Health

The book Brain Rules is full of interesting stuff. Last night’s chapter (ironically read at 3am last night) dealt with the importance of sleep to our mental functioning.

“What’s that got do do with birds,” you ask?

Not a whole lot, really - except that their names provide nifty labels for our chronotypes: the sleep/alertness patterns that determine if we’re the type to chirp happily in the morning, or stay up all night staring at the stars. [click to continue...]

The benefits of cognitive fitness programs still haven’t hit home with most people, but their fears of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and everyday memory loss are growing by leaps and bounds.

Thank you, Loyal News Media! Let’s all be skeered, yay! (Is sarcasm good for the brain? Quick, someone do a Newspaper on Stock.Xchng" align="right" border="0" height="229" width="166"/>study!)

Seriously, my Google News Page has been bogged this month down with news of Alzheimer’s related research.

Nearly every article cited brain-numbing statistics from the Alzheimer’s Association: Every 71 seconds, someone develops Alzheimer’s. More than 5 million people in the U.S. currently have Alzheimer’s disease. As many as 10 million baby boomers are expected to develop Alzheimer’s - that’s 18% of them. Us. Scared yet?

The risk-factor stories the news focused on were just as alarming.

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Ellen Langer is a Yale graduate, a Harvard psychology professor, an award winning researcher, and author of several interesting looking books on applied mindfulness. But it’s her study on hotel maids that’s gotten all the attention this year… hotel maids who apparently “thought themselves thin.”

(Yes, yes this is old news - but sometimes its fun to cover stories *after* the media frenzy dies down, dang nab it! Besides, it fits with the whole mindfulness craze that’s building from the Eckhart/Oprah thing)

Hotel maids are a busy and hard working group of people, lugging around heavy equipment, bending, turning, and scrubbing all day long. It’s a physically demanding and active job that burns a lot of calories.

But maids don’t typically see themselves as active, it turns out. When Langer and grad student Alia Crum surveyed 84 of these hard working women, two thirds of them said they didn’t regularly exercise. A full third said they didn’t get *any* exercise, inspite of their very active jobs. But what was really interesting is that when their fitness levels were measured - they matched their belief, rather than the reality. Their weight, blood pressure and other measurements were equivalent to people living a sedentary lifestyle.

“Given that they are exercising all day long,” Langer says, “that seemed to be bizarre.”

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Earlier this week, I was fighting off the flu.

“Don’t worry about posting” sez Me. “You’ll feel better soon.”

I was wrong. I don’t feel better. I’m sniffly, coughy, feverish, and most of all, whiney. Deep thoughts and disciplined writing are not really options at the moment. So here are 10 less-taxing ways to get your mind in order, suitable for cold and flu-season.

Ahem.

10. Set Lumosity’s difficulty levels down two four notches, then congratulate yourself on how well you did.

9. Remember all those classic movies that somehow slipped through the cracks of your cultural education? Maybe you’ve never seen Hitchcock’s original versions of Psycho or The Birds. Maybe you can quote Casablanca, but you’ve seen the whole thing. Download them on Netflix for free. Stare blankly. Be enriched.

8. Keep up with your healthy brain habits like drinking water and taking vitamins. The same habits will help you get over your cold.

7. Read the books you’ve had set aside for a month. (So far I’ve made it through two of them.)

6. Explore the flakier brainwave entrainment sessions available for MindStereo — see if you can induce a fever-assisted hallucination! OOOoohhh pretty colors!

5. Watch all umpteen episodes of Penn & Teller’s BullSh*t, also available for free download on Netflix. Guaranteed to satisfy the skeptic in you.

4. Balance all that healthy skepticism by indulging in your family folk medicine cures. Chicken soup, dirty socks around the neck, and enough vitamin C to turn you into a Florida Orange grove.

3. Experiment with new varieties of green tea. And honey, lots of honey. (Honey is good for the brain, right? Bees are smart, right?)

2. Try to remember if you posted this list last time you were sick. Fail. Post it anyway.

1. Sleep. Lots of slee—zzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz

You may have noticed an odd silence the last few days. It’s not a lack of inspiration - I’ve had a huge list of ideas, but none have actually made it into post form. Why not?

I’ve had Thistle-Brain.

Inexplicably, my brain has been replaced by rampant wild thistles - you know the type. Spiked flowers, over-ripe fluff, thorned stems that branch out and reach for light, trying to push through the surface of my skull…
Ok, ok, put down the giant butterfly nets, I’m not ready for the lunatic asylum, and I don’t think I have actual thistles in my my brain… but that IS what it feels like.

“Thistle-Brain” is a precursor to some rather nasty headaches I get. It usually continues during and sometimes after the pain. The most marked symptoms (other than the purple flowers sprouting out of my ears) are difficulty in co-ordination, a reduction in cognitive ability, and a heightened awareness of my brain itself.

Creepy, huh?

The invasion of aggressive flora seems to be brought on by a combination of things - allergies, stress, dehydration and low blood sugar seem to act as fertilizer, but but it’s almost always a sense of confusion and overload that trigger the brain-thistles, themselves.

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Yesterday I had one of those halting, heart breaking phone calls.

A good friend of mine has been fighting debilitating pain for months, and kept in good spirits - but last night, it was clearly taking its toll.

I’d never heard this fighter sound so defeated before. Ordinarily, he is a tireless champion for both himself, his family, and others, but this invisible pain with no obvious cause was bringing him to his knees. It was robbing him of the tools he ordinarily used to fight, and what tools the pain didn’t take away, the medication for the pain did. Without a clear diagnosis, healthcare, insurance, and employers were acting skeptical, further demoralizing him.

It wasn’t until after we hung up that I realized just how normal his depression was… and just how intertwined depression and pain likely are.

Pain is a heck of a monster to battle. It changes your brain chemistry, and clouds your mind. It robs you of your sleep, which further clouds your mind and weakens your brain and body. It can be debilitating and disabling — keeping you from doing the things you love, the things that you live for, the things you do to let off stress and help yourself cope.

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Book Review: The Van Gogh Blues

Vincent Van Gogh is the poster child for the depressed, unstable artist, and a strong argument for the correlation between a troubled soul and brilliant creativity.

I refuse to believe that being creative means I’m doomed to a life of mental disorders. When a recent mood-funk sent me reeling, I set out on a search for information, ran across psychotherapist Eric Maisel’s work — and stumbled into one of those rare aHa! moments.

In The Van Gogh Blues, Maisel’s underlying theme is that creative-types are in the business of making meaning.

It’s what we do. We connect the dots from this to that, and draw lines between apparently random observations, until they mean* something. Then we invest and reveal the meaning to others in tangible forms: dance, music, words, and imagery.

So artists are driven by the need to express meaning - and when we loose that any sense of meaning in a project (or in our lives) we fall into what Maisel calls “a meaning crisis” (which seems to have a lot in common with a crisis of faith) Any number of things can cause a crisis in meaning; a goal that has been met, a change in life circumstance, a negative thought or doubt that springs seemingly out of nowhere and runs amok. But whatever the cause, if we don’t recover or reinvest a sense of meaning into our work and lives, depression, anxiety, addictions and a variety of other ills can take over. Only recovering a new sense of meaning will pull us out of it - at least that’s the theory and goal of Maisel’s “Meaning Therapy” [click to continue...]

Meditation is one of my favorite mind-tweaks…. but it may tweak more than just your mind. Preliminary studies show that the benefits of meditation may include reducing the risks of heart failure.

In one test, a group of heart patients randomly were randomly assigned either Transcendental Meditation or general health education, as an addition to their standard treatment.
The TM group made measurable gains in tests of exercise capacity, quality of life and depression.
According to AllHeadlineNews another study in 2000 showed that practicing Transcendental Meditation may actually reduce the thickness of artery walls. Other research has demonstrated drops in blood pressure, and other stress related symptoms.

The DallasNews Religion blog makes some interesting points about the use of TM in these studies. Transcendental Meditation is the trademarked meditation of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and is taught in his schools, for a fee. Apparently some of the researchers are associated with the schools, which would account for why it is the meditation form used in the studies. In general, TM is not much different from traditional forms of traditional Buddhist and Hindu meditations. Most of these would likely have the same effects, and free instruction is available in many places, including on the web. I’ll post links in the next few days, for those who don’t care to pony up the money to worship with the Maharishi.

Meanwhile, here’s the link to the current study, as reported in Scientific American.