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By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on September 21, 2010 

Some would argue that our ability to self-control is on the wane as increasing ranks of obesity and substance abuse permeate our society.

However, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says there’s hope — we just need a little help to see self-regulation as fun.

“Self-control failures depend on whether people see activities involving self-control (e.g., eating in moderate quantities) as an obligation to work or an opportunity to have fun,” says University of Miami’s Juliano Laran and Chris Janiszewski, University of Florida, Gainesville.

According to the authors, approximately one in five U.S. citizens over the age of 12 admits to binge drinking at least once per month, and nearly 10 million people suffer from clinical eating disorders. These epidemics make it critical to examine what can be done to encourage people to regulate consumption.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/09/21/new-perspective-improves-self-control/18481.html

 

By Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.

For you the idea of sleeping well might be as far-fetched as a unicorn sighting. And in our productivity-driven society, sleep is usually the first thing to get sacrificed.

So many of us believe we need to focus on our priorities that we forget sleep is actually one of them.

“Prioritizing sleep is important to overall health and quality of life,” said Mary Rose, Psy.D, clinical psychologist and behavioral sleep specialist at Baylor College of Medicine.

Here are 14 ways you can improve the quantity and quality of your sleep.

1. Go beyond the eight-hour rule. We often hear that eight hours is a must. However, it’s actually an average, and you might need more or less to function optimally, according to Allison T. Siebern, Ph.D, a clinical instructor and sleep specialist at the Sleep Medicine Center at the Stanford School of Medicine. Interestingly, it’s not uncommon for Siebern to see patients at her clinic who sleep five to six hours and whose family or friends are worried that they’re not getting enough sleep. But in reality, “The individual has no daytime impairments, feels optimal during the day, has slept this amount of hours most of their adult life and if they try to stay in bed longer to sleep they don’t.” The takeaway? Pay attention to the amount of sleep that’s best for you.
2. Stop trying. Many people try to force themselves to fall sleep, especially if they have insomnia. However, because sleep is a biological process, Siebern said that it can’t be forced. In fact, “oftentimes short-term strategies of ‘trying to achieve’ sleep may actually maintain insomnia in the long-term.” Instead, focus on rest. Siebern suggested engaging in an activity that helps you relax, “rather than doing something with the expectation that it will put you to sleep.”
3. Don’t compensate for sleep loss. According to Siebern, avoid trying “to ‘catch up’ on sleep by going to bed earlier or staying in bed later than [you] typically do when the insomnia is not present.” That’s because “this can work against how sleep is regulated and can lead to more frustration.”
4. Take inventory of your habits. There are some essential rules for sleeping well such as keeping a “routine, with regard to a set wake and sleep time,” and “finding ways to relax at least one hour prior to bedtime,” according to Rose.

   And then there are the rule breakers, which sabotage your sleep. These include drinking caffeine before bed, working in bed and watching TV in your room. If this sounds familiar, try to banish these sleep stealers.

5. Understand that sleep changes. Bad habits aren’t always to blame — even if your sleeping problems are recent. “Our sleep needs and the quality of our sleep changes over time,” and we “may become more sensitive to disruption at different times in our life,” Rose said. Many factors can trigger this, including age, hormones, (e.g., menopause), illness, injury, stress and environmental changes, she said.
6. Cultivate healthy habits. According to Rose, there are various ways you can “build your sleep drive,” such as avoiding naps, exercising during the day and keeping your room dim at bedtime.
7. Zero in on daytime worries. We tend to take our daily troubles to bed with us. If you’re experiencing anxiety during the day, it’s likely that this angst is affecting your sleep. “Many of my patients have daytime anxieties with work and their families which they have not resolved in the daytime,” Rose said.

   At first, though, your worries might not be so obvious. “Often patients report that they are thinking about unimportant things while trying to sleep — but when they reconsidered and monitor their thoughts more proactively — they often discover that larger issues they have not yet resolved are at play,” she said.

   So try to dig deeper to “identify and manage worrisome thoughts that may be magnifying nighttime anxiety and inability to wind down.”

Read in Full: http://psychcentral.com/lib/2010/14-strategies-for-sleeping-better/

 

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on September 20, 2010 

New research provides further clues as to why Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects four times more males than females.

Scientists from the Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) discovered that males who carry specific alterations of DNA on the sole X chromosome they carry are at high risk of developing ASD.

The research is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

ASD is a neurological disorder that affects brain functioning, resulting in challenges with communication and social interaction, unusual patterns of behavior, and often, intellectual deficits. ASD affects one in every 120 children and a startling one in 70 boys.

Though all of the causes of ASD are not yet known, research has increasingly pointed towards genetic factors. In recent years, several genes involved in ASD have successfully been identified.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/09/20/male-autism-linked-to-dna/18437.html

 

Article Date: 20 Sep 2010

The National Autistic Society (NAS) welcomed the publication of the Kennedy review of how the NHS treats children, which recommends investment in mental health support. The charity says thousands of children with autism in England are needlessly facing a future of mental health problems, because the NHS does not know how to help them.

“Too many children with autism are developing preventable mental health problems and find themselves up against a broken system that doesn’t understand them or their needs. All too often they receive inappropriate, ineffectual and sometimes harmful treatments. This has a devastating effect on families many of whom develop their own mental health problems as a result.

Read in Full:  http://www.medilexicon.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=201723

 

I’m happy to announce that I’ve just finalised an agreement with Penguin to write a book on what hallucinations tell us about the mind, brain and human nature. From the proposal:

The mind and brain can generate fantastical visions and disembodied voices, illusory people and shifting landscapes, internal symphonies and sensed presences. These states happen at the extremes of human experience, in madness, terror and brain disturbance, but they are often an exaggeration of our natural tendency to hallucinate that we rely on for everyday perception – a tendency that has inspired great works of art and shaped history.

We all hallucinate, and our perception relies on it. We have blind spots in our vision that our brain fills with hallucinated experience. Occasionally we experience intense and vivid hallucinations, after taking certain drugs, during mental illness, with epilepsy or brain injury, during hypnosis, after being taken hostage, during deep-sea dives, while blacking out at high Gs, or at other extremes of human experience that tax the body and mind. But it is not just these situations that trigger hallucinations: one in ten healthy adjusted people hallucinate more than patients in hospital with psychosis. In other words, hallucinations are part of human nature.

Read in Full:  http://mindhacks.com/2010/09/21/the-book-of-reality-distortions-2/

 

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on September 17, 2010 

Researchers have discovered that a journal describing what happened to an individual during an intensive care unit stay may help reduce, or mitigate post-traumatic stress disorder.

The diary, often created by ICU staff or close relatives, seems to help patients make more sense of what has happened to them by reducing fragmented or delusional memories of the time spent in ICU.

The research study is found in BioMed Central’s open access journal Critical Care.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/09/17/hospital-diaries-protect-from-ptsd/18334.html

 

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on September 17, 2010

Despite having been used for over 30 years, the pharmacological action of antidepressants such as Prozac has remained obscure.

European research published this week sheds new light on the mechanisms of action of these drugs.

In particular, the researchers have revealed, for the first time, a sequence of reactions caused by Prozac at the neuron level, which contributes to an increase in the amounts of serotonin, a chemical “messenger” essential to the brain, and deficient in depressive individuals.

Details of this work are published in the journal Science.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/09/17/researchers-learn-how-prozac-works/18336.html

 

Article Date: 17 Sep 2010 – 0:00 PDT

Long-term exposure to a common stress hormone may leave a lasting mark on the genome and influence how genes that control mood and behavior are expressed, a mouse study led by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests. The finding, published in the September issue of Endocrinology, could eventually lead to new ways to explain and treat depression, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses.

Scientists and physicians have long been interested in the cause of depression, a sometimes debilitating disorder that affects about 16 percent of people at least once over the course of a lifetime. While studies have shown that many other mental illnesses are strongly heritable, studies have shown that the risk of depression is only about 40 percent genetic. Consequently, environmental factors are thought to play a major role in causing this disease.

Read in Full:  http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/201406.php

 

by Paul Linde, M.D. 

 

15 September 2010 Last updated at 19:13