has a lot to do with the high percentage of depressed people and that reverting to simpler habits would help a lot of folks.
The June 1 book, “The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program for Beating Depression Without Drugs,” by Stephen Ilardi, is based on research he has done. It calls for eating a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids, engaging in activities that avoid negative thoughts, exercising more, going outdoors in the sun, cultivating friendships and getting sufficient sleep every night, according to a synopsis on Health News Digest.com.
“A century ago, according to the best epidemiological evidence we have, the lifetime rate of depressive illness in the U.S. was about 1 percent,” Ilardi said in a news release posted on EurekAlert, a listserv for journalists. “The rate now stands at 23 percent. So we’ve had roughly a 20-fold increase over the course of a century.”
I don’t know whether people 100 years ago reported depression or whether society cared as much about mental health. That 1 percent figure could be off; so could Ilardi’s theory. But it’s interesting. And is there any doubt that modern life is stressful and that stress is a major cause of illness, both mental and physical?
“As a species, humans were never designed for the pace of modern life,” Ilardi says in the release. “We’re designed for a different time — a time when people were physically active, when they were outside in the sun for most of the day, when they had extensive social connections and enjoyed continual face time with their friends and loved ones, when they experienced very little social isolation, when they had a much different diet, when they got considerably more sleep and when they had much less in the way of a relentless, demanding, stress-filled existence.”
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December 29, 2008
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be...and that's a good thing
Have the holidays made you feel nostalgic?
I have always equated nostalgia with a yearning for simple, carefree times. I had no idea it was considered a mental illness until I read a paper that came out just before a big nostalgia-inducing season for me: Christmas.
You can read the paper on nostalgia published in Current Directions in Psychological Science here:
.The history is interesting.
It says that although nostalgia was always equated with homesickness, it was labeled a “repressive compulsive disorder” as recently as the mid-20th century. The “disorder” was characterized by a subconscious desire to return to an earlier stage of life. The paper traces the origins of nostalgia in literature to Homer but says the phrase wasn’t born until the 17th century by a Swiss doctor. The mental illness was believed to affect only Swiss mercenaries made to serve away from the motherland.
In later times nostalgia was found to afflict all ages and groups. After the mid-20th century, nostalgia was “downgraded” to a form of depression “marked by loss and grief,” according to the paper’s authors at the University of Southampton, University of Missouri and North Dakota State University. Today, it’s no longer considered an illness, just “a sentimental longing for one’s past,” according to the paper.
So is nostalgia a good, bad or neutral experience?
These researchers studied nostalgia in British college kids and found it had a positive effect on them, strengthened social ties and helped them feel more loved and protected. The authors cited other research from the University of Southampton and Sun Yat-Sen University.
Those other researchers found that nostalgia counteracts feelings of loneliness. They also said nostalgia “magnifies perceptions of social support and, in so doing, thwarts the effects of loneliness,” restoring social connectedness. (You can read that paper here.
)It suggests nostalgia could be used as a tool to help children and adults cope with loneliness and other challenges in their lives.
“The past, when appropriately harnessed, can strengthen psychological resistance to the vicissitudes of life,” the paper says.
Maybe there’s an innate reason many people are so riveted by the past.
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October 29, 2008
Undecided voter? Oh, really? New research casts doubts
As my husband and I watched a TV news report last night on undecided voters, he was incredulous: “Are there really people out there who can’t decide between John McCain and Barack Obama? I don’t believe it.” I had to agree.
Some researchers also have their doubts. A just-released study from the University of Virginia suggests many voters who declare themselves undecided have “unconsciously” made a pick, according to a news release about the study posted on Newswise, a listserv for journalists.
People can discover their “hidden” preferences on the candidates — and on other topics — by spending a little time with Project Implicit. I didn’t take the quiz, but when I clicked on “Research,” the site says, “Here you will have the opportunity to assess your conscious and unconscious preferences for over 90 different topics ranging from pets to political issues, ethnic groups to sports teams, and entertainers to styles of music. At the same time, you will be assisting psychological research on thoughts and feelings.” The sessions take 10 to 15 minutes and require registration.
“Participants are often surprised to learn that they may have unconscious biases regarding candidates, or racial or religious views that are quite different from their stated beliefs,” said University of Virginia psychology professor Brian Nosek, who was quoted in the release. “For example, few people in modern society are actively racist, but most of us possess implicit associations linking white people with good and black people with bad more easily than the reverse.”
The project has been around 10 years, and the tests have been taken by 7 million people. It looked like fun, but, hey, I’m on deadline.
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