Tag Archives: wellness

31 Ways/31 Days: Make it a great year!

Day 6: No whining!

Practice makes perfect. If you practice complaining, focusing on the negative and wallowing in self-pity, you will become very, very good at being very, very unhappy – and pretty miserable to be around, too. The more you think a particular thought, the more energy your body put towards strengthening that particular set of connections in your brain. It’s hard to NOT complain, and there is a difference between whining and asking for something specific or relaying information. Try to catch yourself complaining and reframe it – or refocus on something positive.

A dear friend describes his approach to this: “Ron” died of a terrible disease very young. When something comes up I want to complain about now – years later – I stop and think, hmmm, how would Ron feel about being able to complain about that right now?

If that approach works for you, please borrow it!

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

31 Days/31 Ways: Make it a great year!

Day 5: Eat something healthy each day.

A lot of people make resolutions that sound like this: “I’m going to give up junk food!” “I’m not going to eat any carbs!” or some such extreme commitment. Then they fail by eating carbs (which we need) or eat something assigned to the “junk” category. It’s a lot easier to achieve success by doing rather than not-doing. Action is empowering; the punitive, goodie-removing approach sets you up for resentment. So turn it around: instead of some sort of mean-parent, “That’s it! No treats for YOU!” in the mirror, promise yourself to eat one healthy snack each day: a piece of fresh fruit, some raw veggies, a handful of nuts – whatever is appropriate for you and your allergies/dietary restrictions. It’s easier and more encouraging to experience success – and the encouragement to keep it going that success engenders – by DOING rather than not-doing.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Day 3/Way 3: Make it a great year!

Back away from the television…or tablet…or computer…or whatever else electronic screen mesmerizes you during non-work/non-school hours.

The average American is consuming 5 hours or more of non-work/non-school related screen time daily. It’s worse for retirees, who average 43 hours a week. There are lots of ways reducing screen time can make it a much better year. I’ll pick one: the fact that much of what’s on there has an ulterior motive of making you feel badly about yourself and your life. If you weren’t dissatisfied, you wouldn’t be tempted to spend money on whatever is being marketed. Your stuff isn’t as new, your face hasn’t been airbrushed and you didn’t have a staff of five fixing up your hair and makeup so, compared to what you see on television, your life and mine look pretty blah. Even if you’re too smart to think so consciously, that subconscious message is hammering away. Make it a great year: just reduce exposure and do something that will make you feel good about your life, instead.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Day 2/Way 2: Make it a great year!

Have a place for quiet and use it daily. Your back steps? Your bedroom window? A chair in the corner? Any place is the right place if it is “your” special place for quiet contemplation every day. The constant beat of artificial lights, mechanical noise and media is an assault on the nervous system. Give yourself a break of quiet. (If you’re addicted to noise and media flashiness, don’t be surprised if 5 or 10 minutes of real quiet makes you feel pretty edgy at first!).

Why this can help make it a great year: it’s refreshing to separate yourself from the racket! Quiet allows us to listen to the subtler messages in life…CS Lewis’ fictional demon, Screwtape, identified constant environmental noise as a means for evil to do its work in our world because the noise numbs us to the quiet stirrings of higher thoughts and feelings.

 

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

New Year’s Resolutions (past tense already?)

Well, it’s not quite the Feast of Epiphany…and a lot of New Year’s resolutions have come and gone. If you have “failed” in some way, you can always start over. To kick off a series on making the new year better, here are some thoughts:

  1. Why do so many people set goals like punitive parents, taking away privileges or pleasures, instead of setting goals of doing something? When you make a goal of dietary changes, why do you have to be a mean parent, taking away your own cheesy poofs, instead of a helpful coach, suggesting you have a serving of fresh fruit or vegetable once a day?
  2. Do you have an old goal – an old hope, or change – that you have postponed making? You keep postponing a particular trip? Never get around to playing the guitar again? A change in hairstyle that’s long overdue (yes, if you had your hair that way in the senior picture, it’s too long overdue if you’re out of college), or some more meaningful change? Maybe you need to revisit that change. It might be time.
  3. Are you picking a fight with someone else’s goals for you? Sometimes failure to reach a goal may be a way of exerting control. Consider carefully if a goal that is really good for you is the smart place to dig in and take a stand for independence…maybe your healthy libertarian streak would be better served taking a stand somewhere else, than resisting making a change that is medically advisable or spiritually essential.

Hoping to chime in often with short, sweet and psychologically healthy changes to make 2016 a great year!

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2016

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

 

Are you settling for 10%?

Why settle for 10%?

Sometimes 10% is just right.

God wants 10%. I can live with that.

The IRS wants WAY more than God, and we have to live with that…but it makes us sad.

When it comes to brain power, there’s that myth that “the average person only uses 10% of their brain!” Is that true? Scientists don’t think so, but it makes for good science fiction, when the occasional person is somehow altered to become a combination Einstein-Terminator. The subtle bias that being super-smart means being a freak isn’t lost on us, Hollywood.

It turns out, though, that perfectly normal people, in the absence of script-writers and special effects, can, via disciplined, deliberate effort, substantially – and I mean by up much more than 100 times – improve the speed and efficiency of their neural connections.  Here’s how that works (my apologies to neuroscientists for my gross oversimplification).

First, a little background on our nervous systems.

We have two major categories of nerve cells. Neurons are the ones everyone’s heard of: they’re usually referred to and people often don’t know that any other sort of nerve cell exists. Glial cells are the other kind. Most people haven’t heard of them but the people that have are super-enthusiastic about how much they contribute to our brains. In rock music terms, neurons are the Kurt Cobains: everyone knows who they are and everyone thinks they are great. Glial cells are Chris Cornell: the true nervous system fanatics know how great glial cells are and can’t believe everyone else can’t see past neurons/Kurt (no disrespect to Kurt Cobain intended!). Then we have myelin: it’s made out of fat, particularly those healthy fats such as DHA and EPA. The more you work your brain, the fatter it gets. That’s good – really good.

So…You decide to master a new skill. You focus – hard. The kind of hard thinking that makes your brain tired. It doesn’t matter what sort of skill it might be: kids learning their multiplication tables, a pitcher learning to throw a 90-mph perfect strike, a musician mastering Rachmaninov. Focusing, making efforts, tuning into all the aspects of the activity. Tossing a ball back and forth absentmindedly doesn’t make you a better pitcher. Focusing on the whole body experience – is this foot an anchor or is that leg a spring that, coiled tightly, releases energy at what specific point in the throw? What does it feel like in rib cage, shoulder, elbow, wrist? How is this attempt a little different from the one before? That studied, deliberate focus lights up the neural connections related to that activity, throughout the brain. Over time, as those neurons fire over and over, the glial cells pay attention. Whatever connections are working hardest get glial cell TLC – in the form of extra myelin. Glial cells wrap myelin, that white, fatty substance, around neurons, making the neurons more and more efficient. One hopes, at this point, that the person trying to develop expertise is eating a healthy diet with the right sorts of fats to support this brain development and getting enough sleep. (Consult your physician on this.) Over time, this intense process can improve the speed of the neural connections by up to 100 times! As the neural connection benefits from the support of the myelin, speeding up its efficiency, another change happens: the individual nerve cells themselves become faster by reducing their refractory period (that little, nano-second of rest/resetting between firings) by up to 30%. Factor that into the extra pace of the connections and, well…you do the math. You are upping your brain power by a tremendous amount in this area of interest.

What’s even more exciting is that our options for doing this are a wide-open window: you can go ahead and decide to devote the necessary focus and energy to many areas of interest over a life time, and, given overall health, a good diet and clean living, your brain will continue to dutifully respond to the demands you put on it.

Physical strength training benefits people in their 90s (yes, you read that right) and this sort of brain training – the kind people make naturally when they are interested and self-motivated – likewise can be a lifetime escapade of growth, challenge and fun.

Are you settling for 10%?

 

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2015

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

 

Water, Judgment and Stuff

Sometimes Mother Nature takes a swipe at our stuff, and we find out what’s important and what’s not.

We had a little water in our basement – the ground was so saturated from 2+ feet of rain in a few weeks that water began oozing through concrete blocks. After some initial dismay (Really? This is the moment the shop vac decides to die?), I felt relief at some items not damaged and indifferent to most that were. The truth was, I was more than a little relieved to be able to be rid of some of that stuff. Do you have those things, too – piles of stuff that have accumulated and are neither treasured nor useful?

It’s an interesting mental exercise: if a natural disaster took a bunch of my stuff, what would I be most relieved to find still intact, in the wreckage? I suspect that in a real disaster, I would be grateful for anything that was a link to a swept-away past. Any photo, any old Christmas ornament, would be precious under those circumstances.

Flashes of insight come relatively easily; change, not so easily. After the realization that I was not sad that some old drawings and paintings are gone, and realizing how little I really cared about a lot of stuff I’d accumulated, life rolled on and I did nothing substantive to reduce the clutter.

Not content to let me congratulate myself on my bit of awareness, I was given a dream. In my dream, I was dead and being judged, and the Lord took me into my closet and pointed to the many clothes I rarely wore and gently asked me why I still had them when others needed them? Each tired shirt and sweater, dusty on a forgotten hanger, was a reproach against my selfishness and oblivion to others’ needs. Dickens’ Marley was weighed down with chains of money boxes; I fear I will drag chains of little-worn clothing, books and kitsch. It is time, once again, to start purging: cabinets, closets, overflowing shelves. There is a big box next to the closet – 2 x 2 x 3 – and it is rapidly filling with “stuff” that I hope someone really can use.

I am still not exactly grateful for that half-inch of stinky water in my basement, but thanks…I got the hint, and this time, I hope, it will stick.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2015

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

22 hours a week…

The contact lens product advertisement in my Sunday newspaper asserts thats that the average gamer spends 22 hours a week playing video games and demands to know if my contact lens solution handle that.

Ugh, who on earth can handle that?

22 hours a week, average, playing video games. That’s right in there with the 3 to 6 hours we hear people who watch television (or whatever form of streaming video they prefer) spend on their habit daily. Hmm, what could you do with 22 hours a week?

  • Take a walk and do yoga every day, spend one day a week building houses for Habitat for Humanity, or working in a food bank, or some other form of service, and still have time to read a book for an hour a day.
  • Train for a triathlon.
  • Earn your HS diploma, your tech certificate, AA, BA, BS, MS, MA, or Ph.D.
  • Learn a new skill: paint, fly fish, built a robot.

The possibilities are tremendous. They are all life-changing.

In five years, what story do you want to tell about the person you will be tomorrow? Do you want to look back and say, “Hey, I was a serious gamer and invested a lot of time and energy into mastering levels of this one game for hours a day”? Is there any other sort of story you can imagine you’d rather tell in a few years, about the person you will be tomorrow?

What about the person you want to be in five years? Will playing video games (or watching television, or streaming video, or surfing the internet) for 22 hours x 52 weeks x 5 years turn you into that person? That’s over 5700 hours. Do you think you could manage to pack some great memories and amazing changes into your life with 5700 hours?

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2015

Posts are for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed to be therapeutic advice. If you are in need of mental health assistance, please contact a licensed professional in your area.

Happiness Hint #1: take happiness hints with a grain of salt!

The world is full of advice on happiness, and there is plenty of research on happiness, too. A word of advice: investigate before you “buy” into information or guidance on becoming happier. Happiness, like beauty, is not something on which people universally agree. Sometimes happiness refers to having fun; at other times, it refers to a more enduring state of life satisfaction, meaning and purpose.

Here’s an example: a few years back, some researchers announced that their study indicated that having children decreases “happiness,” and that’s the headline. Under the headline, deep in the research, you find a narrow definition of happiness used that reduces happiness to little more than an assessment of how much fun one might be having at any given time. For most parents (I hope!), while there are certainly aspects of parenting that are not as much fun as others, that is not the same as being substantially less happy – finding life less purposeful, less rich with meaning and emotion – than before kids. So, as you seek answers, be aware that often hundreds of pages of research have been selectively narrowed to a blurb. The “facts” presented to us are often just the tip of the iceberg.

Dr. Lori Puterbaugh

© 2015

Television: Does it make you sad?

Oh, you think not? Are you addicted? Mesmerized? Just stuck in a rut?

Well, then, “Drop the Remote and Back Away from the Television!”

Do you also complain about being too busy? No time to exercise, or read, or work on the projects you enjoy?

Some people are genuinely busy. Others…well, consider that the average US adult watches five hours of television per day, not including services such as Netflix and streaming video, web surfing, and other passive screen-focused entertainments. For retirees, it’s worse: the average retiree in the US watches 43 hours of television per week. That means that a full-time job was replaced with full-time television viewership. Is your extra time stuck, as my husband would say, “right behind the television?”

If you are watching more than an hour or so a day of television on average, you are inviting dissatisfaction and unhappiness into your home from two angles. First, you are using time for passive entertainment that could otherwise be spent enriching your life. You could be walking, reading, conversing, creating, dancing, or playing, but instead you are sitting there, being fed a diet of stimuli especially designed to make you unhappy. Advertisements point out how miserable your sorry life really is, and the shows themselves are full of people who seem to be beautiful and competent. No one on television is wearing three-year old fashions (unless they are the butt of jokes) or surreptitiously using a permanent laundry marker to touch up scuffed dress shoes. Plenty of real people live that way, and they watch television and can’t help but begin to imagine that what they see there is real.

If you’re the average American, imagine how much happiness you may find in the 35 hours per week hiding with the dust bunnies behind your television. No, I’m not a “television hater,” but I do have a lot of things I’d rather do with my free time.

Can you generate a list of at least 20 things you can do in the place of television? Things you’d like to do? Make them realistic, free or nearly so, and fun! The list should include things you could do when you’d otherwise watch television. For example, at 10:30 at night you aren’t likely to go walking around the park. It’s not recommended; you need activities you could do, safe at home in your pajamas. For example: read a book; write a note to a family member; listen to a learn-a-language CD (you probably have one you have been trying to ignore!); dig out your old art or craft supplies; brush the dog or cat; read to your kids; go for a walk; dance; sit outside and do nothing; go to the library; color on the driveway with chalk…

Keep the list handy, and then cut back to two hours or less per day. When you cut back, make notes to yourself about how it feels: are you anxious? Edgy? Bored?

You are not going to feel instantly happier, but you will be creating opportunities for some elements of happiness to enter your life.