I just read a wonderful post about countering self-criticism by Robert Leahy, Ph.D., who is the Director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy. I wanted to share it with you:

Here's a [big] excerpt:

I am especially drawn to being as kind to yourself as you would be to a stranger. All the practices and perspectives above are incorporated into the Alive experience, as they are very much proven to create positive change in one's life and effectiveness. Would love to hear your comments!

Recently, Everyday Health tackled the widespread problem of insomnia.

Amonng many great recommendations, they include a section on biofeedback to help combat a busy mind.

Relaxation techniques For some people with insomnia, a racing or worried mind is the enemy of sleep. In others, physical tension is to blame. Fortunately, there are ways to release physical tension and relax more effectively. Relaxation techniques that can quiet a racing mind include meditation, breathing exercises, and progressively tensing and relaxing your muscles starting with your feet and working your way up your body — a technique known as progressive muscle relaxation.

In biofeedback, people use equipment that monitors and makes them aware of involuntary body states (such as muscle tension or hand temperature). Immediate feedback helps people see how various thoughts or relaxation maneuvers affect tension, enabling them to learn how to gain voluntary control over the process. Biofeedback is usually done under professional supervision. Other relaxation techniques — such as progressive muscle relaxation or meditation — can be learned in behavior therapy sessions or from books, tapes, or classes.

As part of his work, Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project has put together a great short list of steps to making change that lasts. Lasting change is something we promote at Somatic Vision, and is essentially the goal of Alive and our other work. Ton's list perfectly complements our work, so I am including some highlight below:

1. Be highly precise and specific. Imagine a typical New Year's resolution to "exercise regularly." It's a prescription for failure. You have a vastly higher chance for success if you decide in advance the days and times, and precisely what you're going to do on each of them.
2. Say instead that you commit to do a cardiovascular work out Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m., for 30 minutes. If something beyond your control forces you to miss one of those days, you automatically default to doing that workout instead on Saturday at 9 a.m.
3. Take on one new challenge at a time. Over the years, I've established routines and practices, from weight training and running to doing the most important thing first every morning without interruption for 90 minutes and then taking a break...to spending 90 minutes talking with my wife on Saturday mornings.
4. In each case, I gave the new practice I was launching my sole focus. Computers can run several programs simultaneously. Human beings operate best when we take on one thing at a time, sequentially.
5. 3. Not too much, not too little. The most obvious mistake we make when we try to change something in our lives is that we bite off more than we can chew. The only way to truly grow is to challenge your current comfort zone. The trick is finding a middle ground — pushing yourself hard enough that you get some real gain, but not too much that you find yourself unwilling to stay at it.
6. What we resist persists. Diets fail the vast majority of time because they're typically built around regularly resisting food we enjoy eating. Eventually, we run up against our limited reservoir of self control. Instead, keep food you don't want to eat out of sight, and focus your diet instead on what you are going to eat, at which times, and in what portion sizes. The less you have to think about what to do, the more successful you're likely to be.
7. Competing commitments. Think about a change you really want to make. Now ask yourself what you're currently doing or not doing to undermine that primary commitment. If you are trying to get more focused on important priorities, for example, your competing commitment might be the desire to be highly responsive and available to those emailing you. For any change effort you launch, it's key to surface your competing commitment and then ask yourself "How can I design this practice so I get the desired benefits but also minimize the costs I fear it will prompt?"
8. Keep the faith. Change is hard. It is painful. And you will experience failure at times. The average person launches a change effort six separate times before it finally takes.

Thanks to an article in the Press of Atlanta City, I learned that even the most prominent facilities that help people recover from drug addiction have been including biofeedback in their programs. This comes as no surprise!

From the article:

Scientists define addiction as a chronic illness characterized by relapses during recovery, such as diabetes or hypertension. As with those health conditions, managing addiction requires a sustained lifestyle change, and most rehab centers — regardless of cost and amenities, and some of these are quite deluxe and expensive — aim to bring about that change through counseling, education and community service.

Because addicts share key things in common, they need care, understanding and hope as they work toward recovery — whether it's in a fancy facility or a simple one.

Betty Ford Center, on 20 acres in the desert east of Los Angeles, offers acupuncture and biofeedback as part of their recovery program. Residential patients share double rooms with views of the local mountains, enjoying meals shaped by the staff dietitian and personalized exercise plans designed by the onsite fitness trainer.

It is our hope at Somatic Vision that more substance-abuse programs will incorporate biofeedback, since we have seen first-hand how effective it is at teaching people to:

• - Find healthier ways to cope with ongoing stress from any source
• - Change ingrained habits for better wellbeing
• - Use the mind to control the body
• - Insert conscious self-management into the tumult of life

And this is why we have created and keep building Alive: People need effective tools to help them improve their life experience and move from troubled points in time to better living. People are stronger than they know, and the right tools can very frequently help them to achieve anything they really want.

A friend sent this to me, and because of my own longtime delight in drinking lots of water (for me, the bubbly kind!) I thought I'd share! The following is by Dr. Neill, Registered Psychologist.

After breathing oxygen, drinking water is the second most essential step in maintaining life. So drink lots of water.

It is estimated that 75% of Americans suffer mild chronic dehydration. Many would be drinking enough water were it not for the fact that they also use diuretics such as caffeine and alcohol which cause dehydration.

A host of problems have been associated with dehydration, but how does dehydration relate to stress? The brain is composed of 95% water. A mere 2% drop in body water will begin to shrink your brain and cause fuzzy short-term memory, difficulty focusing and daytime fatigue. The cluster of symptoms is sometimes called the brain fog.

Brain fog makes thinking harder and life more stressful. Therefore, avoiding or minimizing brain fog is a part of any good [tag-tec]stress management[/tag-tec] program.

Of course, chronic dehydration also leads to a host of physical problems such as hypertension, under-functioning kidneys and joint pain. Physical problems tend to create more chronic stress.

The solution is obvious: drink lots of water to keep your brain and the rest of your body working optimally.

Drink extra water under circumstances of increased body-water loss; for example, when you drink alcohol or coffee, exercise, fly or are under stress.

Drinking lots of water is key to good [tag-ice]stress management[/tag-ice]. It is important in avoiding the buildup of chronic stress, and it is a central tool in reducing stress when it arises.

Psychologist Dr. Neill Neill maintains an active practice on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada. He focuses on healthy relationships and life after addictions. He is the author of Living with a Functioning Alcoholic – A Woman’s Survival Guide

Source: http://www.neillneill.com/59/practical-tips-for-stress-management-2-drin...

Especially during the crazy holiday months, it's important to remember how we can cultivate and use inner quiet to combat the frenetic pace of the season and all its attendant tasks. In a recent piece, Arnie Kozack explains:

Four AM is an auspicious time of day in many contemplative traditions. The world used to be quiet at 4 AM, long before 24-hour stores and the ongoing hum of our electrical and now electronic world. Still, Four AM is relatively quiet as are the other early morning hours. The children are not yet awake, traffic has not started piling up, the press of the work day not yet begun.

Of course, we can be in the relaxing silence of the early morning hours and not have inner silence, and this is why we practice mindfulness — to cultivate that inner quiet. And if you’ve tried mindfulness practice you’ve discovered that this quiet is not always so. We move in an out of quiet and this IS the practice. The goal should not be to make the mind quiet for this only sets us up with expectations. Rather, the practice is retrieve the mind back from noise and allow it to be quiet for a moment or however long it is before it is drawn back out of silence. Again, the practice is to keep coming back.

When we can create this space of returning to silence within ourselves we can take this space anywhere. Now when we are in the noisy world of cars, people shouting into cell phones, construction, and just the hum of daily life we can enjoy an inner quiet.

It’s important to spend some time each day cultivating this sense of inner silence. Ideally, you’ll devote a good 30 to 45 minutes in sitting or walking meditation (see the Guided Meditation links below in this entry). If you can’t devote this time, carve out a few minutes to do a mini-mindfulness practice. Just three minutes can punctuate your day with a soulful silence that disrupts the mounting stress of the typical day.

According to a new study reported by the New York Times, you eat less of a particular food if you spend time before you eat it imagining the act and sensations of eating and tasting the food. Very interesting and delightful way to curb one's tendencies to overindulge in favorite foods!

Call it the Imagine Diet. You wouldn’t have to count calories, track food points or memorize rules. If, say, some alleged friend left a box of chocolate truffles in your home this holiday season, you would neither throw them away nor inhale them all. Instead, you would start eating imaginary chocolates.

You would give yourself a few seconds to imagine tasting and chewing one truffle. (If there’s a picture on the box, you could focus on it.) Then you would imagine eating another, and then another and another...until at last you could open the box of real chocolates without making a total pig of yourself.

So far, the Imagine Diet exists only in my imagination, as does any evidence of its efficacy. But there is some real evidence for the benefits of imaginary eating from experiments at Carnegie Mellon University reported in the current issue of Science. When people imagined themselves eating M & M’s or pieces of cheese, they became less likely to gorge themselves on the real thing.

From Dennis Lewis, the full skinny on breathing:

Deep, natural breathing can be important for health, healing, and spiritual well-being. Such breathing can increase our vitality and promote deep relaxation. Unfortunately, many of us who try to take a deep breath sometimes do the exact opposite of what is required: we suck in our bellies, raise our shoulders, and try to expand our chest. That is shallow breathing.

Here's a taste of this great list of seven things you can do to use breathing for better health:

1. Don’t try to breathe deeply in all situations
. The human organism is not designed to breathe deeply at all times and in all situations. Trying to do so will create many problems. The depth of our breath, whether it is shallow, medium, or deep, depends in large part on what it is we are doing. If we are sitting quietly reading, for example, we do not need to be breathing deeply. If we are working hard and expending a great deal of energy, however, we might well need to breathe deeply. Another situation in which deep breathing can be beneficial is when we are trying to revitalize our energy or for special breathing or healing exercises.

Check out the whole article to read all 7 secrets!

Somatic Vision spends a lot of time testing its products with consumers, and incorporating user feedback. We'd love to hear what you have to say, and we encourage you to connect with other users online. Here are two great ways:

1. The Somatic Vision Forum. Just click the link at the top of this page under the search bar, or click here, and you're on the discussion board, able to participate in all kinds of discussions surrounding biofeedback, stress reduction, health games, and much more.
2. Facebook. Yes, we have a page! Become a fan and begin to connect in a fun way with others who share your interests.

UCLA's Susan Smalley writes eloquently about "Why Well-Being Is Not the Absence of Suffering". A few excerpts:

Well-being is not the absence of illness, disease, or pain and suffering -- that is, life's difficulties. Rather, it is an acceptance of such challenges as part of the human condition, not unique to any one of us. And in the acceptance of this truth, there is a choice to be made: how will you relate to life's challenges?

Whether we know it or not, we choose all the time among a multitude of options. If we bring these choices into consciousness, we discover the vast range of freedom afforded. When you choose to accept suffering instead of wanting to change it, a sense of well-being arises, regardless of external circumstances. The great thing is, we have the freedom to make that choice. In some cases our range of external possibilities is limited (in cases like terminal illness, life itself may not be an option), but we always have a choice in how we relate to pain and suffering.

Once, I met a doctor who came from a war-torn country in Africa and was now living life as a cab driver. He told me he had felt discouraged, regretful, and frustrated by his lot in life until the day he consciously chose to accept his life as a cabbie and began to learn from it, with an open curiosity that changed his level of happiness forever. No longer angry and frustrated, he became curious and talkative to his passengers, who opened their hearts to this caring man and expressed their own dissatisfaction with life. They never wanted to leave his cab because in that car was a man who was content with life.

Stories such as these remind me of the power of choice in our own well-being. We need to see such examples over and over again because we forget our role in shaping our well-being; we act from habitual patterns of mind so often that we forget that we are making decisions at all. The more I explore my mind in my day-to-day life, the more aware I become of the choices I make. With attention, coupled with a curious and accepting attitude, we can fine-tune these choices in life.

And ultimately it is our choices that shape our sense of well-being in the world.