For many who are suffering with prolonged grief, the holidays can be a time to reflect and find meaning in loss
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The holiday season is meant to be filled with joy, connection and celebration of rituals. Many people, however, are starkly reminded of their grief this time of year and of whom – or what – they have lost.
The added stress of the holiday season doesn’t help. Studies show that the holidays negatively affect many people’s mental health.
While COVID-19-related stressors may have lessened, the grief from change and loss that so many endured during the pandemic persists. This can cause difficult emotions to resurface when they are least expected.
I am a licensed therapist and trauma-sensitive yoga instructor. For the last 12 years, I’ve helped clients and families manage grief, depression, anxiety and complex trauma. This includes many health care workers and first responders who have recounted endless stories to me about how the pandemic increased burnout and affected their mental health and quality of life.
I developed an online program that research shows has improved their well-being. And I’ve observed firsthand how much grief and sadness can intensify during the holidays.
Post-pandemic holidays and prolonged grief
During the pandemic, family dynamics, close relationships and social connections were strained, mental health problems increased or worsened, and most people’s holiday traditions and routines were upended.
Those who lost a loved one during the pandemic may not have been able to practice rituals such as holding a memorial service, further delaying the grieving process. As a result, holiday traditions may feel more painful now for some. Time off from school or work can also trigger more intense feelings of grief and contribute to feelings of loneliness, isolation or depression.
Sometimes feelings of grief are so persistent and severe that they interfere with daily life. For the past several decades, researchers and clinicians have been grappling with how to clearly define and treat complicated grief that does not abate over time.
In March 2022, a new entry to describe complicated grief was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which classifies a spectrum of mental health disorders and problems to better understand people’s symptoms and experiences in order to treat them.
This newly defined condition is called prolonged grief disorder. About 10% of bereaved adults are at risk, and those rates appear to have increased in the aftermath of the pandemic.
People with prolonged grief disorder experience intense emotions, longing for the deceased, or troublesome preoccupation with memories of their loved one. Some also find it difficult to reengage socially and may feel emotionally numb. They commonly avoid reminders of their loved one and may experience a loss of identity and feel bleak about their future. These symptoms persist nearly every day for at least a month. Prolonged grief disorder can be diagnosed at least one year after a significant loss for adults and at least six months after a loss for children.
I am no stranger to complicated grief: A close friend of mine died by suicide when I was in college, and I was one of the last people he spoke to before he ended his life. This upended my sense of predictability and control in my life and left me untangling the many existential themes that suicide loss survivors often face.
How grieving alters brain chemistry
Research suggests that grief not only has negative consequences for a person’s physical health, but for brain chemistry too.
The feeling of grief and intense yearning may disrupt the neural reward systems in the brain. When bereaved individuals seek connection to their lost loved one, they are craving the chemical reward they felt before their loss when they connected with that person. These reward-seeking behaviors tend to operate on a feedback loop, functioning similar to substance addiction, and could be why some people get stuck in the despair of their grief.
One study showed an increased activation of the amygdala when showing death-related images to people who are dealing with complicated grief, compared to adults who are not grieving a loss. The amygdala, which initiates our fight or flight response for survival, is also associated with managing distress when separated from a loved one. These changes in the brain might explain the great impact prolonged grief has on someone’s life and their ability to function.
Recognizing prolonged grief disorder
Experts have developed scales to help measure symptoms of prolonged grief disorder. If you identify with some of these signs for at least one year, it may be time to reach out to a mental health professional.
Grief is not linear and doesn’t follow a timeline. It is a dynamic, evolving process that is different for everyone. There is no wrong way to grieve, so be compassionate to yourself and don’t make judgments on what you should or shouldn’t be doing.
Increasing your social supports and engaging in meaningful activities are important first steps. It is critical to address any preexisting or co-occurring mental health concerns such as anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress.
It can be easy to confuse grief with depression, as some symptoms do overlap, but there are critical differences.
If you are experiencing symptoms of depression for longer than a few weeks and it is affecting your everyday life, work and relationships, it may be time to talk with your primary care doctor or therapist.
A sixth stage of grief
I have found that naming the stage of grief that someone is experiencing helps diminish the power it might have over them, allowing them to mourn their loss.
For decades, most clinicians and researchers have recognized five stages of grief: denial/shock, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance.
But “accepting” your grief doesn’t sit well for many. That is why a sixth stage of grief, called “finding meaning,” adds another perspective. Honoring a loss by reflecting on its meaning and the weight of its impact can help people discover ways to move forward. Recognizing how one’s life and identity are different while making space for your grief during the holidays might be one way to soften the despair.
When my friend died by suicide, I found a deeper appreciation for what he brought into my life, soaking up the moments he would have enjoyed, in honor of him. After many years, I was able to find meaning by spreading mental health awareness. I spoke as an expert presenter for suicide prevention organizations, wrote about suicide loss and became certified to teach my local community how to respond to someone experiencing signs of mental health distress or crisis through Mental Health First Aid courses. Finding meaning is different for everyone, though.
Sometimes, adding a routine or holiday tradition can ease the pain and allow a new version of life, while still remembering your loved one. Take out that old recipe or visit your favorite restaurant you enjoyed together. You can choose to stay open to what life has to offer, while grieving and honoring your loss. This may offer new meaning to what – and who – is around you.
If you need emotional support or are in a mental health crisis, dial 988 or chat online with a crisis counselor.
Mandy Doria, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Pain Doesn’t Belong on a Scale of Zero to 10
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Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.”
I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of times, so I think hard about how to quantify the sum of the sore hips, the prickly thighs, and the numbing, itchy pain near my left shoulder blade. I pause and then, mostly arbitrarily, choose a number. “Three or four?” I venture, knowing the real answer is long, complicated, and not measurable in this one-dimensional way.
Pain is a squirrely thing. It’s sometimes burning, sometimes drilling, sometimes a deep-in-the-muscles clenching ache. Mine can depend on my mood or how much attention I afford it and can recede nearly entirely if I’m engrossed in a film or a task. Pain can also be disabling enough to cancel vacations, or so overwhelming that it leads people to opioid addiction. Even 10+ pain can be bearable when it’s endured for good reason, like giving birth to a child. But what’s the purpose of the pains I have now, the lingering effects of a head injury?
The concept of reducing these shades of pain to a single number dates to the 1970s. But the zero-to-10 scale is ubiquitous today because of what was called a “pain revolution” in the ’90s, when intense new attention to addressing pain — primarily with opioids — was framed as progress. Doctors today have a fuller understanding of treating pain, as well as the terrible consequences of prescribing opioids so readily. What they are learning only now is how to better measure pain and treat its many forms.
About 30 years ago, physicians who championed the use of opioids gave robust new life to what had been a niche specialty: pain management. They started pushing the idea that pain should be measured at every appointment as a “fifth vital sign.” The American Pain Society went as far as copyrighting the phrase. But unlike the other vital signs — blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate — pain had no objective scale. How to measure the unmeasurable? The society encouraged doctors and nurses to use the zero-to-10 rating system. Around that time, the FDA approved OxyContin, a slow-release opioid painkiller made by Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker itself encouraged doctors to routinely record and treat pain, and aggressively marketed opioids as an obvious solution.
To be fair, in an era when pain was too often ignored or undertreated, the zero-to-10 rating system could be regarded as an advance. Morphine pumps were not available for those cancer patients I saw in the ’80s, even those in agonizing pain from cancer in their bones; doctors regarded pain as an inevitable part of disease. In the emergency room where I practiced in the early ’90s, prescribing even a few opioid pills was a hassle: It required asking the head nurse to unlock a special prescription pad and making a copy for the state agency that tracked prescribing patterns. Regulators (rightly) worried that handing out narcotics would lead to addiction. As a result, some patients in need of relief likely went without.
After pain doctors and opioid manufacturers campaigned for broader use of opioids — claiming that newer forms were not addictive, or much less so than previous incarnations — prescribing the drugs became far easier and were promoted for all kinds of pain, whether from knee arthritis or back problems. As a young doctor joining the “pain revolution,” I probably asked patients thousands of times to rate their pain on a scale of zero to 10 and wrote many scripts each week for pain medication, as monitoring “the fifth vital sign” quickly became routine in the medical system. In time, a zero-to-10 pain measurement became a necessary box to fill in electronic medical records. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations made regularly assessing pain a prerequisite for medical centers receiving federal health care dollars. Medical groups added treatment of pain to their list of patient rights, and satisfaction with pain treatment became a component of post-visit patient surveys. (A poor showing could mean lower reimbursement from some insurers.)
But this approach to pain management had clear drawbacks. Studies accumulated showing that measuring patients’ pain didn’t result in better pain control. Doctors showed little interest in or didn’t know how to respond to the recorded answer. And patients’ satisfaction with their doctors’ discussion of pain didn’t necessarily mean they got adequate treatment. At the same time, the drugs were fueling the growing opioid epidemic. Research showed that an estimated 3% to 19% of people who received a prescription for pain medication from a doctor developed an addiction.
Doctors who wanted to treat pain had few other options, though. “We had a good sense that these drugs weren’t the only way to manage pain,” Linda Porter, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Pain Policy and Planning, told me. “But we didn’t have a good understanding of the complexity or alternatives.” The enthusiasm for narcotics left many varietals of pain underexplored and undertreated for years. Only in 2018, a year when nearly 50,000 Americans died of an overdose, did Congress start funding a program — the Early Phase Pain Investigation Clinical Network, or EPPIC-Net — designed to explore types of pain and find better solutions. The network connects specialists at 12 academic specialized clinical centers and is meant to jump-start new research in the field and find bespoke solutions for different kinds of pain.
A zero-to-10 scale may make sense in certain situations, such as when a nurse uses it to adjust a medication dose for a patient hospitalized after surgery or an accident. And researchers and pain specialists have tried to create better rating tools — dozens, in fact, none of which was adequate to capture pain’s complexity, a European panel of experts concluded. The Veterans Health Administration, for instance, created one that had supplemental questions and visual prompts: A rating of 5 correlated with a frown and a pain level that “interrupts some activities.” The survey took much longer to administer and produced results that were no better than the zero-to-10 system. By the 2010s, many medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians, were rejecting not just the zero-to-10 scale but the entire notion that pain could be meaningfully self-reported numerically by a patient.
In the years that opioids had dominated pain remedies, a few drugs — such as gabapentin and pregabalin for neuropathy, and lidocaine patches and creams for musculoskeletal aches — had become available. “There was a growing awareness of the incredible complexity of pain — that you would have to find the right drugs for the right patients,” Rebecca Hommer, EPPIC-Net’s interim director, told me. Researchers are now looking for biomarkers associated with different kinds of pain so that drug studies can use more objective measures to assess the medications’ effect. A better understanding of the neural pathways and neurotransmitters that create different types of pain could also help researchers design drugs to interrupt and tame them.
Any treatments that come out of this research are unlikely to be blockbusters like opioids; by design, they will be useful to fewer people. That also makes them less appealing prospects to drug companies. So EPPIC-Net is helping small drug companies, academics, and even individual doctors design and conduct early-stage trials to test the safety and efficacy of promising pain-taming molecules. That information will be handed over to drug manufacturers for late-stage trials, all with the aim of getting new drugs approved by the FDA more quickly.
The first EPPIC-Net trials are just getting underway. Finding better treatments will be no easy task, because the nervous system is a largely unexplored universe of molecules, cells, and electronic connections that interact in countless ways. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to scientists who discovered the mechanisms that allow us to feel the most basic sensations: cold and hot. In comparison, pain is a hydra. A simple number might feel definitive. But it’s not helping anyone make the pain go away.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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Maca Root’s Benefits For The Mood And The Ability
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Maca Root: What It Does And Doesn’t Do
Maca root, or Lepidium meyenii, gets thought of as a root vegetable, though it’s in fact a cruciferous vegetable and more closely related to cabbage—notwithstanding that it also gets called “Peruvian ginseng”.
- Nutritionally, it’s full of all manner of nutrients (vitamins, minerals, fiber, and a wide array of phytochemicals)
- Medicinally, it’s long enjoyed traditional use against a wide variety of illnesses, including respiratory infections and inflammatory diseases.
It’s also traditionally an aphrodisiac.
Is it really anti-inflammatory?
Probably not… Unless fermented. This hasn’t been studied deeply, but a 2023 study found that non-fermented and fermented maca root extracts had opposite effects in this regard:
However, this was an in vitro study, so we can’t say for sure that the results will carry over to humans.
Is it really an aphrodisiac?
Actually yes, it seems so. Here’s a study in which 45 women with antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction found it significantly improved both libido and sexual function:
❝In summary, maca root may alleviate antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction as women age, particularly in the domain of orgasm❞
~ Dr. Christina Dording et al.
Read in full: A Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Trial of Maca Root as Treatment for Antidepressant-Induced Sexual Dysfunction in Women
As for men, well these mice (not technically men) found it beneficial too:
Effects of combined extracts of Lepidium meyenii and Allium tuberosum Rottl. on [e-word] dysfunction
(pardon the censorship; we’re trying to avoid people’s spam filters)
It did also improve fertility (and, actually in real men this time):
Does Lepidium meyenii (Maca) improve seminal quality?
Oh, to be in the mood
Here’s an interesting study in which 3g/day yielded significant mood improvement in these 175 (human) subjects:
And yes, it was found to be “well-tolerated” which is scientist-speak for “this appears to be completely safe, but we don’t want to commit ourselves to an absolutist statement and we can’t prove a negative”.
Oh, to have the energy
As it turns out, maca root does also offer benefits in this regard too:
(that’s not an added ingredient; it’s just a relevant chemical that the root naturally contains)
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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Increase in online ADHD diagnoses for kids poses ethical questions
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In 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, clinical protocols were altered for Ontario health clinics, allowing them to perform more types of care virtually. This included ADHD assessments and ADHD prescriptions for children – services that previously had been restricted to in-person appointments. But while other restrictions on virtual care are back, clinics are still allowed to virtually assess children for ADHD.
This shift has allowed for more and quicker diagnoses – though not covered by provincial insurance (OHIP) – via a host of newly emerging private, for-profit clinics. However, it also has raised significant ethical questions.
It solves an equity issue in terms of rural access to timely assessments, but does it also create new equity issues as a privatized service?
Is it even feasible to diagnose a child for a condition like ADHD without meeting that child in person?
And as rates of ADHD diagnosis continue to rise, should health regulators re-examine the virtual care approach?
Ontario: More prescriptions, less regulation
There are numerous for-profit clinics offering virtual diagnoses and prescriptions for childhood ADHD in Ontario. These include KixCare, which does not offer the option of an in-person assessment. Another clinic, Springboard, makes virtual appointments available within days, charging around $2,600 for assessments, which take three to four hours. The clinic offers coaching and therapy at an additional cost, also not covered by OHIP. Families can choose to continue to visit the clinic virtually during a trial stage with medications, prescribed by a doctor in the clinic who then sends prescribing information back to the child’s primary care provider.
For-profit clinics like these are departing from Canada’s traditional single-payer health care model. By charging patients out-of-pocket fees for services, the clinics are able to generate more revenue because they are working outside of the billing standards for OHIP, standards that set limits on the maximum amount doctors can earn for providing specific services. Instead many services are provided by non-physician providers, who are not limited by OHIP in the same way.
Need for safeguards
ADHD prescriptions rose during the pandemic in Ontario, with women, people of higher income and those aged 20 to 24 receiving the most new diagnoses, according to research published in January 2024 by a team including researchers from the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health and Holland Bloorview Children’s Hospital. There may be numerous reasons for this increase but could the move to virtual care have been a factor?
Ontario psychiatrist Javeed Sukhera, who treats both children and adults in Canada and the U.S., says virtual assessments can work for youth with ADHD, who may receive treatment quicker if they live in remote areas. However, he is concerned that as health care becomes more privatized, it will lead to exploitation and over-diagnosis of certain conditions.
“There have been a lot of profiteers who have tried to capitalize on people’s needs and I think this is very dangerous,” he said. “In some settings, profiteering companies have set up systems to offer ADHD assessments that are almost always substandard. This is different from not-for-profit setups that adhere to quality standards and regulatory mechanisms.”
Sukhera’s concerns recall the case of Cerebral Inc., a New York state-based virtual care company founded in 2020 that marketed on social media platforms including Instagram and TikTok. Cerebral offered online prescriptions for ADHD drugs among other services and boasted more than 200,000 patients. But as Dani Blum reported in the New York Times, Cerebral was accused in 2023 of pressuring doctors on staff to prescribe stimulants and faced an investigation by state prosecutors into whether it violated the U.S. Controlled Substances Act.
“At the start of the pandemic, regulators relaxed rules around medical prescription of controlled substances,” wrote Blum. “Those changes opened the door for companies to prescribe and market drugs without the protocols that can accompany an in-person visit.”
Access increased – but is it equitable?
Virtual care has been a necessity in rural areas in Ontario since well before the pandemic, although ADHD assessments for children were restricted to in-person appointments prior to 2020.
But ADHD assessment clinics that charge families out-of-pocket for services are only accessible to people with higher incomes. Rural families, many of whom are low income, are unable to afford thousands for private assessments, let alone the other services upsold by providers. If the private clinic/virtual care trend continues to grow unchecked, it may also attract doctors away from the public model of care since they can bill more for services. This could further aggravate the gap in care that lower income people already experience.
This could further aggravate the gap in care that lower income people already experience.
Sukhera says some risks could be addressed by instituting OHIP coverage for services at private clinics (similar to private surgical facilities that offer mixed private/public coverage), but also with safeguards to ensure that profits are reinvested back into the health-care system.
“This would be especially useful for folks who do not have the income, the means to pay out of pocket,” he said.
Concerns of misdiagnosis and over-prescription
Some for-profit companies also benefit financially from diagnosing and issuing prescriptions, as has been suggested in the Cerebral case. If it is cheaper for a clinic to do shorter, virtual appointments and they are also motivated to diagnose and prescribe more, then controls need to be put in place to prevent misdiagnosis.
The problem of misdiagnosis may also be related to the nature of ADHD assessments themselves. University of Strathclyde professor Matthew Smith, author of Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD, notes that since the publication of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, assessment has typically involved a few hours of parents and patients providing their subjective perspectives on how they experience time, tasks and the world around them.
“It’s often a box-ticking exercise, rather than really learning about the context in which these behaviours exist,” Smith said. “The tendency has been to use a list of yes/no questions which – if enough are answered in the affirmative – lead to a diagnosis. When this is done online or via Zoom, there is even less opportunity to understand the context surrounding behaviour.”
Smith cited a 2023 BBC investigation in which reporter Rory Carson booked an in-person ADHD assessment at a clinic and was found not to have the condition, then had a private online assessment – from a provider on her couch in a tracksuit – and was diagnosed with ADHD after just 45 minutes, for a fee of £685.
What do patients want?
If Canadian regulators can effectively tackle the issue of privatization and the risk of misdiagnosis, there is still another hurdle: not every youth is willing to take part in virtual care.
Jennifer Reesman, a therapist and Training Director for Neuropsychology at the Chesapeake Center for ADHD, Learning & Behavioural Health in Maryland, echoed Sukhera’s concerns about substandard care, cautioning that virtual care is not suitable for some of her young clients who had poor experiences with online education and resist online health care. It can be an emotional issue for pediatric patients who are managing their feelings about the pandemic experience.
“We need to respect what their needs are, not just the needs of the provider,” says Reesman.
In 2020, Ontario opted for virtual care based on the capacity of our health system in a pandemic. Today, with a shortage of doctors, we are still in a crisis of capacity. The success of virtual care may rest on how engaged regulators are with equity issues, such as waitlists and access to care for rural dwellers, and how they resolve ethical problems around standards of care.
Children and youth are a distinct category, which is why we had restrictions on virtual ADHD diagnosis prior to the pandemic. A question remains, then: If we could snap our fingers and have the capacity to provide in-person ADHD care for all children, would we? If the answer to that question is yes, then how can we begin to build our capacity?
This article is republished from healthydebate under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alpha, beta, theta: what are brain states and brain waves? And can we control them?
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There’s no shortage of apps and technology that claim to shift the brain into a “theta” state – said to help with relaxation, inward focus and sleep.
But what exactly does it mean to change one’s “mental state”? And is that even possible? For now, the evidence remains murky. But our understanding of the brain is growing exponentially as our methods of investigation improve.
Brain-measuring tech is evolving
Currently, no single approach to imaging or measuring brain activity gives us the whole picture. What we “see” in the brain depends on which tool we use to “look”. There are myriad ways to do this, but each one comes with trade-offs.
We learnt a lot about brain activity in the 1980s thanks to the advent of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Eventually we invented “functional MRI”, which allows us to link brain activity with certain functions or behaviours in real time by measuring the brain’s use of oxygenated blood during a task.
We can also measure electrical activity using EEG (electroencephalography). This can accurately measure the timing of brain waves as they occur, but isn’t very accurate at identifying which specific areas of the brain they occur in.
Alternatively, we can measure the brain’s response to magnetic stimulation. This is very accurate in terms of area and timing, but only as long as it’s close to the surface.
What are brain states?
All of our simple and complex behaviours, as well as our cognition (thoughts) have a foundation in brain activity, or “neural activity”. Neurons – the brain’s nerve cells – communicate by a sequence of electrical impulses and chemical signals called “neurotransmitters”.
Neurons are very greedy for fuel from the blood and require a lot of support from companion cells. Hence, a lot of measurement of the site, amount and timing of brain activity is done via measuring electrical activity, neurotransmitter levels or blood flow.
We can consider this activity at three levels. The first is a single-cell level, wherein individual neurons communicate. But measurement at this level is difficult (laboratory-based) and provides a limited picture.
As such, we rely more on measurements done on a network level, where a series of neurons or networks are activated. Or, we measure whole-of-brain activity patterns which can incorporate one or more so-called “brain states”.
According to a recent definition, brain states are “recurring activity patterns distributed across the brain that emerge from physiological or cognitive processes”. These states are functionally relevant, which means they are related to behaviour.
Brain states involve the synchronisation of different brain regions, something that’s been most readily observed in animal models, usually rodents. Only now are we starting to see some evidence in human studies.
Various kinds of states
The most commonly-studied brain states in both rodents and humans are states of “arousal” and “resting”. You can picture these as various levels of alertness.
Studies show environmental factors and activity influence our brain states. Activities or environments with high cognitive demands drive “attentional” brain states (so-called task-induced brain states) with increased connectivity. Examples of task-induced brain states include complex behaviours such as reward anticipation, mood, hunger and so on.
In contrast, a brain state such as “mind-wandering” seems to be divorced from one’s environment and tasks. Dropping into daydreaming is, by definition, without connection to the real world.
We can’t currently disentangle multiple “states” that exist in the brain at any given time and place. As mentioned earlier, this is because of the trade-offs that come with recording spatial (brain region) versus temporal (timing) brain activity.
Brain states vs brain waves
Brain state work can be couched in terms such as alpha, delta and so forth. However, this is actually referring to brain waves which specifically come from measuring brain activity using EEG.
EEG picks up on changing electrical activity in the brain, which can be sorted into different frequencies (based on wavelength). Classically, these frequencies have had specific associations:
- gamma is linked with states or tasks that require more focused concentration
- beta is linked with higher anxiety and more active states, with attention often directed externally
- alpha is linked with being very relaxed, and passive attention (such as listening quietly but not engaging)
- theta is linked with deep relaxation and inward focus
- and delta is linked with deep sleep.
Brain wave patterns are used a lot to monitor sleep stages. When we fall asleep we go from drowsy, light attention that’s easily roused (alpha), to being relaxed and no longer alert (theta), to being deeply asleep (delta).
Can we control our brain states?
The question on many people’s minds is: can we judiciously and intentionally influence our brain states?
For now, it’s likely too simplistic to suggest we can do this, as the actual mechanisms that influence brain states remain hard to detangle. Nonetheless, researchers are investigating everything from the use of drugs, to environmental cues, to practising mindfulness, meditation and sensory manipulation.
Controversially, brain wave patterns are used in something called “neurofeedback” therapy. In these treatments, people are given feedback (such as visual or auditory) based on their brain wave activity and are then tasked with trying to maintain or change it. To stay in a required state they may be encouraged to control their thoughts, relax, or breathe in certain ways.
The applications of this work are predominantly around mental health, including for individuals who have experienced trauma, or who have difficulty self-regulating – which may manifest as poor attention or emotional turbulence.
However, although these techniques have intuitive appeal, they don’t account for the issue of multiple brain states being present at any given time. Overall, clinical studies have been largely inconclusive, and proponents of neurofeedback therapy remain frustrated by a lack of orthodox support.
Other forms of neurofeedback are delivered by MRI-generated data. Participants engaging in mental tasks are given signals based on their neural activity, which they use to try and “up-regulate” (activate) regions of the brain involved in positive emotions. This could, for instance, be useful for helping people with depression.
Another potential method claimed to purportedly change brain states involves different sensory inputs. Binaural beats are perhaps the most popular example, wherein two different wavelengths of sound are played in each ear. But the evidence for such techniques is similarly mixed.
Treatments such as neurofeedback therapy are often very costly, and their success likely relies as much on the therapeutic relationship than the actual therapy.
On the bright side, there’s no evidence these treatment do any harm – other than potentially delaying treatments which have been proven to be beneficial.
Susan Hillier, Professor: Neuroscience and Rehabilitation, University of South Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Immunity – by Dr. William Paul
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This book gives a very person-centric (i.e., focuses on the contributions of named individuals) overview of advances in the field of immunology—up to its publication date in 2015. So, it’s not cutting edge, but it is very good at laying the groundwork for understanding more recent advances that occur as time goes by. After all, immunology is a field that never stands still.
We get a good grounding in how our immune system works (and how it doesn’t), the constant arms race between pathogens and immune responses, and the complexities of autoimmune disorders and—which is functionally in an overlapping category of disease—cancer. And, what advances we can expect soon to address those things.
Given the book was published 8 years ago, how did it measure up? Did we get those advances? Well, for the mostpart yes, we have! Some are still works in progress. But, we’ve also had obvious extra immunological threats in years since, which have also resulted in other advances along the way!
If the book has a downside, it’s that sometimes the author can be a little too person-centric. It’s engaging to focus on human characters, and helps us bring information to life; name-dropping to excess, along with awards won, can sometimes feel a little like the book was co-authored by Tahani Al-Jamil.
Nevertheless, it certainly does keep the book from getting too dry!
Bottom line: this book is a great overview of immunology and immunological research, for anyone who wants to understand these things better.
Click here to check out Immunity, and boost your knowledge of yours!
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In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts – by Dr. Gabor Maté
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We’ve reviewed books by Dr. Maté before, and this one’s about addiction. We’ve reviewed books about addiction before too, so what makes this one different?
Wow, is this one so different. Most books about addiction are about “beating” it. Stop drinking, quit sugar, etc. And, that’s all well and good. It is definitely good to do those things. But this one’s about understanding it, deeply. Because, as Dr. Maté makes very clear, “there, but for the grace of epigenetics and environmental factors, go we”.
Indeed, most of us will have addictions; they’re (happily) just not too problematic for most of us, being either substances that are not too harmful (e.g. coffee), or behavioral addictions that aren’t terribly impacting our lives (e.g. Dr. Maté’s compulsion to keep buying more classical music, which he then tries to hide from his wife).
The book does also cover a lot of much more serious addictions, the kind that have ruined lives, and the kind that definitely didn’t need to, if people had been given the right kind of help—instead of, all too often, they got the opposite.
Perhaps the greatest value of this book is that; understanding what creates addiction in the first place, what maintains it, and what help people actually need.
Bottom line: if you’d like more insight into the human aspect of addiction without getting remotely wishy-washy, this book is probably the best one out there.
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