Category Archives: Psychology

Willpower-know what you really want

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Willpower is an instinct everyone has, yet it consists of much more than simply saying “I will’, or “I won’t”. As we move into the third week of the New Year, some of the lofty goals and self-control have vaporized. Don’t despair though;   self-control is only one part of willpower. The ability to remember what you REALLY want, (get out of debt, fit into your clothes, more sleep) is the ability to say “yes” to that particular goal. This is what Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., psychology  lecturer  at Stanford University, whose course, The Science of Willpower, teaches and  which her new book is based on. “To exert self-control, you need to find your motivation when it matters. This is the “I want” power, she writes.

Now Strategies

A student in Dr. McGonigal’s class, a producer, was an e-mail addict. Her behavior disrupted not only her work, but annoyed her boyfriend. The student described her email impulses almost as an itch-she just had to check her email. She was always tense. Her assignment was to catch herself before she reached for her phone. With time, she realized that her impulses had nothing to do with seeking information and was doing nothing to relieve her tension. As she began to notice how she gave in to her impulses, it gave her new control over her behavior. Catch yourself  falling  for your impulses earlier  in the process, and  notice which thoughts or situations might make it more likely that you will give in to your impulses, are strategies that McGonigal  teaches.

Stressed and Sleepless: The Enemies of Willpower

Willpower is essentially a mental muscle, but the body also needs to get onboard. The best intentions in the world can be sabotaged if you are sleep-depraved, stressed, sedentary, have a poor diet, or a host of other factors that sap your energy. Stress is the worst enemy of willpower, McGonigal writes. The  American Psychological Association shows  that 75% of Americans have high levels of stress and 76% of Americans want to improve the quality and quantity of the sleep they get. New evidence shows that poor sleep and stress contribute to poor self-control and focus. How can you harness positive willpower if you are exhausted? Inadequate sleep also contributes to weight gain, high blood pressure, depression, and lowered immunity. Globally, sleep deprivation affects the quality of life of 45% of the world’s population, according to the World Association of Sleep Medicine.

A Willpower Workout

( from The Willpower Instinct. How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of it -by Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D.)

  • Strengthen “I won’t” Power; Commit to not swearing (or refraining from any habit of speech)
  • Strengthen ‘I will” Power: Commit to doing something everyday that you don’t already do just for the practice of building a habit and not making excuses. It could be meditating for five minutes, or finding one thing in your house that needs to be thrown out or recycled.
  • Strengthen Self-Monitoring: Formally keep track of something you don’t usually pay close   attention to. This could be your spending, what you eat, or how much time you spend online or watching TV. You don’t need fancy technology-just a pen and paper.

Above all, believe in yourself and keep your dreams alive in 2012!

Be Present Be Happy

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by CONNIE ARONSON

Buddhists believe you become enlightened when you haven’t a negative thought. Scientists now know that beyond doubt potent physiological states, like anger, envy or blame, affect our health as much as could high triglycerides. Good health is more than the physical habits of our daily lives. How we experience our lives matters. Factors such as isolation, depression, anger, jealousy and hostility, not only rob our true nature of happiness, but can contribute to heart disease. Thoughts can become biology. In her book “The Heart Speaks,” Dr. Mimi Guarneri tells how suppressed emotions, or ones we are unconscious of, or just simmer on the back burner indefinitely, eventually manifest as physical symptoms. She illustrates how emotionally stressful events, particularly anger, precede and may even trigger the onset of a heart attack.The story goes: a man is driving on a highway listening to the radio, when suddenly there is an announcement: “On the 401, a man is driving in the wrong direction. Use extreme caution.” He looks around and says: “Only ONE person is driving in the wrong direction? There are hundreds of them going in the wrong direction!” Isn’t it so easy to point a finger, get angry, or blame the other guy? Nawang Gehlek Rimpoche, the grand nephew of the 13th Dalai Lama, in his book, “Good Life Good Death,” sites the dichotomy: we are all basically beautiful human beings, but our particular behavior and attitudes can get in the way of our happiness.

The heart has an electromagnetic current 60 times higher in amplitude than the field of the brain. It also emits an energy field five thousand times stronger than the brain’s. What, Guarneri asks, if it’s not the brain telling the heart what to feel, but the heart informing the rest of the body? What if, she asks, changing the mind actually involves changing the heart? How can we stop pointing to the other guy, and be here in the present, to allow more happiness in our lives?

Radiate love and appreciation

Anger-provoking situations play havoc on heart rate responses and blood pressure, as we all know. Levels of a protein, IL-6, a maker of inflammation that may cause arterial thickening, and the stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine also kick in to push cholesterol and blood sugar levels higher. The heart and nervous system rhythms’ become chaotic, adversely affecting the whole body. Positive feelings, such as love and appreciation produce heart-rhythm coherence, and increased harmony and health, Guarneri writes. Since the heart is the most powerful oscillator in the body, it has the capacity to synchronize other organs in unison. Heart-rate patterns shift to orderly ones when a person enters a loving, appreciative state, she writes. Forgiveness, optimism and gratitude, topics she says would have been dismissed as irrelevant in medical school, are as much a part of heart disease equation as blood levels. A shift in our thinking, filled with gratitude, can help us connect to something larger than our individual experiences, whether to others, nature or a higher power. May this New Year be filled with happiness and big love.

Connie Aronson is an ACSM Health & Fitness Specialist and an IDEA Elite Certified personal trainer. She is located at the YMCA and High Altitude Fitness in Ketchum, Idaho.

Be present, be happy

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A good life: Love & happiness The story goes: a man is driving on a highway listening to the radio, when suddenly there is an announcement:” On the 401, a man is driving in the wrong direction. Use extreme caution.” He looks around and says: “Only ONE person is driving in the wrong direction? There are hundreds of them going in the wrong direction!” Isn’t it so easy to point a finger, get angry, or blame the other guy? Nawang Gehlek Rimpoche, the grand nephew of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, in his book, Good Life Good Death, sites the dichotomy: we are all basically beautiful human beings, but our particular behavior and attitudes can get in the way of our happiness.

Buddhists believe that you become enlightened when you haven’t a negative thought. Scientists now know beyond a doubt that potent physiological states, like anger, envy or blame, affect our health as much as could high triglyceride. Good health is more than the physical habits of our daily lives. How we experience our lives matters. Factors such as isolation, depression, anger, jealousy and hostility not only rob our true nature of happiness, but can contribute to heart disease. Thoughts can become biology. In her book The Heart Speaks, Dr. Mimi Guarneri tells how suppresses emotions, or ones we are unconscious of, or just simmer on the back burner indefinitely, eventually manifest as physical symptoms. She illustrates how emotionally stressful events, particularly anger, precede and may even trigger the onset of a heart attack.

The heart has an electromagnetic current 60 times higher in amplitude than the field of the brain. It also emits an energy field five thousand times stronger than the brain’s. What, Guarneri asks, if it’s not the brain telling the heart what to feel, but the heart informing the rest of the body? What if, she asks, changing the mind actually involves changing the heart? How can we stop pointing to the other guy, and be here in the present, to allow more happiness in our lives?

Radiate love and appreciation

Anger-provoking situations play havoc on heart rate responses and blood pressure, as we all know. Levels of a protein, IL-6, a maker of inflammation that may cause arterial thickening, and the stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine also kick in to push cholesterol and blood sugar levels higher. The heart and nervous system rhythm’s become chaotic, adversely affecting the whole body. Positive feelings, such as love and appreciation produce heart-rhythm coherence, and increased harmony and health, Guarneri writes. Since the heart is the most powerful oscillator in the body, it has the capacity to synchronize other organs in unison. Heart-rate patterns shift to orderly ones when a person enters a loving, appreciative state, she writes. Forgiveness, optimism and gratitude, topics she says would have been dismissed as irrelevant in medical school, are as much a part of heart disease equation as blood levels. A shift in our thinking, filled with gratitude, can help us connect to something larger than our individual experiences, whether to others, nature or a higher power. May this New Year be filled with happiness and big love.

Copyright Š 2011 Express Publishing Inc.

All Rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Express Publishing Inc. is prohibited.

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week’s issue.

Connie Aronson is an ACSM Health & Fitness Specialist and an IDEA Elite Certified personal trainer. She is located at the YMCA  in Ketchum, Idaho.

We Can Be Better-How Stress on our Long Bones is Good for Us

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DSC03362Modern man may not be the hottest athlete in history. Some prehistoric Australian aboriginals could possibly have outrun Usain Bolt’s 100- and 200-meter world record. With modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks, it is possible that aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kilometers an hour chasing an animal. Anthropologist Peter McAllister, in his book “Manthropology; The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male,” believes our ancestors could most probably have outrun us, and opens his book saying to his male readers, “No ifs, no buts—as a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet.” Ouch.

McAllister believes our predecessors were better at the basic Olympic athletics of running, jumping and throwing. His examples describe Roman legions completing more than one and a half marathons a day carrying more than half their body weight in equipment. The 26.2-mile marathon that thousands now participate in is not a strange genetic marvel, but proof of our ancient, inherited endurance capacity, dating back to the fabled Greek foot soldier, Pheidippides. We were great runners, millennia before these great armies and men, when primitive humans left the forests to seek out and hunt for food in the open plains. They had a crucial functional advantage—the ability to run long and fast to tire their prey.

What happened? Have we become a slovenly lot? In the United States, we spend a large part of our day sitting: driving to work, sitting at a desk at work, sitting for lunch, playing Nintendo, texting, sitting at the computer or watching television. I’m not suggesting that we give up all our modern conveniences and run barefoot in the mud or sharpen a spear to catch dinner. But research clearly shows that a lot of us have become sedentary.

Stresses and loads on our long bones are good for us. Dr. Walter Bortz, clinical associate professor at Stanford University, writes in “We Live Too Short and Die Too Long” that “the robustness of any bone is in direct proportion to the physical demands applied to the bone. Use it or lose it.”

The same holds true for incorporating as much moving as possible wherever and whenever possible during the day. New research shows that when rats are not allowed to stand, there is a large drop in lipoprotein lipase, the enzyme in the legs that captures fat out of the blood to be used by the body as fuel. Blood triglycerides soar, elevating the risk for cardiovascular disease.

If you do spend a good part of the day sitting, make some small changes—stand up and walk around more often, at least once every 30 minutes. At work, get up for some water or walk to a coworker’s desk rather than e-mail. Go for a fast-tempo, 10-minute walk break. At home, watching television, do some easy squats or curl-ups during commercial breaks or run up or down stairs for a bathroom break. Stand on one leg for one minute while you cook, or brush your teeth.

Above all, keep working out regularly. Make our ancestors proud.

Connie Aronson is a health and fitness specialist and personal trainer based in Ketchum.
Published November 13 2009 in the Idaho Mountain Express.

Copyright Š 2013 Express Publishing Inc.
All Rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Express Publishing Inc. is prohibited.

 

What Are You Hungry For?

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Stare long enough at carrot cake in front of you and you will eat it. eventually you’ll take a bite or two out of it. Even if you’re stuffed, weren’t that hungry, or don’t particularly like carrot cake.

 It’s not that easy control sometimes, because the psychological drive to eat, our “head hunger” can take over. Not only are triggers such as stress and anxiety the wrong reasons to eat, but biology, conditioning and metabolic influences also drive our appetites and hunger. Researchers are studying at least 70 receptor sites on individual brain neurons known to play a role in how hunger works to shed some light on our hunger mechanisms.

True hunger, the stomach-growling kind, is an intense feeling of having to eat something, resulting from low blood glucose. We’re faced with hundreds of food choices every day, of wanting to eat, but good food choices go out the window when you are this hungry. Nor does it help us that our supermarkets tempt us with 17,000 new products on the shelves yearly, most of them dense with calories and fat. To make matters worse, when you’re over-hungry or skip a meal, the body needs to make up for this missing blood glucose to sustain itself and uses the amino acid alanine,which is stored in muscle. Overtime your lean muscle shrinks, and your body becomes better at storing fat. A better way to control your weight and hunger is to eat small meals throughout the day. Researchers found that female gymnasts and runners who ate less than what was required of their sport during the day had the highest body fat levels. Other studies that looked at athletes showed the ones that ate smaller, more frequent meals and snacks, instead of bigger end- of- day meals, had lower body fat and lower overall insulin release.

We receive signals from the brain when we want to eat and when we’ve had enough, but they aren’t always reliable. Ghrelin is one of the hormones responsible for wanting to eat.  When you’re sleep-deprived, this same hormone amps up to drive us to eat more, and decreases the turn-off switch, leptin, that tells us we’re full. A recent Standford University study showed that adult men’s appetites for high fat food increased by 45% when they were getting less than 8 hours sleep a night. Interestingly enough, anorexics are masters of ignoring these strong signals to eat. These signals to eat, if we listen to them, can help us understand our eating behavior .It just might be that maybe you really are exhausted, and need a nap, or you might be dehydrated, because you haven’t been drinking enough water.  Dr. Barbara Rolls, professor of nutritional sciences at Pennsylvania State University, explains how you can eat normally, without dieting, if the foods you choose are simply less dense. For example, in her book, The Volumetrics Eating Plan,  a pale –looking traditional high-fat Shrimp Fried Rice, is transformed to one that includes broccoli, carrots, scallions, frozen peas, red and green bell pepper, fresh garlic and ginger. High fat-dense calories, like oil, are replaced by high fiber, lower calorie, nutrient rich vegetables.

It would be easy if there were just a pill to help curb our appetites and up our metabolism.  To date, 2 drugs are FDA approved and 300 clinical trials are underway that are tackling the complicated issue of obesity. The lifestyle changes involving diet and daily exercise are still your best bet to have a healthy, happy appetite for life!

Connie Aronson is an ACSM Certified Health Fitness Specialist, ACE Gold Certified Personal Trainer and an IDEA Elite Personal Trainer located at Koth Sports Physical Therapy in Ketchum. She is currently working on eating slower.

Published  August  10, 2007 in The Idaho Mountain Express.

 

Restorative Napping

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Restorative Yoga- we could all use a little nap

We could all use a little nap. It seems that many of us just keep going until too much stress upsets our normal balance.

According to the American Psychological Association, a third of us are living with extreme stress that can lead to high blood pressure, insomnia, anxiety, heart disease and a host of other health problems. We worry, plan, over-schedule and maybe not pay enough attention to what’s going on inside ourselves. Maybe we are simply exhausted. Restorative yoga is a way to help you relax deeply for a few minutes a day. And no, it’s not an infomercial.

Here is where modern science and the ancient practice of yoga merge. B.K.S. Iyengar, author of the classic book “Light on Yoga,” first introduced props and blankets to his students who had difficulty holding specific yoga poses. He then discovered that he could help them recover from their illnesses and injuries with supported gentle yoga poses that not only stretched the spine in healthy ways but also enabled students to rest deeply in the poses.

Iyengar taught that to relax is to cut tension, and as you practice restorative poses you feel harmonious and balanced. This works by returning the nervous system to its natural state, a state in which the body has the ability to heal itself. The goal when doing the poses is to be aware and passive, not falling asleep. (The sleep state is different from the state of deep relaxation).

The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center studied restorative yoga and looked at its positive impact on emotional wellness in ovarian cancer patients. Imaging studies show significant increases in left-sided brain activity when one relaxes or meditates, which is associated with healing positive emotional states.

In her book “Relax and Renew,” renowned yoga teacher Judith Lasater suggested thinking of restorative poses as taking a short holiday right in your home that it adds to one’s energy rather than subtracting from it. It’s particularly helpful when you feel tired or weak, during big life-changing events, or recovering from an illness.
Race To The Top

“Twenty minutes of restorative yoga is the equivalent to a one-hour nap,” Lasater wrote.

And that’s just the energy benefits. The healing benefits abound.

Here are two simple poses to try: one at home, and the other at the office. The first one is Legs–Up-the-Wall–Pose. It refreshes your legs, especially swollen jet-lagged legs, enhances the health of your circulatory system by the mild inversion and gently calms the nervous system. (Don’t do this pose if you’re pregnant or if you have sciatica.) From a seated position on the floor, swing your legs up onto a wall, so that your tailbone and butt are not lifting off the floor. Your back should be completely supported by floor. If your chin is lifted towards the ceiling put a small pillow under your head to support your neck. Your chin should be slightly lower than your forehead, not strained. Keep your legs straight and relaxed with your arms comfortably out to the sides, palms turned up. Relax and take several long, slow breaths. Feel like your back is completely supported by the floor and your chest is open and free. Stay here for five to 10 minutes, and take your time when you come out of the pose.

The second nap is Desk Forward Bend, nice for a break at the office, at your desk. Lasater likens it to school days when she would simply lean forward and rest her head on her desk. Place your chair near your desk so you can lean forward, feet flat on the floor, and then lean forward and place your folded arms on the desk. Let the desk support your arms, head and worries, and relax completely for three to five minutes. When you’re ready to come up, inhale, and use your arms to sit up. Sit for one more long breath before carrying on with your day, refreshed.

Connie Aronson is an American College of Sports Medicine-certified, ACE Gold Level status-certified, and an IDEA Elite Level-certified personal trainer. She works at High Altitude Fitness and the YMCA in Ketchum.

Originally published in the Idaho Mountain Express – Friday, February 15, 2008