Fastcompany posted an article about a Harvard study using an iPhone app to track what a person is doing throughout the day.

“That last question proved to be the key to the study, which concluded that a main cause of people’s unhappiness is how frequently their minds wander. According to the app, 46.9 percent of people’s time is spent thinking on something other than what they’re doing. And using a bit of statistical wizardry, study authors Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert were able to tease out that that mind-wandering was in fact the cause of much of the unhappiness. In fact, what activity a person was engaged in only accounted for about 5 percent of a person’s happiness, whereas whether that person’s mind was on- or off-task accounted for over 10 percent.”

Their conclusion – “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” is not new to us. I think it is great we are using our toys to not only prove it, but as guides to mindfulness and happiness. With Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose we are seeing more support for being happy as a valid state of being. Now we have an app that will help us get it.

Penn State researchers found walnuts improve your stress reactions. “‘This is the first study to show that walnuts and walnut oil reduce blood pressure during stress,’ said Sheila G. West, associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State”

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

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

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

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

Where have you seen mindfulness adopted?

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Stress along with other irritants causes inflammation.

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

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

What are your irriations that you will remove?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How were sold the lies

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

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

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

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

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

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

I received an email that my request to create an Alltop page devoted to stress was completed. What I didn’t expect was StressOut.org would be in the number one on the page.

Alltop is the go to site on the last information on any topic. Check out the page to get the full range of information on stress.

If you ever question the efficacy of Mindfulness Stress Reduction – check out this link from the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at U.C.L.A.’s Semel Institute.  They have put together an extensive bibliography  of research done between 1975 through early-2009.

Felling like rat on a treadmill, this New York Times article explains why with stress these animals were more likely to do repetitive activities and be less creative. Sound familiar?

Not new to many of you, the constant stress of modern life wears on our brains, endocrine systems and our whole body. This article weaves in new research to the concept of constraint stress being our downfall.

A few nights ago, I saw a new film, The Living Matrix. Just released at a London premiere, it is making its way to the US. James L. Oschman, PhD, an old friend of mine, is one of the dozen scientists in the film, speaking about how healing occurs. These interviews are interwoven between impressive personal stories of healing.

The film addresses how stress influences the body and healing. You can’t heal if you are under stress. A physician highlighted in the film talked about how the key to her healing was traveling into her brain tumor to discover what it was doing for her. Then once she knew in a felt sense, she began to accept the feelings and knowledge. Six months later the tumor was gone, and she’s never had a recurrence.

I highly recommend the film to assist in creating a larger paradigm for your healing. The film covers placebo effects, demonstrating how what we believe creates our reality. For instance. the film cites a study of knee-surgery patients. Half of the subjects in the study never actually received the knee surgery, yet they had the same success rate as the ones who been operated on. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “it’s all in your head.”