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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 about the proliferation of drugs to treat children. May be it is because if I was a child today I would be given these drugs. When I was growing up in the 60’s I had many of the symptoms these kids have. Yet I was fortunate – there was no diagnosis or drugs for my problems.

My parents being good parents did what they could; they took me to speech, reading any other specialist that could help. I don’t recall any helping. I do recall feeling the love and support from my parents. There is a good chance today they would be taking me to a psychologist for elaborate tests to evaluate what would be the best drug. As the above story points out, we have gone beyond Ritalin – now the drugs of choice are anti-depressants hyper kids.

Healing ADHD

I cured my severe Asperger’s Syndrome, dyslexia and ADHD through natural means when I was a young adult. If I could do it as an adult and I have seen many children do it when their parents focused on removing the stress from their kids, others can do it.

I had an 11-year-old boy this week for a client. The day after his first session his mother reported the child was markedly better. It is that simple for most of these kids – just release the tension and their body does rest.

For a better sense of how something this simple is possible, I encourage you to read some of the other posts on this blog.

Please, let’s take our kids off these drugs. I know you want to do the right thing. I know his or her behavior is disruptive. However, there are less toxic, safer and more effective solutions. Drugs at best suppress, they don’t heal.

Further Reading:

1. The Truth about ADHD and Its Drugs
2. Finding a New Solution to Depression and ADHD
3. The Power of Breath – Media’s New Find

A recent article in the New York Times explains how exercise allows you, or at least the rats dunked into cold water to deal with stress better.

There is a catch. My clinical experience is that this does not hold true and in fact has the opposite effect if the person is exercising from a place of exhaustion. At my clinic and our Mindfulness Stress Reduction company we saw many athletes who where in what I called the Jim Fixx phenomenon. Jim Fixx with his book The Complete Book of Running help put running on the map. He had us believing it was a panacea for the problems of the day.

Fixx’s autopsy revealed that atherosclerosis had blocked his coronary arteries between 50% and 95%. The man was fit, but he died of a common stress illness – how is that possible? I assuming he was like many of the runners I saw, he was tense and exhausted.

Exercise for a body that is not only tense, but exhausted from too much exercise and stress is a stressful for the body. The body doesn’t have the resources to take the exercise and apply it to building the body. This body is not resilient; it is as if it is in a state of posttraumatic stress, much like the soldier that never can come down from constant stress of war.

I had runners who would take their pulse as they lay in bed every morning. If it was fast, it told them they were tired, so they would run less or slower or not at all that day. These runners understood exercising tired stresses the body.

No related posts.

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.

Further Reading:

1. Back Pain
2. Mindfulness does Google

Multi-tasking is out, single-tasking is in. Ever since I started teaching Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, I encouraged people to slow down, focus and do one thing at a time. In these days of multiple electronic communication devices doing tasks serially is sacrilegious.

Recently a major productivity blog, Web Worker Daily did a post on the switch to single-tasking. To master single tasking “means ignoring any urge to procrastinate, and making sure that you prioritize very carefully in advance, lest you realize too late that what you thought was most urgent actually could’ve taken a back seat to something else.”

There is a plethora of programs to facilitate multi-tasking. They help you manage a huge amount of information simultaneously. Don’t get me wrong, you often need to juggle several data balls in the air at the same time. Having a system or program that helps will decrease your stress, yet having these systems used all the time will prevent you from single-tasking.

Traditional task management and GTD apps like Remember the Milk and Things for the Mac are great for handling multiple tasks, but they aren’t so great for when you want to drill down and focus on only one at a time. Inevitably, the specter of everything else you have to get done remains present, so it’s hard to devote yourself to any one thing wholeheartedly.

I remember in one of our first classes back in the mid ‘90’s we had a VP for a local bank. He was proud that he had two phones, never took a lunch, worked 60 hours a week, and never was done. Before the class ended, he only had one phone, took lunches and worked 40 per week. Not only was he less stressed, he got more done using mindfulness to focus on the present moment and the present task.

Further Reading:

1. Multitasking – cont.

Relationships can be the most pleasurable or the most stressful experience in life. Using the article Laura Munson wrote in the New York Times I write about a more empowering way to frame a relationship, in Laura’s case a marriage.

Deep love can go beyond loving the person, the protential and the dream. It can be loving yourself enough so that you are right with the world.

Further Reading:

1. Deep Change

I just wrote a post on my site Whole Revolution about how changing is much like competing in an extreme sporting event. In particular, I speake about Rosie Stancer’s attempt to reach the North Pole.

How we maintain our presence can determine our success.

Further Reading:

1. Want to Be Less Stressed? Change Your Life
2. We Are Now in “Extreme Stress”

A recent story on NPR talks about how breathing in a slow, easy manner will reduce stress. Many of you who read this blog or practice mindfulness know how focusing on your breath can be the secret to stress reduction. I am glad the media is noticing the power of breath.

“Improving control of the breath while simultaneously learning to relax is critical” to not only reducing stress, but also from everything from singing as the story speaks about to enjoying life. This is a great intro to reducing stress through breathing – pass it on to your stressed out friends.

Further Reading:

1. Power Naps
2. 8 Ways to Lose Weight – by Just Reducing Stress

The New York Times Sunday Magazine recently ran a long article on depression, chronicling what life is like for both children and adults with depression/bi-polar problems. Essentially, the primary treatment for anyone suffering from any of these disorders is drugs. The old ADHD diagnosis is now evolving; now it’s called depression, too, and children suffering from its symptoms are being given psychotropic drugs.

The increased frequency of these problems in our culture demands that we look beyond what pharmaceutical science has to offer. The use of more holistic therapies is not even mentioned in the article. In conventional medicine, diet, trauma, somatic imbalance, environmental and stress variables are not considered as co-causes. It saddens me that we’re not looking at—let alone treating—the causes of these conditions.

But some professionals do get it. In another article in the New York Times, Dr. Ronald Pies, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts and SUNY Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, comments on the depression diagnosis creating “a bogus epidemic of increasing depression.”

In my practice, I have seen many patients “cure” themselves of depression and ADHD using non-traditional therapies and lifestyle changes. It can be much like getting in shape: at first there is a lot of work and little benefit, but after awhile, the benefits are self-sustaining. The first step is to decide what model of depression you will use to define your condition, from there you can determine your next step.

As a former suffer of Asperger’s Syndrome, dyslexia and ADHD, my healing demonstrates you can go beyond medicating the symptoms to healing the condition(s). Many people will tell you these conditions are not curable, and they’re not—if you use pharmaceutical treatment. But sing bodywork, holistic nutrition, homeopathy, energy work such as acupuncture, and release of emotional trauma and stress, it is certainly possible to be “cured” of depression, bipolar disorder or ADHD.

Further Reading:

1. The Truth about ADHD and Its Drugs
2. Is Stress Real, Is Fibromyalgia Real?
3. They Lied to Us… Prozac Doesn’t Work

How speed = stress

The Canadian journalist Carl Honore-author of the best-selling book In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed speaks about the benefits of slow living.

Honore claims the linear time paradigm; “time is money” is being replaced by the “slow movement” model. Slow living produces more pleasure and better health. The slow city movement is frosting connecting over speed. He makes a good point about how holistic medicine is inherently slow. The Italians now expanded the slow movement into sex.

As I mentioned before, slow work is producing higher production. Multi-tasking is not productive. From the workplace to the home Honore claims slowness is growing.

Stress reduction needs to integrate slowness for our kids and us. Honore speaks about how kids are lacking spark and passion because of being pushed with homework and extracurricular activities. Fortunately, we are putting the brakes on our speed. We are making conscious choice to have a richer, whole life through traveling through it with less speed.

There are places where speed is good. Having faster Internet connections certainly increases production and reduces stress. The unconscious conditioning around speed that we created in our lives is not good. Being mindful of where speed servers us and where slowing down servers us will enrich our lives. As my mother use to say to me, what is the hurry?

Further Reading:

1. The Power of Breath – Media’s New Find

I wrote an article on back pain and stress. It is at Sandpoint Wellness Council’s blog.

Further Reading:

1. StressedOut.org Is Number One
2. 8 Ways to Lose Weight – by Just Reducing Stress
3. Mindfulness does Google