Tag: mental health

anthropology · culture · emotion · happiness · health · Social

The UN Embraces the Economics of Happiness — YES! Magazine

Beth Kelley1 Comment

Should happiness and well being be considered a metric to measure overall success of a country? The UN just voted yes:

Imagine you open the paper tomorrow, and the headlines are not about the “sluggish economy,” but our nation’s quality of life. You turn to the business section, and find not just information about a certain company’s profitability, but also about its impact on community health and employee well-being.

Imagine, in short, a world where the metric that guides our decisions is not money, but happiness.

That is the future that 650 political, academic, and civic leaders from around the world came together to promote on April 2, 2012. Encouraged by the government of Bhutan, the United Nations held a High Level Meeting for Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm. The meeting marks the launch of a global movement to shift our focus away from measuring and promoting economic growth as a goal in its own right, and toward the goal of measuring—and increasing—human happiness and quality of life.

Not just for dreamers

Some may say these 650 world leaders are dreamers, but they are the sort that can make dreams come true. The meeting began with an address by Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley of Bhutan, where the government tracks the nation’s “Gross National Happiness.”…

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon cited Aristotle and Buddha in calling for the replacement of our current economic system with one based on happiness, well-being, and compassion. “Social, economic, and environmental well-being are indivisible” he said.

Read more at: The UN Embraces the Economics of Happiness by Laura Musikanski — YES! Magazine.

Pretty exciting stuff. Bhutan has been using happiness as a metric for several years. so it’s nice to see the idea get picked up on. I believe emotional well-being and happiness is a very valuable metric. What about you? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

behavior · brain · mental health · neuroscience · play · psychology

Playing leads to lower Alzheimer’s risk

Beth Kelley
English: PET scan of a human brain with Alzhei...
Brain with Alzheimer's. Image via Wikipedia

From USA Today:

People who engage in activities such as reading and playing games throughout their lives may be lowering levels of a protein in their brains that is linked to Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests.

Although whether the buildup of the protein, beta amyloid, causes Alzheimer’s disease is debatable, it is a hallmark of the condition, the researchers noted.

“Staying cognitively active over the lifetime may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s by preventing the accumulation of Alzheimer’s-related pathology,” said study author Susan Landau, a research scientist at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Some of the literature has hypothesized this finding, but this is the first study to report that lifetime cognitive activity is directly linked to amyloid deposition in the brain,” she said. “We think that cognitive activity is probably one of a variety of lifestyle practices — occupational, recreational and social activities — that may be important.”

Read more at Keeping brain sharp, active may ward off Alzheimer’s

There have been several different studies that find the correlation between play and a healthy brain less susceptible to dementia, disease, and overall decay. Literally use it or lose it. So you might as well have fun using it!

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brain · happiness · mental health · music

Treating the Whole Patient

Beth Kelley
Icon from Nuvola icon theme for KDE 3.x.
Treating the whole patient, including mind and body, is becoming "cool" again. Image via Wikipedia

The faculty at University of Washington is pretty progressive in a lot of its research surrounding neuroscience and the mind, especially when it comes to Mental Health Care:

Researchers and professors at the UW, such as Dr. Jürgen Unützer, are driving innovative ways to improve access to high quality mental health care delivered in a manner that treats the whole person. Their efforts are focused on health care models that integrate behavioral health services into the primary care clinic and other heath care arenas, where the patients already receive care and have established provider relationships. Known as collaborative or integrated care, these models put the patient at the center of a health team – including their physician, a care coordinator and a psychiatric consultant – that collaborates on a patient’s treatment plan.

Unützer says he knew his research into new models of mental heath care delivery was on the right track when a patient described feeling like a tennis ball. This patient had a combination of health problems associated with diabetes along with alcohol problems and depression. As is common in the current health care system, the patient was being bounced around to different specialists to treat his individual symptoms. Dr. Unützer was concerned that patients like this, with a combination of behavioral health and medical conditions, were falling through the cracks and not receiving care that treats the whole person.

“The patient expects that the various providers are all talking to each other, but that is often not the case,” he says. “Who’s connecting the dots? Patients expect their care providers to sync up and know what’s going on with all of their conditions.”

More at UW Professional & Continuing Education.

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behavior · brain · cognition · emotion

Meditation leads to less mind wandering, more doing

Beth Kelley
Meditate
Meditation helps people stay on task and reduce stress. Image by plemeljr via Flickr

Thanksgiving and the Black Friday rush are behind us, but for many it is just the beginning of a crazy month. How to destress from last week’s trials and tribulations (and sales) and stay focused on this month’s tasks, including work? Meditation:

The brains of experienced meditators appear to be fitter, more disciplined and more “on task” than do the brains of those trying out meditation for the first time. And the differences between the two groups are evident not only during meditation, when brain scans detect a pattern of better control over the wandering mind among experienced meditators, but when the mind is allowed to wander freely.

Those insights emerge from a study to be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which looked at two groups: highly experienced meditators and meditation novices, and compared the operations of the “Default Mode Network” — a newly identified cluster of brain regions that go to work when our brains appear to be “offline.”

“I think its safe to say this is brain-training at work,” says Yale University psychiatrist Judson Brewer, who conducted the study with psychologists from Yale, the University of Oregon and Columbia University. “It makes sense,” adds Brewer. “Anything you train to do, you do better.”

In fact, some studies have found that too much daydreaming or getting off task can have negative effects:

A study that tracked the daily activities and moods of iPhone users-published in Science magazine last November–found that those whose minds were wandering off task more often were more depressed. People who suffer from attention deficit disorder also have difficulty keeping mind-wandering at bay, which may be why many studies have found that meditation helps those with attention deficit disorder.

more via This is your mind on meditation: less wandering, more doing – latimes.com.

Now truth be told, I am not that great at sitting still and clearing my mind. In fact none of us are. But, even attempting to clear one’s mind for 30 seconds at a time has been found to be truly beneficial. Just focusing on one’s breathing for two or three rounds of breathing in and out has been shown to be calming and rejuvenating.

If sitting still is not your thing, stretching, walking or running are also good ways to clear your mind, and they provided the added benefit of exercise.

Remember to breath deep this holiday season! It will improve your mood and overall ability to handle tense situations in any environment, from shopping to grandma to bad weather.

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architecture · design · environment · health · Nature · Social

Rehabilitating Vacant Lots Improves Urban Health and Safety

Beth Kelley

Humans are greatly effected by the greenery in their environments, but remember how a few weeks back I was lamenting that not much robust analysis or study had been done on this kind of positive impact? Well, voila!

ScienceDaily (2011-11-17) — Greening of vacant urban land may affect the health and safety of nearby residents. In a decade-long comparison of vacant lots and improved vacant lots, greening was linked to significant reductions in gun assaults across most of Philadelphia and significant reductions in vandalism in one section of the city. Vacant lot greening was also associated with residents in certain sections of the city reporting significantly less stress and more exercise.

more at ScienceDaily

Journal Reference:

  1. C. C. Branas, R. A. Cheney, J. M. MacDonald, V. W. Tam, T. D. Jackson, T. R. Ten Have. A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of Health, Safety, and Greening Vacant Urban Space. American Journal of Epidemiology, 2011; DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwr273
behavior · emotion · family · happiness · mental health

Steps to ease into being grateful, and how it benefits you psychologically

Beth Kelley2 Comments

"The most psychologically correct holiday of the year is upon us." according to the New York Times article, A Serving of Gratitude May Save the Day.

Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners. A new study shows that feeling grateful makes people less likely to turn aggressive when provoked, which helps explain why so many brothers-in-law survive Thanksgiving without serious injury.

But say you’re not in the habit of giving thanks. After all, we’re only asked to officially do it once or twice a year. Well, there are some pointers in the article to get you going:

Start with “gratitude lite.” – start out with writing just five things, and maybe a sentence or two about why you’re appreciative of them.

Don’t confuse gratitude with indebtedness – you don’t need to owe anybody anything to be grateful for them.

Try it on your family – even if they are horribly dysfunctional, you can still be grateful they passed the peas without throwing you a dirty look.

Don’t counterattack – okay, so maybe they did throw you a dirty look. By being grateful to them anyway, it puts individuals off guard and makes them more likely to be kinder in the future, according to some studies.

Share the feeling – … “More than other emotion, gratitude is the emotion of friendship,” Dr. McCullough says. “It is part of a psychological system that causes people to raise their estimates of how much value they hold in the eyes of another person. Gratitude is what happens when someone does something that causes you to realize that you matter more to that person than you thought you did.”

Try a gratitude visit.This exercise, recommended by Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, begins with writing a 300-word letter to someone who changed your life for the better. Be specific about what the person did and how it affected you. Deliver it in person, preferably without telling the person in advance what the visit is about. When you get there, read the whole thing slowly to your benefactor. “You will be happier and less depressed one month from now,” Dr. Seligman guarantees in his book “Flourish.”

Contemplate a higher power. Religious individuals don’t necessarily act with more gratitude in a specific situation, but thinking about religion can cause people to feel and act more gratefully, as demonstrated in experiments by Jo-Ann Tsang and colleagues at Baylor University. Other research shows that praying can increase gratitude.

Go for deep gratitude. Once you’ve learned to count your blessings, Dr. Emmons says, you can think bigger…

And if that seems too daunting, you can least tell yourself —

Hey, it could always be worse. When your relatives force you to look at photos on their phones, be thankful they no longer have access to a slide projector. When your aunt expounds on politics, rejoice inwardly that she does not hold elected office. Instead of focusing on the dry, tasteless turkey on your plate, be grateful the six-hour roasting process killed any toxic bacteria.

Happy Thanksgiving!

anthropology · architecture · community

Vancouver BC improving urban living for its older residents

Beth Kelley
Crosswalk button ne.
Making cities safe for residents of all ages is a major step to creating a more lively, sustainable community. Image via Wikipedia

Great article in the Vancouver Sun about the city working to make urban living more conducive to older folks:

City planners, engineers, seniors and health researchers came together to discuss things such as pedestrian crosswalks, which often don’t allow enough time for a safe crossing, given that at many lights the halting hand starts to flash after just seven seconds.

“It takes all hands on deck,” said Heather McKay, director of the Centre for Hip Health and Mobility, referring to the necessity of collaboration when making infrastructure changes to the so-called “built environment.” That’s why the Vancouver Coastal Health centre helped organize the second annual research and community partnership symposium, called “If we build it, will they walk?”

Using a $1.5-million grant from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, McKay and her colleagues are examining factors that help make cities good places to grow older. Their goal is to identify the things that can prolong active and independent living, which will also help improve physical and emotional health, plus reduce dependency on the health care system.

Living in an urban environment makes a lot of sense for retired folks – easy access to public transportation, food, activities – as long as those resources are made accessible to their needs.

What other cities are making their spaces and infrastructure better for residents of all ages?

behavior · children · education · mental health

Reading, Writing, Empathy: The Rise of ‘Social Emotional Learning’ | GOOD

Beth Kelley
Creative Curriculum: CDCs provide tools to con...
Learning how to empathize improves the entire learning process. Image by familymwr via Flickr

How does empathy and social learning improve the learning experience at schools? A lot, apparently! And some research is finding that actively teaching empathy and social understanding can be taught in a public school setting, with great benefits for the entire learning process:

At a time of contentious debate over how to reform schools to make teachers more effective and students more successful, “social emotional learning” may be a key part of the solution. An outgrowth of the emotional intelligence framework, popularized by Daniel Goleman, SEL teaches children how to identify and manage emotions and interactions. One of the central considerations of an evolved EQ—as proponents call an “emotional quotient”—is promoting empathy, a critical and often neglected quality in our increasingly interconnected, multicultural world.

Brackett quickly learned that developing empathy in kids requires working on their teachers first. Ten years ago, he and his colleagues introduced a curriculum about emotions in schools, asking teachers to implement it in their own classrooms. When he observed the lessons, he was struck by the discomfort many of the instructors showed in talking about emotion. “There was one teacher who took the list of feelings we had provided and crossed out all of what she perceived of as ‘negative’ emotions before asking the students to identify what they were feeling,” Brackett says. “We realized that if the teachers didn’t get it, the kids never would.”

So in 2005, Brackett and his team at the Health, Emotion, and Behavior Lab at Yale developed a training program—now called RULER—that instructs teachers in the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for emotional health, then helps them shift the focus to children. The program focuses on five key skills: recognizing emotions in oneself and others, understanding the causes and consequences of emotions, labeling the full range of emotions, expressing emotions appropriately in different contexts, and regulating emotions effectively to foster relationships and achieve goals. Classrooms adopt “emotional literacy charters”—agreements that the whole community agrees to concerning interpersonal interactions—and kids use “mood meters” to identify the nature and intensity of their feelings and “blueprints” to chart out past experiences they might learn from.

Read more at Reading, Writing, Empathy: The Rise of ‘Social Emotional Learning’ at GOOD Magazine.

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emotion · environment · happiness · psychology

10 Careers With High Rates of Depression – Health.com

Beth Kelley
On the Threshold of Eternity
Artist is one of the top careers associated with depression. But the most common jobs were in the "helping" professions. Image via Wikipedia

Feeling down about your job? You may not be the only one. In fact, some jobs are more prone to depression. A recent study looked at reports of depression associated with what job the individual had.

Here are 10 fields (out of 21 major job categories) in which full-time workers are most likely to report an episode of major depression in a given year. But if you want to be a nurse (No. 4), it doesn’t mean you should pick another profession.

“There are certain aspects of any job that can contribute to or exacerbate depression,” says Deborah Legge, PhD, a licensed mental health counselor in Buffalo (NY). “Folks with the high-stress jobs have a greater chance of managing it if they take care of themselves and get the help they need.”

via 10 Careers With High Rates of Depression – depression – Health.com.

It doesn’t give an order of which careers are the most depression-prone, but a lot of the careers on the top ten were care-giving or “helping” jobs. These jobs can be draining, don’t pay very well, and apparently there isn’t much appreciation dulled back onto these workers. A lot of them are also associated with or coordinated with government institutions, which is known for its bureaucracy. Bureaucracy can also be frustrating and make workers feel futile or helpless, another key stressor and depresser.

What are some ways to make these “giving” jobs better appreciated and less stressed? There’s a lot of hoopla right now about jobs creation, but what can be done to make the jobs we have right now better?

behavior · disease · emotion · mental health

10 Things I Learned From People Who Survive Cancer | Care2 Healthy Living

Beth Kelley

This is a great article that was shared with me by a friend who has survived cancer (that’s a huge deal, by the way, I’ve had plenty of friends and family the last couple of years who didn’t). It was written Lissa Ranken for her project The Woman Inside. Lissa noticed that all of the cancer survivors she met shared some characteristics in common:

They had all faced down death and decided to live every day like it might be their last. And then they all beat cancer.The more interviews I did, the more I noticed that these women were living differently than most of the people I knew who had not been diagnosed with cancer. Here’s what I learned from those survivor women. Learning these lessons changed my life, and I hope they’ll change yours.

read on for 10 Things I Learned From People Who Survive Cancer | Care2 Healthy Living.

What they all boil down to is being yourself and living for the moment. These women all had days where that moment might have been their last, so they made the most of it. They got angry, they put themselves and their health first, and they got better.

It is a lesson that we can all learn, to not worry about doing what’s “right” for the future so much, or “right” for someone else. Yes it’s important to be nice and get along with people and make sure you have enough money saved for retirement, but so much of the time I’ve seen people, myself included, act a certain way or do something because they thought it would make other people happy, when the truth is if they did what they wanted to do for themselves it would have worked out just as well, if not better!

So go read the 10 things, and then tell yourself you’re beautiful and being feisty is a good thing!

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