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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Quicksand, Serenity and Acceptance - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

We often think of the pains and difficulties in our life as "problems". Just thinking about something as a problem might set it up in our mind as something that therefore needs to be eliminated, gotten rid of. The nasty boss, the illness, the past trauma - the voice inside growls, "That pain is not welcome in my life!"

In protest our mind chants, "Why did this happen to me?" Have we ever received a good answer to that question, "Why me?" We ask that question not because we want to know the cause and effect. It's really more about how unfair and unwanted this pain feels.

What goes on inside when we protest and try to change what has already happened? As we gnaw away on the injustices, abuses, slights, betrayals, and hurts that life inflicts on us, we're churning and stressing. But when we fight with our private experience, who is the fight with? Trying to get rid of a problem or symptom usually just creates more problems and symptoms, more suffering.

I don't know if you're keeping score at home, but this is something that we do all the time. Even so, the wise part of our mind, dressed in shimmering robes or, in my case, an old bathrobe, knows that we're trying to achieve something we can't - we're trying to change history. The really gutsy, courageous, tough and quite healthy way to go is to practice acceptance. From the more trivial (to accept that you'll never have a perfect body) to the more urgent (coming to terms with trauma or chronic illness), acceptance is a wise and foundational part of being well.

Remember those old Tarzan movies when the bad guy gets caught in the quicksand? If you struggle, which your survival instincts scream for, you're a goner. But if you patiently accept that you're in it and relax, you float on the surface.

And so acceptance can feel foreign and even wrong. On the surface of it, acceptance goes against the grain. It may seem passive, submissive or illogical. For physical changes to occur something physical must happen - the garbage doesn't put itself out. But that logic may not transfer over to mind because there's lots that gets hidden from our conscious awareness.

Mostly, what gets hidden is our massive wish to not feel pain, our wish for things to be other than how they are. Like a magnet, we're pulled to what feels good and (with the magnet reversed) repelled by what feels bad. And so our mind might rant about 'how unfair' and try to get rid of the dirty deal, searching for who's to blame - stressing ourselves into more suffering.

These habits of mind can make a bad situation worse. Our mind senses the original pain and then cranks out a whole pile of suffering.

The wisdom of acceptance is embedded in heaps of clichés (think of spilled milk) and offerings such as The Serenity Prayer - "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." I'd pick at this a little. I'd argue that in life it takes alot of courage to accept what's true. I'd argue that only when we accept what is true will we then feel some of that serenity, not the other way around.

So I'd change the Serenity Prayer (is nothing sacred?!) to a Serenity Practice: "I'll suffer less if I change the things that I can change and intimately accept the things that I can't, while practicing the wisdom to see the difference."

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The Trouble with Wanting - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Wants and appetites; compulsions and impulses; desires and addictions.

We want what we want when we want it. Want want want want. Say the word enough times and it starts to sound as fuzzy as a want just might be. Do we ask what it is that we really want, what the wanting comes from, why it's so urgent? Wanting might be fine, but it's the habit of wanting that bites. Is all this wanting, in this incredibly rich first-world world of ours, something that we pay a price indulging?

Maybe wanting comes from appetites that are just a part of our nature. During our mind-brain evolution, when the urgency of survival was lived moment to moment, hanging out in the food chain, a want was highly related to a need. Ask Survivor Man if he wants for a new car or granite counter tops when he hasn't had water for a few days. The need for survival is charged with urgency and emotional power and it focuses all of our senses and mental abilities. More dreamy and delightful things are left until we're safe and sound. But even then, coming out of the same brain, a want can be charged with a similar emotional power and urgency.

If we have a want and all we see is the want, then we can get swallowed up by it, like a zombie obedient to the want. Troubles might follow when wants are not chaperoned by a frame of reference. A frame of reference helps us to see something in relation to something else. One helpful frame of reference comes from simply knowing that we have a want. "I really want these shoes" may be all it takes to slap down the credit card. But if I can step back, aware of my want, I might see that this is just a want and that I might have enough shoes already and that I really could do better with my money.

Unwary wanting may lead us in to romantic affairs, terrible debt, seconds of dessert, gambling and other addictions, you name it! I hear about affairs starting when unmet emotional needs abound. Rather than making a big mess of things, wouldn't it be wiser and healthier to step back and face and address the emotional hurt - slowly, patiently and persistently - first? If you notice some attraction or want, ask more deeply, "Why is this coming up for me now?"

That frame of reference is always available if we stop and look at what we're up to. It's always available because no matter where you go, there you are. It's hard to do but it gets easier with practice.

If we can carry forward the intention to watch our wanting, we'll pay more attention. Our better judgment is more likely to catch a want if we practice paying attention and being mindful. We can then catch the wanting and know what it's more deeply about. Maybe I'm shopping because I'm just feeling down or ripped off about something. Maybe I want that thing or that person because I'm not feeling good about myself, or because I want to celebrate something else. Wouldn't it be wiser and healthier to take just a light moment to acknowledge this other feeling, and see where that takes you?

In our life the true 'durable goods' might be the deeper knowing about what motivates and moves us, not the new leather belt or bowl of ice cream. We might savour some wants and appetites, enjoying the want being fulfilled. But most wants are a yellow flag that says, "Look out, here you come!"

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Slivers - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Sleep is only beneficial when you wake up. That's not only true in some funny way but it's also a great metaphor. Our life and much that we experience may only be of value to us in terms of our psychological and physical health when we wake up to it.

The person who you are today is the lifelong interplay of your genetics and your life experience. This interplay shapes the workings of our bodies, minds and behaviour. We learn a mind-boggling amount and that learning is critical to getting by, surviving, coping, thriving. But it's not all pearls and gems. Some experiences are more like slivers than gems. Some of these slivers are sharp irritants and others may be large and dangerously placed.

Our body 'knows' how to heal a cut. But a sliver keeps that healing from happening. When you have a sliver you have two ways to go - in or out. If you leave it in you'll have to protect it from getting rubbed, which would feel like the original injury. A bunch of slivers left in your hand would require some pretty complicated changes in how you go about your daily activities. Just getting ready in the morning using only one hand would be a challenge best left for Mr. Bean, but over time you'd learn how to use your knees and elbows in whole new ways.

Removing slivers hurts for sure and requires some bravery, but afterwards we're as good as new.

Many of the past emotional injuries in our lives are like slivers, sharp, deeply painful and still lingering. And if we don't face them they continue to cause pain and complication.

We automatically change how we live so as to protect those 'slivers' from being rubbed, without even knowing it. We get anxious about all kinds of situations because our mind rapidly registers how close each situation might be to rubbing a 'sliver'. When we've suffered loss or have been abused, bullied, abandoned, belittled, we might instinctively shy away from situations that have any similarity at all to the original injury. We may feel anxious public speaking, going to a new class or a party, being touched, returning a phone call, going to a family dinner, talking openly with our boss, asking someone out on a date. We get sick with stress and our life gets more complicated and smaller as our mind-brain automatically navigates around and away from all the possible brushes with past injuries. We get bent out of shape, make mountains out of mole hills, lash out or freak out or seem 'sensitive', and we may not know why. All the juggling and wiggling we do to keep our slivers safe can cause even more slivers through lost opportunities, embarrassments and uncomfortable questioning and challenges. And still the original slivers remain.

If we were lucky enough to have attentive and supportive parents, we received protection and comfort and were helped to work with our injuries, learning that we can face them and feel better. Even so, wonderful and attentive parents may miss things, like school yard jabs and our private worries. When we're not so lucky, the world and our own families can inflict terrible injuries, and we may not learn how to face pain at all.

Any and all healing of life's injuries requires that we pay courageous attention to them. That's the way our experience can "come on line" in our mind-brain and get sorted out. It does hurt. It can sometimes be overwhelming to look with awareness at our traumas. The idea is to go slowly, respectfully, kindly, safely, with someone.

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Holidays - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Let's take a break from our usual consideration of stress and the human mind and travel to a new topic - holidays.

The beach, the backyard, the summer fair, the road, the lake all take us away from the routine of work and school, interrupting the rigid patterns of life. The sense of relief that comes from legitimately vacating the stresses of work schedules, pressures and demands makes summer holidays a cherished landmark.

Family vacations contribute to healthy family functioning. Healthy holiday-time together acts as a kind of glue, promoting family bonding and communication and the emergence of new identities (Hey, mom actually knows how to have fun!). This cohesiveness isn't some sort of mushy frill that we can do without. Family bonding is deeply healthy for teens and parents alike, reducing the incidence of just about every calamity you can imagine. Pre-holiday, as the members of a family dwell in their individual ruts, the barriers from work and school, technology and emotional avoidance chop a family up. The healthy holiday shifts the focus to shared experience if not to each other, giving time and space for loved ones to reconnect, joke around and open up.

You'll notice that I've referred to 'healthy' holiday time. Many people see holiday time as an opportunity to set personal bests for getting drunk and stoned or worse. Addiction researchers are quite concerned by the impact that binging holidays have both in the short and long term, particularly with young people. During resort holidays, alcohol and drug use increases significantly for both habitual users and those who refrain at home. That hangovers just get worse as the drinking days wear on says our bodies detest the toxicity, and that a holiday from the holiday is needed.

But increased intoxication is not restricted to any one age group. Advertisers have been clearly teaching us that the good life requires a flow of alcohol and, by extension, drugs. And so vacationers obediently shop the LCBO. While sun screen protects us from the raw rays, protection from the high levels of social pressure isn't so easy. We wish to belong, and shading ourselves from the social demands to get wasted can be a challenge. Reminding ourselves often of why we're taking a holiday is one way to keep to ourselves on our own path.

Does a holiday do a good job of smoothing and soothing? Studies have shown that levels of stress and burnout do decrease heartily during a holiday. For the most part we feel better physically and emotionally, sleep better, get along better. For how long does the relief last? Not as long as we'd like. After 3 weeks most of us are back where we left off, indicating that relief fades as quickly as a tan. But the more recuperation we experience during the holiday, the more we're protected against post-vacation workload stress.

I find it interesting that studies show that more conscientious workers have better moods during holidays, as if taking a break with a clear conscience is cleaner. Here, the rich just get richer. So to get the most out of our holiday it looks like we should get our work done, tie up the loose ends, and resist starting the holiday before it begins.

When you're planning your upcoming holiday, consider the opportunity at hand. If you're taking time with your family, look at how you might use that time together for togetherness. I found no research telling us that how much money we spend matters. Whether it's playing monopoly or travelling to new places, it's how we vacation that matters.

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The Genuis of Women - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

I marvel at my secretaries and at my wife, at their necromancer memory, at their ability to somehow organize office or Christmas chaos, to thrive when there's too much to do and to complain otherwise, at knowing where my file or the ketchup is. And then there's spare brain juice for simultaneously making a zillion other observations and judgements, with kindness all the way. Guys, we're in the presence of genius.

Evolution delivered the big and spatially competent males who could roam far and wide to snag meat, shelter and materials and, at home, to provide protection, to tinker and make tools and to divine answers to the questions about survival. The lesser muscled females worked the portfolio of life nearer home, which included the minor matter of offspring, food organization, safety, social equality and getting along, and knowing the immediate surrounds and contingencies.

Today, our Stone Age mind-brains may set up a David vs. Goliath story in many families. Female brains have got the goods for managing much of the complexity of raising a family, while muscles matter less. Verbal fluency, knowing how everyone is feeling and doing, being graced with a frighteningly detailed and always handy diary-mind, and doing the work of a bees nest give women the nod.

Sex differences are many. Male and female brains show different motor (movement) and visual abilities depending on how far away the action is. Females work more skilfully in near (here) space and men in far (there) space.

In critical ways male and female brains appear to use different strategies to achieve the same result. For example, male rats and male humans are the same (ladies, don't get too smug just yet, there's more) in that they depend on directional (left-right, north-south) cues to navigate space. Here's the equalizer - female rats and female humans both work better with positional (beside the bus station) cues.

And the superabsorbent female brain unintentionally soaks up information about their immediate surrounds while male brains, um, well, you know.

More to the point, neurobiological evidence indicates that females automatically attend to emotion in most of its forms, while men's brains seem pre-dialed in to anything related to power.

Socialization adds to these differences. A baby in a blue blanket is handled in a manly way. The same baby in a pink blanket receives gentle coos and cuddles.

Males are taught to restrict their experience and expression of vulnerable emotions (like sadness, fear or guilt), while females more often receive acceptance and support. As a result, men have a harder time identifying and tolerating feelings, which may underlie the fact that men are way more violent than women.

Lots of studies have shown that women prefer working with people and that men prefer working with things. So while young guys perfect specific skills, like their slap shot and free throw, females work on nurturing (dolls), values (chick flicks) and communicating.

The female mind can be highly attuned to inner lives, theirs and others. No wonder men feel some disadvantage when the complexities of raising a family arrive. The ancient residue of Father Knows Best calls for men to lead, but the genius of women places the competence to stick handle the complexity of family more often with them.

A recent paper in the Journal of Individual Differences showed that men overestimate their abilities more than women overestimate theirs. What makes men think they're so smart remains a good question.

Another study found that the biggest predictor of marital success was the husband's willingness to readily buy-in to his wife's judgment. So it's good advice to be humble anytime, and particularly when you're in the presence of genius!

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Attention - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

"Sit up and pay attention!" Remember those words? For many of us they probably reflect the total of the education and guidance that we've received about how to pay attention. And it wasn't a bad start, were it said just a little more kindly.

The thing is that today's culture is saturated in technology and habits that further undermine, as opposed to strengthen, our ability to pay undivided attention. This undermining may begin in earnest when we introduce TV and videos to our babies. No wonder, as Jon Kabat-Zinn has said, we live in ADHD Nation.

We all know what we're like when we don't pay attention - we're only able to do things automatically, we get distracted easily, and it's like we can't hear or see or plan or know.

Notice that when someone gives you a phone number to hold in mind you can't do anything else that requires attention. We can still do automatic, skilled things, but not much else. If we're distracted the number just goes.

Attention is like a spot-light that lets us see, a mental workspace for planning and creativity, the vital energy that animates our intentions. Attention researchers have determined that attention is like the mind's director, asserting that a goal remain in an active state while pushing away any interference.

What happens if we don't pay attention to what our own minds are up to?

The evidence indicates that attention is critical for regulating our emotion and stress. Remember that emotions evolved as reactions to threats and losses and are essential to survival. The thing about human emotion is that it turns on in a snap but then it can stay turned on and on and on. And we commonly react to our reactions (I'm an idiot to be so worried).

Furthermore, our human mind-brain can vividly imagine future and past situations. We can run epic simulations and plan accordingly, a tremendous ability to be sure. The big trouble today is that our minds have a strong inclination to wander off and get lost in the simulations of past regrets and future worries. Major psychological problems, including depression and anxiety, can follow from the runaway use of this natural ability.

Because attention happens at the moment of intersection of the past and the future, where life is happening, attention is key to regulating this overused simulation process. Paying attention is a way of seeing what's on our mind; not to avoid it but to know it. And seeing can open up new ways of dealing with something.

What is a thought? When we don't pay attention to a thought (This appointment today will be terrible) it can have a power and scope of control that can warp our behaviour and shackle us to a perspective that feels as firm as cement - the thought feels like reality. But when we pay rich attention to what we're thinking, what does the thought become? It can be become as robust as nothing, evaporating under attention, losing its power to direct and bend us.

Being mindful of our mind can reduce our stress significantly. And what problems might follow if we don't pay attention to our bodies? To our children? To our partners?

In hindsight it's quite remarkable that our culture had not hit on the idea of teaching paying attention to kids, teens, adults and oldsters alike. Many varieties of mindfulness training are now appearing and the research examining the application of mindfulness to emotional and physical health is very exciting. Funny that the core of the training is to "Sit up and pay attention."

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Technology - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

From our abilities to love and imagine through to our raw capacities for reason and rage, we are all the embodiment of ancient systems of relating and survival. Unlike computers we have seen no major genetic upgrades or redesigns in, oh, about 50,000 years. In contrast, technology continues to rocket forward keeping pace with Moore's Law, which anticipates that digital technology will double in speed every two years.

Where family had once been the hub of our lives, our touchstone to and experience of values and beliefs, now everything digital shapes and informs the development of minds. Dear reader, it is a huge, huge shift.

Gadgets like VCRs and computers began to babysit our little ones from the 80's onward. Some research points to the brain-shaping effect of quick edit and fast-paced videos and games, perhaps contributing to the erosion of our ability to pay attention for more than four seconds.

The earliest papers on the social implications of internet communication offered pessimistic predictions of users suffering thin, less nourishing human connection. We're now marinating in Blackberries, Twitter and texting. All of these technologies have highly addictive qualities, scream for impulsive use and relay little of the richness of our lives. Research shows that a fraction of the meaning relayed in a face-to-face communication comes from the words alone, that voice, face and body communicate much more - we can't be reduced to emoticons.

Interestingly, a gender imbalance is developing in internet use along the predictable lines of women going for connection and men opting for information.

Tech-connect is typically used with friends and acquaintances. Texting simulates time together, drawing on our imagination to fill in the gaps. Or we can easily tune out. While technology has expanded the size of our social groups dramatically, the costs are in the quality of the contact and in losing contact with those in the same room.

Professor Sara Konrath reported on an ongoing, 30 year study of almost 14,000 students at the University of Michigan. They found a recent 40% drop in empathy scores in undergraduates. One reason may be that the new mass farming of friendships cultivates less love. Perhaps our violent videos and games numb youth to others' pain, resulting in flabby empathy and a callous funny bone.

So there's the good, the bad and the ugly for families from connection technology. The bad and the ugly must include all of the time and life wasted with mindless and inconsequential involvements, isolated hyperconnectedness, online gaming and the underworld of porn, cyberbullying. Remember that technology is about business first and consumption before healthy experience.

And the good for family includes texting as an expanded family awareness system, an aid to keeping in touch with each other and a means for safety when kids are out. The internet brings to us an indescribable amount of information, the quality of which is improving in many ways. There are lots of parenting resources, advice and affirmation. Parental concerns that were kept in embarrassed privacy before can now be googled.

Please work hard to keep some balance in the family. There is no substitute for real (and healthy!) connection. A firm finding is that teens from families that regularly have meals together - and not in front of the TV! - are less likely to act out. More family dinners leads to less running away, drinking, drug use, violence, theft and vandalism.

Finally, for much more consider Jaron Lanier's book, You Are Not a Gadget. He brought us the term 'virtual reality' and is a computer scientist who has deep concerns about technology uprooting our humanness. Or perhaps take some time and just consider the book's title.

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Diagnosis - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Spoiler alert: Psychiatric diagnosis is deeply problematic, in part because the cause of symptoms is difficult to find and to test for. But there's more...

In a scene from the television series, Mad Men, which is about the people of a 1960's Madison Avenue advertising company, a well-to-do woman shares with a shrug the upshot of her consultation with a psychiatrist, "I got my diagnosis: He says I'm bored". There are more serious afflictions but the key here is the shrug.

Our affluent and safe society has the benefit of the best health care in the world. And yet we are more depressed and anxious than just about any other society. In Canada, after cardiovascular drugs, psychotherapeutic drugs are the most frequently dispensed, and depression and anxiety are the fourth and fifth most common reasons for physician visits.

Quite rightly, we consult a physician or a psychologist when we're suffering psychological symptoms. We want to know what's going on and to get help. And many people already have ideas about what to call their symptoms thanks to education from the media, including commercials.

For alot of people a diagnosis of depression or anxiety or ADHD becomes a completed step. But what has really been achieved?

Our brains love to name stuff and a name can feel like the same thing as an understanding. Even more, once we feel like we have an understanding, we tend to stop inquiring. And so, a psychiatric diagnosis can really become an illusion that we know and understand, just as so much of our thinking builds versions of our life that can be mistaken.

Consider this: In this sense of a diagnosis being a label and a concept, we might see that we 'diagnose' ourselves and others all the time. When we say "I'm bored", "He's an idiot", "No one cares about me", "I'm unhappy in my marriage", we're diagnosing. The problem again is just letting this concept or this label stand as if it's adequate and complete.

The idea here is that when we obtain a diagnostic label, it activates this tendency of mind to embrace or get stuck on the label and to not look further.

Our reliance on medication and on diagnosis may lead to passivity and a degree of retreat from looking at our lives. We go to the doctor for something to make it better. The drug companies love it and it's easier work for our doctors, but the evidence is that long-term resolution is infrequently achieved. We're not a very happy culture. We're the richest in the world but we're suffering richly.

There is no adequate or equivalent substitute for paying honest and open attention to our lives. On receiving a diagnosis we may stop paying attention to the immediate and remote experiences that our mind and body have ingested or are ingesting still which could be a crucial part of our problem. We may stop paying attention, we may stop looking and knowing about our lives more deeply and how we are in relation to the things we've experienced. Our natural abilities to sort out our lives shut down if we don't let our experiences 'come on line'. Maybe sometimes that's why we want some diagnosis, so that we can have the illusion of knowing and to then stop looking, and just shrug.

Being given a medication may have the same effect. It becomes about the drug working and how the drug is doing, and we go on vacation from ourselves.

So let's say it again - we have to pay attention to our lives. And if we have children, we have to pay careful and honest attention to their lives, too.

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When We Suffer Abusive Treatment - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Dr. David Lykken of the University of Minnesota says that the evidence tells us "that most of the 1.4 million American men currently languishing in prison would have grown up to be tax-paying citizens and acceptable neighbours if they had been switched in the nursery and sent home with a mature, law-abiding married couple rather than with their biological parent or parents". By "mature" he's referring to parents who love and care for and protect their children.

The complex harm to psychological development caused by child abuse and neglect sets a course for a big range of big problems - relationship instability, violence, addictions, physical and mental health problems, you name it.

The neglect and abuse of children is a product of generations of conditioning. If you want to shine a light on why a parent may be rarely or persistently abusive or neglectful, you'll often glimpse the next layer of insight by looking at the parent's parents, and then at their parents.

When we, as children, suffer abusive treatment and a life that feels dangerous we all reflexively use what we have to protect ourselves and to just survive. Leaving home or calling a responsive grown up is not always an option that a distressed child can muster. Kids are often left to their own meagre adaptations to manage their life.

One protective adaptation is for kids to pay careful and ongoing attention to the abusive parent. Kids can then shift their own behaviour in order to modulate the state of mind of the distressed parent. By "being good" somehow, some control and safety may be had. And the felt reason is to be safe, to be accepted, if not loved.

But vigilance is not just something someone does now and then - it becomes a way of living born of the need to be safe. So paying rigid attention to the Other becomes a deeply ingrained pattern for distressed kids, a habit that we don't even know we're strengthening through repetition. It's automatic. And we grow up that way.

To not pay attention to the Other but to pay attention to yourself can be dangerous because when the guard gets let down you might be open to a new kind of attack. Scolding "What's wrong with you?" would do the job, but sharper sticks are easily at hand. The internal reaction to one's own emotion then becomes complicated instead of being one of acceptance. Kids may be 'taught' to feel ashamed of their own emotions, and so there can develop an internal sense that our own emotion is wrong, bad, awful, disgusting.

And so yet another way we commonly protect ourselves is by keeping our emotion hidden even from ourselves. Children experiencing frequent fear may use and over use their natural ability to space out, slipping away from awareness to nothingness. No feeling, no problem. An emergent problem here is that children don't learn about their emotions and how to tolerate, regulate and know them, a problem which can extend through adulthood.

These and so many other ways of protecting ourselves and trying to get needs met become an automatic way of life that we carry on into adulthood. The emotional infrastructure from childhood results in the understandable tendency to live our adult life with other people in ways that are similar to our developmental history.

Our development doesn't end with childhood. Hopefully those unfortunate early relationships will be supplemented by the loving aunt or teacher or friend's mother, or by later healthy relationships that help to undo the earlier abusive conditioning. It is indeed never too late to face and to work on your life.

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Projection - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Lights! Camera! Action!

The bright beacon behind us delivers the images to the screen. We know that what we're seeing is something that was recorded to film some while ago. But here it is now, right there, and we squirm or cry or cheer or boo.

Good movies are compelling because they pull us in and we react as if to reality.

OK, cue the psychologist.

Our own life, our own history, which was also recorded some time ago, is something that we project into new moments all the time. But because the projector is invisible to us and because we live in the theatre of life all the time, the actual projection of our past onto the present isn't noticed during our usual, day-to-day activity. Let's look at some examples.

Do you ever think you know what other people are thinking? Can we ever really know what's on someone else's mind? It seems to me that we have a hard enough time knowing our own thoughts and motives. 'Knowing' what someone else is thinking is really our own thinking being projected on to someone else, and we then laugh or cringe or judge.

Some people react to mishaps in traffic, such as a bad lane change, with anger, feeling like it's a personal inconsideration. It takes a mindful moment to realize that people just make mistakes and that our anger is about our mind, not someone else's evil intent. A similar, scary scene is of men glaring at each other in bars, challenging "What's your problem?" if someone looks at them - it's like their past abuser needs to be confronted in each moment.

We assign motives and make attributions about things all the time. These come from our mind, as we construct our reality. Parents may react to what their teen or even their toddler does as if their child is defying them in some profound way, when the child may be simply responding to his own wishes to be with friends or just exploring her world.

Is love at first sight not a full on projection, perhaps keeping us from taking a second look? Isn't dread of future disasters, a.k.a. anxiety, a projecting out in time of our past pain?

Here's some hard science: A functional MRI brain imaging study in the 2010 journal Emotion found that the sadness we feel watching a sad movie clip (think Terms of Endearment) is accompanied by activation in "cortical areas that are characteristic of cognitive elaboration, increased self-focus, and ruminative problem solving that would be typical of reappraisal processes". Translation: We relate to the movie with what we know about ourselves. What's more, another group of subjects who had completed a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course showed much less of that "It's About Me" cortical activation, although they felt just as sad and even read their body signals of sadness more vividly.

I have no doubt that it's healthiest for us to take a more discerning role in our life, perhaps as the director (if you're not too tired of this metaphor by now). Paying attention helps us to keep that boundary between us and the rest of life, and to better see what's actually going on.

When you've been watching a scary movie, have you noticed yourself pulling out of the movie from time to time in order to calm down your fear, reminding yourself that the film isn't real - "It's just a movie!" We manage our fear with mindful awareness, and then laugh at how we get pulled in. As Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot just by watching", and if we watch ourselves we'll find a lot to laugh about.

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Take a deep breath...

The profoundly dirty secret came out recently that upwards of 1000 U.S. Veterans attempt suicide every month. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and inadequate help are frequently a part of their misery. This tidy label, PTSD, references the horrendous human burden and infinite complication caused by witnessing and suffering the worst depravities on the surface of our planet - not only in war but at home, school, work.

The forms of trauma are as varied as life itself, including natural disasters through to interpersonal assaults. Physical, sexual, emotional and verbal abuse, accidents and injury, sudden loss, bullying, harassment, betrayal, rape, genocide, terrorism, war - it's quite a list. Age, severity, frequency, history and variety of traumatic exposure, and interpersonal complexities all matter. Falling down the stairs is far more traumatic if you were pushed. Some victims marinade in abuse.

And much more happens psychologically in the injury from trauma than some recording of the event itself. The fact is, trauma may lead to a whole range of adjustment problems affecting our behaviour, emotions, thinking, relationships, physical health and life-course. Because everything is always unique about trauma, in that each unique person with their own unique history experiences some unique trauma in their own unique way, the impacts are personal and highly variable. Nonetheless, there do exist general similarities across sufferers.

The tidy list of PTSD symptoms includes (a) unwanted memories of the trauma popping up anytime, (b) our bodies leaping into stress reactions and living lodged in emergency mode, and (c) avoiding anything that might cause (a) or (b) to happen, including our own memories. And life is clouded with uneasiness, all the time. Even when the mind is asleep traumatic memories commandeer our dreaming and physiology. Trauma can relocate your mind and body to a world of felt threat, emergency and despair.

Our recall of our life is most typically an uncomplicated thing. Watch as you answer this: What did you have for breakfast this morning? You'll probably notice that you had a feeling of recalling, and that what you recalled included images and details about which you could talk for some time. These kinds of autobiographical memories are also tagged by the mind-brain with a sense of person, place and time. No one could convince you that that breakfast actually happened yesterday or at some other location.

In contrast, emotional or traumatic memories are felt and relived more than recalled.

Let's imagine taking a veteran of, say, the Vietnam war with us for a summer hike in Algonquin Park. What might our friend experience and do? He might just freak out in response to the dense foliage, the lack of sight lines, the felt sense of mortal vulnerability from possible traps on the trail and threats in the greenery. The experienced threat doesn't match the 'real' risks in the park, but instead reflect the emotional memories that flood in from another time and place, inappropriately.

Unhealed trauma means that the mental tags for place and time are unborn. The neurobiological underpinnings of healing ultimately place trauma in our past, to great relief.

Healing trauma is complicated in part because of the immediate bind between undesirable alternatives. It is our tendency to avoid unpleasant things, which include terrifying memories. I like the metaphor of dealing with slivers. Avoidance, just leaving the slivers (horrible memories) in your arm alone and wrapping them up in dressings (avoiding any reminders), perhaps with some nice local anaesthetic like xylocaine (beer, doobies), gives immediate relief. After a while of one-armed living, punctuated by explosions of pain should the slivers get bumped (reminded), life lectures us that the only wise course is to have the slivers out (to face the memories).

Our incredibly associative mind-brain is a medium for the subtlest of triggers for traumatic memories, jumpy-startle and threat-based anger. Every moment can be seen through a lens of dread, with the threat feeling as real as real can get. And it's so subtle and so unconscious.

Trauma victims may be touched by literally hundreds of thoughts and things each day that prick a memory, sending the mind spinning, the body bolting and life to the crapper.

I was recently talking with a Veteran of many tours, including Bosnia, and his wife about PTSD and these qualities of emotional memory. His wife then connected how he was unduly upset by his present-day neighbour's unkempt lawn with the once mentioned threat of hidden landmines on tour. Bingo! When our mind connects these dots, relief follows because the connections are now seen, their origins located in time and subject to management.

Unfortunately, we don't have any anaesthetics for emotional pain. Skillful courage and skillful support and skillful help to face and open up to past trauma are the right ingredients to heal trauma's injuries. Talk about easier said than done! But suicide and the many other forms of avoidance are not the way.

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Making Decisions - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Many have said that life is about making decisions. Of course, if we are each the master of our own ship, we would chose our own course in life deliberately and wisely, giving our choices the care that they deserve. After all, it is our very life that we're tending and we all want what's best for us.

But how do we really go about making choices in our life?

We know that we're much more skilled in making decisions when we have good existing knowledge. Also, less complicated decisions benefit from conscious deliberation more than complex ones. Decisions made under stress more often take less or too much time and deliberation, using too little or too much of the information at hand.

Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman and others have amassed a big bag of evidence that wags a finger at us, showing that we humans make even simple decisions illogically, emotionally and from the muck of our biases and idiosyncratic conditioning.

There's little question that the past conditions of our life, the repetition of our ways of seeing and reacting, and the present conditions in our life influence our intuitive judgment and Malcolm Gladwell's rapid cognition.

No one would argue that we steer a premeditated course toward any of the many ruinous places that seem to outnumber the 'happily-ever-after' ones. Instead, we may be pulled like a space-station by the steady gravity of invisible forces into lower and lower orbits around trouble. Another way to look at how the illusion of deciding about the directions in our life develops is to consider a domino of reactions, rippling forward over the moments.

Who in their right mind would have an affair, cheat the law, hurt loved ones, court addictions, embrace hobbling debt or veer toward pain. Well, rather quite a few of us. Actions often precede awareness, and our actions can be doozies. Although we might feel confident, this confidence might be just a feeling of mastery that precedes seeing the real situation accurately.

If we stop and review what guidance we have had in learning about making decisions, for many of us the education has been meagre. For the majority of us, many major life 'decisions' seem to be less a matter of clear deliberation under the sun of brave honesty and thorough review of the issues at hand. While reason and logic may make cameos while we navigate choices, in the company of some amount of conscious agonizing, the reality is that much of our unconscious nature acts as our guide to choices that determine the eventual landmarks of our lives.

The forks in the road are more often navigated by processes outside of our awareness. We may be like passengers looking out the window at aware moments, exclaiming about the dangers or that we like what we see, yet submitting to the general course set by some unseen driver. Maybe that's why blaming someone else can be so easy.

When we meet choices and crossroads, sometimes doing nothing for a while may be our best course of (non)action. You could try that with one of the decisions that's stalking you these days. When we take some time we may become acquainted with the underlying motives, unmet needs or emotional imperatives that highjack choice. Distinguish between wants and needs. Filter out irrelevant and distracting issues. Look in the mirror to discern whether some choice reflects an aversion to some discomfort or pain that we're better off to face and know more clearly. Boredom, anger, insecurity, ego, feelings of entitlement and fantasy can push up impulsive 'solutions' like mushrooms from old soil - not all of them edible, if you know what I mean.

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Police - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

"There are not enough good things said about the people that put themselves in harm's way every day for us. What does that say about us?" wrote Julie Hébert.

Police (and Fire and Ambulance personnel) keep us safe from ourselves and clean up our messes. They respond to the results of human pain and depravity, accidents and mistakes and mindless hurrying and inattention, suicides, crimes of passion or planned crime assisted by opportunity. You and your loved ones would not be safe or subject to being saved were it not for our police.

Many of us have acquired our understanding of police work and life chiefly through the lens of movies and TV. We might look up from time to time and remind ourselves that TV is not a faithful presentation of reality. It's entertainment, the News too, developed to make money when advertisers buy commercial time. Our minds tend to immerge into, or merge with, the stuff on the screen.

Police work, on the other hand, is an immersion into the often unseen reality around us that is not in any way for the faint of heart. Police spend about 80% of their time with that 20% of the population who are the most tragic and unfortunate among us, and who are often violent, addicted, abused and suffering terribly. They expose themselves to situations and conditions from which most of us would run. Police enter worlds foreign to most of us, the world of the abused child or spouse, of shocking suicide, of those who've been raped, beaten, cheated; they witness the hatred among us, the damage done by people to other people.

"How was work today, dear?"

Police have huge hearts. I've seen their pain and their dedication to doing the right thing, to protect us and to catch the bad guys that would otherwise do us harm. They care deeply about their city and the people and families and businesses and brick and mortar that make it up.

If we know that our soldiers are risking everything that they have to serve Canada in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we need to also know that police embrace huge personal risks for our wellbeing. On a ride along I've seen female officers wade in to a stew of drunks fighting in a dark alley, replacing chaos with order and safety (although the drunks surely thought less of it). Even so, police work may not be the physically most dangerous job in the world, but it is one of the most emotionally dangerous jobs out there.

The work may be dull and passive or hyperactive and pressured in the extreme, changing abruptly without forewarning. If you know the exhaustion of vigilance, straining to influence outcomes as though through hope and thought alone, hour upon hour, you might know part of the burden that accompanies investigation or search and rescue.

A recent paper in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior confirms what all officers lament, which is that the uncivil, discourteous, and disrespectful behaviours by the public are a significant source of their stress.

I've heard some of their examples of how the public behaves and you have to shake your head. The public sometimes acts like a teenager in full huff, biting the hand that helps them. Suffering undeserved abuse by an ungrateful public is terribly ironic and rather inhumane. But then it's a cop's job, as it a parent's, to be polite and patient and to labour emotionally (another stressor).

Please, be an adult with our police. Practice courtesy, play nice, say thank you and respect that they are people doing a very difficult job - for you! And if you offend in some way and get caught, remember, it's your fault.

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Psychological Conditioning - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Long ago, in a land far, far away, a grown man named Ivan Pavlov rang a bell before he gave hungry dogs some food. He did this after noticing that the dogs began to salivate whenever they saw his assistant, who was the one who always brought them their meat. After the bell was paired with the food a few times the dogs would salivate just to the ring of a bell.

This type of learning (we call this classical conditioning) changes some physical or emotional system that we can't intentionally control. Other kinds of learning effect voluntary systems, but in life the two are always jumbled up together, inseparable.

Generally, when one thing possibly signals another, a common reaction is forged in our body-brain-mind. Evolution has ensured that just the whiff of a known predator will evoke the original behaviour and stress reaction. In this way, our past is carried forward, sometimes like an invisible hitch-hiker and sometimes as a known companion.

We don't condition ourselves any more than those dogs decided that slobbering to a bell would be cool. We're conditioned by the events in our life. Our body-brain-mind is always "on" for learning, a super-absorbent system soaking up significant events, and soaking them up so richly and deeply that we actually embody the significant events of our life.

Conditioning can happen way outside of our awareness. For example, an established finding is that our immune system can be conditioned. If rats are given a novel sweet drink paired with a tasteless drug that suppresses the immune system, the later offering of that sweet drink minus the drug brings about the same immune suppression. 'Remembering' bad food and bad situations through conditioning for the rest of our days is a big survival advantage.

Advertizers vigourously work these animal abilities, conjuring money (from our pockets!) through conditioning. Ad repetition, product packaging and placement, trend-peer pressure, pairing products with sex, social status and success, even humour, all have the desired effect.

Have you ever thought, "Why did I do that?" When what we want and what we do conflict, we have a purer moment in which to behold the power of conditioning. It's spooky to become aware that what we think may be very different from how we've been conditioned. Don't believe everything you think, but do believe that what you think and do may be an echo of past conditioning.

If all of the emotional and stressful moments of your life trigger learning, imagine just how much conditioning has taken place! Conditioning establishes our tendencies to avoid and to pursue. Habits, phobias, worrying, our self-concept, our patterns of thought and how we evaluate things are shaped by conditioning. The whirl and convolutions of our conditioning shape our dynamics.

We would quite simply be extinct if we did not retain the physical and emotional and sensory representations of dangerous and threatening experiences. Even though we don't suffer the same grim threats as our forebears, life leaves it's impressions in the same ways. Conditioning charts a course of reactions when similar moments come up later. Conditioning means we're more like Velcro that Teflon. For all of us, it isn't a question of whether we've been conditioned by life's pain, but by how much. As Wavy Gravy (the Grateful Dead's official clown) says, we're all bozos on the same bus!

For all of us, our minds (and bodies) have unavoidably and without a doubt been deeply conditioned by past experience. It reminds me of the caution that you'll find on your car's passenger side rear view mirror - Objects (from your history!) May Be Closer Than They Appear.

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Christmas - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

What Scrooge might have said but which Dickens wrote elsewhere (A Tale of Two Cities) seems to apply to the Christmas season for many of us: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us".

The Christmas season is trans-sensory. The music, lights, aromas, tastes and new winter's chill encourage heart-glow. Messages bloom about togetherness. The scent of love and goodwill mingles with mistletoe. People come together to celebrate their knowing of one another and the bounty of family and friendship.

Our culture has taught us since birth a felt sense of what is important for Christmas and the Holiday Season. But on the other hand, we have to be careful that what we actually do and get involved in and realize during this time of year is not unhealthy.

For many people the danger of hope is felt most acutely at this time of year. It's a problem for people who feel separate, injured and remote from the happiness that others and the season itself prescribes.

A recent study found that non-celebrants (e.g., Sikhs, Buddhists) felt some decrease in well-being in the presence of Christmas decorations. A follow-up study found that reduced feelings of inclusion explained the change in well-being. Dominant cultural symbols in a culturally diverse society, even those that carol good-will toward everyone, may unintentionally serve to alienate and depress.

And from the 'No surprises here file' come the findings from a paper in which children's letters to Santa were analyzed. They report that the majority of letters pleaded wants and desires, with a minimum of needs and hopes and dreams conveyed. The researchers concluded that "this implies that for children Christmas seems to be a rather unspiritual festival concerning having things rather than dreams coming true". The spirit of post-modern consumption conditions the cradle-to-grave splurging that advertizers are shooting for, embodied in the U.S. Black Friday - but more than the Friday seems to be so blackened.

People spend money like there's no tomorrow. The problem is that there is a tomorrow, Virginia, and it brings bills of Christmas past. Is there freedom and choice here? To spend more than we have or more than we can afford creates a stress that we all know too well. Being realistic is always a gift to our health, and particularly so with our finances at this time of year. If your children's wish lists are beyond what is appropriate financially or otherwise, an opportunity presents itself to talk with them about money and the greater meanings in life.

Jolly Old Saint Cynic-less may not see the sad truths and cultural dramas that play out at this time of year. But the seasonal spirit and the hope it promotes undoubtedly nudge a prevailing positive shift. Surprisingly, I couldn't find any recent research showing the healthfulness of Christmas but one. A large British study reported that people suffering family and partner relationship problems and social isolation commit deliberate self-harm less during the week of Christmas. But people who episodically used alcohol spiked a 250% increase in self-harm on New Year's Day.

The heartfelt gift of the seasonal values of goodwill, love, compassion and generosity is the wisdom and light that can't be bought. If only those values were avidly promoted year-round; a New Year's resolution, anyone?

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Resolutions for Change - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

The New Year resolution is a healthy but often unsatisfying cultural ritual. The Rez may cause more dread than hope because most of us know it as the humbling half-serious failure with which we start each New Year. Ugh! More often, we just think, "Why bother!" Even so, the Rez comes to mind each year as a taunt, "Do I have what it takes to do it?"

Let's look at this from a couple of new angles and see if we can't rehabilitate the Rez.

Right up front, notice the 'solution' in resolution. Ah, so what's the problem? Is something wrong? Yup, because all resolutions are about desired healthy change. It's the wise ounce of prevention. Unfortunately, as we all know, changing anything about how we live isn't easy. It turns out that the Rez is a light-hearted approach to a very difficult undertaking, like entering the Tour de France on a whim (I must resolve not to exaggerate things so!). And there you have my axe to grind, that the Rez has had the paradoxical effect of teaching people that they can't really change (or win the Tour de France).

Well, I'm here to tell you that we sure can change. But change is easier when you know in advance that it's harder than you'd think.

Making durable and sustained change (not of the three week variety) is really about making a change in how we're living. After all, we wouldn't be making a resolution if we were fully content with the job we were doing.

Change and the Rez point to some unknown and unpractised world, a way of living that is unfamiliar. We want to do something new. Because it's new, we haven't learned to live in that way yet. It's not yet automatic and customary. As long as something isn't automatic and habitual, attention and vigilance are absolutely essential.

Like a radio station pumping out hits from the past, our mind pumps out tempting 'reasons' to drink or smoke or eat or lay around. It's not because our mind in some way wants or is designed to keep us from doing what's better for us, it's because our mind more easily does what it's always done.

It's our nature to do things on automatic pilot. The moment we become unaware, we revert to our automatic patterns, our established ways, our habits. If your Rez is targeting fast-food, watch how your mind greases the way to those fries with quick casual permission, rationalizing like a pro. If we're paying attention and aware then we can play the superhero and defeat the automatic thought. This can be an epic fight sometimes, a fight which we get better and better at with practice. That's the point of the Rez, it needs to be practiced over and over. Fall down nine times, get up ten. The key is being aware and catching the automatic foe red-handed. But you have to know that being unaware is too easy, partly because when we're unaware, we're unaware that we're unaware.

So another thing that we have to get ready for is those moments of truth when our resolution stands in the spotlight. We have to be ready for the unfamiliarity of it. Notice that we have deeply engrained habits to recoil from unfamiliarity. We have to see that it's unfamiliar and that this unfamiliarity is the place where change happens. Effort is expended to do the things that we haven't yet learned to do automatically. We may worry about failing at these moments. But looking at that worry each time is exactly the thing to do. It's just a fear, and if it isn't confronted it will take over and take you places literally against your will. Embody the 'resolute' in resolution!

I love how Wendell Berry put it:

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey."

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Cycle of Badness - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

How do we become psychologically troubled? Oh, let me count the ways...

For some of us the seeds of our most harmful and simultaneously puzzling behaviours were sewn so long ago that it makes sense that we may not now clearly see how we got here.

As a general example, let's suppose that as a little one, doing the things that a little one does, we're scolded by an overly stressed parent, perhaps even a young parent who is still rather unresolved about his or her own life. What if we hear, "What the hell's wrong with you!", or "You just make me sick", or "You stupid brat". And we hear some number of those judgments with some frequency, because an unresolved parent may be unresolved for years. Being overwhelmed and bursting out with angry verbal smacks is a regrettable and unintended pattern that a stressed parent may have.

As little people we internalize the things we hear. If these big people tell me I'm bad, then, ouch, I must be bad. As the negativity continues the message of badness is strengthened, conditioning deeper feelings. A growing mind also explores this badness, a self-protective curiosity that helps with learning about the conditions and contingencies of badness.

In time a young one may do bad little things to see what happens, testing their standing in their relationships. It might unfold that 'bad behaviour' is met with some greater frequency of more or different scolding, with neglect or with surprising understanding, making the mystery more complex and more important to explore.

Our 'badness' becomes something that we begin to participate in, born of our essential emotional curiosity, and a dynamic cycle spills forward. With more negativity, withdrawal or resentment and anger become the roommates of the question about our badness and whether we're loveable. Being 'bad' may look rebellious, but it's often a litmus test, with the 'proof' of how loveable we are residing with the one(s) who does the judging. Kids and teens may so test and do scary things secretly. Some number of those secret things may be discovered and the judgment cycle creaks forward again.

If the pain and question about our badness remains unresolved and is carried forward into our teens and young adulthood, we may find that we're still doing bad things like drinking, taking drugs, skipping responsibilities, having random sex, vandalizing. Seeking acceptance by peers gains even greater importance, as if they have the power to give us value. Independence and dependence, acceptance and rejection, good and bad, self-determination and helplessness, now and then - borrowing from Cormac McCarthy, if this isn't a mess it'll do until a mess gets here.

Lots of research shows that when we have been mistreated as kids we are much more vulnerable to developing substance, psychological, physical and social problems later. Also, because most 'bad things' can provide 'good feelings' from their direct effects or from temporarily decreasing stress, 'bad things' can become a life-feature, a habit.

We hopefully reach the point in our development where we are able to look at our life and 'discover' our own responsibility for what happens to us next. When we see that we have been carrying the question and exploration of our badness and of being judged forward, we realize at last that we have different options. "Ah, I'm hurting myself here! If I do something that's bad for me, of course dad/mom/teacher/boss will disapprove. It's really about me doing something bad to myself."

That one's life is up to oneself is a pivotal developmental epiphany.

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Help From Einstein - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Einstein was not simply a physicist. He offered wisdom for all seasons of life and existence. At one time the whole world looked to him for guidance, like an oracle. He said that his genius was to look in to things deeply and to see with an uncommon clarity untethered to what we think we know. Let's have an annotated look at some of his wise equations to get some ideas about searching our own life's dark matter.

"A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be." Women too! The difference between looking and thinking is the wisdom here. We can get quite caught up in thinking that things are a certain way because our own thinking seductively feels true. Thinking is undoubtedly a powerful and transformative ability, but we can get hijacked by it. A partial inventory of problematic types of thinking includes thinking that is self-critical, catastrophic, magical and superstitious, irrational, anxious, prejudiced, delusional, counterfactual, dysfunctional, ruminative and dogmatic. Instead, if we can remember to just stop and look and accept things as they are, we're then better set up to work with what's true. Lotteries would disappear.

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Most disputes with a loved one are not resolved by more disputing. Usually what breaks a dispute is one person shifting and softening in some compassionate way, suddenly seeing the other person instead of clinging to their own rigid view. Thinking can keep us from foraging elsewhere. Recall that anxiety (future thinking) and depression (negative thinking) are epidemic.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Thanks for the diagnosis, Albert! Sometimes we think and think and think, going to absurd lengths to try to divine what someone is going to do or why they said a certain thing. And we keep on thinking, unsettled that we don't know. Maybe if we realize that it's true that we can't know now, we can stress a little less.

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." If that was true in his time, what about today? Technology is now substantially managing our occupational, financial, social and emotional life. The tail might be wagging the dog.

"Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted." This one feels like a big bag of groceries, a candy store. It recalls the sorry bumper sticker, "He who dies with the most toys wins." What matters may not be what we expect, and what we expect may not be what matters. Opening up to look at your life as it actually is, with curiosity and interest, lets you tap in to intuition, feeling and a personal knowing that offers better guidance than any rational accounting of your life.

"Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler." We should be careful with fast fixes, pat answers (sorry to all Pats out there) and prescriptive advice. Oprah knows that weight loss is more complicated than any advice that her show can package.

"One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." This is perhaps one of the most optimistic insights of all time. Somehow this universe gave rise to us and to our capacity to know this universe and ourselves. When your life seems incomprehensible, please know that it only seems that way. It might be that, by stopping and looking and accepting things just as they are, it gets a little clearer. When we "Ah ha!" we're suddenly seeing something that's true, and a little of the dark matter becomes instead something that we comfortably know.

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The Ancient Practice of Meditation - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

The ancient practice of meditation is rapidly gaining scientific credibility as a remarkable new - for western societies - means for cultivating psychological and physical health. With coverage of new research last week in the New York Times, the Irish Times and Scientific American, Examiner readers can't be left out!

Western ideas about meditation can be pretty interesting. Very little levitating or astral projection is needed, and you can put away your bed of nails. It's really just about strengthening our attention and awareness. Our attention is like a flashlight beam, capable of being moved around or, instead, focused and concentrated. Meditation simply involves intentionally paying attention in the present moment by focusing and concentrating on some object and trying to sustain that focus from moment to moment. Simple! A common practice is to just watch the sensations of your breath through its cycles. "Simple" becomes challenging very quickly because of one little detail - our mind. The human mind is insanely undisciplined and busy and for most of us it has the attentional muscles of an underfed 98 pound weakling. Try paying steady attention for two minutes to your breath as you feel it, perhaps in your chest or at your nostrils - I'll wait...

...and if you tried it you probably saw how awareness flits or disappears. That little exercise gives us a glimpse of the very considerable underpinnings of stress and emotional disturbance. Our undisciplined mind tends to fret and worry and criticize and distort and excrete disturbance way more than we commonly know. We can't really know what our mind is doing unless we have some way of paying attention to our mind. How can we possibly regulate or realistically come to terms with anything if we don't see it or know about it?

Western neuroscience is revealing that this simple practice is something of a universal exercise machine. Meditation works the meatiest of those neurobiological systems associated with stress and our most human and compassionate abilities. Regular practice is being shown to be associated with improvements in a who's who list that includes the immune system, memory, attention, self esteem, depression and anxiety, cardiovascular risk factors, chronic pain, and addictions including our relationship to food. It may be that the common path to whole person health has to do with emotion regulation and the reduction of the wear and tear of stress.

The piece of research receiving the recent media coverage is from Dr. Sara Lazar's group at the Harvard Medical School, reporting changes in the grey matter in some brain structures after an 8 week mindfulness meditation course. The measured increases in grey matter (from more neurons or brain cells) in the hippocampi may be related to better memory and emotion regulation, and the measured reduction in the size of the amygdale may indicate less fear and reduced stress-susceptibility. Our plastic brain responds to practice and exercise.

One study doesn't provide us with anything that we can be completely sure of. It's the body of scientific work that tells a useful story. The research database that I subscribe to shows that since this past December more than 50 peer-reviewed papers about mindfulness have been published. Even so, the early days of research in any new area will suffer growing pains for many reasons.

Mindfulness is clearly trendy and a hot area for research. The body of neuroscience, medical and stress research appears to be telling us that we can do much to look after ourselves if we mindfully see ourselves. And remember too that the wisdom of this very human practice of seeing "the precision and openness and intelligence of the present" goes back 2500 years and has been echoed by Einstein, Thoreau, Emerson and Jung among others.

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Kids and Sports - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

These days a lot of us are watching the weather-horizon for signs of spring. Spring is our time to thaw and grow. It's also the time when many parents plant their kids in organizations and sports, repeating the patterns of their own childhood or hopeful of the growth that these activities may cultivate.

As you might suppose, a lot of research tells us that being active is a good idea and organized activities are uniquely positioned to foster positive youth development because many kids value this context more highly than school. For kids, self-esteem, body image and social skills can all benefit from participation in sports. Physical activity helps relieve stress and reduces the effects of conditions associated with depression. Kids who exercise are more likely to become adults who exercise. Experiences of skill development and mastery are essential nutrients for conditioning healthy life habits. Kids learn that you can't win them all. They are less likely to smoke and take drugs and girls are less likely to get pregnant.

Sport is a rich medium for promoting development, but it can go badly too. Solid research shows that sport has the potential to increase anti-social tendencies and aggression. The suspension of moral reasoning, the cultural acceptance of violence and aggression in the sport world, and the focus on winning and gaining personal advantage body-check adaptive social learning. When our kids become 'professionalized' the full richness of their involvement may be reduced to goals that translate poorly to the bigger complexities of life.

The research shows that we're naïve to think that sport builds character in and of itself. Teams, coaches and parents may reward demonstrating superiority over others, winning by any means necessary and revelling in the defeat of others. Trash talking is sometimes the first skill acquired.

Coaches and parents who encourage winning by any means might want to step back to fully look at their charge, as complex and apparently contradictory as that might seem. Coaches and parents do well to remind their kids that the other team is just like them, that winning or losing doesn't change our inherent worth and that teaching how to genuinely congratulate and value the 'winner' or 'loser' is better work than teaching trash-talking.

Coaches of our youth who have a singular and emotionally driven need to win need some coaching themselves. A study of a soccer league found that a caring climate on the team is associated with kids having more fun, more positive attitudes and caring towards their coaches/teammates and a greater commitment to soccer. Parents and coaches who have high expectations and who are punitive and controlling will create the conditions that breed fear of failure and poorer performance.

We can't just throw our kids into a sport and then step back and watch the benefits accrue. When sports are run like the Bloods vs. the Crips, what might you think is being cultivated?

The 'how' may be more important than the 'what' in cultivating sport's benefits. The critical earliest years of exposure to sports should emphasize keeping it fun, kind and interesting. Keep it fun or kids will quit.

Nothing is simple. Ongoing parental participation, support and easy talk about the life lessons revealed at practices and games, recitals and competitions, are critical.

And when our kids are nurtured well in sport or dance or competition they can savour cleanly the friends they make, the applause and laughter at the dance recital, almost winning the final, the medal hanging on the bedroom wall, pretending to be Sid the Kid or Hayley Wickenheiser - what beats that?

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Working on Mental Health - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Okay, it's time to do another survey.

"Hands up - who has a mind?" Hmmm, I thought so - everyone believes that they have a mind. "Okay, and now who among you has ever received any guidance or orientation or training in what it means to have a mind and how to work with it?"

When I ask a group this question there's often a unanimous sense that we have never ever been taught or shown what having a mind is all about or how to work with our mind. These questions bring up a realization that there's been this little bitty oversight by our culture - school offers sex-ed but no mind-ed. Actually, there seems to be a cultural taboo against knowing our feelings and against working on our mental health.

So, do you think it would make a difference? Do we need to? Do we want to?

On the latter question, it would seem that we're awash in self-help books, shows and health gurus. These might be cultural indicators that there exists some prevalent condition and that people are hungry for guidance.

We also seem to be flush with psychopharmaceuticals that promise to do the job of adjusting our minds for us. Indeed, pharmaco-genetics is an emerging area of research attempting to develop antidepressants that are tailor-made to suit individual genetic variations.

But what if you prefer to DIY? Wouldn't it be great to drop in to Mind Depot where they say, "You can do it, we can help?"

Given that mind and mental health embrace the working and content of our emotions, thoughts, perceptions, memory, behaviour and physical reactions, it's a broad area that doesn't lend itself to quick, fast-food remedy: "Ya, I'll have a Big Insight, hold the Irony, a side of Wisdom and some Contentment, please."

Our society doesn't have a lot of difficulty with the idea, if not the practice, that getting into better physical condition takes work and dedication and time. Four weeks of effort is just a beginning. We accept the truism that a neglected body is more likely to be an unhealthier body, vulnerable to break down. The development of skills also entails repetitive work. To become adept at guitar or you name it, we have to arrange to practice, working patiently as little gains are earned.

There's good reason to suggest that mental health is essentially similar. Neuroscience is effectively showing us that repeating some healthy (or unhealthy) activity over and over changes the brain tissue that mediates that activity. Want to like yourself better? Want to manage your anger or your depressive thinking?

Research shows that our abilities to hold and regulate emotion, heal trauma, and to pay attention are complexly rooted in a neurobiology that can be strengthened like a bicep. It might be that wisdom, intuition and compassion are skills that can be strengthened.

What might it be like to exercise the capacities of mind to see your mind and, really, to see your life, just as it is? What might it be like to learn to respect and listen to your emotion, rather than to avoid it?

Improving mental and physical health takes intention, practice and dedication. And mental health training takes courage, the emotional equivalent of resistance training, pushing against our massive tendency to avoid discomfort. Mental health won't magically improve. Our relationships take work, our parenting takes work, loving ourselves takes work. If 'being a good person' is living in a way that reflects your deepest values, your potentials, your compassion, your heart, then that's the work.

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Stress Response - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Your stress response is a blind reflex, a call-to-arms (and legs) that animates your critical resources for action when you're threatened.

The grizzly bear cometh and your brain yells to your adrenal gland to release adrenaline and steroid hormones which break out the energy reserves from fat stores. Your heart rate pounds up and blood pressure rises, stretching those rubbery vessels. Body repair and growth systems are suspended and blood is diverted away from your stomach and intestines - no need to digest that meal if the grizzly is digesting you! Blood is instead committed to the big muscles that do the work of fight-flight. Platelets, your bodies Band-Aids, multiply and get stickier and the immune system goes on alert just in case of injury. Ugh, maybe your bladder lets go because those pounds of urine are dead weight. Memory sharpens dramatically with a boost from the steroid hormone cortisol, enabling flash-bulb retention. Your attention and senses sizzle.

This acute stress response can save your life, helping you to take the quickest and most robust action possible. Once the threat is over your body regulates the return to normal, leaving you with some appetite so as to replace the energy used.

You sleep through your alarm and wake with alarm. You realize it's garbage day and angrily organize your offering, feeling time pressured. You fret about being ten minutes late, but find that it's no problem when you get to work. Through the day you spill a little coffee on your shirt (arghh!), bump in to that co-worker you had a tiff with (grrrr!), and realize your library book was due back yesterday (dummy!). At home the dog barfs on the carpet, milk gets spilt and the bills pour in. And so the day goes and perhaps the next one, perhaps each day featuring a staccato of these moments.

Most people want the good news first: The good news is that you've been menaced by exactly zero grizzly bears. The bad news is that your body rockets through the same grizzly reactions, time after time, day after day, a pattern called chronic stress. Chronic stress isn't a constant state but is instead an up-and-down, oscillating course of stress reactions. It's not at all good and here's why.

If blood pressure flies up and down like the toilet seat, vessels get pounded and stretched too often, losing their rubbery good nature. Little tears in the vessels cause inflammation and those circulating sugars and fats that fuel your big muscles get stuck there and build up over time. Stress causes plaques, vascular problems, bad news. Even the vessels feeding your heart suffer this wear and tear. Very bad news.

Cortisol stimulates appetite after stress and the craving for carbs along with the loss of self-control from the recent upset increases snacking. All that extra sugar and fat from snacking produces insulin, the hormone of plenty, which results in storage of our excess. When fat cells get too full, they become insulin resistant (hello Type II diabetes), and leave those abundant sugars and fats in the blood, where they can add to plaques.

The stress-based combination of hypertension, blood vessel resistance, elevated blood sugar and insulin resistance all interact. Oh, and that fat we store around our middle also acts as a kind of endocrine gland, chemically signalling for more inflammation. Oh, great! More inflammation will just encourage more sticky build up at those sites in our vessels that have been hurt by the hypertension.

I'll bring you more in the weeks ahead about ways in which we can protect against the damage caused by chronic stress after we look even further into stress and how it impacts us.

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

Our body's multifaceted stress response mobilizes our inner resources for all that life throws at us. Last time we overviewed how the chronic demands and hassles of our modern life may repeatedly turn on physical stress reactions, which can add up to big wear-and-tear trouble.

Today, let's look at stress in children. Do infants and children suffer problems related to stress too?

The answer is a very certain yes and we can push the clock back further to include the period of foetal development. Research shows that a pregnant woman's experience of stress is communicated to the foetus.

You don't want to be a stressed foetus. Maternal stress in mice delays the physical development of the foetus. Human babies of stressed mothers have a lower weight and are shorter babies. Underfed pregnant women have babies who have adjusted to their meagre nutritional circumstances to become very thrifty with any nutrients they receive. They secrete insulin quickly and so store away extra nutrients quickly. This essential adjustment continues through life and results in a vulnerability to obesity and diabetes later.

In fact, the die may be cast in early development for many problems later in adulthood, an area of research called Foetal Origins of Adult Disease. Like an echo, our early environment can establish a trajectory for life-long problems. Some of the dark clouds on the stressed infant's horizon include a poorer regulatory response to stresses, greater levels of anxiety, problems with learning and memory and an array of medical issues.

Infants respond with stress to many novel situations. Six month olds react with stress to baths and medical examinations, but these reactions diminish if no harm is done. Because infants know zip about the world, anything that is novel can be stressful because any new stuff could be dangerous.

Infants react with stress to disruptions in their relationships too. For example, when a parent gives a neutral expression to their infant's emotional response, the infant demonstrates a physiological stress response. A paper in Biology Letters last year reported that 6 month olds have more cortisol in their saliva (a measure of stress) after their parent stares blankly twice for two minutes. When these infants were brought back to the scene of the crime the next day, but with their parent acting normally, they again showed increased cortisol levels. The infants' "Uh oh, here we go again" reaction on the second day anticipated changes in their relationship.

Children's stress response turns on in reaction to parental anxiety, changes in attentiveness and general parenting style because these relationships are nothing less than their lifeline.

If you're a parent it may be difficult to read this without your own cortisol levels moving up! Child development is a bumpy road and the stress response is one part of a vast company of adaptations that help kids develop adaptive resilience and learn about their external and internal worlds. It's normal. Just as with baths and medical exams, if nothing bad happens, it's not a problem. The fact is that the bumps are occasions for exercising healthy resilience. When kids have an adequate, safe and secure base - the healthy parental attachment - which supports their quick return to homeostatic balance, bumps are fine.

The concern is with chronic dysfunction that causes chronic stress which results in chronic problems.

A violent, unpredictable, cruel, alcoholic or neglectful home will absolutely be a profoundly stressful one for an infant and child, establishing conditioned patterns of behaviour and physical and emotional reaction that will be a part of the child's inheritance for life.

Addressing any of this can begin at any time. We have a huge capacity to come to terms with adversity and to change the established patterns of reaction that are formed in childhood.

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Workplace Stress - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

There are facts and there are fictions in this world of ours, and it's a fact that it's a fiction that an employer can save money and benefit the organization by neglecting the psychological needs of its workforce.

The value of looking after one's employees derives not just from the wisdom of the ounce of prevention equalling the pound of cure. In complicated and time-lagged ways people respond to another's caring with caring, to generosity with generosity, to effort with effort. People shine and are most likely to bring you their best in a climate of interpersonal acceptance and respect.

That might be all you need to remember and practice to save your business a boat load, but let's look at some of the details just the same.

The costs of stress are exceptionally difficult to measure thoroughly, but they are clearly well in excess of $12 billion a year in Canada and are estimated to be about $7500 per worker per year in the U.S.

Because most organizations do not have their accounting tuned in to the bottom line costs of employee stress, big financial hits may be taken unknowingly. And the hits can come from many quarters, so to speak, reflecting the diversity of ways in which stress and our mental health affect our functioning. Lost productivity due to sick time, injury and low morale can be considerable.

Stress is the most significant factor driving absenteeism, grievances and (in the USA) worker compensation claims. Under stress and preoccupied with problems, we pay attention more poorly and so become more vulnerable to accidents.

Low morale is associated with higher levels of heart disease and depression. Morale problems can eat holes in motivation and goodwill. Low morale disables efficiency in many ways and increases the likelihood of maladaptive and destructive behaviours, and of poorer workplace relationships and team involvement. Some related workplace conditions such as aggression, bullying and social control are particularly noxious.

And how costly is it when valued and expensively trained but disgruntled employees leave an organization, which then further requires the recruitment and training of replacements?

The research is clear: Workers who feel that their organization is concerned with their well-being will respond with increased citizenship behaviours, enhanced commitment to their work and superior performance. It's essential for the health of the organization that managers become aware of these contingencies instead of persisting in an alliance with values that are so Charles Dickens.

The idea that an organization is actually a complex, interdependent system is definitely not old school. But it affords a managerial perspective that recommends looking with rapt interest into the psychological health of one's organization.

A 2010 paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology distilled the essential findings of over 200 studies and concluded that, "a supportive environment was the most consistent job resource in terms of explaining variance in burnout, engagement, and safety outcomes". This finding was consistent across industries.

Contented employees are more productive, reliable and creative. Paying attention to the conditions that give rise to that contentment is a win-win and an advantageous business strategy.

A safer, more motivated and healthier workforce will help everyone sleep better at night, literally and figuratively. With better morale employees are more flexible around change and more likely to cooperate to help the common good.

A Gallup study concluded that, "If workers' emotional needs are met, they become engaged with their companies, and their productivity, profitability, retention rate, and safety rate increase. They even get sick less often." Otherwise, 'Nice doing business to you' might be the message employees get from their workplace.

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

Chronic stress messes with your mind.

Sitting like tuques atop each of our kidneys are our adrenal glands, which sweat hormones such as cortisol when we're stressed. Cortisol and its buddies have a huge portfolio of stress related jobs, and one of them is to regulate how we retain and remember things. They can slide across the blood-brain barrier and influence a whole lot of what goes on upstairs.

The research is pretty clear that the cortisol from momentary stress helps with the formation of memory by acting on brain cells. On the other hand, a lot of cortisol from chronic stress does some very bad things to our ability to learn and remember.

Before going further, let's first have a look at some of the ins and outs, so to speak, of learning and memory. In the brain, learning is largely about strengthening patterns of connections between collections of neurons. Picture the possible patterns of Christmas lights twinkling not just on your house, but throughout your neighbourhood, your city, your country. Learning involves strengthening old and establishing new twinkling patterns.

And here's some really good news. We've learned in more recent years that we normally make new neurons continuously and that this neurogenesis partly supports neuroplasticity and learning. New learning, a stimulating environment and exercise all boost neurogenesis.

So the two big learning processes to keep your eyes on are the making and strengthening of patterns of twinkling connections and the recruitment of new neurons that can twinkle-in as needed.

Acute stress seems to enhance all this precise twinkling very nicely, with cortisol helping to strengthen connections and capitalize on the new recruits.

But wait a minute. I'm not saying that we have to be stressed all the time in order to be at our best for learning. I'm really talking about stress-related learning. If we recall that stress and fear arise under conditions that may be threatening in some way, then a mechanism for super-learning the details around something of life-changing importance is very desirable. Fear conditioning can happen from one encounter and last forever, thanks in part to the boost from stress hormones.

This is why fear conditioning and traumatic memories are so powerfully and durably acquired. Our little brains are full of them.

We might not think that we have any particular memory for emotion. Instead, emotion seems to be some feeling that arises in the present moment, and seems to be faithfully about what is happening in that present moment.

But consider how we can often overreact emotionally to situations and only realize later that we were way out of line. How come!? The 'way out of line' is an emotional reaction that was 'recalled' inappropriately because the new situation was similar in some way to some old distressing and stress-boosted learning. That we might be sensitive, jealous, offended or even terrified at times when the situation doesn't really call for those reactions is a reflection of emotional states being 'recalled', brought out in an active state, at the wrong but related time. An unhealed broken heart can bring rage or recoil without a second thought.

Now let's look at chronic stress. When we experience stress frequently, the bath of cortisol harms brain cells and disrupts neurogenesis. Chronic cortisol is toxic to cells in the hippocampus, a brain structure that is crucial for forming new knowledge. Chronic stress can kill neurons in the hippocampus. Moreover, chronic stress also disrupts the formation of new neurons.

In this way, chronic stress damages the brain and impairs our ability to learn, remember and to regulate our emotion. Chronic stress can push neurons to the edge of a cliff, leaving them more vulnerable to being nudged over. Chronic stress may potentially worsen neurological outcomes from stroke, aging and disease.

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What Causes Depression and Anxiety? - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

What causes depression and anxiety? Many notions have seeped into our collective understanding about how we come to be depressed or anxious. The most common and deceptively simple idea is that these problems result from a chemical imbalance in the brain. Big Pharma promotes this idea so that we might flock to their products to gain relief from our misery, which we often do.

More sensibly for me, the current and promising state of our understanding of the development of depression and anxiety identifies the chronic experience of powerlessness, defeat and entrapment as a prime culprit.

Lots of evidence shows that animals respond physiologically and behaviourally in ways that look a lot like stress, depression and anxiety particularly when social standing is lost. This response is understood to be an adaptive way of dealing with being an underling. A subordinate monkey or wolf is in real danger of death if it signals any challenge to its dominant counterpart. Evolved ways of unplugging from being a threat to a bigger baboon are life-saving. The evidence is that social mammals have evolved wired-in defeat systems.

But when powerlessness becomes a constant in life, these defeat systems get jammed on (hello stress system!), actually causing emotional and physical illness.

How we human animals may come to feel powerless follows from many familiar and persisting external and internal conditions.

Intractable problems at your job, chronic pain and health problems, relationship and financial burdens, bullying and harassment, and so many other conditions can collapse hope.

Also, our consumer culture breathes life into defeat through all of the many unrelenting messages that imply that we aren't rich enough, successful enough or good-enough looking - we can't get no satisfaction! These chronic reminders are all around us, fuelling our wanting brain, and poke deeper insecurities about how we "should" be.

Internally, we may be very caught up in grim habitual ways of seeing and thinking about ourselves. Punishing messages and abuse during childhood and later traumatic events can unconsciously script our internal self-narrative in adulthood. Unresolved early abusive relationships make it more likely that we'll feel and behave with similar powerlessness in our dealings in the adult world. It's a subtle quality of mind, but a very powerful one.

Feeling and thinking chronically that we're unworthy or inadequate are internal conditions that feel uncontrollable, unremitting and inescapable. Perpetually feeling trapped and defeated is a fundamental way in which depression and anxiety arise. And bad coping just keeps us stuck in additional ways and compounds our hopelessness.

It then follows that seeing your life as it actually and presently is can be incredibly liberating, and dissolves the conditions that support emotional problems. Wanting and cherishing what you already have and distinguishing between needs and truly empty wants turns media buy-in to something sadly funny instead of controlling. Seeing our actual situation at work and at home, instead of seeing the view we get stuck in, can reveal empowering options and alternatives.

Coming to terms with past abuse and loss reveals those old self-views to be unfortunate relics that are without present validity.

Strengthening our ability to be mindful enables a clear look at our life just as it is, a look that includes those parts of our life and mind that create the illusion of entrapment and defeat. It's no wonder that mindfulness is being found to be a powerful approach to relieve anxiety and depression.

Mental health is a tough undertaking. We feel a huge inhibition to talk openly about these aspects of life. The shame we hold leads to a hushed privacy, a deep reluctance to face our life and mind and to explore them with the interest and tenacity and delight that they deserve and require.

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On Being Private - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Our culture does a pretty impressive job of teaching us to show each other that we're, "Just fine, thanks". The many ways in which our culture cultivates this kind of individual need to show that there are 'no flies on us' is an interesting subject in itself.

But if we're all really OK, why are sales of psychopharmaceuticals powering through the roof? Why has the habitual use of substances, sex, food, gambling, consuming and shopping, and aggression in all its many forms become so widespread?

The suicides of nice guy-cum-hockey brute Wade Belak and others this past summer point to tragic truths beyond the confines of hockey today. They tell a story about our cultural imperative to be private, to rarely reveal and work with our fears and pain. Most of our private effort to not 'burden' other people with our problems derives from our own fear that the struggles that we have just shouldn't even exist. All of us know the feeling of the social fear of being judged, criticized, ridiculed, dismissed, if we open up - the shame!

This privacy is conditioned by the messages from our ambient culture and intergenerational family history that teach that we shouldn't be suffering; that, ironically, "There must be something wrong with me if there's something wrong with me". This may be one of the most insidious, cruel and pervasively damaging cultural perversions out there!

This privacy and shame arrests the very process that we need to encourage in order to grow and find contentment - it keeps us from dealing with life and our feelings effectively. If, like an enforcer in the NHL, we find ourselves in a career or some situation that causes us pain, and we don't look at that pain and come to understand what it's about, we're trapped. To be trapped or powerless or defeated by life itself is to set up conditions that will often lead to depression.

Our individual and collective capacity to deal well with anything relies substantially on what we know about it. Consider that we need the World Health Organization and dedicated scientists to use all of the tools of science to look carefully in to any new disease threat. They investigate sources of new virus strains, learn about their nature and how they interact with hosts, and ultimately how we might deal with them so that pandemics are averted and lives are saved. Nothing useful can be done about something that we know too little about. And this research has to be done honestly, without contamination from business interests.

Swinging that logic over to our individual lives and mental health plainly indicates that our fears and anxieties must also be looked into, carefully and honestly, instead of ignored. Self-regulation requires self-engagement.

We each have some state of physical health, dental health and mental health, all of which benefit from preventive and remedial care. The products of neglected mental health include abusing our children (which feeds teen suicide), abusing ourselves in a zillion ways, physical illness, divorce, crime, greed.

Intellectual self-analysis is a withered pretender - your mental health most commonly relies on facing and knowing your feelings, learning how and why they arise and learning how to work with them. Just experimenting with lightly touching in to opening up with someone you trust, someone who's healthy and accepting, starts us all in the right direction.

When we try to open up with a friend, a parent, a religious figure, a therapist, we're taking an uncommonly big and brave step. Also, please remember the Golden Rule and watch your judgement, criticism, gossip and the other ways you keep this problem going.

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Texting and Driving - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Here's your Thursday skill-testing question: Put the following three actions in order, from least dangerous to most dangerous - driving while intoxicated; driving while talking on a cell phone; driving while texting. A collection of studies completed over the past six years or so, using simulations and naturalistic situations, indicates that the correct ordering is the one above that you just read. Texting-while-driving results in an approximate 20-fold increase in collision risk!

Now this research is just getting going, so please remember that comparing apples to oranges (does texting your girlfriend during a spat equate to four beers? Six?) takes a lot of work to sort out. But the evidence is crystal clear that if you're not paying full and clear attention while operating a vehicle (or for that matter while operating a chain saw or having an important conversation with someone) then your performance will suffer very significantly, as may your health.

Some recent surveys shows that 20 - 33% of young drivers text when they drive. Many jurisdictions, including Ontario, have banned texting while driving, but some unfortunate effects may have ensued. There's some evidence that the bans on texting may actually increase our vulnerability to having an accident, maybe because texters feel they have to be more awkwardly sneaky to text without getting caught. This just takes even more attention away from what has become the secondary task at hand, driving. Officials in accident-prone Abu Dhabi noted a 20-40% drop in accidents during the BlackBerry outage in October this year!

A potentially valuable question is, what predicts texting while driving? At this time we don't know very much at all about what individual factors may lead some people to forgo safety and to text while driving. I would wager that those who do text and drive would already know intellectually that the act is dangerous. The issue touches in to that more general question and observation, why do we do things that we know are bad for us? We have to recognize that there exist internal influences, of which we may be unaware from time to time, that powerfully compel unhealthy behaviours, with inattentive driving being a case in point. Would being aware of our moment to moment unsafe motives and impulses make us (and everyone else) safer?

Research published this month in the journal Personality and Individual Differences investigated whether people who are more mindful, more attentive to their moment to moment thoughts and feelings, text-and-drive less. They measured mindfulness and texting-while-driving frequency in 231 undergraduates. They also asked each driver to rate themselves on statements such as, "When I'm feeling upset, I send or read text messages to distract myself", to learn about any emotional and attentional motives that may influence texting-while-driving.

The study found that people who are more mindful text significantly less while driving and take more care to preserve their attention, such as by turning their phones off when they're driving. Further, emotional motives seem to be a considerable determinate of many driver's texting. Emotional upset, irritation and social curiosity were more frequently reported as motivators for texting among those who text-and-drive. The more mindful the driver, the lesser the role of emotional motives for texting.

While this is preliminary research, the findings point to the well-established view that we humans are driven to distraction by the internal flurry of emotional events. Parents and friends, as well as occupational health and safety professionals, would be wise to look at the emotional and attentional underpinnings of unsafe actions, and to consider that mindful awareness is a prerequisite to emotion regulation and the wiser mediation of complicated situations.

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Chronic Pain - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

In many cases chronic pain is another example of how brains and bodies change through the repeated interplay of several systems. If you do something over and over, you'll get better at it. Chronic pain can be the neuroplastic outcome of a brain and body that has learned to be in pain and to suffer.

The question might arise of whether chronic pain has a legitimate physical basis or whether it's a psychological issue, and the answer is, yes. Many ingredients are needed to bake a cake, and a lot is baked in to chronic pain as well. The experience of acute physical pain is a result of injury to or illness in some tissue(s) of the body. Pain sensations also activate stress responses, emotions and thoughts.

Acute pain is a good thing because it tells us when something is doing us harm. It's a protective signal that says, "Look out! Something is harming me"!! Because harm is also a threat, pain signals bring in our old friend, the stress system. Pain and stress are the dynamic duo of survival. Stress activates the immune and inflammatory systems, and it gets us energized, tense, edgy and on the look out.

A lasting, painful injury can recruit a cast of players. They rehearse their lines together, polishing their act, playing off of one another. And wouldn't you know it; chronic stress can sensitize our nervous systems to pain signals.

In some cases chronic pain can become a case of 'brain's gone wild'. The mind-brain can become unintentionally 'talented' at being in pain as the cast of players become interlinked, 'texting' each other like teenagers.

When we have a pain-evoking and ongoing injury, we are exposed to ongoing and repeated pain messages about the injury. Our nervous systems can become increasingly on guard, watching for pain, and increased sensitization to pain can develop. Neurochemical changes can lead to nonharmful stimulation producing intense pain. An overprotectiveness develops from these private lessons, and the body-brain learns to react with the same stress and threat, emotion and thought, from a mere nudge or light touch.

As this learning settles in, any one of the players can set the others to howling. A new financial or social surprise can produce stress and pain. The persisting pain and stress can cultivate mood changes. Chronic pain may take centre stage, but there is a strong cast of players also at work.

Stress plays a critical role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. People who are chronically stressed from childhood maltreatment, trauma, loss or difficult circumstances are understandably more vulnerable to developing chronic pain conditions.

Research shows that when we are more accepting of the presence and existence of pain, we're much less catastrophic and feel more control of our life.

It's not a matter of just saying to yourself, "Just stop feeling the pain". That's about as helpful as telling a novice to just play piano. And being hard on yourself just adds to the stress.

Chronic pain following an injury is very real. Damage to tissue is real and may not be subject to complete resolution. Learning to live with chronic pain equates to finding ways to accept it's presence in your life and working with your pain to reduce it's interference. Living with chronic pain involves learning about your stress reactions and facing all of the facets of the experience of pain. Through this exploration, through unwinding the chronic pain learning with new adaptive learning about what's going on, through learning how to regulate your stress, the mind-body can be retrained. Yoga, mindfulness training, relaxation skills, and cognitive therapy are all helpful routes to better living through neuroplasticity.

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Gratitude - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

We read and hear in the media about all sorts of things that we're doing 'wrong', that we should do more of, less of, and on and on. Do we crave some sort of disembodied scolding, the wagging finger expression of some quasi-parental concern for us? Maybe. Or might we be drawn to ideas that may help us to sort things out and to become a little more content and safe in our lives? To this loud chorus I'm going to add my little voice today.

I want to survey for you a body of recent research that has really delighted me. This research would seem to be revealing that marked improvements in our well-being can result from something that we can do even just once a week for only a few moments - just a few moments! Continuing to do this for a couple of months seems to bring about some striking and lasting changes. That the research shows that people have less depression and more contentedness from completing this brief mental activity, which requires less than five minutes a week, is amazing to me.

What could we possibly do with our brain in such a short period of time that would act like a kind of inoculation or correction against all of the other troubling stuff that goes on in our mind? Further, what little act of attention would produce a strong tendency to be less confrontational, more cooperative, kinder and gentler?

And there are no costs, no nasty side-effects or contraindications, does not cause drowsiness or constipation, you can operate heavy equipment and you won't be kicked off a plane for doing it.

Our colleague, Dr. Seuss, prescribed just this balm for the spirit long ago: "It's a troublesome world. All the people who're in it are troubled with troubles almost every minute. You ought to be thankful, a whole heaping lot, for the places and people you're lucky you're not."

Gratitude is a sense of thankfulness and joy for someone or for something you experience, whether a gift, a kindness or a moment of awareness of some natural beauty. Gratitude might be a passing state, but it's also something of a trainable trait, a "life orientation toward noticing and appreciating the positive in life."

Researchers asked people to write one sentence for each of five things for which they feel grateful and to do this once a week for two months. After these two months of keeping a gratitude journal, as compared to control groups, people felt more optimistic, had fewer physical complaints and were exercising more. The changes weren't just subjective because spouses also noticed positive shifts. In other research, people suffering neuromuscular diseases felt happier, slept better and felt more refreshed.

Across ages gratitude increases well-being regardless of personality type. Youth who are more grateful have a higher grade point average, greater life satisfaction and more social involvement. They also have less depression and less envy than their less grateful and more materialistic counterparts; materialism is associated with more envy and a lower GPA.

The positive emotion evoked by being grateful on purpose increases our resilience, it firmly disposes us to be in relation to others with more warmth and it becomes reciprocal very quickly. Expressing your gratitude to your partner encourages mutual positive 'maintenance work' on your relationship.

Gratitude inspires a sense of life being well-lived. Among the elderly, gratitude is associated with a decrease in death anxiety.

Touch in to gratitude regularly. If you're feeling irritated, if you're feeling like your head might explode over some tension or misdeed, a moment of grateful reflection may be the most radiant gift that you can either give or receive.

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Telka • Smith Practice in Psychology

This Being Human

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

Chronic Stress - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mindfulness II - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

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

Quicksand, Serenity and Acceptance - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

The Trouble with Wanting - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Slivers - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Holidays - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

The Genuis of Women - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Attention - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Technology - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Diagnosis - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

When We Suffer Abusive Treatment - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Projection - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Making Decisions - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Police - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Psychological Conditioning - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Christmas - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Resolutions for Change - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Cycle of Badness - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Help From Einstein - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

The Ancient Practice of Meditation - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Kids and Sports - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Working on Mental Health - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Stress Response - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

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

Workplace Stress - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

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

What Causes Depression and Anxiety? - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

On Being Private - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Texting and Driving - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Chronic Pain - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.

Gratitude - by Lee Smith, Ph.D.