Mindfulness Is Making It

by Owen on August 24, 2010

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

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Stress Apps for Your Phone

by Owen on June 4, 2010

Deepak Chopra in November 2006, speaking at Yahoo.

Image via Wikipedia

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

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

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

What are your favorite apps for stress?

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Guess Who Is Using Mindfulness Now

by Owen on May 28, 2010

Foliage at Penn 2005

Image via Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

Where have you seen mindfulness adopted?

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How Is Your Stress Making You Sick

by Owen on March 21, 2010

A picture of CRP from 1B09.

Image via Wikipedia

Stress along with other irritants causes inflammation.

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

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

What are your irriations that you will remove?

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Don’t Multitask

by Owen on February 27, 2010

Gina Trapani, Editor of Lifehacker.com: Detail
Image by DNSF David Newman via Flickr

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

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Say No to Anti-depressants drugs for Children

February 12, 2010

What are we doing to our kids? A recent NPR story does a thorough job of laying out how drugs are now given to kids that are not behaving as we wish. Since the mid-1990s, the number of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder has increased a staggering 4,000 percent. Yes, I do have a charge [...]

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Learn How Not Be a Victim, Persecutor or Rescuer

January 18, 2010

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

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Lower Your Computer Stress

December 11, 2009

Image via Wikipedia We all are trying to squeeze more production out of our limited resources. Computers can increase or decrease our production and our stress. A new study out says visual reminders are more a distraction then an aid. Rather than having a visual reminder, create an audio reminder. Your mind is less interrupted [...]

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They Lied to Us… Prozac Doesn’t Work

December 3, 2009

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

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