LONDON (AFP) – A diet heavy in processed and fatty foods increases the risk of depression, according to research published on Monday.
Researchers at University College London also found that a diet including plenty of fresh vegetables, fruit and fish could help prevent the onset of depression.
They compared participants – all civil servants – who ate a diet largely based on “whole” foods with a second group who mainly ate fried food, processed meat, high-fat dairy products and sweetened desserts.
Taking into account other indicators of a healthy lifestyle such as not smoking and taking physical exercise, those who ate the whole foods had a 26 percent lower risk of depression than those who ate mainly processed foods.
People with a diet heavy in processed food had a 58 percent higher risk of depression.
The researchers put forward several explanations for the findings, which are published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Firstly, the high level of antioxidants in fruits and vegetables could have a protective effect, as previous studies have shown higher antioxidant levels to be associated with a lower risk of depression.
Secondly, eating lots of fish may protect against depression because it contains high levels of the sort of polyunsaturated fatty acids which stimulate brain activity.
And they said it was possible that a “whole food” diet protects against depression because of the combined effect of consuming nutrients from lots of different types of food, rather than the effect of one single nutrient.
The researchers concluded: “Our research suggests that healthy eating policies will generate additional benefits to health and well-being, and that improving people’s diet should be considered as a potential target for preventing depressive disorders.”
The study was carried out on 3,486 people with an average age of 55, who worked for the civil service in London.
Each participant completed a questionnaire about their eating habits, and a self-assessment for depression.
You know what you need to do. You know why you need to do it. You even know what steps you must take to get it done. But there’s one small problem: you can’t seem to get moving. It’s a common problem. Maybe it’s chronic procrastination or maybe you’re just so overwhelmed that you feel paralyzed. Either way, the task you must complete is just sitting there, gathering metaphorical (or perhaps literal) dust, and growing more ominous by the day.
A recently study by Dr. Piers Steel, a professor at the University of Calgary concluded that procrastination is on the rise. According to Steel’s research, in 1978 about 15 percent of the population were considered moderate procrastinators. Today that number is up to 60 percent, a four-fold increase. While procrastination is to some degree a natural phenomenon and can’t be completely eradicated, you can use the following ten strategies to to get in the habit of getting things done.
1. Take advantage of your power hours. Are you an early riser who tackles your morning to-do list with all the gusto of a bear eating honey? Perhaps you’re a night-owl and crank through your most pressing projects at 11:00 p.m.?Either way, knowing and taking advantage of your natural energy patterns will help you steer clear of procrastination by using your power times to tackle the projects you find most challenging.
2. Focus for five minutes. The hardest part of overcoming procrastination is often just getting started. For a tedious task that you have been putting off try setting a timer for five-minutes and get to work. When the alarm sounds, if you feel like stopping – don’t be surprised if that first five minutes turns into 10, 15 and 20.
3. Create cues. Write down the item you need to do and place it somewhere where you can see it – your refrigerator door, car dashboard, calender, iphone, bathroom mirror. Posting prompts on items you are procrastinating about in a highly visible place, helps remind you to get them done.
4. Use the clout of your calendar: Do you have a task that has been lingering on your to-do list for days, weeks or even (gulp) months? If so, use the clout of your calendar to move from inertia to action. Open your planner or PDA and schedule a specific date and time period when you promise yourself that you will work on that item – and that item only.
5. Decide on the next action: One reason people procrastinate is they feel intimidated by the task as it is currently stated and can’t figure out what to do next. To overcome overwhelm, figure out the next smallest, easiest and most comfortable action you could take to move forward. By breaking down the bigger less defined item into smaller more specific chunks, you tell your mind “I can do this”!
6. Give yourself credit all along the way: The moment you take any action (no matter how small) – give yourself credit. Don’t wait until the entire to-do is complete before experiencing at least some degree of satisfaction and accomplishment.
7. Tackle the hard ones first: Almost everyone has more focus, energy and attention available at the beginning of their workday than at the end. When you have to do a hard task, get it out of the way and do it first thing in the morning. This way it won’t nag at you all day long.
8. Be decisive: Putting off a decision on what to do with that piece of paper won’t be any easier tomorrow than it is today. Train yourself to categorize every item that comes across your desk as something to do now, delegate, dump, or defer. Defer does not mean placing it back in the pile and pretending it does not exist. That is the pathway to procrastination. It means putting it in a dated tickler file, scheduling a time to do it, or moving it to a someday to-do list – where the guilt and stress of procrastination don’t apply.
9. Enlist encouragement. Tell a close friend what you’re going to accomplish by when and ask them to check in on your progress. Going public can create a self-imposed pressure to shun procrastination and perform. Having a buddy who can celebrate your successes, and help you maintain perspective when you procrastinate is invaluable.
10. Play let’s make a deal. To get yourself moving on a hard to do activity, try a bribe. Make a promise to yourself that when you stop procrastinating and take some action on the item, you get a reward. This can be a piece of chocolate, watching a favorite tv show, spending time with your family - anything that you value and will motivate you to get moving.
Wednesday, Jul. 08, 2009
By John Cloud www.time.com
In the past 50 years, people with mental problems have spent untold millions of hours in therapists’ offices, and millions more reading self-help books, trying to turn negative thoughts like “I never do anything right” into positive ones like “I can succeed.” For many people — including well-educated, highly trained therapists, for whom “cognitive restructuring” is a central goal — the very definition of psychotherapy is the process of changing self-defeating attitudes into constructive ones.
But was Norman Vincent Peale right? Is there power in positive thinking? A study just published in the journal Psychological Science says trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they are. (See pictures of people mourning the death of Michael Jackson.)
The study’s authors, Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick, begin with a common-sense proposition: when people hear something they don’t believe, they are not only often skeptical but adhere even more strongly to their original position. A great deal of psychological research has shown this, but you need look no further than any late-night bar debate you’ve had with friends: when someone asserts that Sarah Palin is brilliant, or that the Yankees are the best team in baseball, or that Michael Jackson was not a freak, others not only argue the opposing position, but do so with more conviction than they actually hold. We are an argumentative species.
And so we constantly argue with ourselves. Many of us are reluctant to revise our self-judgment, especially for the better. In 1994, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper showing that when people get feedback that they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better. If you try to tell your dim friend that he has the potential of an Einstein, he won’t think he’s any smarter; he will probably just disbelieve your contradictory theory, hew more closely to his own self-assessment and, in the end, feel even dumber. In one fascinating 1990s experiment demonstrating this effect — called cognitive dissonance in official terms — a team including psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton asked participants to write hard-hearted essays opposing funding for the disabled. When these participants were later told they were compassionate, they felt even worse about what they had written. (See how to prevent illness at any age.)
For the new paper, Wood, Lee and Perunovic measured 68 students on their self-esteem. The students were then asked to write down their thoughts and feelings for four minutes. Every 15 seconds during those four minutes, one randomly assigned group of the students heard a bell. When they heard it, they were supposed to tell themselves, “I am a lovable person.”
Those with low self-esteem — precisely the kind of people who do not respond well to positive feedback but tend to read self-help books or attend therapy sessions encouraging positive thinking — didn’t feel better after those 16 bursts of self-affirmation. In fact, their self-evaluations and moods were significantly more negative than those of the people not asked to remind themselves of their lovability. (See pictures of couples in love.)
This effect can also occur when experiments are more open-ended. The authors cite a 1991 study in which participants were asked to recall either six or 12 examples of instances when they behaved assertively. “Paradoxically,” the authors write, “those in the 12-example condition rated themselves as less assertive than did those in the six-example condition. Participants apparently inferred from their difficulty retrieving 12 examples that they must not be very assertive after all.”
Wood, Lee and Perunovic conclude that unfavorable thoughts about ourselves intrude very easily, especially among those of us with low self-esteem — so easily and so persistently that even when a positive alternative is presented, it just underlines how awful we believe we are.
The paper provides support for newer forms of psychotherapy that urge people to accept their negative thoughts and feelings rather than try to reject and fight them. In the fighting, we not only often fail but can also make things worse. Mindfulness and meditation techniques, in contrast, can teach people to put their shortcomings into a larger, more realistic perspective. Call it the power of negative thinking.
On a bone-chilling night in late January, a capacity crowd of roughly 400 people packed the main auditorium at First Unitarian Society on Madison’s west side.
The man everyone came to see was selected by Time magazine in 2006 as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. He’s in regular contact with the Dalai Lama. His work has made him a veritable rock star in the world of neuroscience.
Yet UW-Madison researcher Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., known simply as “Richie” to friends and colleagues, seemed to genuinely enjoy taking questions from the public just as much as he might from scientific colleagues.
Punctuating his talk with humor, and frequently flashing a broad smile, Davidson seemed thoroughly at ease. The 57-year-old Madison resident (he lives on the west side with his wife, Susan, a perinatologist at St. Mary’s Hospital) spoke fluidly without notes for more than an hour, moving freely about the stage.
Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry and director of the UW’s Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, was speaking on neuroplasticity — the ability of the brain to remain flexible, adaptable and trainable. It’s one of the foundations of his work.
The adult brain, scientists now realize, continues to make about 5,000 new cells per day. It is ever changing, or “plastic,” throughout life.
“Traits formerly considered to be fixed are really not,” said Davidson. “They’re characteristics that can be changed through training.”
In other words, human beings have more control over our minds than previously thought. And one way of training the brain is meditation — another main focus of Davidson’s work.
“We’re carrying our own laboratory between our ears, and we just need to use it,” Davidson told the crowd.
One audience member asked about the potential benefits of meditation for prisoners. It was a prescient question: On Thursday, March 26, Davidson will participate in a panel discussion following a screening of The Dhamma Brothers, a new documentary (see sidebar).
The film explores an intensive meditation course in an Alabama maximum-security prison. And there is reason to believe it works. As Davidson mused, “With a slight shift of mindset, prisons can become monasteries.”
This statement seemed to be greeted with a slight ripple of surprise, maybe even shock. It’s not hard to imagine saffron-robed Buddhist monks engaged in hours of serene contemplation, but criminals?
Hello, Dalai
Davidson, from within his sunlit office in the UW’s Waisman Center, admits his ties to the Dalai Lama are at first a bit surprising.
“It’s exceedingly rare,” he says of their association. “I don’t know any other spiritual leader who has that kind of intense interest in science.”
But the Dalai Lama, Davidson suggests, is a scientist at heart: “He has a deep, abiding and tenacious curiosity. He asks amazingly probing questions, and he has made the statement that he is prepared to give up anything in Buddhism that is directly contradicted by scientific fact.”
Davidson’s interest in contemplative practices predates his friendship with the Dalai Lama. In fact, as he told the crowd at First Unitarian, he first went to India in 1974, after his second year in graduate school at Harvard.
It was in India and later Sri Lanka that Davidson first witnessed intensive meditation, which he began to dabble in himself. He came to the UW in 1984, when contemplative practices were not always considered a suitable topic for research psychologists.
In 1992 the Dalai Lama sent Davidson a fateful fax, encouraging research into the effects of meditation and inviting him to a meeting in Dharamsala, India. That marked the beginning of an enduring intellectual partnership. In fact, Davidson plans to return to India on April 1 to meet with the Dalai Lama again.
Beginning in 2000, Davidson and colleagues at the Waisman Center began studying seasoned meditation practitioners as they engaged in specific exercises, such as compassion meditation. Functional MRI scans were used to record brain activity.
In compassion meditation, one aims to obtain a state of mind suffused with love and compassion for all, without reasoning or distracting thoughts.
The meditators used in this study each had a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice, and their lifetime average was much higher: a whopping 35,000 hours, roughly equivalent to 17 years at a full-time job.
Davidson’s research revealed increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain, an area also correlated with happiness, as well as significant activity in the motor regions of the brain, which are connected to converting intention to action.
While Davidson does not discount the spiritual aspects of meditation for many practitioners, it need not be a spiritual practice to provide benefits.
In fact, mindfulness-based stress reduction, widely taught in academic medical centers, is completely secular. And even the Dalai Lama has said: “Love and compassion are the true religion to me. But to develop this, we do not need to believe in any religion.”
Davidson himself lives in the world of firm evidence and peer-reviewed journals, not a gauzy web of hunches.
He frequently uses phrases like “hard-nosed research” or “hard data.” He’s careful to spell out what is concretely known about meditation’s benefits and what is surmised but not yet proven.
For example, when asked about the link between compassion for others and a sense of personal happiness, Davidson cites an experiment conducted elsewhere in which participants were given $50 to spend. Half were instructed to spend it on themselves, half to spend it on others. Those who bought gifts for others reported feeling happier after the exercise.
Concludes Davidson, “We are built to experience happiness when we can facilitate the happiness of others and facilitate the compassion that is the relief of suffering of others. I think there is this connection, but there is precious little hard-nosed research at this point in time.”
Ongoing research
While much psychological research focuses on dysfunction — negative feelings and destructive patterns — Davidson seeks to investigate correlations between brain activity and positive human emotions. The goal is to see whether human beings can produce physical changes in the brain that can improve their lives.
Early studies suggest meditation could help people coping with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, hypertension and asthma. And Davidson and his colleagues want to study how meditation might benefit K-12 students, medical patients, prisoners and others.
Two new grants will help advance these goals, though further funding is needed and actively being sought.
Last November, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a $6 million grant to the Wisconsin Center on the Neuroscience and Psychophysiology of Meditation. Some of this funding will go toward supporting ongoing research in Davidson’s lab.
The Fetzer Institute, a foundation based in Kalamazoo, Mich., has donated $2.5 million toward the formation of the UW Center for Creating a Healthy Mind. The five-year grant is specifically geared toward work on the “neuroscience of compassion, love and forgiveness.” The new center will have space within the Waisman Center; renovations are already under way.
“Architects are designing 4,000 feet of new space that will include a meditation room for both research and the use of students and staff,” says Davidson.
Outreach has also begun, such as training in mindfulness-based stress reduction, offered free to teachers and staff at the Waisman Early Childhood Program.
The Center for Creating a Healthy Mind is set to open in May 2010. It’s already lined up a keynote speaker: Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the author of such books as Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life.
Davidson’s work is not without controversy. He’s been criticized for collaborating on studies involving the use of nonhuman primates. He’s defended that work publicly in lectures and media interviews.
“Contrary to some of the claims that have been made by people who have been objecting to this,” he says, “I’ve actually never received a penny of research dollars [as the principal investigator] either from a federal agency or any private foundation for research on animals ever in my career. That is a matter of public record.”
Neither the NIH nor Fetzer Institute grants involve research on nonhuman animals.
Davidson says he is “not defending the status quo” in terms of how animals are treated, seeing this as an area in which scientists and animal rights activists can work together.
“Animal research is not going to go away, I think everyone would agree,” he says. “So the most practical thing is to try to change the culture to reduce the suffering of animals.”
Man on a mission
Like other scientists, Davidson is optimistic that the Obama administration will change the scientific climate for the better.
“The sensibility and the inclination of the new administration is, in my own view, a terrifically healthy change from the past,” he says. “In the stimulus package, there’s an enormous increase for the NIH budget; that’s a very hopeful sign. So I think that it’s great news for science in general.”
Speaking more specifically about meditation, Davidson continues: “There is an unbelievable crisis in this country with health care costs. Something has to be done. There is some reason to believe that individuals who engage in a regular practice of meditation will show decreased health care utilization. This needs to be studied very carefully…. [Meditation] is an extraordinarily low-cost intervention with very few, if any, side effects.”
Indeed, meditation is practiced by some members of Congress — including Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who sits on the House subcommittee dealing with appropriations for health and education.
“[Ryan] has actually visited my lab very recently,” says Davidson. “He is intensely interested in this area and strongly believes in its importance. He is currently in the process of organizing hearings on Capitol Hill that will allow me and several other scientists to testify.”
Like any scientist needing ongoing funding, Davidson seeks to ignite the interest of government officials, foundations and individual donors. He’s a man on a mission.
Yet he seems equally keen to share his ideas with the public. Thus his talk at First Unitarian or one he gave at the Overture Center on behalf of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, which inducted him as a fellow in 2004.
“It’s very important to me, and I enjoy talking to lay audiences,” says Davidson of his public speaking engagements.
“I do it because we as scientists in general have a moral obligation to communicate with the public, since so much research is supported by taxpayer dollars.
“But in my case,” he adds, “it’s even more important because we’re discovering things and dealing with issues that are genuinely beneficial to people in their everyday lives.”
http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=25405
