Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

This entry is part 5 of 10 in the series Mind-Body HealingAs I mentioned in my last post, I’m reading Candace Pert’s fascinating book Molecules of Emotion at the moment, and her theory of the “bodymind” as one integrated, dynamic network is seizing my imagination. She’s a prominent scientist who has worked mostly on peptides, [...]

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I’m always pleased to find good stress resources. There are many simple things that we can do to manage stress, and doing so is a significant health benefit. So here’s a website from Mental Health America: Live Your Life Well.
There’s a test to evaluate your stress, and there are ten sensible tools for handling it [...]

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Two interesting articles on BBC Health recently.
The first talks about a University of Toronto study which claims that one death in 25 is linked to alcohol consumption – one in 10 in Europe and one in seven in the former Soviet Union. The researchers say, “Globally, the effect of alcohol on burden of disease is [...]

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This entry is part 10 of 10 in the series Mind-Body HealingEarlier this week, a few things weren’t going too well for me – nothing too tragic, in the scheme of things, but enough that I felt mildly depressed.
I decided to try a technique that I’d stumbled upon with the help of a colleague. I [...]

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This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Positive PsychologyToday’s post is a difficult one, and at first sight an odd fit for the Positive Psychology series. I’m going to talk about suicide.
The reason is that a relative of mine by marriage has just committed suicide, much to the shock and grief of [...]

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This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Positive PsychologyI’ve recently finished reading Richard O’Connor’s book Happy at Last: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Finding Joy. O’Connor doesn’t identify himself as part of the Positive Psychology movement, and in fact has some criticisms of it, but I am putting this review in my [...]

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This entry is part 4 of 10 in the series Mind-Body HealingWouldn’t it be great to have a second brain to take care of some routine tasks?
photo credit: *madalena-pestana*
Well, actually, we already do. I’m studying anatomy and physiology as part of my Health Science course, and I’ve just been learning about the “enteric nervous [...]

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The BBC reports on a UK study showing that group meditation is just as effective as drug treatments for preventing relapses into depression. The research, in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (December 2008), in fact suggests that the group meditation was more effective than the medication: relapse rates were lower (47% versus 60%), [...]

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I’ve just had a guest post published at Brain Blogger if you want to hop over and take a look.
It talks about experiments with mice showing that conditioned “safety” responses can have a similar effect to antidepressants, and suggests a non-drug alternative for humans as well.

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The New Zealand Mental Health Foundation is running Mental Health Awareness Week this week. Although my practice doesn’t deal with the more severe mental health issues, let’s not forget that mental health, just like physical health, exists along a spectrum.
photo credit: Dawn Ashley
A major New Zealand Ministry of Health survey found that “46.6% [...]

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