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.

Further Reading:

1. Mindfulness does Google

Image via Wikipedia

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. Teaching our children about stress
3. Finding a New Solution to Depression and ADHD

Image via Wikipedia

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 how to remove yourself from the drama and how to heal it so you are not vulnerable to it in the future. We all fall prey to the drama; I know I do. Awareness and some simple tools can make a huge difference.

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.

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?

Further Reading:

1. Finding a New Solution to Depression and ADHD
2. Is Stress Real, Is Fibromyalgia Real?
3. The Truth about ADHD and Its Drugs

For those who want to include “direct the national healthcare agenda toward a health-oriented, integrated system, ensuring all people access to the full range of safe and regulated conventional, complementary, and alternative healthcare professionals” go to The Integrated Healthcare Policy Consortium (IHPC).

This organization is getting Congress to include holistic health in our healthcare reform! Let’s support them in the campaign to transform our healthcare system.

No related posts.

Deepak Chopra, MD created an app, Stress Free for your iPhone to deal with stress. NPR has an interview Chopra on the features of the app, including its ability to tell jokes.

It is great we are using some of the technology that creates our stress to reduce it. Now if we only can get the iPhone to massage shoulders, I would buy one.

No related posts.

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.

Further Reading:

1. Stress and Colds
2. Posture of Stress

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. Mindfulness does Google
2. Back Pain

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.

Further Reading:

1. Mindfulness Stress Reduction via the Internet
2. Mindfulness does Google