Perhaps the most common New Year’s resolution, not surprisingly, is to lose those extra pounds that may have dogged you for some time – even before the holidays rolled around. And this is for good reason, as about 40% of US adults are overweight, and another 30% are obese (defined as having a body mass index of 30 or greater).

Most people know that eating healthier and exercising regularly can facilitate weight loss, and that remaining overweight comes at significant costs to health and self-esteem.  Yet, only about 20% of overweight individuals are successful at maintaining weight loss long-term.

First, it’s important to acknowledge that there are a number of physical factors that increase the risk of overweight. Some of these include:

• Prenatal factors (maternal overweight, gestational diabetes, maternal smoking)
• Genes
• Chemical exposure (e.g., phthalates, bisphenol A, the pesticide DDT)
• Hormonal factors (hypothyroidism, PCOS, Cushing’s disease, etc.)
• Certain medications (e.g., some antidepressants, corticosteroids, anti seizure medicines)
• Too little sleep (which affects insulin and other hormones that impact appetite, eating behaviors, and weight gain)
• Exposure to antibiotics (which alters the quality of one’s gut bacteria)
•  “Obesogenic” lifestyle factors (eating too much, making unhealthy food choices, and moving too little)

Although we cannot go back in time and change our prenatal environment or undue previous exposure to chemicals, nor can we change our genes, adopting and sticking with healthy lifestyle behaviors can do a lot to help with weight loss and improve well being. This is where hypnosis can be especially helpful.

Emotional and Unconscious Factors that Keep Pounds On: Overweight as a "Tool"

Your unconscious mind may believe very strongly that obesogenic behaviors serve an essential purpose - that they are important “tools” for helping you to function in some way.  And if a part of you believes the overweight or associated behaviors are necessary, you are much less likely to change them for long. Here are some common examples:

• Using food to increase feelings of comfort.
• Eating to decrease feelings of sadness, anger, anxiety, or other emotions.
• Weight serving as a buffer between yourself and others, especially with regard to intimate relationships.
• Positive identification with others in your life - past or present - who are overweight.
• Equating “good times” with calorie-dense, sugary, fatty, or processed foods.
• Fattening foods or beverages identified as “rewards” for enduring difficulty, suffering through illness, or not having felt loved.
• Fattening foods are rewards for “good behavior” or achievement.Feeling overly full associated with comfort.
• Obesogenic behaviors as a defense against the fear you would fail if you tried to lose weight.
• Weight as a way to rebel against others who are upset about your weight.
• A way of communicating something without speaking(e.g., eating the leftover cake to express anger at a spouse or parent, etc., rather than discussing the situation that left you feeling angry).

We know from the research that hypnosis pairs well with other weight-loss and stress reduction strategies, such as mindfulness, relaxation training, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Some research has found that adding hypnosis to CBT further increases its effectiveness for weight loss.

How Hypnosis Can Change Your Mind and Body

Hypnosis can help you understand unconscious barriers to weight loss and enhance your chances of success via a variety of types of positive suggestion. Some examples include:

• Development of an “inner ally” to help support you in making potentially challenging, but necessary changes.
• Enhancing competence and confidence via encouraging, affirming language.
• Visualization of already having achieved your goal and feeling good about it.
• Accessing and partnering with the part of your unconscious that wants to make change.
• Comforting the part of you that may be afraidof change.
• Understanding why you have needed to use weight as a tool.
• Reframing the previous “use” of eating as a tool that can now be safely retired.
• Visualization of the new, healthier “tools” for coping, navigating personal relationships, and communicating effectively.
• Mental rehearsal to make using healthy tools more automatic.

To summarize, at present, excess weight affects more people than not, and losing the extra pounds remains a challenging task for most. Hypnosis – either with a qualified professional or via self-hypnosis techniques - can help you address the unconscious reasons for keeping weight on, and help you more easily shed those extra pounds.

Dr. Traci Stein is a licensed psychologist, certified clinical hypnotherapist, and adjunct professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the author of several popular self-hypnosis audio programs on sleep, self-esteem, conquering procrastination, and changing habits, including two on Healthy Weight and Body Image, due out this winter.

For more information:

Asmundson, G.J., Fetzner, M.G., Deboer, L.B., Powers, M.B., Otto, M.W., and J.A. Smits (2013). Let’s Get Physical: A Contemporary Review of the Anxiolytic Effects of Exercise for Anxiety and Its Disorders. Depress Anxiety. 30(4):362-73. 

Entwistle, P. A., Webb, R. J., Abayomi, J. C., Johnson, B., Sparkes A. C., & Davies, I. G. (2014) Unconscious Agendas in the Etiology of Refractory Obesity and the Role of Hypnosis in Their Identification and Resolution: A New Paradigm for Weight-Management Programs or a Paradigm Revisited? International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 62:3, 330-359.

Harvard School of Public Health: Obesity Prevention Source – Prenatal and Early Life Influences

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-causes/prenatal-postnatal-obesity/

NIH National Heart, Lung, & Blood Institute: What Causes Overweight and Obesity?

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/obe/causes

World Health Organization: Obesity Situation and Trends

http://www.who.int/gho/ncd/risk_factors/obesity_text/en/

 Photo credit: © Gelpi | Dreamstime.com - Pretty Woman On Seeing His New Weight Scale Photo

I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made. – A.E Housman

She lived alone. Days passed, dry brittle pages turned one by one, an interminable progression toward an inevitable end. Time and deaths had worn her grey. “A child,” she thought, “That’s what I need to cheer things up.” But her children were grown and her grandchildren never visited. Then, one afternoon, walking home after desultory shopping, she passed a pet store. There in the window sat a beautiful young green parrot.

His wing feathers shone a rainbow of green, red, and blue and his eyes were bright and alive. The woman pushed open the store door and walked over to the bird’s cage. “How much is that parrot?” she asked the clerk. The young man looked up and called out,”Eighty dollars without the cage, and a hundred with.” The woman opened her purse, counted out the money, and in a few moments, encaged bird in hand, was on her way home to a third-floor flat.

The bird’s chirps and snippets of song were happy punctuations in an otherwise silent room. The clerk had assured her that the bird wasn’t noisy like some parrots. She decided to call him Danny. After a few days, she moved Danny’s cage over from the window to a small table next to her armchair and that is how they spent most of the day, watching television and trading treats.

This went on for several months until her son came over to move her out. The apartment manager had called several times to complain that the old woman was causing problems. She had started to leave the television on all night, blasting, and then, caught the kitchen on fire because she had forgotten to turn off the stove. “Yesterday was the last straw,” the manager told the son. “When your mother went downstairs to take out the rubbish, she wasn’t wearing a thing. You know, we can’t have that sort of thing around here.” The doctor confirmed a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and said that the condition was accelerating. Nursing homes weren’t affordable so the son brought his mother and Danny to their home.

Things didn’t get much better. Very soon, the outer world receded. The old woman was confused. “What are those voices and where do they come from? Where am I?” she wondered. The bright little bird began to fade as well. His frantic chirps and pecks went unnoticed and the rest of the family had little interest. “Can’t we get rid of that bird?” the wife asked. “I’m tired of cleaning up the mess and your mother doesn’t even pay him attention anymore.”

The son called the pet store where the bird had been purchased, but they weren’t interested in taking him back. “Take him to the county shelter,” the clerk advised. The son put the caged bird in the backseat of the car and dropped him off at the shelter. There, the bird now sat, alone, in the same small cage. The staff tried to get him to talk, but he stayed on the perch back turned, facing the pale stucco wall. One morning, they found him lying on his side at the bottom of the cage, legs straight out, dead.

******

The story of Danny is not so different from human children today. Danny’s suffering and death, like that of children around the industrialized world, are the fruit of abuse, neglect, and indifference. Relationships are the brokers of the soul and when these lifelines are compromised, the results are devastating. This is particularly so during the vulnerable period of childhood dependence. Of course, in the case of captive birds, dependence never ceases. Forced confinement renders even the most robust into a helpless victim of others’ whims.

Neuroscience and psychology have codified this relational paradigm for describing mental development and wellbeing. In contrast to previous models, bird and human minds are understood not as isolated billiard balls bouncing off each other, but as interpenetrating fields, similar to what Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.” An individual is less an “I” than a “we,” crafted through an accumulation of relational experiences encountered in the tumble of life.

Even before birth, in the womb or egg, the nascent mind readies to receive the subtle rhythms of parent and community. Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist who specializes in child trauma, asserts: “There is no more specific 'biological' determinant than a relationship.” These scientific insights cast a harsh light on modern society.

According to moral neuropsychologist Darcia Narvaez, industrialized life radically departs from the rest of human history, much to its detriment. Dating back 250,000 years, when our species lived in small bands as subsistence gatherers, relational rearing was positive, loving, and nurturing. Not so now. The brains of today’s children are denied this ancestral promise.

Most childhood experience is dominated by violence, abuse, indifference, and social isolation. These conditions are the underlying cause for widespread symptoms of self-injury, depression, anxiety, and bullying and they are not easy to extinguish. The mismatch between what the brain anticipates evolutionarily and what it ends up experiencing transmits across generations. Perry refers to this intergenerational enculturation as the transformation of psychological states into psychological traits. Lessons from our own species apply to others.

Bird captivity and captive breeding reflect the same imprisoning mentality that modern humans have imposed on tribal people everywhere. Epidemic suicide and despair are the signatures of colonial violence. Captive bred parrots are also denied their native heritage and biological parenting in the open expanse of freedom. They are exposed to a succession of relational shortfalls and trauma. Deprivations on the outside – unnatural rearing, premature weaning, poor nutrition, and the bone penetrating ache of loneliness – transmit within to the depth of genes. Telomeres (protective ends of a chromosome) of African Grey Parrots who live alone are shorter than those of parrots who are pair housed. The stress of loneliness foreshortens both present and future.

With every generational iteration, the natural constellation of a parrot’s mind ratchets down yet another notch. These winged souls are pulled further down into a Dante’s inferno of sterile, empty cages. Humanity’s own anguish inoculates bird minds until the figure who remains is literally parrot in form alone.

Like the lonely woman who purchased Danny, other people yearn to possess what they have lost or never had – the bright vitality of love. In so doing, millions upon millions of angels like Danny are sacrificed on the barren rocks of human pain, the echoes of loneliness piercing their hearts unto death.

References Cited

Aydinonat D, Penn DJ, Smith S, Moodley Y, Hoelzl F, et al. (2014) Social isolation shortens telomeres in African Grey Parrots (Psittacus erithacus erithacus). PLoS ONE 9(4): e93839. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093839

Narvaez, D. 2013. The 99 percent—development and socialization within an evolutionary context: growing up to become “a good and useful human being, In War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (Ed. D.P. Fry). Oxford University Press.

Perry, B.D. 1997. Incubated in terror: neurodevelopmental factors in the ‘cycle of violence.’ In: Children, Youth and Violence: The Search for Solutions (J. Osofsky, Ed.). Guilford Press, New York, pp 124- 148.

*First author is Jessica Zohrer, with assistance from Angela Kurth

Do you have a partnership system, an environment that encourages positive development of all within the family, or adomination system, where one person is dominant over the others?

Scholars, like Dr. Riane Eisler, examine the family environment as a whole, characterizing the parent relationship into two categories: partnership or domination.

In a partnership system, the family makes mutual decisions, creates a warm and loving environment with minimal stress, and parents show their children how to treat each other with respect.

On the other hand, a domination system consists of one parent being the person in the charge of the rest of the family, including the other parent. The environment found in a domination system is tense, overly stressful, and not at all welcoming.

What’s wrong with the domination system?

This type of family dynamic shows children that it is okay to be disrespectful, rough, and downright bossy to other people, which most of us would agree that this is not what we want to teach our kids. These stressful experiences at young ages, some even more stressful and traumatic than others in cases of abuse, have negative affects on the development of the human brain. Children who live in dominant systems, aka stressful situations, have higher cortisol levels in their brains. Cortisol is a hormone that often leads to violence and depression, along with the use of drugs and/or alcohol for psychological escape. Would you want your children to grow up in a home where their brains cannot develop as they should because of all the stress? I didn’t think so.

So now the question is how to change your home into a partnership system environment. How can families do this?

• Treat your children as you want to be treated from the beginning of life.
• Equally value both males and females in the families—treat all like unique individuals
• Be egalitarian and authoritative (mutually responsive) not authoritarian (command and coerce)
• Promote mastery of challenges for their own sake
• Don’t use fear or threats
• When conflict arises in the home, use this as an opportunity to teach the children how to handle disagreements with peaceful resolution

Below are links to websites with resources on how to change family dynamics to help your child flourish and for more on partnership rather than domination.

Website Sources

http://www.partnershipway.org/core-pathways/abcs-of-dominator-and...

http://www.partnershipway.org/core-pathways/abcs-of-dominator-and...

References

Eisler, R. (September, 2014). Societal Contexts for Family Relations: Tradition, Violence, and Stress Riane. Pathways to Child Flourishing conference, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN.

http://www.partnershipway.org/core-pathways/abcs-of-dominator-and...

SERIES ON CHILD FLOURISHING*

1. Kindness in Kids and the Nature-Nurture Debate (Dr. Sarina Saturn)

2. Why You Should Hold Your Children More (Dr. Ruth Feldman)

3. “I want it—now!” Children’s Self-Control (Dr. Julie Braungart-Rieker)

4. Why Kids Should be Buffered Against Toxic Stress (Dr. Bruce Perry)

5. “Mr. Mom” --The Old Normal (Dr. Lee Gettler)

6. Why Dad’s “Talk” is Important (Dr. Holly Brophy-Herb)

7. Conflict in the Family: Why Mom and Dad Should Say “Sorry” (Dr. Mark Cummings)

8. Domination or Partnership? How Does Your Family Stack Up? (Dr. Riane Eisler)

9. Community Daycare (Dr. Robin Nelson)

10. Respecting Young Children (Drs. Mary McMullen, Joshua Sparrow, and Paul Dworkin)

*Posts are based on talks presented at the Pathways to Child Flourishing conference, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN.

ALSO SEE:

What is Child Flourishing?

Happiness and Growth through Play

Promoting Thriving in School-Aged Children: A Checklist

How to Grow a Smart Baby

Dear Santa,

Sometimes when I pass you in the mall there’s a note of sadness in your brave “ho ho hos,” and you seem to have a little less sparkle in your eyes. Are you okay?

Yes, I know. You are a Giver. Yes, it is better to give than to receive. Lots of scientific research confirms this. Not all giving is created equally, though. It’s understandable that your elves are not up to date on the latest scientific journals, considering the time of year. But research finds that there are ways to give that can make you feel happier and closer to others.

For example, people who give their time and money to nonprofit organizations are happier, healthier, and live longer than those who don’t. Yet according to the National Retail Federation, last November and December Americans spent nearly twice the amount of money on holiday gifts ($602 billion) than they donated to charity ($335 billion) across the entire year. Perhaps Americans are unaware of your strategic collaborations with children’s charities.

Gift giving is important of course, but the way that we give matters. Studies find that giving shared experiences makes people feel happier and closer to each other than giving material objects. So why carry that backbreaking bag of toys when you know they’ll be discarded as soon as the novelty wears off?  What if instead of giving Susy a new DVD, you took her out to see a movie? I realize that sometimes it’s easier to just have your elves make another train set, doll, or video game. But giving us your time is how we know you really care, Santa.

And it may not be a good idea to save up all of your giving until the end of the year. Just as it’s good for our physical health to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables, it’s good for our emotional health to give in many different ways, so that each act of giving is fresh and enjoyable. Have you considered spreading out your giving throughout the year, instead of pulling a single all-nighter, fueled by cookies and milk? Getting this all done in one day must really take its toll on your health. With a few small tweaks in the way you give, you may start to feel like yourself again.

One other thing—healthy relationships involve mutual giving and receiving—not just one person who gives all the time without ever receiving. Being an over-giver without receiving can lead to compassion fatigue. That might explain the punitive, “naughty or nice” distinction on which you seem so fixated. (There are some really great therapists at near your home if you ever want to talk to someone: http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/state/AK/North+Pole.html). We know you mean well, Santa, but no man is an island, even if he lives at the North Pole. To be a better giver, you also need to be able to receive sometimes. You probably don’t get asked this very often, but what do you want for Christmas this year? 

When is an experimental treatment ready for prime time ? The growing popularity of ketamine as a treatment for mental disorders has posed this question and created an interesting challenge for clinicians, patients and policy makers. The drug, an anesthetic that has traditionally been prescribed for pediatric patients undergoing minor surgical procedures and burn victims, has been used over the last few years to treat severe difficult to treat cases of mental disorders such as depression and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). And its use is on the rise. At the same time, because of its mind bending and euphoriant effects, ketamine has also found favor as a recreational or “club drug” that many refer to as “Special K.”

Ketamine is related to the drug phencyclidine, more commonly known as PCP. Both medications act by blocking the excitatory effects of the neurotransmitter glutamate, which is integral to information processing and memory formation in the brain.  PCP was a popular recreational hallucinogen in the late 1970’s and 80’s before the medical community recognized its toxicity and understood the severe, and sometimes, psychotic reactions it caused.

I vividly remember my own experience, as a psychiatric resident, seeing desperate, maniacal patients intoxicated with PCP brought into the emergency room by police or ambulance. Many were wildly agitated and completely detached from reality. Even the most potent medications seemed to have no effect on them. Most were recreational users who, through their abuse of PCP, had developed psychotic behaviors as a result of the drug.

Research has shown that PCP and Ketamine do have genuine therapeutic uses, but a narrow therapeutic index. This means that the difference in the dose of the drug at which it will produce therapeutic (beneficial medical) effects and that at which it will cause adverse or toxic effects, is very small. So if too much is taken, the drug can result in adverse, and potentially disastrous, consequences. There is a fine line between a medicinal substance producing salutary and toxic effects.

When research with ketamine first showed dramatic therapeutic potential in alleviating the symptoms of depression which had resisted all approved forms of treatment (psychotherapy, antidepressant medications, even electroshock therapy-ECT), desperate patients began to seek and demand the treatment, and clinicians were eager to utilize it.  But the question is how can this new therapeutic option be best applied to serve patients in a beneficial way as we continue to learn about its potential and its consequences.

Ketamine is usually given by injection in single doses. Yet the conditions for which it is used (depression, OCD, etc.) require ongoing and often life long therapy. The dosing intervals for ketamine, to maintain improvement in patients, are not yet understood. Although the results of research with ketamine appear promising, we must determine what the consequences are of repeated administrations and long-term use. We need to know how much and how often.

The pressure to use promising new treatments for clinical purposes before they have been fully tested is not unique to psychiatry or ketamine. And it’s not hard to understand this pressure or the urgency. People are suffering from disabling and often life threatening conditions, and they want—and deserve—appropriate treatment. We have experienced the same phenomenon with treatments for AIDS/HIV in the late 1980’s, treatments for cancer over the last half- century, and recent responses to the devastating Ebola outbreak in Africa.

I believe that we must translate new research findings as rapidly as we can into treatments to improve patients’ lives, but we must be cautious about moving too quickly to apply therapies we don’t completely understand into clinical practice. We must resist the temptation and pressure, and be deliberate and careful. In mental illness, as in every form of human disease, we must stay true to our oldest and most essential principle: primum non nocere. First, do no harm.

You may think that ‘How to take a holiday’ is a silly title for an article. Surely we all know how to do that right? Well, I am not so sure. Both my research and my personal experience tell me that in reality, many people find it really difficult to take real time off each year.

What’s just as bad, is that even when people do manage to get some time off work, many people spend most of the time wound up, thinking about work, or feeling guilty for not being in the office. Pretty crazy right? So with the holiday season looming (well, it's actually here), it’s time to look at the why and how of taking a break.

Now before we get in to the advice dishing part of the article let me fess up. Until about five years ago, I never, ever, took more than a week’s break at any given time, and there were a few years there, where I didn’t take a break at all.

The times when I did take a rare week off, I always checked my emails while away, called the office to generally let everyone know that I wasn’t really on holidays (not really), and I was still completely contactable and could be on any necessary conference call that I needed to be, blah, blah, blah ad-nauseam-here. It’s exhausting, just writing that.

Shocker, right? Or does that sound familiar to you right now? It probably resonates, and unfortunately, you would be in good company.

We think that we are indispensible and that our workplace cannot do without us. Or we are worried for our jobs or our clients if we take too much time out. But the reality is that your talent and the value you add will be fresher and more innovative when you come back from a few weeks off, than if you stay slogging your guts out for six months straight, without so much as a long weekend to catch your breath.

It’s an amazing feeling, to be able to switch off from the routine of daily life. No meetings, no conference calls, hopefully little cooking or domestics, no school lunches, no homework, nothing of a regular nature to have to contend with. The body and the brain can just let go and relax. And the spirit gets that chance to recharge as well.

So how can you get from where you might be (working like a dog) to where you want to be (relaxing at the beach)? Here are some tips and thought starters to get you moving in the right direction.

Get real about your mindset

We all know those people at work who moan and grown that they haven’t taken a holiday in five years. Really? No-one likes a martyr, so don’t be one. Shifting your mindset is the first really important step and the mindset you need is one of permission. Permission you give to yourself, to just be, to switch off, relax, let go and take that break. The days of slogging your guts out for endless months without a break, hoping someone will notice, or having no boundaries with your clients, and killing yourself in the process, are over.

Stress less quicker

Research tells us that it takes most people around five days into their holidays before they really start to unwind and switch off. What a waste right? Make the decision these holidays to let it all go, fast. Be present and enjoy the limited time you have with family and friends to really relax. You will be back at work soon enough, don't worry about that!

Before you head out, check these 

There are many important things to get done before you head out, but make sure these are at the top of your list - they are simple, effective and peace of mind generating:

- Close out any projects that you can before you leave, and handover any work that is left if you are taking a longer break.

- Make lists of anything that needs to be done when you get back so you aren't thinking about it while you are away.

- Put your out of office on your email and voice mail so you have let people know when they expect to hear from you. Redirect people if need be to the back up contact while you are out.

Finally relaxing at the beach? Do's and don'ts

Don't check your email and voice mail religiously. You may be wired to this habit from a year of doing it (or a lifetime), so leave your phone in your hotel room or if you staying at home, stick it in a drawer somewhere so it's not attached to your hand. You don't need it. At least not every five minutes.

Do get off social media. I suggest a social media fast when you are on holidays. At a minimum, take the first day with no contact to break your addiction if you have one (yes, you know you who are) and then only post or check in once or twice a day after that if you absolutely must. I know it can be hard, but your brain needs a rest from being so wired, and social media is like sugar.....too much and we're unhealthy.

Don't start new projects or start re-working old ones. This can be tempting for sure. We finally have the headspace we have been craving all year, so why not just do a 'little bit'. Right? Wrong. Once you get your head back into workspace you may struggle to get it out again. Give yourself at least a chunk of your vacation to really switch off. You will be so much better for it.

Do something new or get creative. I find with so many of my clients that lost creativity is a source of great frustration and sadness, even when they can't quite name it. What can you do this holiday season to reignite some fun, playfulness and creative vibes? Paint, play the piano, do your vision boards, draw with the kids, do yoga, create an alter for meditation, go dancing, visit an art gallery. It doesn't really matter what it is, choose something and revel in it.

And finally, do take time to restore yourself. I am sure, if you are anything like me or my clients, you have had a full on year. That is how we live now. Full on and flat out. Please make sure you do some lovely nurturing things for yourself that will help to restore and nourish your system - especially your nervous system. Go to the spa, get a massage, take some lovely long bubble baths, meditate, read, drink tea and savour the aroma, sit under a tree, lie under the stars, cuddle your kids (and your partner), spend time with friends having long and luxurious conversations. And most importantly, take some time to just be. 

And remember, breaks are not a luxury – they are a necessity for you to reach your ultimate potential. And you know what they say – all work and no play makes Betty a very boring girl – and no-one wants to be boring! Now, are we going to Tahiti or the Bahamas?

Wishing you a most peaceful, joyous, relaxed and safe holiday period. May you be well, happy and loved.

Need something inspiring to read on this wonderful holiday of yours? Make sure you get your copy of my beautiful new ebook Rise and Shine: Creating the career and life you love. Gift it to a friend and you both get access to my special Ask Megan Anything Q&A call at the end of January. I hope you love it.

New research on "cow talk" shows that mothers and their offspring can communicate using different types of "moos." In a study published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science by Mónica Padilla de la Torre and her colleagues, with the cryptic title, "Acoustic analysis of cattle (Bos taurus) mother–offspring contact calls from a source–filter theory perspective," we now know -- though farmers have known this for a long time -- that "Just as human voices differ from each other, the researchers confirmed that cows make their own unique sounds."

I often wonder why scientists can't use simple and descriptive titles, because this study escaped my attention when I saw it online. Perhaps something like, "Cow mothers and calves communicate with one another using various moos" would have been more attention getting. And, the abstract for the study also is a bit cryptic, However, I do not mean this in a pejorative way, because that's what professional journals require. I also found myself reading more popular accounts of the research (please see alsoand where you can listen to the sounds) because I'm not an expert on how sounds are rigorously analyzed. 

I mention the need for more descriptive titles because this is a very significant study that has far-reaching welfare implications for how cows (and other "food animals") are treated -- read, mistreated and egregiously abused -- on factory farms, and how other animals are mistreated in a wide variety of venues.

Indeed, the authors recognize this when they write: "Cattle vocalisations have been proposed as potential indicators of animal welfare." However, very few studies have investigated the acoustic structure and information encoded in these vocalisations using advanced analysis techniques. The researchers discovered three types of individually distinctive calls. "Low frequency calls (LFCs) were produced by cows when they were in close proximity to their calves, in the three or four weeks after birth. These were quiet and were made with the mouth closed or only partially open. Louder high frequency calls (HFCs) were produced by cows when they were separated from their calves (not in visual contact) and preceded nursing. Calf calls were produced when they were separated from their mothers and wanted to suckle milk." And, age, but not gender, are conveyed by the calls. 

The researchers conclude their abstract as follows: "Although it has previously been suggested that cattle contact calls are individually distinctive, to our knowledge, our study is the first to use the most rigorous, modern methods to analyse their calls. This study represents an important advance in our knowledge of cattle contact vocalisations, which is essential for future work on cattle communication and welfare."

Many farmers already knew much about the sort of communication that goes on beyond mothers and their young. For example, Farmer James Bourne, who has been around cows since the 1950s, said the research supports what he has always noticed himself. "A calf certainly knows its mother from other cows, and when a calf blarts the mother knows it's her calf," said Mr Bourne, who is a farmer in Lincolnshire.

 "If they are not distressed and they are calm they will moo fairly low to the calf, almost talking to their calf.

 "If they are distressed, in other words they have lost their calf or are separated from their calf, it's a much higher pitched moo.

 "She starts bleating louder and louder because she's distressed because he's away from her."

Surely we should look more to citizen scientists to inform systematic research here and elsewhere. I've learned a lot, for example, about play behavior in dogs by spending countless hours at dog parks, and many colleagues depend on non-researchers to inform their research programs.

Based on this landmark study, I'm sure I'm not alone wondering if -- or, more likely, how -- cows communicate distress when they are raised for meat. Do they moo something like, "Get me the hell out of here now." And, I always note that cows and other "food animals" not only suffer their own stress, abuse, and terror, but also that of others. What are they saying to one another? 

I hope this research will be used to learn just what cows and other animals are trying to tell us, as they are prepared, none too gently or humanely, for human meals. There's plenty of evidence that their journey to human forks, knives, spoons, plates, and glasses and cups is not a happy time for them nor for their family or friends, and we must pay attention to what they are telling us. Dairy farms also have a sordid history of habitual and repugnant abuse of cows (please see "New Mexico dairy shuts down after undercover activist videotape"). To quote Matt Rice, director of investigations for Mercy for Animals, “Unfortunately ... every time we go behind closed doors, our investigators emerge with images that shock and horrify most Americans.”

We also need to pay much more attention to how animals in other venues tell us what they're feeling and use this information on their behalf. They depend on us for protecting them from merciless and often interminable pain and suffering and slow death. A blend of common sense and solid science should help us uncover the messages that are contained in moos, oinks, baahs, bleats, squeals, quacks, and other sounds that come from the mouths and hearts of other animals. 

The teaser image can be seen here. 

Marc Bekoff's latest books are Jasper's story: Saving moon bears (with Jill Robinson; see also), Ignoring nature no more: The case for compassionate conservation (see also), Why dogs hump and bees get depressed (see also), and Rewilding our hearts: Building pathways of compassion and coexistence. The Jane effect: Celebrating Jane Goodall (edited with Dale Peterson) will be published in 2015. (marcbekoff.com; @MarcBekoff)   

I was trying to explain that having undiagnosed NLD made me into a more compassionate person. I was trying to explain that, wrongly, it made me into a person who put others over me.

 I was trying to explain that I can't bear to see people go without——whatever "without" is to them.

 I was trying to explain that I made it through grad school without once playing the disabled card. I saw people with problems that seemed far less than mine ask—no demand, and it seemed so wrong. But they were right and went much further than I have because they had the chutzpah that had been knocked out of me.I was trying to explain that I have never asked for help. I know that's wrong but I was raised to do for myself. I also never asked for help because I didn't know what to ask for.

 I have never said that I feel lonely. That my need for self-sufficiency came at a great cost. People tell me all the time that I was selfish because they think I have so much to offer a child.

 They are wrong. When you're not sure what your problems are but you know you have them you're selfish if you bring a child into this world or try to raise one.

 I know that you never know what your child will turn out to be but I know parenting plays a part. At least it did with my friends and family all of whom have incredible now adult or almost adult children.

 I envy them. But you didn't hear me say that. It's so wrong to covet what you don't have.

 I do thank G—d that something in me has enabled me to have many friends and family who love me.

 Yet I had nobody to celebrate Hannakuah with. It was my own fault. I left New York where my family lives and didn't move to a Jewish area.

 Usually I love it here. Today my heart is heavy for many reasons.

 If I could change my personal history I wouldn't ask for much. I would only ask to have learned about NLD at 46 when I just finished grad school and my mother was still alive instead of at 56 which felt so old then.

 I hope that I have done good in my life. I hope I do even more good as the years go on.

 Life is short. Let's not waste it on hating or feeling sorry for ourselves——though sometimes it's not a choice. Sometimes we can't help but wallow in our misery.

 Excuse me. I have to go make myself laugh now for laughter really does help.

 I hope you have great holidays. I hope you're only alone when you want to be. Again I should have planned this better. I have only myself to blame.

 I will never blame another for anything that affects me as I know I'm the only person who can make my present and future great.

 And I loved and love most of my life. I understand that people who go through life claiming never to feel misery are delusional——or exceptionally lucky.

I hope that knowing what your problems are helps guide you to future success. Knowledge is power. That's all I really was trying to say.

On CNN's Reliable Sources on last Sunday, University of Virginia student Alex Pinkleton, a friend of  an alleged crime vicrtim, observed that Sabrina Erdely, the author of the Rolling Stone Magazine story on a gang rape at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, behaved  like an "advocate" instead of a dispassionate journalist as she interrogated witnesses to the proported sexual assault. Pinkleton stated  that Erdely "did have an agenda, and part of that agenda was showing how monstrous fraternities themselves as an institution are, and blaming the administration for a lot of the sexual assaults."

This hatred of "monsterous" mens institutions  and  their negative depiction in the media is becoming a trend in the 2010s. The ironic thing is that mens groups are vital to create men that make good husbands and fathers. Women have always had "eye-to eye" friends with which to share openly, let off steam and get valuable feedback in addition to their primary relationship with their partner. But many feminists and media critics are begruding men to even have "side to side" friends in activities like fraternal orders, sports teams  and service clubs. Author and therapist Marvin Allen warned against this trend of  of men becoming isolated from one another and becoming an  unhealthy burden on their female partners to provide them with all their relational needs. " Few  men have lasting friendships with other men, " Allen noted. "It is common for a man to have only one intimate realtionship, the one with his female partner, and to keep other people at arms length. He has business contacts and acquaintances, but few close, continuing friendships."

Why would this trend of men totally relying on  their female parner be deleterious? Can't women replace a man's friends? Sociologist Dr. Robert J. Ackerman describes the irreplaceable importance of strong male relationships in a man's life, observing that "if men ever talk about their problems, it is usually with women. However, we only share with women what we think a man SHOULD share with women. Whether we are aware of it or not, there is an unspoken line about what we talk about with women that few men will cross. We don't talk about men's issues with women. We don't talk about how it feels to be a man. We can talk a little bit about our pain or express some emotions, but it is not the same as sharing with another man."

 Men need men in their lives as well as their significant other. These friends represent the man's real self, established over years of good times and bad. These primary relationships are carved out from grade school, high school, military service or college to meet the man's varied tastes and needs ranging from emotional intimacy to competition. In addition to providing an audience with which to safely discuss men's issues, these friends exact a "buffering effect" on the man. They keep him from wide behavioral swings, just as a buffer solution resists drastic alterations in pH. Changes in mannerisms, speech, style and personality are instantly challenged with hoots of derision, sarcasm or a raised eyebrow from knowing chums, who exert a scouring pressure that corrects unreasonable or unsustainable  behavior. This buffering effect from male friendships ultimately benefits women and society as a whole because men make much better mates and fathers when they aren't stressed out, prone to outbursts of anger and tense from the burden of pretending to be someone else and  living dual lives.

Men need groups of men like social fraternities from which to bond and make friendships that last a lifetime. No woman can meet all her partner's relational needs. Well meaning but misguided educators like University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan  should reverse their antifraternity policies for the good of the 43% of the American college campus population. 

Let me begin by declaring two biases: first, I am a pacifist, and second, my perspective on this issue is influenced by my personal experience of being born in a POW camp as a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII, a camp in which my family was interred for almost 4 years.

We should be shocked by the grotesque details of the 6,000 page U.S. Senate detailed report on how the CIA tortured prisoners and subsequently lied about it.

Some of the mainstream media echoed that shock. The Washington Post editorial stated: “This is not how Americans should behave. Ever.” Vox Editor-In-Chief Ezra Klein said, “We betrayed our values. We betrayed who were are.”  And President Obama was quoted in many publications as having said, “This is not who we are. This is not how we operate.”

Part of the problem exposed by the CIA report was the lying and deception of officials about the torture program. George Tenet, former CIA Director, interviewed by CBS’s Scott Pelley in 2007 stated repeatedly and falsely, “we don’t torture people.” And former Vice-President Dick Cheney once stated in an interview in 2006, “We don’t do torture.”

The CIA report described numerous detailed incidents of torture of detainees, including:

• Rectal feeding
• Rape
• Blinding detainees
• Forcing detainees to stand for hours on broken feet
• Extensive and repeated waterboarding
• Being constantly shackled with arms over their heads
• Extensive periods in isolation with continual loud noise and only a bucket for human waste
• Being slapped and punched, then dragged down a long corridor
• Sleep deprivation
• Forced nudity
• Mock executions
• Threats to sexually abuse the detainee’s mothers or harm their children

As for the effectiveness of the torture program, the CIA report indicated the detainees were tortured before they were asked to cooperate. The report concluded that torture did not provide any useful information about terrorists. This conclusion has been supported by neuroscience research. Shane O’Mara, writing in the Trends in Cognitive Science, concludes “Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or ‘enhanced interrogation.’”

Not only is torture illegal under U.S. law, the U.N. Convention Against Torture which the U.S. signed in 1994 states, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war, or threat of war, internal instability, or any other public emergency, may be involved as a justification for torture.” The Convention defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person, information or a confession.”

One of the dangerous moral morasses that leaders and the public often fall into is the utilitarian concept of “the ends justifies the means,” or justification theory. With this belief comes the assertion that a “good” end is justified by any means necessary, however bad it be. 

That belief has been interpreted many times in history. The Romans enslaved populations in order to bring “order” to the world; the Crusades forced people to accept Christianity in order to “save them;” Western nations preemptively started war in order to avert war; and innocent civilians have been killed and seen as “collateral damage” in bombings in order to kill the “bad guys.”

It becomes a dangerous moral slope when we embrace the “ends justifies the means.”  Where are the limitations to the ends? Who defines them? And what of the torturers? What happens to their sense of right and wrong? What happens to their mental and emotional states? Joe Navarro, one of the F.B.I’s top experts in interrogation told The New Yorker, “only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected.”

CIA officers and those responsible for the torture have not been charged with a crime or faced disciplinary action as of the date of this article. If the U.S. does not take action to bring to justice those officials who broke the law, it has lost its perceived right to boast of being a “shining light” of democracy and freedom to the rest of the world. The world wants and expects a higher standard from the U.S.

And if torture is practiced and condoned by the U.S. or other Western nations, what effect might it have on those countries which may have been more willing to participate in torture? Finally, if torture is condoned and those responsible for it don’t face consequences, is there a danger that those techniques and justifications for them could spread to police forces?

Serious questions requiring some serious answers.

"The regret of my life is that I have not said 'I love you' often enough." Yoko Ono

Hearing your partner say "I love you" and "You are my greatest love" is regarded as one of the highlights of a romantic relationship. However, people are often uncertain about when to declare their love: whether to be the first to do so or whether to wait till the other has given an indication that they feel the same. Is there a best time to reveal your heart? Does timing make all the difference?

When should you say "I love you"?

"You don't have to have a ring on your finger to say, 'I love you.'" Tyra Banks

Romantic love expresses our genuine attitudes. Revealing our loving heart to our partner is immeasurably valuable for communication and for personal flourishing. However, such self-disclosure makes you more vulnerable and may put the partner in an uncomfortable situation, especially if the partner's attitude is different from yours.

Consider, for example, some common (and conflicting) advice about when to tell your partner "I love you": Go on at least five dates; Say it only after two months; Don't wait too long; Wait until you're absolutely bursting; Do not do it before, after or during sex; Don't say it when you're very emotional and cannot think rationally; Don't say it when you want to reward your partner for something; Never say it first, and don't echo it back until you've spent some extended time together.

These examples emphasize the importance of timing; however, is timing more important than honesty and self-disclosure? More plausible advice assumes that there is no precise formula for when to say "I love you": You should say it when you feel that way, without making too many calculations about the right timing.

What is important in long-term love is not timing, which refers to a specific temporal point, but time, which has a wider reference, including, for example, duration, frequency, and development. Accordingly, a few apparent mistakes along the road, stemming from bad timing or political incorrectness, will not change the whole romantic picture, and may even enhance trust and honesty between the lovers. Since profound love needs time to develop, it isn't reasonable to say "I love you profoundly" after being together for just a brief time; it may indicate that you are not serious about what is a serious matter. However, as love at first sight can occur, you can say "I love you" after a short time together, if you are just expressing what you feel now. You may add, if this is indeed the case, that you see great potential for the relationship to grow. We can perceive potential, but we cannot perceive its inevitable implementation (Ben-Ze'ev, 2014).

In profound love, it is activities, rather than words, that count; not saying "I love you" may stem from many reasons and not necessarily the lack of love. When Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, asks Golde, his wife of many years, whether she loves him, she is surprised at the question and wonders whether he is upset or tired. She advises him: “Go inside, go lie down! Maybe it’s indigestion.” When Tevye nevertheless insists on being answered, Golde says: “For 25 years I've washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, milked the cow. After 25 years, why talk about love right now?” And when he continues to insist upon receiving an explicit answer, Golde says: “I suppose I love you.”

Different paces of developing and expressing love

"It's not easy to sit down and open yourself up and say, 'This is how much I love you,' you know? It's scary to do that." Jason Isbell

When one is sincere, confessing one's love is typically not problematic. There may be a problem in expecting a reciprocal answer to the declaration. The difficulty stems (you used this verb before, can you find another formulation) from two major aspects: the different paces at which love develops and the different personal tendency to reveal one's heart. Not everyone develops love or expresses it at the same pace.

In addition to the fact that love develops at various paces with different people, there are indications that gender differences play a part. Men tend to confess love earlier than women do and are happier than women are when receiving confessions of love from their partner (Ackerman, et al., 2011). According to one survey, men take only 88 days to tell their partner they love them, compared to a woman's languid 134 days. Moreover, 39 percent of men say 'I love you' within the first month of seeing someone, compared to 23 percent of women.

On top of the gender differences, personality differences cause people to fall in love at different paces. These paces do not express differences in romantic profundity; the one who falls quickly in love might be the one who will quickly fall out of love. In addition to the different paces at which love develops, there are also differences in the pace at which love is expressed. Thus, shy people tend to express love later than outspoken people even when their level of love is similar. As one shy woman told her lover, who confessed his love to her: "Don't weigh my words now; weigh my deeds." And she was right—deeds speak louder than words.

In light of all these differences, one common advice is that lovers should reveal their love only when the other feels the same as them and is ready to express it. One reason for this suggestion can be seen from the following confession of a young woman: "We got married when I was 19 and I married him knowing that I didn't love him. Later on, I was discussing my ex-husband with my current husband and he asked me why I ever even told my ex that I loved him. All I could say was that he said it first and it seemed like the nice thing to say in response."

Part of the wedding etiquette is to praise the bride's beauty; it is not part of romantic etiquette to tell someone that you love him just because he has declared his love for you. It is probably best not to respond by saying "I love you too", but rather to say that although right now you do not know whether you love him, you do know that you like him a lot, that you want to get to know him better and to give the relationship a chance to develop further. It does not have to be love at first sight. Another (less preferable option) is to postpone discussing the issue of love and to enjoy the bliss of ignorance (Ben-Ze'ev, 2014).

Love does not grow at the same pace in all lovers. While it is true that profound romantic flourishing involves mutual loving attitudes, this does not mean that you should hide your love, just because the beloved is not (yet) as in love with you as you are with her. You should be honest and open about your attitude and give your partner the time she needs for her feelings toward you to develop into profound love. The development might be gradual and might reveal itself in "softer" and more indirect expressions of love, such as calling you "My love" or saying "I send you my love,""I love what I see in you,""There are many reasons why I love you"; till finally, the direct declaration "I love you" might be spoken.

The fact that one goes slowly does not indicate that one is not advancing or that one is less committed to the journey than the person who goes faster—often, the opposite is true. We should respect the different personalities and not expect our partner to feel and express the same as we do at the same time. As profound love is for the long term, it is possible that sometime in the future both lovers will feel profound love and will be able to reveal it. Rushing to achieve an unripe romantic profundity is often harmful; in profound love, patience and calmness is the name of the game.

When should you say "You are my greatest love"?

"I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home." Dorothy L. Sayers

Much of the above also applies to other expressions of romantic intensity, such as "you are my greatest love,""the love of my life," and "my hottest lover." These expressions create a ranking between past and present lovers, making the declaration even more complex, as it involves not merely the two lovers, but also includes other lovers from the past. If, for example, you tell your lover "You are my greatest love," you should not be insulted if he does not reciprocate by saying the same about you. In addition to the issue of the difference of paces at which love grows for different people, there is the problem that each case of love is different and making comparison between them is often impossible or even destructive. Thus, one love affair might be very passionate, another more profound, and a third a kind of companionate love. Even if comparisons can be made, the fact that your beloved's first lover many years ago was and remains her greatest love does not diminish her love to you—the circumstances of the two relationships are different and she probably finds in you many good qualities that were absent in her former lover; in any case, your relationship is unique and a genuine comparison, even if it is possible, is of little value.

In light of the comparative concern involved in saying "You are my greatest love," the reciprocal answer may take much longer than in the case of "I love you." So don't hold your breath till you hear this declaration from your partner—it may take a long time; you may hear it only in the last days of her or your life, and perhaps you may not hear it at all.

Concluding remarks

It does not matter who first says "I love you" and who says it more frequently, just as it does not matter whether you are the first or the second on your partner's romantic and sexual list. What matters is the profundity of your relationship and the way it is developing. Here, timing and ranking are of no concern—depth and flourishing are what count. In light of the above considerations, in many circumstances an appropriate response to a declaration of love might be "I think I love you, but I can't be sure whether it is profound love until we've been together for longer." 

References

Ackerman, J. M., Griskevicius, V. & Li, N. (2011). Let's get serious: Communicating commitment in romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 1079-1094.

Ben-Ze'ev, A. (2014). "Ain't Love Nothing But Sex Misspelled?” In C. Maurer, T. Milligan, and K. Pacovská (Eds.), Love and its Objects. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 25-40.

“Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.”

Albert Schweitzer

More enticing than the smell of baking gingerbread, we can create heart-popping joy and tear-inducing meaning to sail us into 2015. Skill makes love unending, and knowledge creates skill, so let’s explore our knowledge about having a joyful holiday.

Nadia was stumped. Salt and pepper hair a bit awry from the blustery weather, her blue eyes looked both angry and sad as she poured out her frustration with husband Morris. The ebullient grandmother of four toddlers, each Christmas she scouts thrift shops for bargains tailored specifically to the loquacious four year old, the cartwheel wiz, the blond, blue eyed princess, and the racing car maven. Victorious, she returns home to report and show her treasures to Morris. Instead of offering support, he throws her a cursory “Oh, good,” leaving her feeling discounted. Recounting this well-worn pattern, Nadia asked herself if she should keep trying to change Morris’ "Bah Humbug" attitude, or should she seek support for her purchases from her friends and sisters? Nadia added that she deeply loves Morris other than what he proudly refers to as his Grinch-like demeanor. Nadia’s conundrum is shared by many wives, so I dug into the research on how to avert a disappointing holiday.

Although many of us experience three times more positive than negative experiences daily, we naturally accentuate the negative experiences that create anxiety and pain. Baumeister calls this the negativity bias: we automatically ignore the good and focus on what does not work in our lives. Once accustomed to a pleasant experience, we often take these experiences for granted so they lose their ability to create joy. Even dark chocolate at every meal becomes a habit. For this reason, we tend to associate joy with experiences that are novel and to overlook the daily hugs and dog walks that bring us joy. Nadia knew she loved Morris and enjoyed much about him, but found his condescension so frustrating that it overpowered her ability to appreciate him at the holidays.

What to do to accentuate the positive? Lambert’s research suggests that Nadia would naturally expect her husband to be genuinely supportive of her good fortune. Sharing pleasure with a loved one leads to heightened well-being, increased overall life satisfaction and increased energy. Describing our happy experiences to close friends and romantic partners is a wise investment in a joyful holiday.

But since Morris was being a curmudgeon, Nadia needed to redirect her desire to share holiday joy. Which lessons can we take from Nadia’s situation?

1. Accentuating the positive and expressing gratitude is powerful medicine. Research indicates that the more we share happiness each day, the happier and more satisfied we are on that day. It is the act of sharing, not just thinking about happiness that boosts well-being. Expressing gratitude can improve psychological and physical health and well-being by improving our ability to connect with others, boosting our altruistic tendencies, making us optimistic, and decreasing envy and materialism. It even improves health of those with physical ailments. Nadia decided to express appreciation when Morris put up the tree and bought her white poinsettias.

2. Sharing happy events with others increases zest and energy for life. Research informs us that sharing grateful experiences correlates with greater zest for life, happiness and vitality. Nadia now benefits from sharing regularly with friends.

3. Asking for needed verbal support from partners and friends creates greater happiness, love and appreciation. Nadia now avoids Morris’ negativity because it increased her own her self doubt. Instead she calls a close friend often each week.

4. Sharing joy increases joy for all involved. Kristakis and Fowler found that sharing our happiness is infectious: others feel happy when we share happy events. And, supporting a friend can impact their well-being. So Nadia is sure to ask her friends about their holiday successes, and all then benefit.

Like Nadia, might it help you to decide who genuinely cares about the tiny pleasures in your days and find a way to share with them? Sharing each other’s brief interludes of pleasure can increase health and well being for you and your those around you. So this Holiday season, take a lesson from Nadya and allow your personal Morris his solitary grinchmanship. Instead, share with friends and family who, like you, love to celebrate the joy of the season. I bet you won’t regret it.

To consider: Whom shall I choose to share my joy over small triumphs? Who cares enough to be there for me? Who knows what it means to share with those you love?

I live in Colorado, one of the first two states to legalize mariuana first for medicinal use and now also for use by anyone over the age of 21.  My conclusion: our society in general and teenagers in particular need to pay attention.  While pot may not be chemically addictive the way, say, cocaine or crack are, excessive use can be a huge mistake. Marijuana can re-route a life totally off-course, causing irreversible cognitive and emotional harm that can undermine career success, and inviting relationship damage that marriage counseling cannot reverse. 

Smoking pot first became an option for middle class Americans in the late 1960’s.  Emerging along with hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, which create a psychotic-like mental state, pot appeared them to be a far lesser evil and hence an option that many college students tried.  At that time, experimentation was truly that, as no research existed on the impacts of smoking pot on the development of a person’s life.  Smoking pot looked like a daring experiment that college students could try.  And of the many who did, a relatively small proportion continued to smoke after their first exploratory attempts, while most treated marijuana smoking “trips”  like travel: “Interesting place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.”

Clinical cases of the impacts of marijuana use on adult functioning

Two cases of pot use in my clinical practice have most dramatically impressed me with regard to current adults whose smoking started in their younger years. In both of these cases, the husband had been a marijuana user since early high school. This pattern accords with research suggesting that the earlier young people first begin using marijuana, the more likely they will end up using it addictively.  Junior high (middle school) or younger is particularly dangerous in terms of addiction potential and also brain injury.  High school years are still dangerous though slightly less so.  College initial experimentation has milder likelihood of leading to a problem habit and brain damage but still poses significant risks.

In one of the therapy cases, the wife was considering leaving her husband, Joe, because Joe had been unable to fulfill the role of breadwinner.  Joe had been well-educated, at least in terms of having completed college and a reputable university.  He worked some after college, but over the subsequent ten years, and especially when he needed to job hunt, he just couldn’t get going.  His significant (multiple hours daily) pot use had burned out his starter engine.  I recognized right away the similarity between Joe’s inability to start projects, both larger projects like seeking employment and small projects like loading the dishwasher. 

I recognized the cognitive deficit of loss of ability to initiate because I’d learned about it from observing my aging mother.  My mother had been a lifelong dynamo in terms of accomplishments and leadership.  In her 70’s when she began to show first signs of the cognitive declines that eventually became dementia, two cognitive abilities showed decrements.  Her losses of short term memory capacity showed in repetitions; she would say, and then say again the same comment. 

My mother’s second type of cognitive decline confused us more.  Calling a friend to meet for coffee felt too difficult for her.  So did inviting neighbors for dinner, or starting to cook.  Initiation of action, it turned out, requires a spark plug she no longer had.  Joe’s spark plug similarly had disappeared.  And in fact, decreases in ability to initiate action were one of the first cognitive deficits caused by excessive marijuana use that researchers discovered as they began to look for long term impacts of pot smoking.

The second therapy case that stood out for me involved a lovely, highly capable and highly likable couple with two totally adorable young boys.  The woman was both strikingly attractive and a winner in her professional life.  The man, let’s call him William, also very good looking, had a work track record as a CEO that had left them already, by their late 40’s, set up financially for life.  Yet at home the wife complained that she never felt connected with her husband.  He didn’t share information with her about his work life, he didn’t initiate conversations, and if they did talk, she felt like no one was home.  Their gears didn’t seem to mesh.  At long last the truth came out.  For years when William returned home from work he had immediately started smoking or otherwise ingesting pot. 

William’s habit also had started in high school.  He actually smoked less in college where the many activities in his Ivy League university kept him quite fully engaged.  As a young adult however he had started smoking again, and by the time his boys had both reached elementary school, he rarely spent time at home without being stoned.  The marriage had problems, with a wife who felt chronically dissatisfied.  The more she felt irritated, the less comfortable William felt interacting with her without first having gotten high.  At the same time, the more his mental state was skewed by pot, the more William’s wife felt frustrated and disconnected from him.  Alas, by the time that the truth of his addiction had emerged, his wife had reached a point of no return and wanted only to terminate the marriage.

What can be done to protect kids and teens from being harmed by marijuana use?

For starters, our society as a whole, at least here in legal-to-smoke-pot Colorado, needs to be educated about the harms that can be done by even occasional pot use, especially by youth and teenagers. 

Toward this educational end, I recommend for starters the simple and easily accessible new book by Marc Aronoff called One Toke: A Survival Guide for Teens.  Aronoff takes a perspective toward pot smoking that’s remarkably flexible and yet clear.  If you are going to use pot, he says, use it in a smart way.  Keep it occasional rather than a daily habit.  Make sure it is not interfering with getting homework in on time or with connecting with friends and afterschool sports, music or other important activities of teenager years.  And smoke safely, including NEVER in conjunction with driving.

In addition to what teens can read in One Toke, young people and their parents need to learn about the findings of recent studies of the impacts of pot-smoking on young people's developing brains. These studies strike a dire note. 

Neuroimaging pictures of the brain's various parts show that young people who smoke regularly (that is, once a week or more) show frightening brain changes.  They develop smaller brains.  They show losses in intelligence (as evidenced by  a 2012 longitudinal study of 1,037 participants, and they produce less "grey matter" (the stuff of intelligence). 

Pot-smokers show other unfortunate decrements as well.  They become more prone to depression and other states of emotional distress.  The smoking may trigger a psychotic episode, and also may launch on-going paranoia (as in a very sad clinical case I saw today). Users in their teen years or younger typically grow physically smaller than their non-smoking teenage peers.  They tend to gravitate toward loser/drop-out social groups.  If pot-smoking leads them to disengage from taking school and studying seriously, they squander their educational years so that they then will enter the workworld as young adults from a significantly disadvantaged position.

One Toke is good starter reading for children, and then needs to be supplemented by exploration on the internet of the many enlightening resources for parents and kids.  Explore them.  Take them seriously.  Pot addiction can have lifelong negative consequences.  Look ahead.

------For an indexed listing of Dr. H's posts, see Dr. H's Blogposts on her clinical website.-----

Denver clinical psychologist Susan Heitler, Ph.D, a graduate of Harvard and NYU, has authored From Conflict to Resolution for therapists, plus the Power of Two book, workbook, and website that teach couple communication skills for successful relationships.  

Click here for a free Power of Two relationship quiz. 

Click here to learn the skills for strong and loving relationships.

Solar panels are going up soon in my house; years ago I switched to energy saving light bulbs. I use reusable shopping bags, recycle my rubbish and compost my leftovers.

I want to be a responsible consumer, mindful of the connection my impact upon global warming.

But the relationship between lower energy use and climate change isn’t as obvious as it seems. Tom Roser, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, pointed out at a meeting of the Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island that "every device designed to save energy itself requires energy to produce it."

"To collect enough energy to power a home it takes many large panels of highly sophisticated solar cells," he said. "This can be compared to about 100 barrels of oil that contain enough energy to power the home for the typically 20-year lifetime of solar panels. Whereas it takes little energy to extract the 100 barrels of oil out of the ground the production, transportation and installation of solar panels can take a substantial fraction, if not all, of the energy that the solar panels collect during their lifetime. Note that the recent price drop of solar panels is partially just the result of using cheap coal for the production of the solar panels in China."

"A similar situation exists for wind energy," Roser continues. "Both wind and solar energy are low-density energy sources and need complex installations and a lot of energy investment to collect this energy. In some ways by relying on only solar and wind we would return to the time before fossil fuels when, always, substantial energy had to be invested to collect energy. It is highly questionable whether our lifestyle or the world population could be sustained using only solar and wind energy."

While the use of renewable energy brings down the cost to the end user, it has been accomplished by moving production to low cost countries that use cheap fossil fuels for the production of solar and wind devices. “None of this actually reduces the energy invested in the production and sometimes might even increase it.”

For example, Roser, estimated that the effect upon the environment is no different between the Prius, which he drives, and the simpler Corolla also made by Toyota.

The net result of the use of energy efficient light bulbs, solar panels and hybrid and electric cars means lower costs to consumers in lower electric bills and gasoline usage but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has helped the environment.

Alternative energy sources are good for consumers by lowering the price per unit but real help in reduction of green house gases requires something both simpler and more difficult to implement: a reduction in overall consumption.

A real difference comes by turning off lights when not in use; turning down the heat when not at home; driving less; buying products with fewer features; keeping products longer; and using smartphones less often.

Goethe wasn’t writing about climate change but he may as well have when he said, “I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate.”

Changing personal habits is difficult. It is hard to remember to turn off lights, especially when there is the excuse that the bulbs are efficient. It is hard to drive less when the car is so fuel efficient. And it will be hard for me to not use air conditioning on not-so-hot days because with solar panels my electric bill will be near zero no matter what I do.

Last week, my niece graduated from nursing school and I am very proud of her. I believe in the importance of celebrating the moments, big and small. It might be the warrior in me, or maybe I’m just the kind of woman who always looks for a reason to celebrate. It’s hard to know where this compulsion began. Perhaps it is genetic and inherited from my father. My niece is a warrior in her own way because she is the first in her family to enter the medical profession. She hopes to become a nurse practitioner, which is really the wave of the future. She is paving the way for so many others of her generation to care for those of us from the baby boomer era as we age.

My need to celebrate such achievements, especially those of women warriors, might have begun while writing my first memoir, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s SecretJournal and learning about how my grandmother survived as an orphan during World War I after losing her parents at the age of twelve. She grew up with a passion to become a doctor and was accepted into NYU Medical School just about the same time they began accepting women, but she had to decline due to a lack of funds. If the circumstances had been right, she could have easily become a woman warrior.

As a child, I was fascinated with biographies about women and their success stories. My interest in medicine, inherited from my grandmother, lead me to an interest in Florence Nightingale. In many ways, her story might have inspired me to become a registered nurse earlier in my career. The stories of others can inspire us all.

During college, while reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s classic memoir, The Woman Warrior, I came to truly believe in the enormous power of women and the human spirit. I had the good fortune of meeting Maxine on her recent visit to Santa Barbara. Not only did Kingston pave the way for future memoirists, but she paved the way for many in her culture. Her bravery was a mere reminder of all the warriors in the world, some more recognized than others.

Women warriors may be found in many disciplines, including psychology, sociology, literature, anthropology and women’s studies. Classically speaking, a warrior belonged to the military or was maybe a revolutionary. However, I believe the word has evolved to refer to anyone who has paved the way and inspired others through her words and actions. The term women warrior also refers to someone who teaches women how to think and behave. Writers are warriors because they expose others’ experiences and scenarios by helping them navigate their own journeys.

But to be a warrior is not just a classical concept; it is one that is ever-evolving. Anyone who has survived cancer, for example, could also be considered a warrior. By sharing our stories, like I have in my memoirs, Regina’s Closet:  Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal and Healing With Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey, we are warriors in that we are helping others find their way.

Over the years, more and more women have been thought of as warrior material. Oftentimes, women warriors hang together. Sometimes men are driven to these types of women as well. I have always been drawn to both women and men warriors because they are strong, powerful, influential and they have compelling stories to share which we can all learn from and try to  emulate.

Now that 2014 has come to a close, it might be a good time to review the year and think about which warriors influenced our lives and why. This is another reason to celebrate, and again, in my world, any reason to celebrate counts.

May your transition from 2014 to 2015 be a smooth one! 

That is a very common and unfortunate objection to essays describing life on the autism spectrum.  I read quite a bit of that in response to my recent column in the MIT Technology Review, after I questioned what I feel is an excessive emphasis on genetics studies.  The words seemed to come most often from parents who felt their kids have more major challenges than me.  Much has been written about calling people high functioning or low functioning.  With all respect to you and your situation, I don’t do it anymore and I suggest you don’t either. 

Calling autistic people "high functioning" or "low functioning" is degrading and demeaning.  Suggesting that, “you’re a real high functioning autistic” feels to me a lot like “you talk pretty good for a retard.”  People say the former to me all the time today, and they said the latter to me quite a bit 50 years ago.  I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. Both phrases imply I (and all others like me) are pretty good even though we are the “other;” some lesser class of human.  How would you feel about that, if it were you? 

Talking about autistic people as if we're not here, or describing us as "barely living" and "missing" is just as bad.  That kind of talk sometimes comes from grandparents and other older people when they talk about their autistic grandchildren and it bothers me a lot.  I don't need anyone to speak for me; least of all someone who makes offensive use of words like that.  I speak just fine for myself. 

The problem with labels like these is that their meaning is insidious and we don’t always catch on right away.  Autistics like me were called retards in casual conversation by all sorts of people in 1965.  That does not happen anywhere near as much today, but phrases like “high or low functioning” have evolved to mean the same thing.  At their inception I don’t think they had a pejorative meaning.  Retard didn’t start as a pejorative either, for that matter.  But both do now. 

I used to use those words and phrases myself, before I understood their meaning.  Now I know better.  I used to smile when I was the butt of jokes too. I smiled because I wanted to fit in and be liked, and the others laughed so I laughed too. Now that I understand, I cringe at those memories. I don't laugh at stuff like that anymore.

In 1965 we also used other names for levels of observed intellectual ability.  Moron or idiot, for example.  Those names are problematic for the same reasons. Those of us who are honored with labels like that feel the sting of being less, no matter what our functioning level.  You may claim that I can’t speak for others but I can say this: I have spoken with thousands of autistic people of all intellectual levels and not one has taken issue with that particular statement. Describing us as “less” always hurts. But it takes time to realize that.  

My dad had what my family an "idiot cousin who tended the pigs," back in Georgia.  That’s how everyone described him, growing up, and I pretty much ignored him because I was told, “he didn’t have any truck with people, just pigs.”  Today we would call Bob a non verbal autistic, and we might even find a way for him to communicate.  Sometimes we look back with shame at the things we said and did long ago, but we didn’t know any better.  Now we do, and rather than dismiss people like Bob we try and understand and engage them.  

That's more important today because society has changed. When my dad was a boy it was possible for a nonverbal person to have a life with farm animals and nature, out in the country, and be safe.  That's not so true now.  What we called "the mountain farm" is now a subdivision near Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Half-wild pigs have been replaced by quarter-wild kids. That may sound like progress but my cousin likely wouldn't see it that way.  We'll never know, though, because he died when I was a kid.     

We now know that our functional level changes with time and other factors.  As bright and capable as someone like me can seem, I can have meltdowns during which I become essentially nonfunctional. If you evaluated me in one of those moments the picture would not be pretty.  It’s true that is not a lasting condition for me, but it happens, and when it does I would just as soon not be stigmatized for it. In the longer term many autistics grow up to be far more capable in society than they were as children, especially when compared to their same-age peers.

My autistic son, for example, did not read till he was 10.  At age 9 he was in the lowest percentile for several developmental milestones. Now, at age 24, he is near the top.  But that does not mean he is not challenged by autism.  He is; just differently than as a boy.  What some called low functioning became something different through natural processes. I’ve had the same experience. Psychologists say we learn adaptive strategies.  Neurologists think our brain pathways may develop later. There are various explanations but they all boil down to this: autism causes developmental delay, and we may therefore be developing and improving much later in life than you might expect.  Many of us experience significant functional improvement in our fourth, fifth, and even sixth decades of life.  That would be unusual for neurotyopicals but it’s common for us. 

As an alternative to functioning labels, consider describing someone has having particular challenges or not.  I am very verbal.  Other autistics are non-speaking.  A few don’t communicate successfully at all, in ways we understand, though they may still be trying.  Many of us have medical challenges of very different kinds.  To say that I speak and your son does not is not to call him less.  One day he may speak, and you won’t say that anymore.  Or maybe he will never speak.  You never know with this autism. 

I often hear that head-banging, biting, and aggressive behavior sets some autistics apart from me.  Why?  I smashed holes in my walls as a kid, with my head. And I bit. When you ask yourself why we would do that, “being autistic,” is not the answer.  The answer is frustration combined with cognitive challenges.  Communicate with those people successfully, respect them, understand and help with their challenges, and most of those behaviors will moderate.  Do I presume to answer for every single case? Of course not, but I’m confident there is a lot of truth in that philosophy.   

In our society, it is the bright and articulate who find voice in the media, in schools, and in workplaces.  That happens because their skill with words causes others to sit up and listen.  When those articulate people express thoughts about the economy or how we run our schools, we do not knock them down by saying, “Those are high-functioning views. People like my son don’t agree!”   How do you know?  Did your child communicate their disagreement?  Or do you presume it, because that view suits you better than the views expressed by other communicative autistics? 

The autism spectrum contains people of every intellectual level.  Why is it that the bright and articulate autistics are attacked for possessing the ability to speak out about our shared autism? It always surprises me that parents attack me for what seems essentially being different.  I'm not their enemy.   I'm not the only verbal autistic person who's felt that sting.  "You're not a real autistic person.  MY son has real autism."  

When I talk about therapies that are needed, I consistently advocate for research that will benefit people whose cognitive challenges seem very different from my own.  I do that because I believe we have a societal duty to help all autistic people, not just some.  That’s what community is about, folks.  Attacking a community’s articulate members when they advocate for the group won’t help their less articulate brothers.  It just hurts everyone. Autism has such a broad range of affect that your experience as an autistic person may have little or nothing in common with my own.  So I may not know much about your life from the mere fact that we are both autistic.  

If I choose to speak up as an autistic person, I feel I have a duty to try and understand the full breadth of autism’s affect so that I can describe our shared spectrum fairly.  While “my spot on the spectrum” is obviously the one I know best, I recognize a duty to “speak my best for all spots” when I raise my voice in public.   I believe this is a general moral obligation that’s shared by anyone who chooses to speak for a common cause.

In closing I'd also like to point out that I have never claimed to speak for you, your child, or any other specific individual.  My words are my own; grounded in my life experience.  The idea that I have a duty to advocate for the breadth of the autism community is not a presumption that I speak for specific individuals.  It's simply a recognition that my words may be broadly interpreted as an "autistic voice" and I should try and make those words helpful and not harmful for autistics as a group. 

I'm a strong believer in science, and I believe we will eventually develop therapies, medications, and treatments to remediate many of the ways autism disables us.  But "many" isn't all, and we must accept that when things cannot be changed our only constructive course of action is to make the best of how we are.  Calling us "less" only makes that harder.  Obviously the acquisition and dissemination of understanding is an ever-evolving process.  I speak out the best I can today, and when I learn more tomorrow, I will speak then with the benefit of that new knowledge.  That’s all any of us can do.  

John Elder Robison is an autistic adult and advocate for people with neurological differences.  He's the author of Look Me in the Eye, Be Different, Raising Cubby, and the forthcoming Switched On. He's served on the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee of the US Dept of Health and Human Services and many other autism-related boards. He's co-founder of the TCS Auto Program (A school for teens with developmental challenges) and he’s the Neurodiversity Scholar in Residence at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.  The opinions expressed here are his own.  There is no warranty expressed or implied.  While reading this essay may give you food for thought, actually printing and eating it may make you sick.

Santa’s Coming to Town

                Over the past couple of decades scenes of anxious shoppers rushing the entrances of big box stores in the early morning hours of Black Friday to acquire door-buster bargains have threatened to overwhelm the rather more idyllic Christmas images of the past.  Currier and Ives’ prints conjured up family members gathering for a festive holiday at beautifully decorated rural cottages in snow-covered landscapes.  Traditional Christmas images carried unequivocal messages of kindness, fellow-feeling, and good cheer.

                American retailers readily contributed to the transformation of the traditional Saint Nicholas into the merry old elf, Santa Claus.  In his contemporary form, Santa Claus is a grandfatherly figure of unbounded jollity and generosity, who is alleged to deliver gifts to children the world over in a single night.  The high-spiritedness of all of this and this bounteous demonstration notwithstanding, not even the most glittering visions of Santa in popular culture have managed to suppress completely a darker side to all of these dealings.   

                Although the song has a merry tune, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” explicitly warns listeners that Santa is, in fact, a moral monitor, who is in many ways like Big Gods.  After all, Santa “sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake” and knows “if you’ve been bad or good.”  The song then pivots to its somewhat misleading, prosocial, moral message – “so be good for goodness sake.”  That message is misleading, since the entire system is built around rewards for good behavior and sanctions for untoward conduct.  When I was a child, one threat was the possibility of receiving a box of ashes.  This is not about goodness for its own sake.  This is about gaining rewards and avoiding punishments.

Elves on Shelves and Krampus

                A recent expression of this special moral monitoring around the Christmas season is the elf on a shelf.  This involves a plausibly elfin figure, who takes up different positions in the house from one day to the next and whose job it is to monitor children’s behavior for the purpose of reporting back to Santa about who has been naughty and who has been nice.  The elf is wise to remain out of reach in the face of young skeptics, who wish to put their suspicion that it is merely a doll to the test.  An anecdote suggests that the elf’s cheerful expression and diminutive stature can be serious liabilities.  After a time-out for a transgression, a five-year-old child of an acquaintance was subsequently overheard threatening the elf with bodily harm if it carried through on its report to Santa.

                Still, this is benign when compared with Krampus, whom Melissa Eddy describes as “a devilish mountain goblin.”  Throughout much of central Europe, Krampus’ arrival, announced by clanging cowbells, coincides with the festival of Saint Nicholas on December 6.  Unlike the revered Saint Nick, however, this sinister looking, masked, goat-man, does not merely advertise the withholding of rewards with ashes.  He carries switches with him for the thrashing of wayward children.

The Case for Krampus   

                So which of these arrangements, a jolly Santa or a menacing Krampus, is likely to elicit the desired, prosocial behaviors?  Azim Shariff’s research points to a case for Krampus.  Shariff has carried out both experimental and correlational studies.

                Shariff and Ara Norenzayan carried out an experiment in which participants, when left alone in a room, were able to cheat on a computerized math test.  Independent measures of participants’ religiosity showed that it had no effect on the probability of them cheating on the test, however, participants who had, in questionnaires administered a few days previously, favored conceptions of God as compassionate and forgiving, were significantly more likely to cheat than participants who had endorsed conceptions of God as wrathful and punishing. 

                Shariff and Mijke Rhemtulla carried out a fascinating correlational study that looked at the relationship between crime rates and relative levels of belief in heaven and hell across nations.  Here higher percentages of religious believers in a population did make for lower crime rates, but it was belief in hell and, thus, in punishing gods, that appeared to be the relevant factor.  Across all of the world’s major religions, nations with more widespread belief in hell among their citizens had the lowest crime rates, whereas those that downplayed punishing gods the most had the highest crime rates.  The paper explored and ruled out on statistical grounds a variety of alternative explanations concerning factors known to affect crime rates such as nations’ overall wealth and their wealth inequality.

                As the threatening five-year-olds’ behavior hints, it is probably a safe bet that the prosocial impact of Santa and elves on shelves pales in comparison to that of Krampus. 

Does this sound familiar: You were fine yesterday but you woke up this morning weighed down by the stress of all the things you normally have to do and all the additional holiday demands suddenly piled atop your To Do List. Like what? Like finding the perfect gifts for those special people in your life, gearing up to call the relatives you haven’t spoken to since last year, preparing for last minute combat shopping at the mall, figuring out what you are going to wear to the party that doesn’t make you look fat – you know, stuff like that. Special occasions that are normally spread out over an entire year - like birthdays and anniversaries – seem to be jammed into a few intense weeks. You are supposed to be happy. But instead you, in slow motion, fall into that deep, dark chasm called “depression”. Is this simply situational? Or maybe you are suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)?

The answer to these questions and more were answered in our pre-interview for an article by Katherine Schreiber that will appear later this month at www.greatest.com. We thought we’d share with you now some of this important information regarding the traditional holiday blues and the newer concept of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD):

1. What explains the holiday blues — and what exactly do we mean when we say "holiday blues"; what are the signs and symptoms / does "holiday blues" really just mean Seasonal Affective Disorder?

The holiday blues is what folks commonly call depression - and the stress that accompany it - during the holiday season. It can start prior to Thanksgiving and last after the New Year. As an aside, the term “the blues” dates back centuries and although disputed, it may be in reference to the “Blue Devil” that would overwhelm people with melancholia. Over the years, it was adopted by the medical community as a popular synonym for having low spirits - or depression. It’s different from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

2. How much does SAD play into the Holiday Blues?

People with from Seasonal Affective Disorder actually suffer from clinical depression that is a result of their personal biology – it’s the way their body works. The holiday blues is strictly situational; it comes from sadness or depression that is psychologically based. In other words – something happened in the past that – maybe at this time of year – that causes you to be depressed during the holidays. Typically SAD lasts for a few to several months while the holiday blues are time and situationally limited, happening just during the holiday season. And SAD brings with it myriad of physical and physiological changes caused by depression – like difficulty falling asleep or sleeping too much, an increase or decrease in appetite, low energy, difficulty remembering things or having a hard time handling situations, experiencing irritability and anger, and worse – a desire for isolation. Folks with the Holiday Blues don’t usually have these more profound symptoms.

3. How can we better prepare for the Holiday Blues — what are some strategies we can employ (behavioral or otherwise) to combat these low feelings and stave off the drop in mood that comes after the presents are unwrapped and we/re back at our desks, or doing our usual life tasks, trying to get back into an effective work mode.

The first thing is to embrace the joyous, compassionate, giving aspect of the season. This is in reference to the type of giving that comes from within you, not to the commercial gift giving aspect of the holidays. Be generous with your smiles and laughter; be compassionate and sensitive towards others, especially in difficult situations like long lines at the checkout counter. Sure, we may have had a hard day, but the other person may have had it worse! Also, make time to give others deserved compliments that can make their day.

Secondly, make life easier by planning ahead. If you feel the weight of too many obligations – like attending numerous events, or fighting crowds at the department store to get that special gift, lighten the load. As much as possible be selective about how you spend your time. Sure, there are some obligations that must be met – like going to visit relatives. But there are likely others that we can let go of. And instead of fighting crowds at the mall, take advantage of the internet to do your shopping and connecting with family and friends. Do stuff at off hours and try to arrange with your partner, kids or friends to share the load equitably.

An attitude tweak toward the positive - less hassled, more compassionate - will help lift your low mood. And when you find the Holiday Blues coming on, remember that these feelings are temporary; you’ll get through it. Think of the power of your smile to brighten your inner landscape as well as the social one around you.

4. What are the biggest misconceptions (in either the lay or the professional community) about holiday blues?

The biggest misconception may be that the holiday blues isn’t real – that it doesn’t exist. But it is and it does. Having the holiday blues doesn’t require medication – but if you think you have it, some gentle reflection may be in order. It may not qualify as clinically significant, but it is real and messes up our mood and thinking for weeks or more.

5. How does what we focus on during the holidays (or after) alter our mood—and what are some strategies to shift our focus so that we have a happier, healthier outlook once the holiday season is over?

What we focus on during the holidays is important but perhaps even more important is how we focus. It’s all about choice. We can choose to think and be positive or negative. For instance, if something bad happened in the past at this time of year, instead of going over and over what happened and wallowing in the sadness or loss, choose to remember the good experiences you’ve had during the holidays. If this seems too daunting then start small – notice the beauty of the lights and decorations, the smell of evergreens. Remember the taste of special seasonal foods and the warmth after coming in from the cold. When we are stuck in past negative experiences, we can poison your experiences today and your expectations for tomorrow. So choose to be positive! Go for the Zen Now moment of joy.

6. Does the advice you have for people combatting holiday blues differ based on their age, parental status, relationship status or gender? If so, how, and are there specific concerns related to certain populations that are important to highlight?

With the exception of children and young teenagers – who may have difficulty grasping the concept of the future and future-thinking, and the elderly who may be suffering from elder-related illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, the advice we have given here should work no matter a person’s age, gender, parental status or relationship status.

The population most prone to the Holiday Blues is the elderly. This makes sense because they have likely suffered the greatest amount of loss. They are of an age when people in their lives – spouse, family members and friends - are starting to pass on. Perhaps they moved from their house into an elder-care facility or with an adult child. They may have lost vitality, energy, their health. And if they suffer from an elder-related illness, they may not be able to grasp the provided advice. But, they deserve love, attention and respect. If you are visiting an elder this holiday season, steer the conversation toward their past positives; make their past part of your positive present.

For all others, it doesn’t cost anything to draw upon past positive experiences – and no matter how bleak life may seem, we all have good things that happened to us. It’s just a matter of choosing to remember them – the good old times or the good recent times. Also try overlaying the negative with the positive. Reducing stress by lessening your daily load and simplifying your agenda during the holidays goes a long way toward creating a brighter, more joyous holiday season. Finally, make time for yourself – for personal compassion.

For more in depth information about how your life is affected by the mental time zones that you live in, please check out our books: The Time Cure and The Time Paradox.

Wishing you and yours a happy holiday season!

Rose Sword and Phil Zimbardo

Visit our Psychology Today blogs to get a fuller appreciation of how to create a more balanced time perspective in your life!

Take the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory at www.thetimeparadox.com to discover your personal time perspective.

See The Time Cure: Overcoming PTSD with the New Psychology of Time Perspective HYPERLINK "http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/psychotherapy" \o "Psychology Today looks at Psychotherapy" Therapy (Zimbardo, Sword & Sword, 2012, Wiley Publishing); for strategies to reduce stress and improve communication, visit HYPERLINK "http://www.timecure.com/" \o "www.timecure.com" \t "_blank"www.timecure.com and HYPERLINK "http://www.lifehut.com/" \o "www.lifehut.com" \t "_blank"www.lifehut.com.

Visit our website, HYPERLINK "http://www.timecure.com/" \t "_blank"www.timecure.com, to view a free 20 minute video - The River of Time; you’ll learn self-soothing techniques as well as how to let go of past negatives, work towards a brighter future, and live in a more compassionate present.

Last week as I was doing a live podcast with Dr. Sophy, a listener called in wondering if Americans today are less trustworthy. This got me thinking about two competing ideas about American society. One is that notion of neighborly bonding associated with the barn raising, quilting bees, the Great Depression, and WW2.  You help one another, and the strong help the weak. It’s the assumption that we’re all in this together. Today as in the old days, the notion varies from place to place, and it’s always under pressure.

The New Deal and WW2 treated society as a system. If we pull together, as the chorus goes, we can lick any problem. That mentality gave us Social Security, a winning war effort, and then postwar prosperity. When he died, FDR was envisioning basic rights to employment and health insurance.

The opposite idea, privatization, worked best for the rich. It meant individual responsibility, but also every man for himself. Pulling together was for Communists and socialists. Polls show that the lies of the Vietnam War undermined trust in government, and that spurred President Reagan to demand that “big government” (we’re all in this together) be privatized. The idea was to put Wall Street in charge of Social Security, punish welfare parasites, and lower taxes, especially on wealthy investors. 

Privatization encouraged Scrooge McDuck, but ordinary salaries have been flat for three decades. In the 1980s a family needed two wage earners to hold its own. MBAs preached that job insecurity is good for business, whereas an employee voice—organized labor—is bad. At Walmart the pay is now so low you need government food stamps to survive.  Even so, Walmart’s been caught cheating employees on their pay stubs (an estimated 5% of companies cheat their workers).[1] Any new expense may be the bullet that cripples or kills you. 

When living standards are under stress, everybody’s tempted to cheat and fib. Privatization gets rid of regulations, so that when businesses advertise “A name you can trust” and run amok as the banks just did in 2008, nobody is punished. When you’re downsized, you suspect that maybe we’re not all in this together. You worry about trust.

But there’s a deeper problem. Pure trust is a fantasy. Even babies scream at their trusted parents when they’re scared and hungry. Trust is always a best guess, an estimate of how reliable others are. We want to believe that we’re all in this together—or that a privatized “free market” will police itself. But these are enabling fictions. In a psychological age, the ad industry manufactures belief. The advertising costs more than the beer in the bottle. People feel manipulated, unsure which corporate talking head to vote for. They worry about trust.

You can see these ideas shaping the turmoil over police killing young, unarmed black males. At the center of things, trust is in trouble.  If we’re all in this together, police are supposed to protect everyone, not victimize a stigmatized group of the poor. Yet alone on the street, his life at risk, the cop’s situation is radically privatized.

If he kills an innocent person, the law privatizes his role, too, by judging whether he felt his life threatened. In different ways, both sides are in denial about the reality of risk, the role of guesswork, and the overlays of prejudices that distort their assumptions. 

The nationwide protests aren’t just about the numbers of victims (a few hundred a year versus 33,000 traffic deaths in 2012) and racism. The police killings, I think, dramatize a kind of hair-trigger oppression that’s becoming pervasive in the US. It feels like a betrayal when forces that should help you make a life are instead pushing you toward social death. Corporations send your job abroad or refuse you a living wage. Politicians shred the safety net to force you to settle for crumbs. Wall Street cheats on mortgages, then takes your house. The corporate military takes your social security trust fund to spend on endless futile wars. The law itself shoots first and asks questions afterward when it replaces the jury trial—every citizen’s right—with hair-trigger plea bargains that force you to plead guilty or we’ll lock you up forever. [1] Police broke up Occupy Wall Street’s lawful demonstration with rough-house arrests and courthouse harassment. 

I call this hair-trigger oppression because it’s violence seems to happen too fast for a response, let alone accountability. Any number of processes now are structured so that deadlines or rates are triggered, as if nobody is responsible. Financialized mortgages disguised risk so that it blew up in somebody else’s hands. Inquiries or problem-solving efforts meet with a phone tree (“Your call is very important to us, please wait“). A Cleveland police spokesman on TV expressed the underlying fantasy when he warned that nobody would be killed “if people would just obey us when we tell them to stop”—even though two Ohio cops had just been caught on film shooting first and asking questions afterward.

TV allowed no follow-up to determine if the spokesman was lying or just in denial. He assumes that you'll sympathize: You can't expect obedience from those people.

This is the formula for our undeclared wars, as in the invasion of Iraq on the false suspicion that Saddam Hussein had terror weapons.  As in police killings, with hair-trigger panic, soldiers cut down innocent civilians without punishment. The Cleveland spokesman implies that as in warfare, policing is all about obedience, at a time when police departments are becoming militarized by acquiring equipment from the armed forces. More chillingly still, when a deranged black man ambushed two New York policemen in retaliation for publicized black victims of police bullets, NYPD spokesmen purportedly threatened that the protesters’ concern for justice had caused the officers’ deaths, and that the NYPD would “become a ‘wartime’ police department. We will act accordingly.” They vowed that protesters and New York mayor de Blasio had blood on their hands. [2]

Notice what happened: denying the agonizing guilt of killing innocent civilians, the police accuse the protesters and the mayor of being murderers. Retaliating for the deranged killer’s retaliation, they indirectly threaten to escalate their killing. This is of course how real wars start, in a cycle of fear and self-righteousness.

You can understand the cops’ denial. Who wants to wake up every morning thinking, I killed a 12-year-old boy with a toy gun in a playground? In countries free of American mania for guns, cops are rarely if ever killed. When people try to privatize policing by being armed to the teeth, suspicion and terror are explosive.  

Even if it’s only an enabling fiction, it’s useful to maintain that we’re all in this together as a way of defusing paranoia and that devilish cycle of retaliation. It helps keep morale up and stress down. American police are scared, especially in cities, among racial “strangers.” Risk is real, yet ironically polls show blacks generally trust police, while police overestimate the criminality of blacks, especially black males.

When living standards are under pressure, racism is inflamed, especially with a mixed race president to blame for any ills. The invective hurled at Obama shows that gut-level mistrust of blacks is surfacing again. Race also spurs some to blame minority victims rather than cops. Maybe they were lazy parasites sucking your money out of the system. Maybe they were competitors for scarce jobs and status. In any event, scared citizens don’t want to blame police. They don’t want to know that a scared and unreliable cop killed someone by mistake. They want to feel protected, whatever the cost.

Trust, belonging, race, crime, hair-trigger oppression—you can see why people dream of escape from such stress. In the PBS documentary “America by the Numbers,” Maria Hinojosa interviews folks in Coeur d’Alene Idaho, once a bastion of Aryan Nation white supremacy, now a civilized suburb that is, nevertheless, 94% white. The citizens say they’re not racists, they just feel more comfortable among people like themselves. We’re all in this together—as long as you’re in my family, my exclusive suburb. 

The problem is, differences and “strangers” are everywhere, and they compete, sometimes to the death. Like the nation, Coeur d’Alene is reluctant to acknowledge the economic injustice minorities face (since the 2008 banking disaster, net worth has shrunk by 25% vs. 43% for minority families).[3] It’s particularly perverse since haves feel so much mistrust and contempt for have-nots. Cops don’t gun down Wall Street crooks with attaché cases. 

The air today sizzles with images of excessive force. In Montana a man named Kaarma shot to death an unarmed German exchange student, enraged that the kid might pilfer something out of his garage. Meanwhile the “global policeman” uses hair-trigger drones to whack “enemies” who may or turn out to be visiting aunts. Hair-trigger CIA has tortured innocents off the street. Oh, and by the way, NSA has you and me under surveillance. Just obey when they tell you to stop. 

Across the planet, like children, humans react to strangers with mistrust and hair-trigger nerves. It’s how we’re built. Even with our big brains it’s not easy to understand that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Resources used in this essay:

 Kirby Farrell, The Psychology of Abandon (soon to be out in paperback from Leveller’s Press)

 Also in this series, “Who Can You Trust?” (September 15, 2014); “The Child and the Monster” (November 29); and “Guilty Games” (December 5).

 1. Laura Klawson, “Walmart ordered to pay $188 million in Pennsylvania wage theft lawsuit,” Daily Kos, December 16, 2014.   << http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/16/1352314/-Walmart-ordered...

2. Steven Thrasher, “Two NYPD Cops Get Killed and ‘Wartime’ Police Blame Protesters.” Guardian UK, December 22, 2014.

3. Quentin Fortrell, “Americans Are 40 Percent Poorer Than Before the Recession,” MarketWatch (December 16, 2014).