Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

I’ve just come across the website CALM, which stands for Computer Assisted Learning for the Mind. It’s been created by Auckland University’s School of Medical and Health Sciences, initially as a resource to help their students manage stress. As if teaching doctors to manage stress wasn’t laudable enough, they’ve now thrown it open to the public.

The CALM site focuses on three factors of positive psychology that research has identified as keys to genuine happiness in life:

• mental resilience, which includes developing positive mind states and managing depression, anxiety, stress, alcohol and drugs;
• healthy relationships; and
• finding meaning in life.

Within each of those sections are a number of resources, mostly audio files. You can listen to them from your browser or download them.

Among the resources on the page managing stress is a self-hypnosis script, about which the site says:

Hypnosis is a technique which can be helpful in many ways in medicine, as shown by brain imaging and rigorous research. It is often misperceived by many as a form of “control” which is used in entertainment. In reality it is a procedure which involves the use of the imagination and the focussing of attention. Amongst its many uses are pain management and enhancing relaxation.

How refreshing to see that on a medical school’s website, especially one developed to help trainee doctors!

I downloaded the self-hypnosis MP3 and gave it a listen. The first two and a half minutes are a very good summary of what hypnosis is (and isn’t), and then the speaker – a psychiatrist and pain specialist, Dr Bob Large – gives a 15-minute session. He starts with an eye fixation induction, then suggests alertness and focus, uses a lovely medical-student-oriented image of blood being reoxygenated by the lungs as we breathe and taking the oxygen to every part of the body and energising it, and concludes with anchoring the good feeling to a finger touch. Throughout, he uses “permissive” language – “you may experience such-and-such, you can enjoy so-and-so”, and there’s a brief touch of Ericksonian confusion technique here and there.

There’s a little bit of background noise on the recording, but overall it’s a good track and a nice sampler of self-hypnosis.

I recommend checking out CALM and trying out some of the material, and I’m very happy to see a highly respected “conventional medicine” institution going beyond the hangups that such institutions often have about anything that isn’t cell biology, and offering the fruits of so much good research into what actually makes us happy and able to cope well with life.

Technorati Tags: medical school, stress management, positive psychology, online resources, audio, MP3, recording, hypnosis, self-hypnosis

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