July 2011

How to Land Your Kid in Therapy

Published: July 3, 2011

Lori Gottlieb (The Atlantic) asks the question if as parents are we doing too much for our children, and can well meaning parents ruin their children?

Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

Child-rearing has long been a touchy subject in America, perhaps because the stakes are so high and the theories so inconclusive. In her book Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children, Ann Hulbert recounts how there’s always been a tension among the various recommended parenting styles—the bonders versus the disciplinarians, the child-centered versus the parent-centered—with the pendulum swinging back and forth between them over the decades. Yet the underlying goal of good parenting, even during the heyday of don’t-hug-your-kid-too-much advice in the 1920s (“When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” the behavioral psychologist John Watson wrote in his famous guide to child-rearing), has long been the same: to raise children who will grow into productive, happy adults. My parents certainly wanted me to be happy, and my grandparents wanted my parents to be happy too. What seems to have changed in recent years, though, is the way we think about and define happiness, both for our children and for ourselves.

Nowadays, it’s not enough to be happy—if you can be even happier. The American Dream and the pursuit of happiness have morphed from a quest for general contentment to the idea that you must be happy at all times and in every way. “I am happy,” writes Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, a book that topped the New York Times best-seller list and that has spawned something of a national movement in happiness-seeking, “but I’m not as happy as I should be.” Curious? Continue reading

Source: The Atlantic

What happens in the brain when we experience a panic attack?

Published: July 3, 2011

Paul Li, a lecturer of cog­nitive science at the University of California, Berke­ley, explains: Before going onstage to give a presentation, you notice your breathing becomes heavy, your hands tremble and you feel faint. Though frightening, these symptoms are not life-threatening; rather they are indicative of a panic attack.

We know a fair amount about the physiology of a panic attack, but we have only recently started to understand how it affects our brain chemistry. Panic attacks are episodes of intense fear or apprehension. Sufferers often report thinking that they might be dying, choking or going crazy. They may also feel like they are experiencing a heart attack or about to black out. These episodes usually begin abruptly, reach their peak within 10 minutes and end within half an hour.

When people feel stressed, their sympathetic nervous system typically revs up, releasing energy and preparing the body for action. Then the parasympathetic nervous system steps in, and the body stabilizes to a calmer state. If the parasympathetic nervous system is somehow unable to do its job, a person will remain fired up and may experience the heightened arousal characteristic of a panic attack.

Recently researchers have identified certain regions of the brain that become hyperactive during a panic attack. These regions include the amygdala, which is the fear center of the brain, and parts of the midbrain that control a range of functions, including our experience of pain. A study performed by scientists at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College London used functional MRI to locate which specific brain regions kick in when a person senses an imminent threat. They found activity in an area of the midbrain called the periaqueductal gray, a region that provokes the body’s defensive responses, such as freezing or running. Dean Mobbs, the lead author on the study, wrote: “When our defense mechanisms malfunction, this may result in an overexaggeration of the threat, leading to increased anxiety and, in extreme cases, panic.”

By identifying brain regions involved in panic attacks, such studies can improve our understanding of anxiety-related disorders and in turn help researchers find better treatments.

Source: Scientific American

Try Something new for 30 days

Published: July 1, 2011

Small changes are attainable. Is there something you’ve always meant to do, wanted to do, but just … haven’t? Matt Cutts suggests: Try it for 30 days. This short, lighthearted talk offers a neat way to think about setting and achieving goals. Something this author can attest that actually works. For the past 60 days I have been making my own journey . It started as my personal challenge but guess what it has become part of what I do …. I exercise 1 hour a day 6 days a week. Its taken me years of sloth to arrive at this point and all those excuses of not being able to find time, fit it in to my life or even sustain it have melted away. Hey guess what? I found after 30 days its do-able, I love it, and what’s more the added benefit is that I have lost 18 pounds to date!

Source: TED

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