Category Archives: self improvement

Success Means Never Feeling Tired

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FAILURE is probably the most fatiguing experience a person ever has. There is nothing more enervating than not succeeding—being blocked, not moving ahead. It is a vicious circle. Failure breeds fatigue, and the fatigue makes it harder to get to work, which compounds the failure.
We experience this tiredness in two main ways: as stan-up fatigue and performance fatigue. In the former case, we keep putting off a task that we are under some compulsion to discharge. Either because it is too tedious or too difficult, we shirk it. And the longer we postpone it, the more tired we feel.
Such start-up fatigue is very real, even if not actually physical, not something in our muscles and bones. The remedy is obvious, though perhaps not easy to apply: an exertion of willpower. The moment I find myself turning away from a job, or putting it under a pile of other things I have to do, I clear my desk of everything else and attack the objectionable item first. To prevent Start-up fatigue, always tackle the most difficult job first.
Years ago, when editing Great Books of the Western World,
I undertook o write 102 essays, one on each of the great ideas
discussed by the authors of those books. The writing took me
2½ years, working at it—among my other tasks—seven days
a week. I would never have finished f I had allowed myself
to write first about the ideas I found easiest to expound. Applying my own rule, 1 determined to write the essays in strict
alphabetical order, from ANGEL WORLD, never letting myself skip a tough idea. And I always started the day’s work with the difficult task of essay-writing. Experience proved, once again, that the rule works.
Performance fatigue is more difficult to handle. Here we are noçrcluctanc to get started, but we cannot seem to do the job right. Its difficulties appear insurmountable and, however hard we work, we fail again and again. That mounting experience of failure carries with it an ever-increasing burden of mental fatigue. In such a situation, I work as hard as I can— then let the unconscious take over.
When I was planning the 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, I had to create a topical table of contents for its alphabetically arranged articles. Nothing like this had ever been done before, and day after day I kept coming up with solutions that fell short. My fatigue became almost overpowering.
One day, mentally exhausted, I put down on paper all the reasons why this problem could no! be solved. I tried to convince myself that what appeared insoluble really was insoluble, that the trouble was with the problem, not mc. Having gained some relief, I sat back in an easy chair and went to sleep.
An hour or so látêr, I woke up suddenly with the solution clearly in mind. In the Weeks that followed, the correctness of the solution summoned up by my unconscious mind was confirmed at every step. Though 1 worked every bit as hard, if not harder, than before, my work was not attended by any weariness or fatigue. Success was now as exhilarating as failure had been depressing. I was experiencing the joy of what psychologists today call “flow.” Life offers few pleasures more invigorating than the successful exercise of our faculties. It unleashes energies for additional work.
Sometimes the snare is not in the problem itself, but in the social situation—or so it appears. Other people somehow seem to prevent us from succeeding. But, as Shakespeare wrote, “The fault, dear Bnitus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.” Why blame other people and shrug off our own responsibility for misunderstandings7 Doing a job successfully means doing whatever is necessary—and that includes winning the cooperation of others.
More often, the snare that blocks us is purely personal. Subject to human distractions, we let personal problems weigh on us, producing a fatigue-failure that blocks our productivity in every sphere. A friend of mine went into a decline over a family problem that she had let slide. Her daughter had secretly married a man she thought her father would disapprove of. The daughter told her mother but made her promise to keep silent. Worrying about the problem, and carrying a burden of guilt over the secrecy, exhausted the mother. Her fatigue spilled over into her job and turned her usual successes there into failures. She was saved from Serious depression only when other people intervened and told the father—who didn’t display any of the anticipated negative reaction. It seems incredible that a person can allow his or her life to get snarled up in this fashion, but that is how problems can fester if they aren’t solved as they come along.
So, our first step should be to use inexplicable fatigue that has no physical base as a radar—an early-warning system— and trace the fatigue to its source; to find the defeat we arc papering over and not admitting. Then we must diagnose the cause of this failure. In rare cases, it may be that the task really is too difficult for us, that we are in over our head. If so, we can acknowledge the fact and bow out. Or the block may simply be in refusing to confront the problem. In most cases, it can be solved by patient attention to the task at hand—with all the skill and resolution we can muster. That, plus the inspired help of the unconscious.
I have already given an example of one way of achieving a breakthrough. First, put down all the reasons why the problem is insoluble. Try to box yourself in, like Houdini, so no escape appears possible. Only then, like Houdini, can you break out. Having tied yourself up in knots, stop thinking consciously about the problem for a while. Let your unconscious work on untying the knots. Nine times out of ten, it will come up with a solution.
The worst mistake ‘.c can make is to regard mental fatigue as if it were physical fatigue. We can recuperate from the latter by giving our bodies a chance to rest. But mental fatigue that results from failure cannot be removed by giving in to it and taking a rest. That just makes matters worse. Whatever the specific stumbling block is, it must be cleared up, and fast, ‘fore the fatigue of failure swamps us.
Human beings. I believe, must try to succeed. This necessity
built into our biological background. Without trying to define performance, to doing tasks and solving problems as they come along. it is experiencing the exuberance, the joy, the “flow” that goes with the unimpeded exercise of one’s human capabilities.
Success, then, means never feeling tired.

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How to Think Through a Crisis

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WE CHANGE continually from birth to death, but the process is not always steady.. Sometimes it is a leap forward or a devastating setback: Almost overnight, it seems, a pleasant, self-assured housewife suffers a complete breakdown; a confused, rebellious teen-ager becomes a civilized young man: a competent, reliable worker goes to pieces at his job; a disorderly, childish young woman turns out to be a splendid mother.
How can we explain these abrupt changes for better or
worse? What is it that suddenly sets us on a better p.ath—or
makes us lose our way?
For some time, psychiatrists, delving into the histories of people suffering from mental disorders, have beçn struck by the fact that the beginning of long-range illness followed a crisis in the life of the patient. In some cases, the crisis was a misfortune or a catastrophe that might be expected to cause trouble: the death of a child, the loss of a job, major surgery. But in others, the event that preceded the downturn was not a disaster or even a piece of ill fortune. The birth of a baby. a promotion, the first year of college often appeared as the forerunner of the plunge into illness. Some people cracked under the strain of even supposedly joyful transitions.
While psychiatrists observed the apparent connection between crisis and mental illness, they could not help noticing that the very same crises that defeat some people call forth the most amazing and unexpected strengths in others. And it is not necessarily the “strong” person who reacts well; often it is someone who hitherto has been relatively weak and ineffectual. ft seems, then, that a crisis can produce a real growth of personality.
A person in the midst of a crisis is in unfamiliar territory. He is disoriented and confused. His thinking and feeling are flooded with memories of past crises that filled him with similar anxiety or fear. The older person facing surgery may be haunted by the vague terrors of a childhood tonsillectomy; the new schoolboy bidding his mother good-by is reliving all the separations he has ever known.
Caught in the grip of a situation that seems insoluble,’ a person becomes tense and irritable, hostile to those closest to him, or depressed and moody. He doesn’t eat; he can’t sleep; he feels exhausted. His symptoms may resemble those of impending nervous breakdown, but they are the normal reactions of a person in crisis. Eventually he “solves” the problem one way or another, And, according to the way in which he has handled himself during the crisis, he comes out mentally stronger and more in tune with reality—or weaker and more susceptible to trouble in future times of stress. What makes the difference?
For more than a decade, at Harvard University Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, as well as at a few other centers, researchers studied the “acidencal” crises that beset us and the “developmental” crises that punctuate our growth. They watched the way iri;which people respond to the death of a loved one; the &actions of patients awaiting operations; the responses of men ‘women and children to disasters such as tornadoes and fires; the behavior of women who have given birth to premature babies; the adjustment of couples to the early months of marriage. Their studies show us how our handling of these critical turning points molds our personalities and shapes our lives.
Athong women who gave birth to premature babies, for example, there were two quite distinct ways of reacting to the crisis. Some responded ‘with grief and an acute awareness of the danger to the baby. They poured out their fears to their husbands nd family, badgered dxiors and nurses for information. They insisted on seeing the baby, even though they were warned that it might be an unpleasant experience. When the danger of the baby’s dying had passed and they returned home, they embarked on a campaign of preparations for the baby’s homecoming. They visited him regularly, and collected facts from all possible surces about ways to handle him. They corralled a mother or aunt to help.
Another group of v,c)rnen faced with the same crisis, behaved in many ways more considerately to family, friends and hospital personnel. They accepted the first reassurance of a husband or a doctor that “everything will be all right.” Occasionally they speculated on why this thing had happened and who was to blame for it, but they didn’t lament about it. When the baby was out of danger, they were confirmed in their belief that there had been no crisis. They visited the, infant rarely and took no steps tcr learn about his special needs.
Six to ten weeks after the babies’ release from the hospital, the mental-health workers who had followed the behavior of the mothers reported that the women’s different reactions to the same crisis were associated with two very different outcomes.
The women who had been most upset, most vocal in their concern, most aware of the real problems of the crisis had survived it well. They seemed strengthened. Effective problem- solving had been learned, which seemed to make the mothers and their families more capable of adjusting to other crises. Family relationships were often better than they had been before the birth of the baby. But the women who had denied the importance of the crisis, rather than confront it in all its unpleasantness. were the center of deteriorating family relationships. The household was beset with bickering and blame; everyday problems were bypassed, and the baby was often either neglected or spoiled by an oversolicitude that impeded his development.
The patterns of response to the crisis of premature birth were repeated with subtle differences in all the studies of crisis. To the extent that a person faced the realities of the problem and actively grappled with them, he emerged stronger or at’ least as strong. To the extent that he fled from the realities of the crisis, he set the stage for a worsening pattern of adjustment to life.
The latter type evaded the issues that the crisis presented by belittling the problem and pretending that he was not upset. He had not sought the help of others and refused help when it was offered. He shifted his energies away from trying to solve the problems that the crisis posed and focused them instead on blaming individuals or groups of people for his plight. Or he developed neurotic symptoms—excessive sleep, headaches, muscle pains or stomach trouble—which replaced the crisis itself as his main concern.
In a sense, none of us can be educated in advance to deal constructively with a crisis. Yet to some extent we can anticipate certain life crises and rehearse, as it were, our role in them.
For the key to healthy adaptation is the ability to face up to a situation, despite its stress and unpleasantness and despite the inevitable tensions that afflict us when a problem has no ready solution.
People who weather a crisis well are those who actively search for a solution. They thirst for helpful information. They want to know in advance exactly what surgery is like, or how to care for a premature baby. They avoid blaming themselves or others, realizing that this is a distraction from the real problem. They are not ashamed to express fears and anxieties. They learn how to rest when theirefficiency falls because of fatigue, and how to discipline themselves to return to the painful struggle when they have been replenished. They can accept, even enlist, help, considering this not a sign of weakness but of maturity.
What we know about healthy and unhealthy paths during a crisis not only gives us tools for self-help but also provides us with ways of aiding those we Jove. Consider the normal crises of early married life.
Exciting and gratifying as they are, the first months of marriage also involve many physical and psychological demands. which many people experience as a series of crises. A young couple must set up a home and work out complementary patterns of the division of labor and decision-making. They must weaken their ties to parents and direct their emotional energy to the new relationship. Each must extend the boundaries of personal privacy to include the other in all the apparently minor aspects of living which hitherto have been private—and this may be very unsettling. They must achieve a satisfactory sexual adjustment, which is complicated Lfl our culture both by the excessive romanticizing and sentimentalizing of sex and the breakdown of premarital sexual prohbitions. If the young couple fail to deal with these problems, if they turn away from unpleasantness and postpone adjustment, they set the stage for a marriage in which future crises, the birth of a baby, illness or the loss of a job, may be more poorly handled. But if they do their crisis work properly, they will have taken crucial step toward a relationship of mutual trust, respect, ;upport and love. And to the extent that each person has contributed to. the realistic solution of each crisis, he will have enhanced his own personality and strengthened his individual problem-solving skills.
In every life crisis, then, there are both the danger and the opportunity, the threat and the promise, the specter of deterioration and the hope of growth and enrichment. For we arc not the prisoners of a’pcrsonality forged once and for all in childhood or adolescence. If we can learn to avoid the ways of evasion, and to make healthful choices during the critical turning points of our lives, we may change the whole quality and direction of our existence.

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Figure Out People From Their Words

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by John Kord Lagemann
AFrER a visit from a friend, my mother would review the conversation in her mind, the pauses, inflections and choice of words, then announce the real news the caller never mentioned:
“Henry wants to sell his hous&.”“Frank is going to marry Janie.”“Young Mrs. Cole thinks she’s pregnant but isn’t sure.”
Mother was no mind reader, she was practicing a technique we now call “content analysis.” ft’s a kind of systematic search for the small verbal clues that, when put together, reveal a larger meaning: attitudes, intentions, behavior patterns, underlying strategy. As Ben Jonson wrote more than 300 years ago, “Language springs out of the inmost parts of us. No glass renders a man’s likeness so true as his speech.”
Experts in business and science use highly developed content-analysis techniques to measure changes in consumer attitudes and to diagnose emotional conflicts. Governments keep corps of analysts monitoring other nations’ broadcasts and printed materials to extract useful intelligence. Details that seem trivial by themselves have a way of adding up, when classified and counted, to vital information. I’ve found—as have many other people—that certain tricks of content analysis help you to read between the lines of ordinary conversation.
Fingerprint Words. A word or group of words that recurs frequently is one of the surest clues to who or what is on a person’s mind. As any parent knows, you can easily tell which of your daughter’s boy friends is becoming the new favorite— sometimes before the girl herself is really aware of it-.–simply by counting the number of times the name is mentioned.
But the technique can have more subtle applications. For example, verbal fingerprinting helped a young lawyer handle .a difficult clientwith whom other members of the firm had been unable to get along. The young man collected all letters and memos from the client in his firm’s files. As he read them he was struck by recurrent expressions and allusions typical of a certain period of English literature. Further investigation revealed the client as a prodigiously well-read amateur scholar, a shy man who hid his sensitivity behind a cantankerous manner. With this key to the client’s personality, the lawyer had no trouble in gaining his confidence.
The Big Pronoun. We instinctively notice how often someone says, “I,”“me,”“my” and “mine.” To most of us, excessive use of the first person singular simply means that the person is a bore—but it can mean something more. “When one’s automobile is out of order,” says social psychologist 0. Hobart Mowrer, “one is likely to refer to it oftener. Likewise, when a person’s psychic equipment is grating and squeaking, it is understandable that his attention should be directed toward it much of the time.”
Counts made at the University of Iowa and the University of Cincinnati demonstrate that hospitalized mental patients use “I” oftener thn any other word—about once every 12 words, three times as often as normal people. As these patients recover, their use of “1” and “they” goes down, and their use of “we” goes up.
The Judgment Test. One way ‘1 recognizing a person’s values is by cataloguing the particular adjectives he uses to express approval and disapproval. With one of my friends the fun4amenta1 criterion is practicality: good things he describes as “feasible,”“applicable,”“functional”; things he doesn’t like are “unworkable.”
Several years ago a close friend of ours became engaged to a man whose usual words of praise were “powerful,”“strong,”“overwhelming.” Things he disliked were “weak,”“tiny” or “insignificant.” He seemed to judge everything on the basis of size and power. Our friend, on the other hand, was a woman of artistic interest* ‘whose value judgments were mainly in terms of “beautifur versus “ugly.” it was no great surprise when they found they “did not see eye to eye,” and broke the engagement.
Images and Themes. The metaphors, similes and analo‘gics a person uses not only reflect his life experience but tell you how he thinks. Individuals have certain dominant themes. highly revealing of character. One man I know constantly uses images that suggest he is steering toward a distant landfall through buffeting winds. His main concern is to “Iceep his bearings” and “stay on course.” He urges friends to “state their position” and to be su.re they “know where they arc going.” A nautical background is indicated—but, more than that, a whole philosophy of life.
How Do You Feel? The late psychologist Dr. John Dollard of Yale and Dr. Mowrer devised a sort of emotional barometer by comparing the number of words a person uses expressing discomfort of any kind—ill health, annoyance or boredom— with the number of words which express relief, comfort, fun or satisfaction. They use this “Discomfort-Relief Quotient” to measure progress in the emotional adjustment of a patient undergoing treatment. If in the course of a few minutes’ casual conversation a man has used no comfort words at all but has mentioned the “horrible” weather, the “appalling” headlines, the “dull” plays being written these days and the “aggravating” traffic situation, he doesn’t have to add that he is feeling out of tune with the world.
A similar formula was developed years ago by Dr. Harold Lasswdll• of the Yale School of L..aw. He counted the number of favorable self-rcferences in a person’s speech and the number of self-derogatory references, and used the raio as a measure of self-esteem. Dr. Lasswell also counted the favorable and unfavorable references to others. Comparing the two sets, he found that the person with high self-esteem tends to be well disposed toward others, too.
Grammar Counts. Verb tenses can provide a hint as to how much a person dwells in the past as compared with his concern for the present and his plans and hopes for the future. When the past tense predominates it may indicate melancholy or depression.
Passive versus active is another clue. A decided preference for passive constructions—”l found myself there” instead of “I went there”—may reflect a feeling of impotence, active constructions a sense of power and responsibility. Er… Ah…. A doctor friend told me once that in taking the history of a new patient he sometimes learns as much from the hesitations as from the direct answers. “Occupation?” The
person who’s happy with his job usually answers promptly. A
long pauses a cough, laugh, throat clearing or sniffle may
indicate trouble in that department. “Married or single?” Again,
in this doctor’s experience, a hesitation can be meaningful.
Pauses may indicate tension or anxiety associated with the
words that follow. “1, er, ah, .love you” means something very
different from a forthright “I love you.
Using clues like these, my friends and I have gained a surer
understanding of one another, and even of ourselves. Content
analysis will never replace reason or common sense, of course. But it can supplement them, and sometimes reveal messages we would otherwise miss completely.

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How to Take Charge

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by Sydney J. Hams
I WALKED with my friend, a Quaker. to the newsstand the other night, and he bought a paper, thanking the newsie politely. The newsie didn’t even acknowledge it.
‘A sullen fellow, isn’t her’ 1 commented.
“Oh, he’s that way every night.” shrugged my friend.
“Then why do you continue to be so polite to him?” I asked.
“Why not?” inquired my friend. ‘Why should I let him decide how I’m going to act?”
As I thought about this incident later, it occurred to me that the important word was “act.” My friends acts toward people; most of us react toward them.
He has a sense of inner balance which is lacking in most of us; he knows who he is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return incivility for incivility, because then he would no longer be in command of his own conduct.
When we are enjoined in the Bible to return good for evil, we look upon this as a moral injunction—which it is. But it is also a psychological prescription for our emotional health.
Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but in the world outside him. His spiritual temperature is always being raised or lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at the mercy of these elements.
Praise gives him a feeling of euphoria, which is false, be-cause it does not last and it does not come from self-approval. Criticism depresses him more than it should, because it confirms his own secretly shaky opinion of himself. Snubs bun him, and the merest suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness.
A serenity of spirit cannot be achieved until we become the masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another determine whether we shall be rude or gracious, elated or depressed, is to relinquish control over our own personalities, which is ultimately all we possess. The only true possession is self-possession.

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Biofeedback-Mind Teaches Body to Heal Itself

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FOR almost seven years. Mrs. Andrews had been unable to move her head. Her condition—known as wryneck—had started with painful muscle spasms, which grew worse until her head was always pulled to the left. After years of going to doctors, including psychiatrists, she was referred to New York’s lCD Rehabilitation and Research Center to learn a new technique of sensory feedback (also called biofeedback) training.
“Now look at me!” Mrs. Andrews said after her fourth treatment. She slowly moved her head from side to side, then held it proudly eyes-forward. “First, the doctors explained that I could learn to relax the major muscle that turns my head. I was skeptical, but willing to try. Electrodes from a small machine were attached to my neck, and the machine made loud clicks. My job was to lower the number of clicks by relaxing my neck muscle. I can’t tell you how I did this, but I did, and the next thing I knew, I could hold my head straight.” Having leaz1ed how to relax this muscle, Mrs. Andrcws is now able to do it without the aid of the machine.
Biofeedback training is based on the premise that we can modify or gain control over a range of bodily functions once thought to be totally automatic. We all use natural forms of feedback to perfect skills. For example, in learning to serve a tennis ball, we throw it in the air, hit it, and watch where it lands. If the ball sails 15 feet past the service line, seeing that constitutes a feedback on our actions. Accordingly, we modify our swing and footwork until we make the ball land where it should. Learning such a skill requires only making an effort, then seeing, hearing or feeling the results.
In many instances—if we want to relax a back muscle at will, or move a paralyzed ann, say—we cannot carry out the intention. Either nature has not provided us with a feedback mechanism, giving us signals we can use to learn that skill, or disease has destroyed a feedback system. Now, however, researchers have developed a host of sensory instruments that can help bridge the gsp.
For example, an instrument called an electromyograph tG) picks up electrical activity within muscles. Other devices monitor galvanic skin response (GsR)— the resistance that skin offers a minute amount of electricity. Other instruments detect minute temperature changes. The signals that are picked up are converted into sounds or visual aids for the patient to hear or see, and to use as signposts in controlling specific processes.
The list of chronic ailments being treated—experimentally, at least—with biofeedback includes asthma, back pain, migraine and tension headache, to name a few. Some favorable results have been achieved in the areas of stroke and, to a lesser extent, epilepsy.
“The potential is quite encouraging, and some results are truly amazing, especially in treating neuromuscular problems,” says Dr. Joseph Brudny, former director of the Sensory Feedback Therapy Unit at the lCD Center. “But I see it as a useful adjunct to our present medical tools, not as a panacea.”
“It may not, always work,” a New York University professor of neurology, Dr. Julius Korein, says. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have any harmful side effects—something you can’t say about many drugs or surgical trcatments.”
Just how the technique works may be seen at Denver’s National Jewish Hospital and Research Center, where researchers arc refining EMO bic feedback to help patients control asthma attacks. Although asthmatics suffer because they arc sensitive to environmental agents like dust, fumes, cold, foods and certain plants. their attacks arc sometimes complicated by their psychological reaction to such potential threats. An asthmatic enrolled in the hospital’s biofeedback program is placed in a
comfortable, soundproof room and electrodes are connected to his forehead, to detect electrical activity in the muscles just above the eyebrow. If relaxed, he hears only slow, lethargic clicks. If he is tense, his forehead muscles knot up, and the machine bursts into frantic clicking.
The patient is asked to visualize flowers, trees, dust—whatever threatens him with an asthma attack. As he reacts instinctively to the image, the biofeedback equipment, reflecting his mounting anxiety, clicks like a Geiger counter. Hearing the crescendo, the patient knows he is laying the groundwork for an intensified asthma attack. Over the course of several training sessions, he learns to keep the click rate slow by keeping his tension down. (Just how he does this, he cannot explain, any more than he can explain exactly how he learns to ride a bicycle.) In time, patients learn to relax even without the machine.
Many doctors, especially those who deal with chronic pain and pain that defies medical analysis, are eagerly embracing biofeedback training as a way of inhibiting nonspecific pain feelings in the brain. One is Dr. Stuart H. Mann, an associate clinical professor in the Department of Rehabilitation at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. After tests are run to rule out a discernible cause for pain (a tumor, for example), the patient is attached to a GSR device, which emits a shrill, piercing sound. “We tell the patient the sound is the pain,” Dr. Mann says. “He has to turn it off.”
In time, a large percentage of Dr. Mann’s patients learn to “think” the sound down. Then, after intensive practice, even without the machine, they are able to sit down when they feel the pain coming and “work it down.” They are very proud when they can get themselves off drugs.
Even the crippling pain of migraine headache has proved amenable to biofeedback training. An instrument, highly sensitive to temperature changes, is attached to the patient’s hand and emits increasingly higher sounds as hand temperature rises—the result of increased blood flow. Patients have learned to increase blood flow to the hand enough to raise its temperature ten degrees in two minutes. As this happens, relaxation takes place—and as a side effect the migraine is aborted. Researchers who discovered this biofeedback technique at the Menningcr Foundation, in Topeka, Kari., helped 80 percetfi of the migraine patients they first treated with it.
Physicians who deal with stroke and paralysis are also using biofeedback to help patients regain muscle function. To move an arm, there must be sensory input to the brain as well as motor output. Without input we cannot monitor our actions. A basketball player who loses his sight, for example, will not be able to make baskets consistently from a set spot on the floor. However, if a buzzer goes off every time the ball goes ‘in. by substituting his hearing fqr his sight he can eventually releai-n the skill. Similarly, for some stroke and paralysis patients with brain injury, whose normal feedback system has been disrupted, biofeedback instruments can serve as a substitute. The patient learns to monitor an activIty through another, undamaged pathway. The instruments are used to pick up muscular electrical activity in the paralyzed limb and make it audible or visible to the patient. The patient works with the signals until he can actually begin to use the muscle.
In an initial study by Dr. Brudny and his colleagues, involving 36 patients with varying degrees of paralysis or other neuromuscular disorders, 34 achieved improvement ranging from meaningful functional gains to full recovery. One patient was a young electrician who had been left seemingly para1yzd from the neck down. With several weeks of painstaking training, .the young man slowly regained use of his arms and hands to the point where he could shave, feed himself, even do leacherwork.
“I wore a leg brace for iwo and a half years,” says a former stroke patient of Dr. Herbert E Johnson, former medical director and a psychiatrist at Casa Colina Hospital for Rehabilitative Medicine in Pomona, Calif. “But I had read about biofeedback training at Casa Colina, and asked to be taught it. I had to practice every day, one hour in the morning and one at night. I would practice starting and stopping the noise from the machine 100 times every ten minutes—about 600 times an hour. In three or four weeks, I had been able to strengthen my ankle and get rid of the brace”
About 1000 medical researchers are now working with biofeedback at some of the nation’s leading medical centers, and many more ire involved in clinical research outside the hospital.
If you think biofeedback may be the answer for your problem, ask your doctor if it can help you. He may be able to refer you to acceptable programs in your area. But avoid any so. called “expert” who uses the devices indiscriminately and shuns proper medical supervision. The Federal Drug Administration cautions that biofeedback devices used for diagnosis or treatment of disease conditions be used only by or after consulting a physician or other licensed practitioner.
Bear in mind that biofeedback is still in its early stages, not a magic cure-all or a substitute for other treatment. It is simply an adjunct which, as one research psychologist points out in connection with asthma, may help the patient feel he is back in the driver’s seat.

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Think Thin! Behavior Control of Dieting

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Don’t look in this article for menus, calorie counters or weight tables. Here, instead, is a scientific technique that can change your eating habits for the rest of your life—and become the key to making that life last longer.
The technique is called behavior control, and is based on the reward-and-punishment ideas of B. F. Skinner and the many psychologists• who followed him. I came upon it quite by accident. The year was 1956. 1 weighed 190 pounds. For a five-foot, ten-inch man at the age of 30, 1 was 35 pounds overweight. My father, too, had been overweight by 35 pounds when he died of a coronary heart attack in 1948, at the age of 44. His diet had been rich in high-calorie, high-fat foods, as mine was. As a science reporter, I understood well the relationship between overweight and his misfortune.
On the day my father died, I arrived a few minutes after his last heartbeat. The picture of his final agony was burned into my mind: jaw drawn back, mouth slightly open, skin gray. I shall never forget it.
I recount that sad, terrifying moment because of b curious phenomenon that occurred when I began to try to lose weight eight years later. Lunchtime. A cafeteria. Like an addict, I am drawn to the hot table with its corned beef and french-fried potatoes. At the sight of corned beef, I actually feel my jaw working. And then, an image of my father’s face as I last saw it flashes before me. I am appalled. I try to turn off the picture by moving away from the hot table. I take a salad. The picture returns. I shout silently to myself: “Stop!” I try to think of something pleasant: my forthcoming trip to Europe—anything to get that hospital scene off the screen of my mind. But note:
I ended up with the salad rather than the corned beef. And it happened day after day.
Unconsciously, I had altered my eating habits through behavior control. I did not hear about the technique until many years later. Indeed, it was not until the I 960s that psychologists showed that human beings can use thoughts to reward and punish themselves in order to bring unwanted behavior under control. And only more recently have the psychologists applied these techniques to eating behavior.
The use of thoughts as reward or punishment is enormously convenient if you can make it work, because thoughts are always available. However, each person must find the technique that fits his own life and convenience. And he must use it in a formal and systematic way—that is, set it up as if it were an operating manual for driving a car.
Let’s analyze how it worked with me. It depended on the fact that eating is automatic, my eating behavior and yours being governed by signals—stimuli. The sight of food is obviously a signal to start eating. Hunger may also be triggered by a glance at the clock, a TV commercial, a feeling of anxiety. On that day back in 1956:
I. I am confronted with a stimulus (a signal)—the corned
beef.
2. The stimulus initiates an automatic response—I start to reach for the corned beef.
3. At that moment, the unpleasant thought (punishment), the image of my father, appears in my mind.
4. Instead of the corned beef, I take the salad—a desired behavior.
5. Because the image of my father is disturbing, I shut it off by shouting, “Stop!” in my mind. I must do this or else the punishing image will overlap with the desired behavior and perhaps stop that, too.
6. Finally, a pleasant thought as a reward. I used a trip to Europe, imagining that picture immediately after—not before—the desired behavior. The sooner rewards are given, the better they work.
7. 1 move rapidly away from the food table, so as not to let the persistence of the corned-beef signal overwhelm me.
Such a system can be adapted to your own situation. By using thoughts in this way consistently and—it should be emphasized—over a long period, you will instill a new eating pattern. And the result will be a “permanent” weight loss.
The first concrete step in formalizing your own diet change is to make sure you can get your imagination under conscious control. You need to learn three skills: conjuring up an unpleasant thought, stopping that thought (remarkably, imagining yourself shouting, “Stop!” will momentarily clear it away), conjuring up a pleasant thought. Practice this sequence in your mind while lying down.
If you cannot imagine a scene that is sufficiently punishing,
perhaps one of these will do:
• An image that will make you nauseated, such as a bowl of ice cream covered with maggots.
• Someone you know who is so obese that he or she disgusts you. Then let that person’s face dissolve and replace it with
your own.
• Rolls of fat around your abdomen come off in your hands like sticky, hot taffy—and then grow back instantly.
The essence of such negative thoughts must be that they are sufficiently horrifying to deter you, even momentarily, from undesirable eating behavior. Indeed, the rougher a negative thought, the better will be its effect. Heart-attack victims often have no problem losing weight initially, because they unconsciously use scenes of themselves in the hospital or dead to deter eating behavior.
in the punishment-stop-reward sequence, the punishing thought loses its potency if you do not reward yourself—at once—for the desired action. The following scenes are suggestions for thought rewards:
• Walking arm in arm, thin and handsome or beautiful, with someone you love.
• A thin you standing before a mirror in a bathing suit.
• Playing with your children on a smooth, green lawn.
Whatever image you use, it must give you great pleasure; it should almost have the quality of a daydream.

Once you get your imagination under control, you are now ready to put the technique of reward/punishment to work. As far as your diet itself goes, it really makes little difference what plan you use—counting calories, restricting or eliminating certain foods, or following a specific menu. The key is to be consistent. If you count calories, count them every day and eat a variety of nutritious foods. You must end up each day, however, having eaten less food than is required to keep the energy balance in your body.
Unfortunately, habit often overrules plan. Calorie-counters find themselves wolfing down a piece of apple pie when they “could not resist it any longer.” When they count up the calories later in the day, the thought of having “broken the diet” is so punishing that they give up counting. But remember that in the reward/punishment system, there is no such thing as “breaking the diet.” Instead, you are concerned with achieving control at the moment of eating. Occasional failures are not critical; the idea is to adhere to the method more often than not.
To keep track of your food intake, I suggest you make a chart. A graph that shows a line of what your basic weight loss should be over a period of time will suffice. (Don’t try to lose more than a pound or two a week.) Just remember as you go along to make another line on the chart of what your actual weight loss is. Such a chart has some reward/punishment features. For instance, you are about to reach for a slice of pie; in your mind you picture the chart with the line representing your actual weight crossing above the projected weight-loss line; the punishing image will deter you. Even without its psychological utility, the chart is essential as a method of monitoring the amount of food you eat.
After you have chosen your dieting plan—calories, food restriction or menus—and set up a chart, you still face the major problem of handling eating behavior in the presence of a stimulus. Learn to recognize the external signals that trigger your eating. Keep a diary in which you list for each eating occasion what happened to start you eating. Then develop tactics for avoiding these stimuli. If a commercial acts as stimulus, never have food near the TV set, or better, never have a high- calorie, ready-to-eat food in the house.
But behavior control is more powerful than avoiding stimuli,
because every refusal increases your resistance. To review the
sequence once more: stimulus, television commercial, for in-stance; food desire: punishment thought, a fat person—your’ self—unable to get off a sinking ship; alternate activity, you pick up a book or a magazine; stop the punishment thought; pleasant thought. walking along a beach, for instance, held long enough so that the eating stimulus (the commercial) ends,
Each success makes the next effort easier, because the power of the stimulus to make you feel hungry will be reduced—and that will reduce your food intake.
How well does all this work? Experiments indicate that reward/punishment methods can cause weight loss. If you are more than 50 percent overweight, you probably will need the help of a doctor and perhaps a behavior therapist to set things up for you and to keep you on track, If you are 15 percent to 50 percent overweight, you will find behavior changes on you own difficult but not impossible. People who are around 15. percent overweight have the best chance of changing on their. own, using the reward/punishment schemes.
They worked well for me. I now weigh 157. I’ve lost 33 pounds—and I never felt better in my life.

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Emotions And Health

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“For Two months I’ve had these spells,” Fran Wilson told the heart specialist. “1 get short of breath. My heart beats like a hammer and unevenly. I’m dizzy and I tremble. My chest hurts. ‘ice I’ve fainted. My doctor says that my blood pressure and electrocardiogram are abnormal.”
“Was there any upset in your routine before the spells began?” the specialist asked.
“My husband was transferred to Arizona,” said Fran. ‘1 stayed behind to let the children finish the school year. Since he left, I haven’t slept well. Do you think fatigue brought out my heart trouble’
“I suspect we’ll find,” said the specialist, “that you don’t have heart trouble at all. I suspect that your illness is caused by emotion.”
Although the doctor proved correct, Fran was not imagining her ailments. Nor was she mentally ill in the usual sense of the
phrase. Emotional stress can produce real illness—true changes
in the body chemistry and structure of quite normal people.
And this phenomenon is amazingly common. Many specialists
agree that psychogenic (emotion-caused) disorders account for a large percentage of Visits to the doctor.
Physicians have long known that the mind could make the
body ill. But they did not know how to differentiate between
physically caused illness and that caused by emotional stress.

Today, answers to this problem are beginning to appear. And many doctors are using this new information as regularly as they employ their stethoscopes and tongue depressors.
Fran Wilson’s case illustrates one of the easiest means of recognizing such ills: identifying characteristic “clusters” of physical symptoms which often point to emotional causes. Since Fran’s spells resembled a common cluster called “neurocirculatory asthenia,” the heart specialist tried a simple test. For two minutes he had her breathe deeply and rapidly. She grew dizzy. Her heart pounded. She gasped that she was having an attack.
When she had rested, the doctor explained: “Those were some of the physical signs of great anxiety. Rapid deep breathing produces many such signs in any person. When we are afraid or angry, a part of the brain called the hypothalamus prepares the body for action. The heart speeds up to rush blood to our muscles. We breathe hard to fill the blood with oxygen. Hormones are released to bring the nervous system to a pitch of alarmed readiness. Sometimes our conscious mind, seeing no reason to be angry or afraid, may block out our awareness of anxiety. Yet all the while the hypothalamus continues the alant.”
Fran’s emotional alarm had evidently been triggered by the temporary separation from her husband. “I feel upset if anyone close leaves me,” Fran admitted to the doctor. “When I was a child, my parents left on a trip and were both killed in an accident. When Jim left—the first time in our marriage he’s been away more than overnight—I felt real panic. I pulled myself together, but I guess the fear was still there.” Fran was given tranquilizers and saw the doctor three times to talk over her fears. The symptoms vanished in two weeks.
Everyone knows that the mind evokes certain automatic responses from the body. Think about food and you salivate. Words or thoughts can prepare sexual organs for function, and cause a blush or goose-flesh. But more serious effects can be wrought by emotion. Take the case of Ruth Chadwick.
Four times Ruth had conceived a child but miscarried. On her fifth pregnancy, the obstetrician asked Ruth how she felt about motherhood. He learned that, though she wanted a child, girlhood tales of the rigors of labor and terrified her. The doctor decided to let Ruth talk out her fears at each prenatal visit.

With no other treatment, Ruth delivered a healthy full-term baby.
Why? Researchers at the University of Colorado have said that a woman fearful of pregnancy might, after weeks or months of carrying a baby, produce special hormones of a type normally produced only at the end of pregnancy. They cause contractions, dilate the opening of the cervix, and bring about birth. Indeed, many women like Ruth Chadwick, who habitually miscarry, may need only a little office counseling to carry a child to term.
How can thought work such changes? There is a pathway between the hypothalamus, the brain segment that controls primitive reactions to anger, fear, hunger and sex, and the pituitary gland. This mysterious gland, a lump the size of a sugar cube, located at the base of the brain, had long been known to secrete a growth hormone. But recent research has uncovered a number of other hormones it produces. The front lobe alone was found to create chemicals that trigger the making of sex hormones and govern the thyroid, which in turn controls the body’s metabolism, it yields yet another chemical that regulates adrenal secretion.
The middle and back lobes of the pituitary affect the kidneys, contractions of the uterus, and blood pressure. “We have just opened the door,” says one researcher, “and have had only a superficial look at this gland. But we now know one way in which emotion can be translated into bodily changes.”
With such clues to very real mechanisms, many doctors have begun to look for signs of emotional stress in patients as a matter of routine. Written tests have been designed to seek out the factors most commonly found among people whose ailments have been proved to be caused by emotion.
One such patient was Jean Becker, whose low back pain had grown steadily worse for a year. with no apparent cause. The symptoms seemed to suggest a ruptured spinal disc, which sometimes cannot be seen on X ray. During an office visit her doctor gave her a 20-question test. When he had scored it, he asked, “Have you been depressed lately?”
“Ever since a year ago, when my father died,” she said. “Mother died when I was small, and Dad brought me up alone.
Although my husband and children give me plenty of family,
without Dad all the joy seems to have gone out of things.”

The doctor gave her anti-depressant pills and told her to
come in for a chat every few days. Within a week Jean’s back
pain had disappeared. Moreover, the talks revealed that she felt that her children had little need of her and that her husband
was too occupied with his business to give her much attention.
Only her father had seemed to depend on her.
When the situation was explained to Jean’s husband and
children, they’ quickly gave her the assurance of love she needed, and the pills could be stopped. Had the back pain persisted once Jean’s depression was gone, the doctor would have felt it more likely that the cause was purely physical.
One test devised by doctors at Duke University. Durham, N.C., sought out unexplained fatigue, lack of sex interest, loss of weight, constipation, hopelessness, feelings of uselessness, difficulty in making decisions and restlessness. All of us sometimes have such feelings, of course. The key to the Duke test is whether a number of such factors are present much of the time. Sleep disturbance is one of the prime clues: the person with a psychogenic disorder is likely to wake early in the morning or during the night and have a chronic feeling of fatigue.
Sudden changes in life are often found to precede illness. In one study of patients with a wide range of ailments, three out of four were found to have recently suffered some major loss—loved ones, jobs, homes. Even apparently pleasant changes, such as a trip abroad, can cause trouble. The tourist who complains about foreign food or water would probably be wiser to blame the tension of being in a strange place. More- over, susceptibility to minor illnesses, such as colds, may be caused by small emotional stresses.
Are doctors other than psychiatrists really able to handle
such emotional problems? Numerous experiences show that
they are And some medical schools now are offering short courses in office psychiatry to their graduates Most physicians cannot devote an hour to talk with a patient as psychiatrists do. But so long a time has been found unnecessary in treating most patients with psychogenic illness. They need, primarily, ye- assurance that their ills can be dealt with.
As doctors learn to incorporate the new knowledge of psychogenic illness into their work, some of the responsibility, as
always, must rest with the patient. He should make an effort to protect himself when he knows that stress has made him vulnerable. He can help the doctor by telling him when emotional upheaval has preceded or accompanied an illness. He should be completely frank about his angers and fears, his frustrations and losses. The heroic view that “everything is just fine” may be good manners with a friend, but it is poor judgment when it is your doctor who wants to know.

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Naughtiness at school points to failure in life: study

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Children who badly misbehave in school are likelier to end up with a dud job, poor mental health, teen pregnancy or divorce, according to a British study published on Friday.

The paper, published online by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), provides statistical backing for teachers who sound warnings about anti-social behaviour, its authors say.

It draws on an exceptionally long-term investigation, launched among 3,652 Britons who were born in 1946. With their consent, these volunteers have been monitored at occasional intervals since their birth, filling in questionnaires about their health, family and professional life.

At the ages of 13 and 15, this group was assessed by their teachers, who were asked to grade their behaviour as having severe, mild or no conduct problems.

A total of 9.5 percent of the teenagers were identified as having severe problems; 28.8 percent had mild problems; and 61.7 percent no problems.

Forty years later, the followup inquiry found a clear link between misbehaviour at school and difficulties in adult life.

“Adolescent misconduct might adversely affect developing social behaviours and result in pervasive social and mental health difficulties throughout adult life,” the paper suggests.

Compared with those with no conduct problems at school, those who severely misbehaved were twice as likely to become a parent before the age of 20; likelier to get divorced or have relationship problems with spouses, children or friends; four times likelier to leave school with no qualifications, and twice as likely to be in a manual job or unemployed.

Problems in life also extended, but to a lesser degree, to those with milder forms of misbehaviour.

Males accounted for 62.6 percent of those with severe behavioural problems at school and 54.8 percent of those with mild problems. If the father had a manual job, this too was a major factor among teenagers in these categories.

The study is led by Ian Colman, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Colman says the study provides a useful guide for focussing resources to help teenagers whose behaviour could prove costly both to themselves in adulthood, and to society.

He admits that the study has some limitations — there are no data to explain why children misbehaved, for instance.

On the other hand, the teachers’ assessment was a good indicator of a child’s risk of delinquency, and a better guide than the parents’ own assessment, he argues.

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High fibre diet helps in healthy weight loss

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Whole grains high in fibre help in weight loss and also provide some healthy nutrients to those who diet.

Researchers from Kingston conducted a six-month long study of 180 overweight adults and found that whole-grain cereals helped people lose weight while boosting their consumption of fibre, magnesium and vitamin B-6, Health News reported.

Their intake of these nutrients was higher than that of dieters who cut calories but did not eat whole-grain cereal. The implication is that fibre-rich cereals can help people cut calories while maintaining or improving the quality of their diet.

A problem with cutting out calories or certain foods to shed pounds is that nutrients can be lost from the diet. The current findings suggest that whole-grain cereals can help prevent some of these losses.

The researchers compared three weight-loss strategies: exercise only; exercise plus a reduced-calorie diet that emphasised whole-grain cereals; and exercise plus a low-cal diet that included no cereals.

They randomly assigned 180 overweight, sedentary men and women to one of the three groups. Those in the cereal group were given packets of whole-grain breakfast cereal and were told to eat a serving twice a day for the first half of the study, then once a day for the remaining time.

In the end, both diet groups lost more weight than the exercise-only group, with dieters in each dropping roughly 12 pounds, on average.

But the cereal group cut down on saturated fat to a greater extent and increased their fibre, magnesium and B-6 intake. On the other hand, all three groups were short on calcium and vitamin E.

Many study volunteers who were in the cereal group ate their cereals directly as snacks rather than with milk or yoghurt, because of which their calcium intakes did not increase as much as expected.

Besides having their cereal with milk, dieters can get calcium from foods like green vegetables, almonds and canned fish with bones.

Vitamin E sources include vegetable oils like canola and safflower, some fish, wheat germ, almonds, peanut butter, avocado and mango. Some of these foods, like nuts and oil, are high in calories, so people trying to lose weight will have to exercise portion control.

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New Year’s resolutions can be bad for you: mental health charity

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LONDON ( 2009-01-01 10:54:13 ) :Making self-improvement New Year’s resolutions often leaves people feeling worse, the British mental health charity Mind warned on Thursday.

Mind urged people not to make resolutions focusing on physical imperfections — such as attempting to lose weight — because they create a negative self image and lead to feelings of low self-esteem, hopelessness and even mild depression.

And when such optimistic resolutions fail, that could spark feelings of inadequacy and failure, the charity warned.

“New Year’s resolutions can sometimes focus on our problems or insecurities such as being overweight, feeling unhappy in our jobs or feeling guilty about not devoting enough time to friends and family throughout the year,” said Mind chief executive Paul Farmer.

“We chastise ourselves for our perceived shortcomings and set unrealistic goals to change our behaviour, so it’s not surprising that when we fail to keep resolutions, we end up feeling worse than when we started.

“In 2009, instead of making a New Year’s resolution, think positively about the year to come and what you can achieve.”

Mind suggested resolution-makers focus instead on being active, connecting with nature, learning something new and working for one’s community.

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