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This Being Human

The following are brief articles about all kinds of things that have appeared in the Peterborough Examiner in the bi-weekly column, 'This Being Human':

What is Stress About? - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

This being human, and often a really stressed out human at that, sometimes feels so much more complicated than we ever imagined it would be. Why is that? Over the next while let's look into this business of being a stressed out human being.

Why should you read further? After all, many of us appreciate the sentiment of Thomas Gray, who wrote, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise", which may have inspired a T-shirt someone gave me that says, "Therapy is expensive, beer is cheap. What to do? What to do?" But dismaying as it is, research tells us that prolonged psychological stress lurks behind a huge array of medical illnesses and psychological problems. Getting to know our stress is truly a wise and effective step towards sparing ourselves all kinds of misery and illness.

Stress is brought to you by a coordination of brain, body and mind that activates us for action. Long, long ago we were all a part of the food chain, stripped of all of the protective comforts and supports that we take for granted today. Our ancestors had to avoid being injured and killed by others and by the environment in order for life to go on. Nature has always been essentially indifferent to whether we make it or not, but it does have ways of selecting for abilities that are better for the job of survival. Because of this selection, brains and bodies slowly evolved protective ways of reacting to threats to survival.

When we see a threat to our well-being a lot happens simultaneously. For one, our sensory systems lock on to the threat, and all of our senses become heightened. We actually see and hear and smell better. Also, the nervous system and circulating hormones get our body ready for action. Heart rate, blood pressure and breathing all increase and blood is diverted to our major muscles and away from our gut (because we don't need to digest our lunch if some other animal is digesting us!). The immune system moves to high alert, ready for injury. And there's lots of emotion. We feel fear, we feel we want to get away, we may feel enraged by the threat. The whole system kicks us into hyper drive, to fight or run for our very life or for the life of a loved one. Together these reactions have tremendous survival value, or at least they did have when we were in the food chain.

This ancient fight-flight-freeze system is still ours today. Although we are now quite removed from the food chain, when we feel stressed we're feeling the expression of ancient systems that cut their teeth on mortal danger. And we can get quite caught up by these systems. Violent crimes of passion, panicked flight, and freezing on an exam are all examples of this survival system in action.

The short term varieties of stress are interesting for sure. In fact, many of our entertainments draw on stress reactions - thrill ride amusement parks and suspenseful movies are a way of making fear fun! But it's the long standing stress, the stress from unyielding real and perceived threats, numerous it seems in our lives today, that takes a nasty toll on all of us. Prolonged stress physically harms us, and it can shape our lives, automatically selecting courses of action that may be unwise and pulling us into not-so-healthy methods of coping. More about that next time.

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Chronic Stress - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

We looked last time at our stress reactions in all their physical and mental glory as prehistoric systems that are on board in all animals, acquired through evolution, because they save lives. I like to remind myself that we are all at the end of a very long family tree of survivors - if any of our remote relatives hadn't been able to survive, to then conceive and protect their children, we just wouldn't be here. Stress reactions, in part, got us here.

But just like guests, stress can be tremendous for a while but not without end. Chronic stress is a huge wear and tear problem. Psychological stress can become a 24/7 state of emergency, demanding that our immune, endocrine, cardiovascular, gastric, emotional and thinking systems all work overtime. Without rest and recovery, ongoing psychological stress nibbles away at us from the molecular and cellular levels on up to the levels of our behaviour and our relationships.

For example, research shows that chronic stress influences basic physical systems such as wound healing. One study administered the very same cut to the arms of brave or bribed medical school students at two different times - during the exam period (high stress!!) and during the summer break (ahh, that's better!), and then watched carefully to see how the cuts healed. They found that greater stress resulted in the simple wounds taking days longer to heal, a result of stress-related changes in immune and inflammatory processes.

Stress-related wear and tear can be seen at the molecular level. Chronic stress can actually shorten our lives because it chemically damages parts of our chromosome structure, the telomeres, which determine, among other things, aging and disease development. There may be some truth to it when Uncle Max said that the strike at work took years off his life. Psychological stress contributes to the majority of visits to family doctors, and some long term studies have shown relations between stress and cancer and between stress and heart disease that are greater than the relation between smoking and those ailments.

And it may be no surprise to know that our levels of stress are increasing. A recent U.S. survey found that 60% of people are more irritable and angry, and more than half said they now lie awake at night because of stress. The economy, future uncertainty, media violence, family strain, illness, addictions - it's a long list - it all gets to us more deeply than we like to think.

What to practice? All the advice that you may have heard about dealing with your stress is good to heed, but tweak it so that it fits just for you. Maybe ration your diet of the doom and gloom news. Ration the sweets and fats and carbos too. Go for walks. Decrease the drama in your life by watching that voice in your head and how much it complains and grumbles. Even better, watch that voice in your head to see how hard it is being on you. Watch to see when you make critical comparisons. It's often very helpful to take an inventory of the things that get us worried, angry, impatient, sad or scared. Usually it's not anything that really matters to the degree that we experienced it to be ("Whoa, I really got bent out of shape because that person was slow in the checkout line!"). It's a good piece of homework to take on. And maybe take a little time to practice appreciation and gratitude - if we look, we find an awful lot to be delighted by and thankful for.

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Thinking and Stress - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Is there any relation between thinking and stress? Can we think ourselves into stress reactions?

It's an interesting question when you consider that stress is about dealing with threats. Do we threaten ourselves? The evolution of our stress systems was essentially about dealing well with external threats, like severe weather, predators and attacks from our own kind. So how might our own, private thinking get us in to trouble with stress?

Thinking is a way of using what our brain and mind have stored from our experiences in life. If you can imagine what happens in all of the seconds and minutes and hours and days and months and years and decades of experience that our minds register, interpret and store, you can see that we carry a lot in our heads.

Our stream of thought and feeling is very busy. Attempts to estimate how many different thoughts we have each day puts the number at about 65,000. That's busy!! What are these minds of ours doing?

If you watch your mind for a while you'll notice that it goes all over the place. Even while you're reading this you might notice all kinds of things coming up, taking you away for moments here and there. Don't worry, that's completely typical of minds. Minds are pretty chaotic. But there are lots of things that our minds do quite predictably. One extremely common mind habit is to go back to the past, to things that we didn't like, that hurt us, that we felt embarrassed by, that we regret. Our thinking is often trying to set things right (in our own mind), finding who's to blame, how it would all be different if that thing never happened, how unfair it was, how we could have handled if differently. But here's the point - can any of us change what has already happened? Truly, what's done is done and the best we can do is learn and accept.

So if our minds are churning away on distressing things from our pasts that we cannot change, might that not arouse the body and mind into states of stress?

Another place that the mind likes to hang out is in the future. We create all kinds of stories in our heads about how things will be. We don't mean to, it's just something that minds do when we're not minding our mind. We imagine successes, embarrassing failures, and disasters galore. We get pulled into these stories and feel at the same time that they have a truth and certainty in them. Mark Twain wrote,"I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." Might a mind churning out an anxious future and a tomorrow gone rotten cause us stress?

What we think of as thinking can be a commotion of ideas, memory fragments, feelings, and physical reactions - things that can't really be separated any more clearly than can the ingredients of a well-cooked soup. Minds can act like museums of memories that are animated by mean-spirited fiction writers that time travel with abandon - B-movies without end.

What to practice? 'Getting real' with yourself might help a lot. Try watching your mind a little every day. Maybe just check in with what's going on in your mind, looking in as you would look in a window, being honest and not trying to change what you see but just taking it in. If you're in the past, or in the future, or running yourself down, notice that, notice how it feels. And try to let that moment teach you a little about how your own thinking may be one of the primary agents for generating some of the very stress that you don't want in your life.

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The Pursuit of Change - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Sometimes those of us who work in health care may feel like we're professional nags and guilt-trippers. For the rest of us, all of the advice, recommendations, guidance and even threats we hear from our physicians and others undoubtedly are efforts to get us to do healthy things. Notice that a whole industry dedicated to our physical and emotional health has grown over recent years, providing all of the information, inspiration, guidance and guilt imaginable. Self-help books, Dr. Phil, the legion of experts on Oprah, and so many others speak to us about the benefits and relief that are just around the corner, if only we try. And here we are, in this article together right now, yet one more example.

Maybe this mass helping industry is popular simply because many of us find ourselves and other human beings fascinating. But more likely, this is because many of us are uncomfortable, even suffering, in many ways. And the suffering may be overwhelmingly vivid or just a notch from known, but it's there. Even so, notice that the advice just keeps on coming, and that we keep coming back to browse the advice. Hands up those who have a personal library of self-help books.

I don't know about you, but personally I couldn't count the number of times that I've heard with great interest some healthy idea about what I might do or ingest, only to let the idea slip away. It's pretty evident that we consume a lot of written and televised material that is directed to getting us to eat better, exercise more, love more and live well. We're very interested in feeling better than we are. If we cleanse our colons and mental floss our minds, life will be better. The advice can be great, but "just doing it" is the problem.

Putting the ideas and advice from shows and books and each other into real and sustained action is incredibly difficult for us. There's a great felt need to change, but doing it is tough. In this regard, the business of change hasn't changed much.

One stumbling point in the pursuit of change comes from what we might call embedded problems. Nested like Russian Dolls, these are problems that began in the service of another problem. Huh? What I mean here is that one problem, like booze or eating too much or getting angry all the time, may have started because there was some quality of the drinking or eating or anger that was softening temporarily some other problem, such as being stressed out by (quick, what came to mind?). It's hard to deal with one problem when you're paying attention to something else.

What to practice? Well, for starters it makes sense to get a hold of what it is that is most important to you. Ask yourself, "What is it that I really want? Why?" I'm deeply serious here. No one can answer those questions for you but you. But here's the twist. I'm suggesting that you continue asking those questions at different times, over and over again, for many days. Keep drifting back to the questions. Let the questions 'bug you'. It'll get complicated and the "answers" will shift and change, but the point is to know more about your patterns of feeling and reaction, the stuff that our stress is usually made up of in the first place.

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Seasonal Affective Disorder - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

The leaves have turned and dropped, and perhaps our minds and spirits have followed as we say goodbye to yet another (alleged!) summer and gradually slip into winter. There are countless ways in which our minds and bodies change with changes in our environment. One of these is due to the fact that the further north we live the less light we receive through the winter. And the further north you go the greater the number of people in the population who suffer emotionally through the winter.

More serious than the winter distress of Leaf hockey fans, but perhaps just as predictable, is a form of depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD for short.

SAD includes increases in appetite and weight, more fatigue and sleepiness, problems concentrating, irritability, social avoidance and feelings of anxiety and despair. It sounds a little like our bodies are trying to hibernate. SAD may affect about 9% of us and about 25% more grump through winter with a milder form, the Winter Blues. There is no seasonal variation in other mood disorders such as bipolar disorder or post partum depression.

These general, categorical signs of SAD don't give us a very vivid sense of what suffering SAD is like, just as a neat list of salmonella symptoms doesn't touch the actual experience. Our experience of anything is always unique. Some people feel too withdrawn and flat to be festive through the holiday season, troubled with the question, "Why?" People say they feel "shut down", "weighed down", and "bleak". It's like living with an extra 50 pounds in your backpack; it quickly feels too hard to function at all and the wish to drop out of everything can take over.

How come? A brain hormone, melatonin, helps regulate our night-and-day rhythms, among many other things. Light may regulate the manufacturing of melatonin through connections from the eye to the pineal gland in the brain. Also, seasonal changes in retinal function are found in people who suffer SAD. People with SAD don't build melanopsin, a photopigment chemical in our eyes, as effectively, but extra light seems to correct this genetic difference.

So it seems that light is a drug, an external agent that regulates our inner world. Since Dr. Norman Rosenthal first described SAD 25 years ago (his book, Winter Blues, was revised in 2006), light therapy has been shown to be very effective as a treatment. This involves sitting with a light therapy box that provides bright, full spectrum light for 30 - 60 minutes each day. Light in the morning may be best.

A study hot off the presses found that light therapy does only some of the job of addressing SAD. How we feel and think about winter itself plays a big role too. Many people just have a cheerless mental set when it comes to winter. This mental set creates a cold environment inside their head, full of chilly grumbling gloom ("friggin' snow ... I can't stand this ... what's more miserable?"). Reducing our mental bellyaching and self-criticism significantly helps to relieve SAD.

What to practice? Light therapy is a good way to go. Do a little more research and look into the light boxes that are available on the internet market. Get out for a walk in the light of day, every day if you can. Lift your face to the sky and drink in the light. Definitely get more physically active, even if you don't like it. And check your mind's commentary and criticism, because SAD may be one more example of our mind making us miserable.

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Attachment: Babies and Bonding - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

You were born to connect - we all were. The popularity of Twitter and texting attest to our human appetite for connection.

Before this modern time our forebears were a part of the food chain (very different from being a Costco member), and the cruel and relentless reality was that a baby left unattended was a nice light snack for some other creature. Over the millions of evolving years, any wee natural tendency that supported keeping everyone closer meant better safety and survival, and any genetic basis for that tendency was befriended by natural selection. This genetic basket of tendencies, polished through experience from birth, is so much of what is essentially our humanness.

As babies we were never passive. Nature has preloaded us with lots of different brain programs (thanks, evolution!) that help with bonding. Don't be fooled by those cute, fuzzy blankets because research shows that newborns are working the room and schmoozing within minutes of birth. If flattery will get us anywhere, and if imitation is the highest form of flattery, then you can bet that babies are shameless flatterers. For example, in one study someone stood over 18 hour old babies and either opened their mouth really wide or stuck their tongue way out. The babies were then videoed for the next 24 hours. You guessed it - the newborns imitated what they had seen. Our baby brains 'know'.

A bunch of studies have shown that babies prefer their mother's voices. But the schmoozing keeps going. The cries of newborns have an accent! A recent paper reports that the first vocalizations of newborns show that they've been listening and learning from before birth. French newborns cry with a rising melodic pattern, and German newborns more often deliver a falling melody, and these melodies are typical of their 'resident' language. This suggests that infants are on to elements of language in the womb, and are 'wired' to copycat.

Touch is a building block of bonding. A study in the journal Birth followed 176 mom-baby pairs who had different degrees of contact immediately after birth. They found that two hours or less of skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth (as compared to nursery placement or swaddled contact) made a huge difference up to one year later. One year! Those moms and babies were closer and were just getting along better. That simple, quick and early contact during that 'sensitive period' is like a super nutrient that gets everything going the right way, right from the outset.

Psychiatrist John Bowlby famously observed in the 1950s that babies were messed up by a separation from mom. Before then, babies were separated from their mothers during a hospitalization just as we leave our cars for service, to be picked up later. Not so hot for a developing self.

Our humanness is shaped by our human connections. The infant-parent bond that begins before birth is our signing on to something like an intense university education with diaper breaks and frequent naps. The course work is all about you and what it means to be human, and the quality of your education is desperately tied to the health and history of your teachers, Mom and Dad, and anyone else who's there. Decades of research loudly declare that our mental health and emotional intelligence are profoundly influenced from birth by the quality of our relationships with mom and dad. The first year of life greatly predicts the physical, psychological and social roads we go down. The bond, the attachment, is nature's kitchen, preparing a self.

Imitation, connection, touch - it's all about love and attention. It turns out that it's just nature's way. We'll come back to this in future articles to look at why attachment and quality parenting matter.

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The Importance of Sleep - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Your word for the day is 'soporific' , meaning 'something that causes sleep'. If this column is a soporific for you I'm not offended in the least, because sleep is important and my only intention here is to be helpful. You see, sleep and your brain and your health are intimately linked.

We think of sleep as a kind of shutting down, the opposite of being active. But when we sleep the boss of the show, our brain, is doing anything but sleeping while it's busy, er, sleeping. Brain recordings during sleep show many distinct types of activity throughout the brain, the most pronounced being the 90 minute see-saw shift between the rapid eye movement (REM) stage and the non-REM stage. This activity is like a continuous 90 minute wave at the home of the Blue Jays, but with lots of other busyness going on at the same time.

Sleep is commonly disturbed by conditions such as pain, depression, bullying, stress and anxiety, by drug and alcohol consumption, trauma and many medical illnesses, making things even more difficult for us.

We might feel like sleep is a soft luxury that we can do without, something that some teens treat like a rented mule. But there's a huge range of bodily and neural processes that depend on sleep which would be beyond the mother of all soporific textbooks to summarize. Here's a quick survey to highlight the importance of sleep for all of us, from young to old.

The effect of sleep on our well-being starts before we know it. Women who are having sleep problems before they conceive their baby are more likely to have babies with a sleep disturbance. Children with an elevated body mass index may undergo sleep-related changes in hormonal processes that result in yet more fat storage. The possibility that childhood sleep problems may contribute to adult obesity has been noted for quite some time.

Children's sleep problems may both be caused by and worsen emotional and behavioural problems. Sleep problems in childhood, as in adulthood, may be a sign of unspoken stress, anxiety or depression, or may be a biological marker for the later development of teen substance abuse.

Sleep helps us learn, and learning is crucial to all that we do. We have brain systems to remember what we've done, how to do things, for facts, for feelings. Memory first requires that our experiences in life be properly stored, like a book placed in the correct spot at the library, so that we can find it later. Sleep helps this process of learning at those spooky, 'plastic' cellular levels, those places that make us who we are. Research shows that sleep helps the brain's ability to physically change, which is behind the ability to store and learn. Lots of research is showing that, when we sleep less, we are more forgetful and can have more difficulty learning new things. Sleepy people should be put to bed before being asked to make complex decisions, or fly planes.

Long term alcohol abuse harms sleep patterns even after a long period of sobriety.

Better sleep at night reduces that afternoon dip. Older adults experience more fragmented sleep, greater daytime sleepiness and they nap more often than younger adults. Extremes of sleep duration effect immune and inflammatory systems in the body.

There are lots of ways to improve your sleep hygiene and I suggest you continue to educate yourself. Reduce caffeine use - take none after the morning. Avoid napping because it can be like snacking before a meal. Alcohol and nicotine hurt restorative sleep. And establish a regular sleep schedule (brains love rhythms!). Sweet dreams!

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Intending to Change - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Guess what? If you apply yourself to practicing juggling there will follow measurable changes in your gray and white brain matter. Truly. Scientists are recording all kinds of ways in which the brain physically changes when we learn anything new. After all, you're alive, your brain is alive, and your memory and sense of life are alive.

One critical requirement for bringing about change or for developing a skill is to arrange for repetition and then more repetition.

It's just like getting into better physical condition. Here's a quiz: Can we get into better physical shape by reading about cycling? Nope. Can we get into better shape by wanting to be in better shape? Nuh uh. Can we get into better physical shape by going to the gym for a week? Hmmm. You get the point. To change our physical condition we have to use our tissue (muscles, lungs, bones) and our tissue dutifully responds. More use becomes more change. And if we've been going to the gym frequently for 6 months, can we then stop and remain fit for the rest of our days? You wish! So in this way you can see that physical fitness must actually become a lifestyle in which we keep practicing the activity of exercise over and over and over, always.

Now let's swap the idea of physical fitness for psychological or emotional fitness (with big acknowledgements to life's full complexity). In practice we have to reduce this to specific things like better attentiveness or greater patience or changing an addiction or whatever you wish. Here's the easy truth: We can get better at just about anything that we have the basic potential to do if we practice that ability in the right way, over and over and over and gradually make that practice a part of our lifestyle. For example, there is solid evidence from neuroscience that we can improve our ability to pay attention, to be patient and to love ourselves and others.

Change has to begin with an intention. Once the intention fades you're back on automatic pilot. The intention is essential and must be preserved and nourished for weeks, months, or always. With an intention we begin to pay attention. As a working example, quitting biting fingernails requires catching yourself in the act or post-act in a friendly way, paying attention over and over again with each nibble. Each time that you pay attention in the moment (and resist lambasting yourself or proposing that it's hopeless), look at exactly what's there - perhaps some tension inside, some worry, some boredom, some anger, some physical sensations. As you look you learn (that plastic brain is doing it's thing), and what you learn are the subtle feelings and thoughts and sensations that are as much a part of the nail biting as the chomping. By repeatedly connecting with the full nail biting landscape, we gradually come to know the nail biting impulse. And with the knowing there develops a sense of having a choice. And there you are! You can begin to regulate your behaviour - your self-regulating brain has done it again!

Neuroscience and clinical research show that complex systems, from our immune system to our emotional well-being, are subject to change. We need not be stuck in depression, anger, shyness and fear. The key is to not surrender your intention because change is truly a live process that takes lots of repetition. Looked at this way, we can practice how we want to live. And take a moment to consider the words of Lao Tzu: "When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be".

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What is Mindfulness? - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Human minds are exceedingly busy. Studies have estimated that we have something like 60,000 plus thoughts a day - without even trying! The stream of consciousness is actually a mighty river. The surprising thing is that we are often not aware of the content of our own stream of consciousness, that is, until we stop and pay attention. Most of us wake up in the morning (there are, of course, teenagers) and thereby become conscious, and then go about our daily routines and activities on a kind of automatic pilot. But stopping to pay attention to what is happening in the present moment is something different, something that we call mindfulness.

Would you accept as completely true that all that has happened in your life, from birth to mere seconds ago, has already happened and is not subject to revision or change of any kind? What has happened has happened. We can know the past but we cannot change it. Would you accept as an indisputable fact that beyond this very moment resides the future, and that the future is not a place or time that we can inhabit, ever, except in our imagination? We cannot know or be in the future, even though we like to think that we can. We often and must plan for the future, but that planning always happens in the present.

If you accept these facts, that the past is a done deal and that we can't know what will come in the future, then we are left with some pretty interesting implications. One is that we exist and that life is lived only and always in the present moment, here now. We exist in a three-dimensional space, not one that includes the fourth dimension, time. Time travel happens only in our mind, within our imaginings or those of science fiction writers and movie makers. Next time you check your watch, you'll find that it's now once again. It's always now. Check it out!

Mindfulness is the intentional act of paying attention in the present moment, knowing what is happening now, which is literally where you live. However, much of the time our minds mindlessly wander off trying to undo the past, dreading the future, stressing. Our mind can be gripped by any thinking or emotion or gut sense you can imagine and we may not really notice, unless we pay attention.

To be mindful is also to be honest. Whatever is happening in a given moment is indeed what is happening, and so the accurate and honest paying of attention is to note just what is occurring, nothing less and nothing more. To judge or deny is usually to invoke a wish for our mind to be otherwise, to begin to disappear from the present moment into desires, aversions and distractions. To judge is to disrupt attention to what is already here.

Mindfulness is like an internal GPS - we could call it our Grounded Personal Sense. We have this ability to just look and see what's going on right now. Most of us want the 'full function' GPS that effortlessly navigates us to some destination (like to be kinder, sober, rich, famous, illness-free) - good luck with that!

Mindfulness has recently become a huge focus for research, and its application to living well and healthily seems to be limitless. It's like suddenly discovering that we have muscles, and that there are all kinds of things that we can do with them. This GPS of ours is a big deal. We'll visit this in more detail next time.

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Mindfulness II - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

If you missed class last time (the previous article) we looked at mindfulness and the present moment. Science is revealing that mindfulness, being tuned in to what is actually happening now, is associated with better emotional and physical health. Why?

A huge part of our human sophistication comes from our ability to "know" - Homo Sapiens means "knowing man". 'Knowing' involves being informed, dialled in, up to speed, aware. On the evolutionary road 'knowing' helped survival. With knowing one could make a tool, get a meal, avoid danger - live.

Mindfulness is really just about knowing through paying attention, a neurobiological ability that, like a muscle, can be strengthened. Given that the present moment is where and when life happens, it might not be surprising to find that our brain has many subtle talents when it comes to paying attention in the present moment. Research is revealing that many of our most human and wise abilities, such as patience, self- and other-awareness, empathy and compassion, and intuition are all team mates of mindfulness, working together.

One thing that we want to know and to work with is what is true and real. That's just so obvious. But this mind of ours tends to stray wildly from what is actually going on, unknowingly. Our mind gets stuck on yesterday like there's no tomorrow. Or we dread the unknowable future, certain of the worst outcome. These tendencies cause stress and great physiological wear and tear. They break down the body and the mind.

By paying attention to what our mind is doing, we can test the reality or the healthiness of what we're up to. By knowing what our mind is doing, we can self-regulate and choose healthier and wiser perspectives and directions.

You might think of mindfulness as being something akin to eating healthily. A continuous healthy diet - not just a nutritious meal once in a while - provides our body with the right stuff. Learning to pay attention honestly, to what is really going on for you, provides your mind with the most nutritious content possible -reality. The idea is to not just take a bit of reality now and then, but to practice a steady diet of the stuff, even when it's not so savoury, such as when we're angry, jealous or envious, scared, sad. It's really what all growth moments in life are made of - what's true.

We often experience levels of distress that are just through the roof, but if we pay attention to what the distress is about, we'll often find that we have 'unknowingly' freaked ourselves out with thoughts that just don't hold up under scrutiny. One fine fellow I know was set on leaving his marriage and leaving society at large because it was "hell". But when we looked for the "hell", the true problems were at best minor irritants. "Hell" was supplied by his mind, but he was mistaking the content of his mind for what was actually going on in his life. It's something we all do, some of us more than others. Lesson: Don't believe everything you think.

Mindfulness isn't some sort of magic cure-all or an answer to life's problems. It's simply how we can look clearly at our life when and where it's happening. We all have a complicated emotional life and we all tend to not look at it. Mindfulness is not for the weak of heart. To be mindful of what we feel allows us to work with our emotion in a clear way. This kind of honesty takes alot more courage than just stuffing our emotion away.

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The Human Problem of Avoiding - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

We shouldn't avoid this question any longer: What do you do when you feel troubled? Owning negative emotion and briskly bouncing back from problems are the oh-so-desirables. But most of us just automatically put the troubles out of our mind, using abilities such as distraction, thought stopping, denial or numbing. Or we "think". All of these abilities can be exercised in the service of avoidance.

Hey, look over there!! Shifting our attention away from our problems brings temporary relief. Something must be looked up on the internet, or the kitchen calls, or work beckons. Something just has to get done and there's a single-mindedness of purpose. Or maybe it's just getting absorbed by the lives of celebrities. Hey! I recognize that I'm writing this, right now, to avoid painting! Some people are driven to stay busy through much of their life, so as to avoid. But our mind-brain holds critical life experiences forever, patiently insisting, "You have to deal with this".

Thought-stopping is like our mind covering its ears and going "la-la-la-la", or pushing the stop button on the DVD player.

Denial, that river in Egypt, is a fluid lie we tell ourselves, quite convincingly. After all, denial only works if we, the liar, swallow the lie. The only problem is that the lie isn't true. And if it isn't true then it can never be digested, broken down into the constituent parts of true experience, leaving us the wiser.

And lastly, our troubled mind may instead use a practiced ability to go numb, feel nothing, day dream and lose time.

Our confrontation of the subject of avoidance wouldn't be complete without also mentioning addictions. This is a huge area, deserving of many columns. Our neurobiological abilities to feel pleasure are a picnic for avoiding. Substances (yes, beer is a substance), gambling, sex/porn, food, work - all can bring about a quick change in our state of mind, getting us away from ourselves, from our lives. Our brains easily develop a deep compulsive taste for temporary relief.

All the flavours of avoidance can be very agreeable. But it can be like using your charge card when you don't have the money - quick and painless. The problem is that the balance remains due and with a super-hefty interest rate to boot!

The yin and yang of why we get into trouble with avoidance in the first place is a brain thing. On the evolutionary road, the chances of survival increased if our attention was locked on to the creatures that might eat us. Our successful ancestors didn't forget about the lions and tigers and bears.

And so our mind-brain rivets attention to what's threatening. The interview tomorrow, the exam, the past trauma, money issues, you name it, stick like Velcro. We tend to automatically zero-in on the scary and threatening, real or imagined, and have a much more difficult time tearing our attention away. We easily get stuck, caught up and preoccupied. It's no wonder that we scramble for "Serenity Now".

And so we might see-saw between these two automatic systems, fear and avoidance. Or some people practice worry (fear, anxiety) like Olympic contenders while others make avoidance a lifestyle. We can get so stuck it can feel like there's no other option. Yuck!

Peace of mind requires a sort of internal referee, some strengthened ability that is independent of the rivalry between these mental siblings, avoidance and anxiety. That's where paying attention - mindfulness - can play its most beneficial role. Honestly facing and intimately knowing our reactions and problems is a natural third option, healthier and perhaps quite radical in an inside-the-skull kind of way.

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