Source: Wikimedia Commons

Skeptics of the most commonly prescribed antidepressants—the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—often cite the fact that it takes four to six weeks for these medications to kick in.

SSRIs are commonly believed to work by blocking the serotonin transporter—a molecule that carries serotonin back into brain's cells. When serotonin is inside a brain cell, it does not do anything good or bad. For it to work as a neurotransmitter that can help activate brain signaling, it needs to be on the outside of the brain's neurons. If SSRIs work by blocking the serotonin transporter, they will result in more serotonin sitting on the outside of the neurons (or in the gap between—to be more specific), where it can do its job.

Although serotonin has multiple functions in the brain, one of them is to keep us calm and content. So, when too little serotonin is active outside our brain cells, we become nervous, unhappy or unable to feel any pleasure. Blocking the transporter that inactivates serotonin can thus restore our brain's levels of active serotonin and once again make us calm and content.

Those who are skeptical of SSRIs and of the whole idea that low serotonin levels in the brain can be a reason we suffer from anxiety and depression occasionally make mention of the long time it takes for SSRIs to work.

It is certainly peculiar that SSRIs do not work instantaneously after popping the first pill. After all, SSRIs are not the only drugs to block to the serotonin transporter. Street drugs like cocaine and ecstacy also appear to block the serotonin transporter. But it does not take four to sex weeks for cocaine or ecstacy to have a noticeable effect on us.

Some skeptics think the difference between street drugs like cocaine and SSRIs shows that depression and anxiety are not due to too low serotonin levels in the brain but rather to something else altogether. When SSRIs work (which they do—roughly—for 30 percent of depressed/anxious people who take them), they say, it is because the SSRIs activate some other brain system after increasing serotonin for weeks or months.

There is, however, a different explanation of why SSRIs, unlike cocaine and ecstacy, take so long to kick in. Consider an analogy. Let's say you go to a dietician and set up a new meal plan in an effort to shed weight. You and your dietician come up with a good regimen that will likely work. However, your refrigerator and freezer are stocked with the foods you and your family used to eat. Since you do not want to waste the food you already have, you decide to finish it before starting your new and healthier eating habits. Because you have a lot of food in your house, it takes a few weeks before you have replaced most of it with healthier alternatives. So, your weight remains stable for a while. After a month or so, however, you start to lose weight. This is the time when most of the old foods in your house have been replaced by healthier alternatives.

Resent research suggests an analogous explanation of why SSRIs don't kick in right away. The reason is that they don't target the serotonin transporter directly. Although some of these drugs bind to the transporter (for instance, Lexapro), this is not their mechanism of action. Instead they target our DNA, in particular, the genes that code for the serotonin transporter. They make these genes less active, so fewer serotonin transporter molecules are available in the brain. This explains the delayed action of antidepressants. Since our brain has plenty of active serotonin transporter molecules when we start taking antidepressants, it takes a while before suppressing the genes that code for the transporter has an effect on serotonin in the brain. When we start taking the medication, our brain is like a refrigerator stocked with our old food choices. It takes a few weeks for us to get through that food and replace it with the healthier alternatives that can ultimately stabilize us and make us function optimally.

Berit "Brit" Brogaard is a co-author of The Superhuman Mind and an author of On Romantic Love.

Source: Penguin, used with permission

Source: Leszek Glasner/Shutterstock

Almost fifty years ago, in a fit of moral outrage, I committed a gleeful act of vengeance that I still recall with pride: I spray-painted a condom gold and sent it in an envelope marked “fragile” to my ex-boyfriend. Why did I send him such a gift?  I’d just received a letter from him asking advice on how to seduce another woman, and I could not just let it stand.

This was the sweetest, healthiest retribution I ever hope to exact, a shining moment of self-assertion after a year of silently tolerating bad treatment, as a nineteen year-old college student is wont to do when she is in love with someone who does not love her back. Creating and mailing that cheeky piece of performance art diminished the pain I suffered and helped me eventually improve my taste in men; it was the beginning of the end of my masochism.     

In four decades as a psychoanalyst, I have been privy to many fantasies, and several completed acts, of retaliation for assorted crimes of the heart. These experiences confirmed my own insight: By no means is every vengeful thought or deed hazardous to one’s mental health or worthy of condemnation. Many are, like mine, emotionally beneficial—even witty and wise. Some are profoundly moral. They can be both a palliative for mental distress and a prelude to working through humiliation and betrayal, a potent short-term anti-depressant with few side effects.

“Healthy sadism” sounds like an oxymoron, but that is because we fail to make distinctions between truly vicious behavior and benign hostility—the kind that is the mainstay of torch songs like “Cry Me a River”, which owe their enduring popularity to the universality of the sentiments they express.

Revenge has a bad rep in traditional religions. Plotting or carrying out any act of reprisal is considered a serious sin—the Biblical injunction “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” is intended to discourage us from making it ours. Most psychotherapists, even non-religious ones, agree that vengefulness is a sign of serious pathology, “acting out” that entraps the avenger in a vicious cycle of hatred and prevents any resolution of the original harmful experience. But one of Freud’s early followers, Theodore Reik, agrees with me; “A thought-murder a day keeps the doctor away,” he declared in his autobiography, Listening with the Third Ear. Violence in fantasy, he argues, actually prevents violence in reality, safely releasing aggressive and even sadistic impulses without harming anybody.

Most vengeful actions are based on the misconception that harm to the self can be undone or at least mitigated by harming the perpetrator, when, in fact, magical undoing of what has already happened is impossible. It never erases your own suffering, and can even cause it to fester; the hard job of working through the feelings of powerlessness that betrayal always causes is the only permanent solution. But even though there are no shortcuts, there can be jumpstarts that galvanize the will.  

In addition to my own salutary experience, I have seen numerous examples where revenge, within safe limits, can assuage the pain of a broken heart, a demoralized spirit or a wounded ego—providing, as one woman put it, “the strength to go on.”

My favorite avenging angel is a former patient of mine, whose husband stole her PIN number when they were newlyweds and absconded with a large sum of her money. Several years later he called to ask her to meet him for a drink as a prelude to rekindling their relationship. The same day, she was contacted by an FBI agent who told her that her ex had been under surveillance as a con man, and that she was not his only victim. Would she assist in his capture by agreeing to the reunion? I enthusiastically encouraged her to comply. The trap was set, the prey was caught, and she later had the profound satisfaction of meeting his other victims and prospective victims at his trial, which sent him to the federal penitentiary. Her savings were lost forever, but her self-esteem was eventually restored, with interest.

I even heard of another condom that served as the instrument of revenge—luckily, in this instance, only in fantasy: A man, wounded to the quick by his beloved wife’s infidelity, consoled himself by imagining coating the outside of a condom with hot pepper powder and having sex with her so that she would suffer physically what he had endured emotionally. His good nature and solid moral sense restrained him from going through with it—something he was proud of—but the short-lived sadistic pleasure he felt when he imagined the scene bolstered his sense of agency and diminished his shame and his rage. Depending on the situation, carrying out an act of vengeance, or refraining from doing so, can be equally effective.

What differentiates healthy thought-murders from the pathological kind? They are not the deranged avenger’s knee-jerk reaction to every slight, and can even be funny, the way killing someone’s cat, sending a hate-letter, or wishing even in private that the perpetrator would die of AIDS, never is. The narcissistic injury (a psychoanalytic term for wounds to the sense of self) that inspires benign vengeance is transient, not all-consuming like the narcissistic rage that overcomes a person whose sense of self is extremely vulnerable. For such people, only mayhem or murder will do. They are dead-serious about their vicious thoughts or deeds, and obsessed with getting even. To listen to them is grim, dull, and frightening.

There is also a grey area between fantasies and behaviors that safely diminish anguish and those that torment one’s soul, even though they do no real harm to anybody but the avenger. A woman described to me the black magic ritual she performed after discovering that her boyfriend was having an affair with her best friend. Under a full moon, she gathered and incinerated belongings and photographs of the lovers, with evil intent: “I wanted to deny them their love, and the possibility of love for all time,” she told me, regretfully, years later. The plan, she believes, worked perfectly—but affected the wrong person: herself. The man she attempted to curse has a loving long-term relationship, but she is still alone. Her guiltyconscience (an indicator that she is actually a moral person) will not let her rest.

When the chemicals in the spray paint interacted with the latex of my golden condom, it unexpectedly expanded threefold. I laughed at the ludicrous sight—which stayed in my memory far longer than my fury. My intention had been sadistic—I had wanted to humiliate my ex—but the absurdity of the situation had transformed wrath to mirth, and I have never been tempted to repeat it.

So don’t be too hard on yourself, or anybody else, for yielding to the temptation to inflict a little payback in thought or deed. Living well may be the best revenge, but a golden condom or its equivalent judiciously applied can do you a world of good.

I recently joined Sarah Brokaw in her podcast Shared Secrets to discuss my story—as well as the shame that can accompany being single on Valentine’s Day and throughout the year.

How often do we say these words, when we discover connections upon chatting with new acquaintances? How do we feel when this happens? How does the awareness of connections affect our perception of the size of the world?

Why do older people talk so much about the past, about people and events they once knew? As we get older, don’t most of us feel more insecure as our ability to remember things decreases? We like to know how our world works, how people and things are connected. Context gives meaning. Lack of context often leads to confusion and misunderstanding.

Providing context is a major challenge for innovators because they have to find and create enough connections so that the value of their innovations can be easily recognized as familiar, but not “commonplace”. At the same time, new features must be different enough that new connections can be generated in the minds of users and customers (and media). The desired outcome is new perceptions, along with a certain degree of comfort with an existing awareness of value.

A new wrinkle on this approach to innovation is the concept of “shareable design”. The objective is to build social connectivity as an outcome of the human-centered design process. When products and services are already designed to elicit an emotional response, as so ably demonstrated by Apple, what can the business do to “exceed customers’ expectations”? What does that phrase even mean?

How can an experience continue to be fresh, after a new product or service is used?

We are inundated with tools, mostly created by young techies, e.g., Millennials, primarily for the type of customers they know best, i.e., other Millennials. Many of us in the older generation feel lucky when we can understand the basic functionality, but can’t figure out the more “advanced features”. Yet, when we ask our children to show us how to use those features, they quickly show us, saying “see how easy it is to use?” Of course, we didn’t think it was easy to begin with, and now we feel a bit stupid whether we agree or not.

What’s the lesson here? Of course, we have to learn from each other. What if the original design concept of an app is specifically to encourage community-building through sharing, and not just to make the app easier to use? I recently read that Instagram has “secret features” that are not evident to new or more casual users. The awareness of these features and how to use them can only be shared by those who have figured them out – or learned from someone else. Isn’t this an intriguing design concept?

Don’t we feel pleasure and satisfaction when we can share in this way? Isn’t this a little like the positive aspect of gossip? Why do we gossip? It’s fun. It’s more about relationship-building than knowledge sharing or problem-solving. The building of a human connection is much more important than the intrinsic value of the information. This creates a new context, a new pattern, for the information and for the people doing the sharing.

The human brain is wired to perceive patterns. Our emotional state responds instantly to those perceptions, before intellectual analysis can be done. The feeling of trust is a pattern. Before we feel trust, some of us want to be consciously aware of a lot of data points, words and actions that help us feel we have knowledge of another person or a situation. Others, because they come from a different context, may be able to trust with less awareness or fewer data points. Children and dogs, for example, because they are more open and have little expectation of people, can quickly decide whether to trust an unfamiliar adult human being. Whether that trust is justified is another issue entirely. As we mature, most of us tend to demand more proof of trustworthiness.

It’s a small world, isn’t it? Old, familiar connections seem to have greater credibility and validity. New connections that make sense in the context of what we already know give us comfort. The connectivity reduces the perceived distance of who we are. We are not so far apart, are we? Shared history, shared experiences, even bits and pieces, bring a sense of comfort because we are naturally driven to seek and appreciate these human connections.

Connections => Knowledge

Knowledge => Trust

Trust => Comfort (happiness)

Maybe this age-old universal truth can be illustrated in innovative tools that will help us redefine our social context to be more positive? Across the hundreds of countries in our world, things we have in common will not trigger our awareness as much as our differences.  What might happen if we focus our energies on our “connectedness”?

DJ Khaled, the one-man internet meme, is known for warning his tens of millions of social media followers about a group of villains he calls “they.”

“They don’t want you motivated. They don’t want you inspired,” he blares on camera. “They don’t want you to win,” he warns. On Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show, Khaled urged the host, “Please, Ellen, stay away from them!”

The “they” Khaled invokes are clearly a sinister force. But who are they? Khaled offered clues when he told DeGeneres, “They are the people who don’t believe in you.…They is the person that told you you would never have an Ellen show.”

Although Khaled’s claims may seem outlandish, he is in fact leveraging a powerful psychological hack: scapegoating. The practice of imagining a villain that’s conspiring against us, scapegoating can be an effective way to motivate ourselves and change our behaviors. Of course, as history has shown, terrible things can happen when people act on baseless conspiracy theories. But sometimes the antidote is in the venom.

Khaled isn’t the first to use the technique. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield uses an entity he calls “Resistance” to describe the force conspiring against creative output. “Most of us have two lives,” Pressfield writes. “The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” Throughout his book Pressfield reminds readers, “Resistance is always plotting against you.”

The author and game designer Jane McGonigal described a similar conspiracy of bad guys in her book SuperBetter. McGonigal blames villains like “Mrs. Volcano” and “Snuff the Tragic Dragon” when she loses her temper with her kids or feels self-pity.

Khaled, Pressfield, and McGonigal know that “they,” “Resistance,” and the “bad guys” don’t actually exist. For Khaled, that’s the joke that powers the meme. If Khaled were to point a finger at a real group of people intent on sabotaging him, such as an ethnic group or a particular corporate entity, his scapegoating wouldn’t be funny — it would be malicious.

​

Correct Causes

In order for productive scapegoating to work, it’s important not to assign blame to something or someone too specific; if we do so, we’ll shirk our responsibilities to change our own actions.

Instead, we need to find the underlying causes of our bad behaviors, which requires asking difficult questions — especially since our intuition is frequently wrong. Maybe we don’t binge on junk food or YouTube videos because of the pleasure in what we’re consuming, but because of deeper problems consuming us. Perhaps the true reason we allow our phones to interrupt dinner is not that we’re addicted to our phones, but that we’re addicted to work.

Once we’ve identified our own self-defeating behaviors, the next challenge is to implement a change, which can be difficult if we think what’s happening to us is beyond our control. In these situations it’s easy to feel powerless and to give up. It’s here that scapegoating can be used to our advantage. By directing our anger and anxieties at an invisible they, the forces working against us seem more tangible, so we feel like we have more power to fight them.

Powerless if You Think You Are

Several recent studies have observed a strong connection between the way we think about our ability to act and our follow-through. For example, to determine how in control people feel regarding their cravings for cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol, researchers administer a standard survey called the Craving Beliefs Questionnaire (CBQ). The assessment is modified for the participant’s drug of choice and presents statements like “Once the craving starts…I have no control over my behavior” and the cravings “are stronger than my willpower.” How people rate these statements tells researchers how powerful or powerless they feel in the face of temptation. Lower scores reveal that subjects believe they are more in control, while higher scores correlate with people who believe the drugs control them.

A study of methamphetamine users that appeared in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment in 2010 concluded that people with low CBQ scores were more likely to stay sober and that participants whose scores decreased over time — indicating that they felt more powerful as time passed — had increased odds of abstinence. A study of cigarette smokers published in 2014 found similar results: The smokers most likely to fall off the wagon after quitting were the ones who believed they were powerless to resist.

Though the logic isn’t surprising — if we believe we’re powerless, we don’t even try not to fail — the extent of the effect is remarkable. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that individuals who believed they were powerless to fight their cravings were much more likely to drink again. In fact, beliefs of powerlessness determined whether someone would relapse after treatment as much as the level of physical dependency itself did.

Embracing the Enemy

Besides making us feel more powerful, scapegoating can harness our instincts to resist threats to our freedom and autonomy, a phenomenon that psychologists call “reactance.” For example, when your boss micromanages you and tells you what to do in a patronizing way, you may feel crummy and decide to do the opposite, to “stick it to the man.” Scapegoating uses the power of reactance toward productive ends. If we feel that someone or something is conspiring against us, we’re more likely to work harder to prove them wrong.

Eliciting reactance has been used successfully in public health efforts, such as the antismoking Truth campaign, which tried to appeal to rebellious high schoolers (who feel reactance toward just about everyone). Instead of showcasing far-off consequences like emphysema and black lungs, the Truth campaign did away with the gore and instead painted the tobacco industry as a bunch of scheming jerks. In one ad activists attempt to deliver a case marked “lie detector” to the headquarters of a tobacco company and are promptly kicked out. In another spot, cartoon characters interrupt smokers at a party by shouting “It’s a trap!”

We can apply the same methods to use careful scapegoating to increase our own motivation. If we imagine a force working against us, we’re more likely to get fired up, resist our temptations, and work harder to achieve our goals.

Of course, it’s actually just us against ourselves. But for the times when we don’t want to admit that, providing a clear enemy to rebel against — a “they” who doesn’t want you to leave that extra cookie on the plate or get back to writing that blog post — can help us summon the tenacity we need to succeed. Even if, in reality, that “they” resides in each of us.

Here’s the gist:

• If used correctly, scapegoating can be a powerful tool for resisting temptation and sticking to hard goals. It can also be dangerous and backfire if used incorrectly.
• Assigning blame is a kind of psychological defense mechanism that frees us from uncomfortable feelings when bad things happen out of our control, or when we don’t want to accept that we are responsible for our own problems.
• Nothing can be done when bad things happen as a result of circumstances truly beyond our control. But we’re often more powerful than we think we are when it comes to our own behavior. Studies have found that people who believe that temptations control them are much more likely to give in.
• As long as we target the behavior at the root of the problem, creating an imaginary enemy — projecting our struggle onto the scapegoat — can make us feel more powerful and help us resist temptation or achieve our goals.​

What do you think?

Have you used scapegoating to tackle hard goals? Do you have any techniques for overcoming adversity? Tell me about it in the comments below.

Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and blogs about the psychology of products at NirAndFar.com. For more insights on changing behavior, join his free newsletter and receive a free workbook.

This article was originally published on NirandFar.com

Source: Leena Robinson/Shutterstock

The American Psychiatric Association estimates that approximately one in ten people in the United States suffer from some type of phobia. About 40 percent of phobias are related to creatures such as spiders, snakes, rats, lizards, bats, etc. If you are among the millions of people who are spider-phobic (arachnophobia) or have an abnormal fear of other vermin, there is good news.

A new study offers a potentially revolutionary treatment option for anyone suffering from an atypical fear of spiders or other phobias. For arachnophobes, the researchers found that subconscious exposure to a spider image (such as the tarantula above) for a millisecond—without any conscious awareness of viewing the image—was more effective at reducing a fear of spiders than longer, conscious exposure. The February 2017 findings were published in the journal Human Brain Mapping. 

Although phobias are often considered to be an irrational fear, most of the stimuli that trigger phobic responses have deep roots in our evolutionary biology that stem from a justifiably hardwired fear of anything that could have threatened our individual or collective survival as a species. Interestingly, humans are born with a host of innate fears that are part of our neurobiology from birth but reside below the threshold of conscious awareness. 

Humans respond to any fearful stimuli via an interplay between subcortical ("non-thinking") brain regions and cerebral ("thinking") cortical brain regions such as the frontal cortex. For decades, I've been researching the hypothesis that implicit learning and fear-based conditioning or avoidance behaviors are driven by subcortical brain regions seated below the conscious awareness of cortical regions in the cerebral cortex. The latest research on backward masking adds valuable insights to this hypothesis. 

As an example of subconscious fear responses, anyone who has ever mistaken a harmless piece of rubber on a path or in your backyard for a snake knows how deeply embedded a fear of serpents is seared into your subcortical brain regions. This primal subcortical fear of snakes is why your body will automatically jump away at the sight of an innocuous garden hose in the yard before your conscious mind and cortical brain regions have time to rationalize or decipher that the garden hose poses no danger.

The Dynamic Interplay Between the Frontal Cortex and Caudate Nucleus Influences Fear Responses

For the new study on arachnophobia, a team of researchers including Bradley Peterson, director of the Institute for the Developing Mind at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and Paul Siegel, associate professor of psychology at Purchase College of the State University of New York, used fMRI brain imaging and a technique called "backward masking" to pinpoint brain areas involved in conscious and subconscious fear processing. (Very brief exposure to potentially phobic stimuli followed by longer exposure to a non-threatening "masking" image that distracts from cognitive awareness of the threatening image is called "backward masking.")

To test neural activity during very brief subconscious vs. longer conscious exposure to phobic stimuli, the researchers recruited a group of 21 spider-phobic study participants and a cohort of 21 people who weren't afraid of spiders. All 42 participants were exposed to three conditions: (1) Very brief exposure (VBE) to masked images of spiders, severely limited awareness; (2) clearly visible exposure (CVE) to spider images, full awareness; and (3) masked images of flowers (control). 

Brain activity of spider-phobic people during repeated presentation of pictures of spiders—when they were aware of them (left column), and when they were not aware of them (right column). Phobic people processed the spider pictures significantly more when they were not aware of them, particularly in brain systems (including frontal cortex and caudate nucleus) that support regulation of fear and its associated behavioral responses. (These are 2-D slices positioned parallel to the floor in a standing person, with the forehead at the top and the back of the head at the bottom of each slice.)

Source: Photo courtesy of Bradley Peterson, MD

Then, Peterson and colleagues examined the degree to which specific areas of the brain involved in fear processing and deciding how to respond to a phobic image were activated when someone was consciously aware or unaware of the spider image. Interestingly, they found that even though non-conscious awareness didn't register in a way that could be brought to mind or was cognizant, this type of exposure caused subliminal fear responses to skyrocket. 

Surprisingly, the amygdala (which is widely considered the hub of fear responses and processing) wasn't the focus of this study. Instead, the fMRI neuroimaging honed in on the activity of the caudate nucleus—which regulates emotional fear responses and works with the frontal cortex to figure out how to respond to threatening stimuli. As you can see by this colorful fMRI image, both the caudate and frontal cortex lit up more significantly during subconscious exposure to phobic images when someone was "unaware" of a spider image. 

Subcortical Structures Are Taking Center Stage in the Early 21st Century

The caudate nucleus is a small subcortical brain structure in the dorsal striatum, which is housed in the basal ganglia. In recent years, there's been growing interest among neuroscientists to identify how subcortical “non-thinking” regions such as the basal ganglia, brainstem, and cerebellum (Latin for "little brain") interact with cortical “thinking” brain regions such as the frontal cortex, which is housed in the cerebrum (Latin for "brain"). 

This 2-D sagittal brain slide shows the salient divide between cortical and subcortical regions along with hypothetical descriptions of various dyadic functions presented in two columns. This illustration of the "Bergland Split-Brain Model" was created in 2005 by Christopher Bergland in conjunction with his father, Richard Bergland, M.D., and published on p. 81 of The Athlete's Way (St. Martin's Press).

Source: Photo and illustration by Christopher Bergland

In 2005, my father and I created the "Bergland split-brain model" as the foundation for The Athlete's Way program—which relies on taking a two-pronged approach for optimizing your mindset and maximizing performance based on implicit (subcortical) and explicit (cortical) learning and memory. My father, Richard Bergland, was a neuroscientist, neurosurgeon, and author of The Fabric of Mind. Tragically, he died unexpectedly a few weeks after our split-brain model was published by St. Martin's press in 2007 and didn't live to witness 21st-century advances in neuroscientific research catch up to his visionary hypotheses about how the brain works.

In the late 20th century, my dad had an "aha!" moment when he realized that the dynamic interplay between subcortical and cortical brain regions needed to be put in the spotlight. The Athlete's Way became a vehicle for my father (and me) to deliver potentially radical neuroscientific ideas to a general audience that were too iconoclastic at the time to be published in peer-reviewed journals.

The Bergland split-brain model refers to cortical regions as "up brain" and uses the terminology "down brain" to describe subcortical regions. "Up brain-down brain" is a direct and cogent response to the ubiquitous but deeply flawed "left brain-right brain" dyadic model. As I describe on p. 25 of The Athlete's Way,

"The salient divide in the brain is not from east to west or from right to left. Instead, it is from north to south. The down brain is our emotional and intuitive center and may even hold our personal and collective unconscious mind. It stores all [evolutionary] long-term memories, an ancient primal defense mechanism."

If you'd like to read more on this topic, in a January 2017 Psychology Today blog post, "Radical New Discoveries Are Turning Neuroscience Upside Down," I give an overview of a broad range of cutting-edge research that gives top billing to the cognitive and behavioral power of previously underestimated subcortical brain regions buried beneath the "thinking cap" of the cerebral cortex.

Because many of the ideas presented in The Athlete's Way about subcortical brain regions were ahead of their time a decade ago, I've kept my antennae up for 21st-century technological advances in neuroimaging that provide state-of-the-art empirical evidence which corroborates many of the educated guesses my father made decades ago and that I first published in 2007.

Needless to say, I was thrilled to read about the new research by Peterson et al. because it advances our understanding of the dynamic interplay between subconscious/subcortical brain regions and conscious/cortical brain regions. In a statement, first author of the recent arachnophobia research using backward masking, Paul Siegel described his team's findings, 

"Counter-intuitively, our study showed that the brain is better able to process feared stimuli when they are presented without conscious awareness. Our findings suggest that phobic people may be better prepared to face their fears if, at first, they are not consciously aware that they've faced them."

Bradley Peterson added, "Although we—expected and observed—activation of the neural regions that process fear, we also found activation in regions that regulate the emotional and behavioral responses to fear—reducing the conscious experience of fear." 

Current therapies to cope with phobias often involve directly confronting the feared stimulus to create desensitization. Unfortunately, consciously facing fears can cause young people to experience significant emotional distress and may actually be less effective than starting the process with subconscious backward masking. Peterson is in the process of fine-tuning potential ways to use backward masking to treat children and adolescents with a variety anxiety disorders and phobias.

Backward Masking Can Fortify Self-Belief and Athletic Performance

In 2014, there were two studies that reported on the power of backward masking and subconscious messaging to improve athletic performance and minimize negative self-beliefs about getting older. I reported on this research in a Psychology Today blog post, "Subliminal Messaging Can Fortify Inner Strength." This previous research dovetails with the new 2017 findings of using backward masking to help overcome phobias. 

The first example of using backward masking to improve performance is a December 2014 study, “Non-Conscious Visual Cues Related to Affect and Action Alter Perception of Effort and Endurance Performance,” conducted by Professor Samuele Marcora at the University of Kent in collaboration with colleagues at Bangor University and published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 

In this experiment, the researchers flashed subliminal cues, such as action-related words or happy vs. sad faces on a digital screen while endurance athletes were exercising on a stationary bicycle.

The subliminal words and faces appeared on a digital screen for less than 0.02 seconds and were masked by other visual stimuli making them unidentifiable to the participant's conscious mind. When the athletes were presented with positive visual cues like "go" and "energy" or were shown happy faces they were able to exercise significantly longer compared to those who were shown sad faces or words linked to inaction or fatigue.

Another example of the power of subliminal messaging and backward masking was conducted at Yale University. The October 2014 study, “Subliminal Strengthening: Improving Older Individuals, Physical Function Over Time With an Implicit-Age-Stereotype Intervention,” was published in the journal Psychological Science.

In this study, the researchers used backward masking to examine whether exposure to positive age stereotypes could weaken negative age stereotypes and lead to more vitality and healthier outcomes.

The Yale School of Public Health researchers found that older individuals who were subliminally exposed to positive visual cues and stereotypes about aging showed improved physical functioning that lasted for several weeks.

In this study, some of the participants were subjected to positive age stereotypes on a computer screen that flashed words such as "spry" and "creative" at speeds that were too fast to be picked up consciously. This was the first study to show that backward masking can improve attitudes aging and physical function among senior citizens. 

Stay tuned for future research on specific ways that backward masking can be used to overcome fear and phobias. Hopefully, future research will also fine-tune ways to use backward masking and implicit learning to improve confidence, physical performance, and someone's overall capacity to seize the day.

Source: Source: Lebron James // Keith Allison // Flickr

Picture this: Your team are 2-points down in the deciding game of the NBA finals. There are 4-seconds left on the clock. Your teammate passes you the ball. You somehow find yourself in space, so you set up your shot, when–boom!

You’re fouled.

Two seconds left on the clock.

Two free throws.

Two successful conversions needed to push the game into over-time.

Your teammate hands you the ball. This is your moment. Your time to shine.

And so you step up to the free-throw line.

Shut your eyes.

Take a deep breath.

You do everything you can to calm those nerves. But it’s no use. Your muscles feel tight. Your whole body is stiff. Your palms are sweaty. Knees weak. Arms are heavy. Negative thoughts swirl non-stop around your head: The consequences of missing this shot, the what ifs?

So how do you compensate?

You force yourself to focus on the task at hand: The free throw. You break the movement down into its individual components, try and control each of these individual steps. You try to remember every single coaching cue you used to first learn the movement. Because gone are those relaxed times from training, where you could hit 100 successful free throws without so much as ever thinking about the movement.

This is completely different.

And so you find yourself consciously controlling a movement which would otherwise be automatic. You place your hands in their correct position on the ball. Aim carefully. The time has come. You bend at the knees, shoot the ball off your fingertips, making sure that you follow through with the shot. The ball leaves your hand, but the shot felt stiff, stilted. The movement felt everything but fluid.

Or maybe this anxiety acts as a distracter, pulling attention away from the sources of information which are crucial for ensuring you make the shot: hand positioning, foot placement, aiming at the correct spot on the net. Instead, you fill your mind with worries about missing the shot. You focus on the source of the threat: the crowd, the TV cameras, your parents in the front row. You forget important steps in your pre-shot preparation routine. Your hand placement is all wrong. Your feet are in an unnatural position. Your eyes aren’t locked on the spot on the net where you wish the ball to land.

But you take the shot.

And so what happens?

You watch, hoping—praying—but it’s not use. The ball misses the net. Your world comes crashing down. You choked. You failed to execute a movement which, under normal circumstances, you could complete with your eyes closed.

Anxiety got the better of you.

Now imagine this: You’re 75 years old. It’s only February, but you have already fallen twice this year. You live alone. There’s no food in your fridge, so you’re forced to leave the safety of your house to head to the local grocery store. It’s only two blocks away, but the sidewalk en-route is poorly maintained and the paving stones are uneven. To make things worse, the whole sidewalk is covered in ice. You’re nervous. Anxious about falling.

You take a deep breath, hoping to calm those nerves. But it’s no use. Your muscles feel tight. Your whole body is stiff. Your palms are sweaty. Negative thoughts swirl non-stop around your head: The consequences of falling over, the what ifs?

So how do you compensate?

You force yourself to focus on the task at hand: Maintaining your safety while walking. You break the movement down into its individual components. You try and control each of these individual steps—quite literally. And so you find yourself focusing all your mental effort towards controlling a movement which you carry out hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day, usually without so much as a thought. You walk a few steps, but everything felt stiff, stilted. 

And so what happens?

Maybe you are focusing so hard on controlling your movement that you fail to spot an upcoming trip hazard: an uneven paving stone or a patch of ice. You slip on this ice and—as a result of adopting this stiff, stilted pattern of movement—are not fast or fluid enough to make the necessary rapid reactionary step to regain your balance. Either way, the prognosis looks grim; a fall, likely.

Or maybe this anxiety acts as a distracter, filling your mind with worries about falling. You focus solely on the source of threat—the uneven paving stone or the patch of ice—at the expense of proactively scanning your environment, thereby limiting your ability to perceive and identify other upcoming threats to your balance, such as an upcoming cyclist.

It seems ironic that changing one’s behaviour to prevent the occurrence of an event can actually increase the likelihood of this event occurring. But, unfortunately, it seems that this is exactly what happens when we perform a motor-skill under anxiety, whether that skill is performed by an expert athlete trying to immortalise themselves in sporting history (see Masters & Maxwell, 2008, for a full review on how consciously controlling/monitoring movement can negatively impact motor skills), or an older adult simply trying to avoid falling over (Young & Williams, 2015).

At first glance, expert athletes performing under extreme anxiety couldn’t be further from older adults experiencing worries about falling. But as this anecdote demonstrates, these situations share many similarities. By acknowledging this, researchers develop the opportunity to apply theory and knowledge from the domain of sport psychology to elderly fall-risk.

Basketball stars and your grandparents. One and the same. Who would have ever known?

Part 2 in this series will further expand on what research from the domain of sport psychology can tell us about older adult fall-risk, while identifying how researchers working with high-risk older adults may be able to utilize these findings in their work.

Employee engagement is one of those management attributes that can be hard to define. Different companies characterize it differently, but there's one thing they pretty much all agree on: They do want engaged employees.  Why? It's simple: Engaged employees are usually more committed, hard-working, and productive.

Ohio 1937, Mural by Paul Meltser

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Which is why it was disturbing (though not too surprising) to read about declines in key management metrics in a new report from TINYpulse, "2017 Employee Engagement Report: The Broken Bridges of the Workplace."

There are three measures in particular in this research that I feel go to the heart of substantive problems management often deals with - problems that if not resolved have far-reaching consequences on employee engagement (or more accurately, disengagement), productivity and retention. The three measures are:

Lack of employee recognition. According to the survey, the number of employees "who feel strongly valued at work" dropped 16% - from 31% in the prior year's survey to 26% in the current one. The fact that barely more than one in four employees feels valued is a sad commentary on management.  Over the years I've spoken with many, many employees who didn't feel valued in their jobs, and this sort of malaise is usually a deeply personal disturbance that rarely has a good outcome (e.g. disengagement, reduced productivity, leaving for greener pastures). The most unfortunate part is, the kind of recognition that is often most desired - simple, honest words of praise from one's direct manager - has no cost and takes little effort.  Yet organizations continue to falter in this regard, as this current survey indicates, at a high cost to many companies.

Lack of transparency.  Lack of management transparency is, like lack of recognition, another common morale-killer.  Why wouldn't it be? Who wants to feel their own management is routinely less than direct and honest with them? Yet this survey places the number of employees "who feel management is very transparent" at only 25%. (The figure rises to 42% for those who are part of management.) But if only one in four individuals on the employee side feels transparency, the great majority inhabit an at least somewhat mistrustful environment where it's only natural for motivation and extra effort to lag.

Disconnection from peers. There's a mountain of data out there (plus of course good old common sense) that tells you that on-the-job relationships are an integral element of the employee engagement formula. A collegial day-to-day environment makes a great difference in one's experience of work. Yet data in this survey shows that only 24% of employees "feel strongly connected to their co workers," an 11% drop from the prior year. A common theme in employee responses was "my team is OK, but others aren't." Or as the report concluded, "Management's failure to foster cross-functional  relationships is increasing the gap between departments." Only 27% of employees thought their company was "doing a great job with team building."

The bad news about these numbers is that they're bad for business. Very bad for business. And they're unnecessary. Very unnecessary. Issues like recognition and transparency and team-building don't take a huge management effort to address. They don't require massive budgets or complex project plans.

The good news about these kind of numbers is that with the right kind of management these numbers are fixable. Very fixable. None are insoluble or even, for well-trained and thoughtful managers, difficult. They take no great technical skills that can only be learned by MBAs from B-schools with ivy growing on them.

Recognizing and valuing employees is simple; it just takes a little time and effort and awareness that it does indeed make a difference. The way I like to put it: There's little for a manager to gain by being emotionally stingy.

Transparency is easier still. It's arguably harder to not be transparent and to have to make up explanations that aren't real but sound credible. Transparency just involves open, straightforward communication - plus of course a senior management who will support it.

Helping to create a positive team environment where employees feel free to speak their minds and connect with each other is a bit more complex, but by no means unattainable. Mostly it takes managers who understand how different personalities interact... and who can make employees feel comfortable while still getting the needed results. It takes managers who can create an open atmosphere where friendships can flourish.

Not one dominated by fear and uncertainty.

This article first appeared at Forbes.com.

*   *   *

Victor Lipman is an executive coach and author of The Type B Manager.

Source: "Brain Clock"/bzztbomb/CC BY-NC 2.0

For at least a decade I have been trying to teach my daughter Sam “executive functioning.”   For at least a decade she has been failing to learn—to learn how to manage her time, prioritize her obligations over her preferred activities, organize her belonging, regulate her impulsivity, and plan and execute projects such as writing a paper. After a decade, one might wonder if this is a losing battle.  And that’s the question.

Executive functioning strategies abound.  We have tried visual strategies, including special clocks and timers, visual schedules, and homework and chore checklists.  We have tried planning discussions in which we estimate the amount of time each activity will require and then factor in breaks.  We have tried scripts, we have tried first/then instructions, and we have tried threats.  We have tried IEP goals.  We have tried me yelling that I do not care if she fails all of her classes and lives in a pigsty the rest of her life.

The problem is, when the cat walks in the room or an interesting picture shows up in a textbook or an unfinished sewing project peeks out of a bin, all beg for attention.  The strategies derail.  If Sam had to learn the word “futile” for a vocabulary test, her struggle to learn executive functioning skills would be the perfect example. 

Then last weekend Sam was working on a paper for English.  It was, I am slightly embarrassed to admit, the first paper she has ever attempted by herself.  She completed a “pre-write” which involved composing paragraph-long responses to a series of questions.  Next she asked me to sit with her, just to keep her company as she wrote the essay.  When I noticed that she was hunting and pecking the identical words to those in her pre-write, I suggested she cut and paste the passage.  She scrolled back up, highlighted the words, and then stopped.  I assumed her mind was wandering to another topic until, after a minute or two, she said, “I think maybe these answers are supposed to be the different paragraphs.”

Holy cow.  Ten years of graphic organizers, outlines and pre-writes, and she never knew why; she never realized how they connected to writing a paper!  Did we all assume she knew?  Did it just take a while to sink in?  Or did we explain it repeatedly, but her brain was not ready to process it?  In other words, was the last ten years just a waste of energy?

The answer, for now at least, seems to lie somewhere in the intersection of neuroscience, intuition, and a parent’s own needs.  Neuroscience teaches us that

Source: Lobes and Its Boundary/Sebastian023/CC BY-SA 3.0/857

executive functions are associated largely with the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the last part of the brain to mature. Even in cognitively sophisticated people, the PFC does not operate optimally until the third decade of life. And adolescents with autism or ADHD exhibit significant, though distinct, abnormalities in the amount, direction and distance traveled by the two neurotransmitters seratonin and dopamine as they send messages from the PFC to other parts of the brain. It’s a double whammy of executive functioning not functioning well.  But we need to remember that inefficiency in neuronal activity is different from an absence of such activity.  New pathways do develop and old pathways are pruned, even in the most atypical of brains.

Next up is intuition.  We parents know our kids, and we have seen that new skills take time to sink in.  Sometimes they click in like learning to ride a bike, and sometimes they take an entire childhood, like remembering to write thank-you notes.  We have all seen our children learn things we never thought they would master.

And finally, we parents need to feel like we are doing something.  We need to feel proactive, even if we are proactively stepping back to let our children learn from failure.  Especially for those of us who live in dread of phone calls from teachers, we need to prove that we are neither oblivious nor lazy.  So even if the lists, schedules and threats are futile, we at least have the effort on display.

When I take these three considerations together, I do not believe the last decade of failed strategies has been so clearly a failure.  Every once in awhile, we see glimmers of success, such as Sam’s epiphany about pre-writing.  Nobody really knows what any person is capable of learning and when that window of opportunity will be open. Given our ignorance, the best strategy is to keep trying the latch and hope to catch a breeze.

Source: Courtesy of SplitShire

When we think of Valentine’s Day, love, and romance, the color red often pops into mind. In fact, people tend to rate the color red positively, because of its association with passion and warmth (Kaya & Epps, 2004). Williams and Neelon (2013) note that “…the color red carries many different social, emotional, and sexual connotations across cultures” (p. 10).

A growing body of research has shown that the color red can influence perceptions of attractiveness. In fact, this phenomenon has been labeled the “red effect” (Elliot & Niesta, 2008).  It’s not all that surprising, as red has long been associated with attraction. For example, red cosmetics are often linked to romance (Essie has a deep red nail polish called “Romantically Involved”). Names of these red beauty-related items range from romance to some that are much more suggestive, but I’ll leave those for you to find.

Now, back to the research…

In 2008, Elliot and Niesta conducted a series of five experiments to examine the “red effect.” In one experiment men had to rate whether a photo of a female presented on a red or white background was more attractive. Additional experiments altered the color of the woman’s shirt and examined factors other than attraction, such as the male’s intentions regarding their likelihood to date the woman. Results showed that not only did men rate the women in red as more attractive, but they were also more likely to want to date and spend money on her (Elliot & Niesta, 2008).  Follow up studies have also shown how the presentation of the color red can alter behavior. Niesta-Kayser, Elliot, and Feltman (2010) demonstrated that men chose to sit closer to females wearing red t-shirts than those wearing blue t-shirts.

In 2016, I conducted a study with two research assistants examining the red effect and coupled it with Aron, Melinat, Aron, Vallone, and Bator’s (1997) closeness-generating questions. You may be more familiar with these questions as the “36 questions that lead to love,” which went viral in an article during Valentine’s Day 2015 (Catron, 2015).

Our research focused on how color influences people’s perceptions and behaviors. In order to do this, we conducted an experiment to examine how the presence of the color pink influenced both judgment of the intimate nature of an ambiguous vignette and the likelihood to use questions which encourage self-disclosure from a random partner. Pink was chosen to see if the red effect would extend beyond the specific red hue.

For this study, 78 college students, 12 males and 66 females, were recruited. A majority identified as heterosexual (92.3%). These participants ranged in age from 17 to 52 (M = 21.6) and were ethnically diverse. At the time of the study 57.7% of the participants were single.

Participants were welcomed by two research assistants; one identified herself as the researcher and the other was identified (by this researcher) as someone that the subjects would be getting to know. The participants were told that the researcher was interested in studying the art of conversation. The subjects were also told that they were not going to have a conversation with the other individual, but were to select a total of five questions to ask her (with the goal of getting to know her better) from the list presented to them. This list consisted of 12 questions (six closeness-generating questions and six small talk questions from Aron et al.’s (1997) study). 

Depending on the condition they were assigned to, these questions were either printed on deep pink or deep blue paper. It was hypothesized that the red effect would extend to the color pink and that those given pink paper would choose more closeness-generating questions, as they require more intimate answers. Thus, the color would influence participants’ choices.

In fact, there was a statistically significant difference in the number of closeness-generating questions selected between the pink paper and blue paper groups, with those in the pink paper group opting for the more intimate questions. It is important to note that there were no gender differences in question choice.

After this, an ambiguous vignette describing two high school friends was presented to both groups on either pink or blue paper (depending on the condition participants were assigned to in the first experiment). The goal was to see how romantic the participants felt this vignette was. It was hypothesized that those who had the story presented on pink paper would view it as more romantic in nature.

Results did not demonstrate a significant difference in whether or not people viewed the scenario as romantic based on the color paper given. There also weren’t any gender differences.

While the red effect held true for the first part of the experiment, it didn’t alter people’s perceptions of the story in the second part of the experiment.

While there were limitations to our work, such as the use of a convenience college sample and the majority of participants being heterosexual females, it was an interesting initial investigation. It showed that color can influence the likelihood of forming intimate relationships with others, by making people more likely to ask closeness-generating questions. However, when an ambiguous scenario was presented, color did not have a significant effect. This suggests that perhaps the influence is related to behaviors and perceptions that affect us directly, rather than situations involving two other people that have no relation to us. Either way, this did spark the idea for new studies in this area.

Stay tuned…

Note: I would like to thank Shanice Lawrence and Claribel Lizardo for their help with the data collection and for being such wonderful (and professional) research assistants. 

Source: www.unsplash.com

Have you had the experience of feeling lonely, like there is no one around, no one to talk to, as you sink into a state of sadness, anxiety, and fear that you will never get over this feeling? You are plagued by a sense of emptiness, a desire to connect with someone—anyone or, perhaps, someone special to you—and you feel it is overwhelming you at times?

Well, if you have had these feelings of loneliness—no pun intended—you are not alone. Loneliness is one of the most common, unpleasant emotions that millions of us experience. For some, it’s a recurring sense of desperation and of sadness. For others it may be a passing emotion that one has at times. But for all of us it is part of being human.

Loneliness can lead to excessive drinking or binge eating—simply to suppress those unpleasant feelings. It can lead to depression and rumination, as you dwell on the question, “Why am I alone?” It can lead to a sense of hopelessness—“I will never be happy because I will always be alone”.  Having a strategy to deal with loneliness may be an important protection against depression, substance abuse, or even making bad choices for partners.

Let’s take a look at how you can cope with your feelings of loneliness.

1. Normalize loneliness

As John Cacioppo, a researcher in the field of loneliness, points out, loneliness is on the rise—from 11% to 20% in the 1970s and 1980s to 40% to 45% in one study in 2010. So you are not alone in feeling lonely. Perhaps the breakdown of connectedness in the last 40 years can be related to the decline of the family, higher divorce rates, people moving more frequently, the decline of church attendance, and the decrease of participation in organizations like the PTA and labor unions. As Harvard social historian, Robert Putnam, illustrates in his book, Bowling Alone, people would participate in bowling leagues—on bowling teams—in the 1950s, but now they bowl alone. As widespread and increasing in frequency as loneliness is, we need to recognize that we need to have strategies for coping with this experience.

2.Relate loneliness to your values of connection

It may sound invalidating but we can also ask, “What is loneliness good for?” I would suggest that loneliness reminds us of the value of connection, intimacy, or simply sharing experiences with others. We evolved to live in smaller communities with daily face-to-face contact—and with shared labor in child-rearing. That has changed for many people. But loneliness may remind you of the fact that you value connecting with other people and that this value is an important part of being human. Don’t give up on connection when you are feeling lonely.

3. Have a plan

The first part of developing a plan is to identify your “trouble times” for loneliness. It might be evenings, it might be weekends, and it might be holidays. So have a plan in advance. What are you planning on doing? For example, on weekends you might make plans with friends or family, you might go to museums, concerts, bike rides, guided walks, church or synagogue events (you don’t have to be religious), or connect with people on meetup.com or other websites. Have a plan. I like thinking of turning yourself into a tourist for a day or a night. Or if your lonely time is at night, have a plan for a couple of nights each week when you might connect with someone—and it could simply be on Skype. Plan some videos to watch, music to listen to, take a yoga class, join a health club, take up a hobby. A friend of mine who is incredibly resilient, took up the guitar and swimming—separately—at the age of 68. He experiences great enthusiasm with these activities. So, what is your plan?

4. You don’t need someone else to do something rewarding.

So often people will say, “I have no one to do things with”. You don’t need someone to go to the movies, go for a walk, work out at a health club, go to a concert or take up a new hobby or skill. Some people say, “I feel self-conscious doing these things by myself”. But try to identify what those self-conscious thoughts are--- they may be thoughts like, “People will see me alone and think that I am pathetic”. Really? How do you know what they think? And if they did think that, why should you care? Maybe doing things alone means you are independent and empowered and free.

            In fact, doing something by yourself might actually be a good way to meet new people. Imagine that you are at a museum or bookstore and you start talking to someone next to you about a painting or a book. Or imagine that you are taking a cooking class or yoga and you start talking to people. Empower yourself by getting out and realizing you don’t need someone else to do things with. You have yourself.

5. Identify your loneliness thoughts

We just identified a few of those thoughts just now. But write down some of the thoughts that you have when you are lonely. These might include thoughts like the following:

• I will always be alone
• If I am alone I have to feel lonely and unhappy
• I must be a loser because I am alone
• I can’t stand feeling lonely..

If you have these—or other negative thoughts—then you are like millions of people who are stopped in their tracks by loneliness. But try some of these rational and helpful responses:

• You are only alone for these moments (minutes, hours) and you will be interacting with other people soon—at work, waiting in line, talking to a friend, or participating in an activity. You are not living on a deserted island.
• Just because you are alone doesn’t mean that you have to feel sad and lonely. You can look at being alone as an opportunity to do some things that you like. For example, you might enjoy having the peace to read something you like, listen to your own music, cook your special food, watch your favorite movie, go to a museum at your own pace.
• The idea that you are a loser because you are alone makes no sense since everyone is alone at some time. And, as recent research shows, about 45% of people experience loneliness. Being alone is a situation—it’s not a person. Situations change.
• The idea that you cannot stand being alone also doesn’t make sense. It may be true that you don’t like being alone, but it’s the way that you relate to it that matters. If you relate to your loneliness with protest, anger, desperation, and defeat then it will be unpleasant. On the other hand if you relate to it with the idea that feeling lonely or being alone comes and goes and that it is something we all cope with—including you—it might be more helpful. Accepting what is might be better than catastrophizing what we all experience.

6. Direct compassion and tenderness toward yourself

Rather than think that you need to rely on others for love, acceptance and compassion, you might think of directing these thoughts and feelings toward yourself. This can include acts of loving kindness toward yourself (such as making yourself a healthful treat to eat, buying yourself a simple gift), directing loving thoughts toward yourself (by giving yourself support for being who you are and being your own best friend), and by imagining a loving person from your childhood (your mother, grandmother, father, aunt)  whom you recall showing tenderness toward you. Taking care of yourself and soothing yourself is a wonderful antidote for loneliness.

7. Build a community of connectedness

We all need some connection with other people—or even animals. Let’s take animals. So many people I have known over the years—friends, family, patients—have told me how much love and connection they experience with their pets. So consider getting a cat or a dog. Or, even easier, go to the local animal shelter and offer to volunteer. One woman I know volunteered for several months at a local animal shelter, “socializing the kittens”. Talk about great work to have, playing with kittens.

Another way of connecting is to do volunteer work. I think we all need to be needed. You can search on-line in your local community for volunteer organizations, even specifying the interest that you have. Perhaps it’s working with kids, older people, cancer patients, or people who are poor. I doubt that you will feel lonely when you are showing kindness toward someone.

And plan connection. This includes using social media—whether it’s Facebook, Linkedin, or even listservs from your college or high-school. Make plans to see people. Just because you haven’t been in contact doesn’t mean you can’t take the initiative. Join organizations where there are people interested in what you are interested in—political, cultural, religious, or social activities.

Being alone doesn’t mean that you have to feel lonely. And feeling lonely doesn’t mean that you have to feel lonely indefinitely. All emotions pass and go. It depends on what you are thinking and what you are doing.

It’s up to you.

Source: Pixabay.com

The national day of hearts, romance, and roses has always been a favorite of mine.  Despite experiencing singledom for most of my Valentine’s Days while on this planet, the idea of universal love and emanating these positive feelings for a day has always filled my heart.  In actuality, I wish it were Valentine’s Day every day!

However, too often as we focus on loved ones, friends and family, we are quick to dismiss the importance of showering this love right back onto ourselves.  We are so busy in modern times and now distracted with our devices that rarely do we take a moment to step back and assess what our needs are.

In Ashley Davis Bush’s artfully written, Simple Self-Care for Therapists, she writes that too often we are quick to feel selfish or guilty for taking time to take care of ourselves.  However, when we neglect this critical task, we also risk depleting ourselves, essentially running on empty. The more burnt out we are, the worse our interactions with our loved ones, our work, and in the end, we suffer.

One of the greatest impediments to self-care naturally is time. While we often think that things like engaging in hobbies or exercise is simply too time-consuming (or expensive), it is about learning how to weave these practices into our every day on the micro and macro level.

Many of us are familiar with the macro level. We may (or may not!) take vacations once a year, we might get the occasional massage or do an annual spa treatment. We may consider prioritizing our sleep, our diet and exercise. In fact, some may consider the sheer act of doing well on these domains as self-care enough. While it’s a good start, it’s also about the micro practices.

The inclusion of micro self-care practices is critical. Think about it. What do you do in a given day? Perhaps get up to a blaring alarm (semi-traumatic), stumble through the house, deal with mini-crises induced by missing shoes, spilled juice and any other host of things. Then you get on the road (the bane of my existence) and deal with aggressive drivers, traffic and general misery. NOW, you are just starting your day.  You haven’t even checked email yet and the stress response is already high. Micro self-care practices help to combat just this. They begin at the start of the day and go all the way to the end.

Think about your best mornings. What have they looked like? Perhaps you woke up a half hour early.  Maybe even ten minutes. It may have been just long enough to have you up before the noise of the rest of the house. You might have read a few pages of the newspaper, had a cup of coffee, or just sat by the fireplace and aimlessly stared off into space. Whatever it was, it was a brief, sacred moment just for you.

What about the work day? What are the simple things that make the unpleasant more enjoyable? Maybe it is soft background music, perhaps you dim the lights. I love turning my fountain on in my office every day when I get inside. Micro self-care also encourages you to tune into the transitional moments that we all have in our workdays. For therapists, the transition is between clients. For others it may be between customers or a break period. What do you do with that short amount of time to really make it worth your while? Meditation apps? Read a few short pages from a favorite book? Knitting? I’ve seen folks do all of them in past work settings. All I had to do was circle our counseling center once around the lunch hour and I saw all sorts of lovely self-care taking place.

Lunchtime is also an important part of the ritual of self-care. As much as I love the convenience of eating out, there is something about a nutritious meal you have made with love for yourself that simply can’t compete with the Freshii bowl. Depending on the length of the lunch hour you might take a power nap, or connect on the phone with a loved one. Again, these activities can and will look different for various folks. What might be relaxing to one person is a nightmare to someone else. 

One of my favorite simple ideas from Bush’s guide is the afternoon beverage ritual. While our society has essentially shamed us out of a Starbucks habit due to excess sugars and chemicals, Bush encourages us to savor our afternoon treat. No, she is not encouraging the Frappuccino with double whip. But she allows you to indulge. I used to have a small piece of dark chocolate with tea every afternoon that somehow in the busyness of life got completely neglected. So often in an attempt to be “healthy” we end up depriving ourselves of the small things that can bring us so much joy.

Finally, the end of the day is critical in rejuvenating us. Safely in the haven of home, the choices we make here are also deeply impactful. Do we lounge in front of the tv for 3 hours, or do we go for a walk around the block? Is dinner fast food or nutritious?  Do we stay up late and repeat the cycle of exhaustion, or prepare ourselves for an energizing day ahead?

Perhaps put most simply, self-care is about choosing joy. It’s about not feeling guilty or badly, but knowing it is essential to our vivacity. Self-care is every day but also requires planning. Maybe you decide you finally need to make weekly yoga a habit. Or you sign up for the massage package. But you also fill your work drawer with your knitting needles, aromatherapy scents, and puzzles. However you do it, give it some serious consideration. It’s not just you that benefits. It’s your loved ones, family, coworkers, and if I dare say it, the world at large. Happy Valentine’s Day!

For more pseudo-sappy posts, follow me on Twitter at MillenialMedia. 

Idealization is the normal experience of a young child who puts his parents and himself on a pedestal. "My Mom is the best cook in the whole world," OR "I am the best checkers player ever—nobody can beat me." 

Source: Juan Galafa/ Unsplash

It is also a common part of adolescence when the idealization of someone other than the parents is part of the separation process and usually transforms in adulthood into a more realistic and integrated view of self and others.

However, when idealization continues in adulthood and through middle age, it is often part of a cycle in which it is followed by devaluation. This cycle characterizes many personality disorders—borderlines, sociopaths and narcissists for example.

Underlying the idealization/devaluation cycle is "splitting"—the world is split into good and bad. On the good side, there is idealization—exaggerated positive qualities are attributed to self or others. For example, “I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created”  OR  “I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me."

On the negative side, qualities of either self or other  are exaggerated, devalued and worthy of contempt. For example, "If Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card, and the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.”

Splitting keeps the positive and negative aspects of self and other walled off from each other. The person cannot tolerate being a mixed package or anyone else being one. While all of us may split during particularly stressful times, for borderline, narcissistic and sociopathic personality disorders splitting is chronic.

For the narcissist, the primary need is to be the center of attention in order to support his labile self-esteem. While healthier people are hurt by disappointment or disillusionment, the narcissist feels completely destabilized by it. He cannot get "back on the horse." Unable to maintain his sense of worth, the narcissistic personality is dependent on others for sustenance. If other people mirror the self-aggrandized self, they may be idealized. Hence, people might report that their experience of a narcissist was that he was charming and flattering. But disagreement or criticism by another person (even a therapist or a judge) is experienced as a narcissistic injury—as if the self is being attacked. The narcissist needs constant reassurance that he is special and can spin out of control and attack others venomously when he feels unappreciated or disrespected.

By Catherine Tinsley, Jason Schloetzer and Matthew A. Cronin

Source: PublicDomainPictures/Pixabay

Failure is not a dirty word. Despite our general aversion towards failure, it is a natural part of our life experiences. Yet most people find it difficult to simply acknowledge failure and would almost certainly balk at the idea of respecting failure.

The problem is that when we ignore or avoid failures, we turn our backs on learning opportunities. And even worse, when we punish failure, we dis-incentivize exploring new ideas or experimenting with new approaches that might lead to significant improvements. Whether for individuals or for companies, our fear of failure can obliterate creativity, extinguish innovation, and damage success.

People do not like to fail. When people fail, there are natural feelings of shame, disappointment, and frustration that can make people withdraw. To get people “back on the horse,” organizations need to reframe these reactions, not amplify them with punishment. Our research shows that if these individuals are embedded in a culture that can reframe how people process failure, it makes those people more confident, productive, and successful.

Over the course of four months we ran a field experiment in a large company whose sales force operates in several countries. We followed sales people in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa. One group from each country was randomly selected to watch a company-based video about embracing and learning from failure. This video said, for example:

Every one of us who has succeeded has also felt the sting of failure. The only people who never fail are the ones who are not trying hard enough….Setbacks, bumps and “failures” are a normal part of everyone’s journey—both in business and in life. In fact, these obstacles are future successes in disguise. Failures are the launching pad which inspires us to think creatively and positively. Remember the most important thing is to power through any failures. 

Strikingly, we found that when people had been exposed to this organizational message to reposition failure their confidence increased, which had a direct impact on their business success. These sales people had, on average, 22% higher sales and 27% higher sales productivity than those members who did not receive this message. 

We also verified that this was a general effect. We surveyed workers from multiple companies in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa, and we found that being embedded in an organizational culture that acknowledges and embraces failure can improve employee confidence and creativity regardless of industry, job type, gender, and country. More confident workers are 17% more likely to report being innovative, 16% more likely to come up with better ways of getting work done, 24% more likely to be able to overcome challenges at work, and 10% more likely to solve problems independently. 

Notably, the effect was most robust when it was part of the organizational culture rather than just a message from a direct manager or supervisor. When failure experiences are tolerated throughout the culture and understood to be part of growth in an organization, people’s entire orientation can shift. For instance, they approach opportunities rather than avoid engagement out of fear of failure and retribution. They risk experimentation, enabling both companies and workers to fulfill their potential. It makes those workers more confident, which translates into more bottom line success. 

There is a well-known irony in business: You have to spend money to make money. Companies that pinch their pennies too tight go out of business. Maybe it is time we realize that you need to fail to succeed. Ignore the paradox at your peril.

Catherine Tinsley, the Raffini Family Professor of Management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and academic director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Institute; Jason Schloetzer, the William and Karen Sonneborn Term Associate Professor of Business Administration at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business; and Matthew A. Cronin, an associate professor of management at George Mason University School of Business, are co-authors of “Cultivating the Confidence Cycle,” recently presented at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

In the brief period since Trump took office, those who oppose the president have been riding an emotional rollercoaster.  "It's after midnight, I should be asleep, and I am livid about our government,” writes one Twitter denizen.  "The more I follow everything thing Trump and co. are doing, the more hopeless it feels,” writes another.  

Some liberal-minded people are experiencing a sort of “Trump Addiction”—they feel almost magnetically drawn to reading about every executive order and new appointment, even though each one slowly chips away at their optimism.  To avoid feeling overwhelmed, others are tempted to navigate away from political websites, switch off the radio or television, and generally "tune out" the news.  Whether Trump-addicted or tuned out, the common denominator between both of these states is a sense of hopelessness.  CNN recently reported that even

Source: Damian Boeselager/Shutterstock

Trump’s own Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, called the president’s recent tweets criticizing the judiciary “demoralizing” and “disheartening,” words sometimes used to refer to feelings of hopelessness.

Hopelessness obviously isn’t a good thing.  Not only does it feel bad, but it’s associated with inaction, making it a recipe for disaster in the context of a participatory democracy.  As a form of government, democracy thrives only when people with diverse opinions vigorously debate, act, and vote.  

So, how do those in the political opposition remain hopeful?

There are more than two decades' worth of research about the psychological conditions under which hope thrives.  Perhaps most importantly, this work shows that it’s possible to be hopeful even when things aren’t going your way.  That’s because hope is a future-focused emotion.  Although it’s somewhat influenced by the current state of affairs, hope primarily involves the belief that the future can be better.  So, it’s possible to be very unhappy with the way things are going in Washington and still be hopeful that your actions today can make a difference tomorrow.

The most widely endorsed model of hope in the field of psychology was developed by C.R. Snyder, a researcher and clinician at the University of Kansas in the 1990s.  According to Snyder’s work, hope thrives when three basic conditions are met.

The first condition is having a goal, something important or meaningful to strive for.  Certainly those in the political opposition have many goals.  The key to setting this condition in your own life is to choose to adopt a goal that is truly meaningful to you—one that gives you a sense of purpose.  Viktor Frankl, the late great psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, was often asked what kept him going during his time in the concentration camps.  In response, he often quoted philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”  Certainly we’re far from the horrors of World War II, but this saying still holds great wisdom.  A lot of people are feeling disheartened by “how" the political climate is right now.  But a sense of purpose can keep the flame of hope lit by giving us a “why” to live for.

The second condition for hope to thrive is having what Snyder called "pathways”—strategies or plans that you believe could help you to achieve your goals. There are lots of possible pathways in politics, including protesting or marching, blogging or tweeting, volunteering for a non-profit organization, donating to a cause, writing to your congressperson, signing a petition, or even running for office.  Regardless of whether you choose one of these pathways or any other, the important thing for keeping yourself feeling hopeful is to choose to do something that you believe will positively contribute (even in a small way) to achieving whatever goal or goals you’ve embraced.  It’s not necessary to change the world all at once, just to take one step at a time along your pathway.

Finally, the third condition for hope to thrive involves nurturing a sense of personal agency.  Agency, a fancy word for empowerment, pushes us forward to work on our goals.  As in Watty Piper’s celebrated children’s book, The Little Engine That Could, agency fills us with the belief “I think I can” and is the engine of hope.  For many, this sense of agency comes in part from the care and encouragement of those in our lives.  When people come together in support of one another and their collective goals, this bolsters agency.

In many ways, the political opposition to Trump currently has all three of these conditions met.  Many people who attended last month’s Women's March, for instance, have commented that there was a palpable sense of hope in the air. This doesn’t mean people were happy.  On the contrary, they were marching out of dissatisfaction.  But the march still fueled a shared hope that the actions of the people present could make a difference.

Regardless of where each of us falls along the political spectrum, most of us can agree that staying hopeful and engaged in a good thing.  In 1799, Patrick Henry famously said, “United we stand, divided we fall.”  The truth is, the population of the United States has never stood fully united on its political ideals.  There will always be disagreements, even passionate and angry ones.  But as divided as we may be about our ideas, we can remain united in the hope that our democratic actions matter.

___________________

David B. Feldman is an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University and co-author ofSupersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering & Success(HarperCollins).

Source: Dean Olsher

The nursing home resident—I’ll call her Marian—was not especially popular on her unit. The reason was that she spent most days vocalizing at full volume. Often she sang fragments of old spirituals. Other times it sounded like an agitated distress call, including cries for help as if she was under attack. It was hard to tell the difference between the two.

Marian, who was born just as the Great Depression was getting underway, presented with advanced Alzheimer’s-type dementia. She grew up in the Deep South, and her life was defined by the kind of trauma that pervaded the Jim Crow era. According to her daughter, Marian was beaten and whipped regularly by her father. She ran away to Florida, where she married a man whom she eventually fled. “She’s a runner,” her daughter said. Marian brought her five children to New York City, where she cleaned houses, earned her GED, and became a nurse. She bought a piano when her daughter was young and always liked to sing. 

Marian’s mind had gone back to live in that earlier time. Approximately 20 minutes into my assessment, after a long stretch of singing, there was an abrupt shift in her affect. Suddenly, with a terrified look on her face, she looked me directly in the eye and shouted fearfully, “Mama, please help me! Please!”

After two months of therapy we fell into a regular groove. As I quietly played blues chords, Marian would relive what appeared to be incidents from her younger days. In our early sessions she would speak these narrations in prose. Then she started to sing them melodically, as if they were recitatives in the opera of her life. She told stories in improvised song, and the melodies she invented fit perfectly with the accompaniment that I played at the piano. 

Marian often sang variations on “Wade in the Water,” a song associated with the Underground Railroad.  

Wade in the water.

Wade in the water, children.

Wade in the water.

God’s gonna trouble the water.

One reason the creative arts are a powerful therapeutic resource is that they function on multiple levels. This particular song operated on at least three. The literal meaning of the words tell the Bible story of Israel’s enslavement by Egypt; the water in question is the Jordan river. In Harriet Tubman’s time, the lyrics acquired a second dimension that reflected the reality of Americans attempting to escape from slavery to the northern United States and Canada. More than a century after Tubman’s death, the song continued to resonate in Marian’s singing with the particulars of her personal story of running away from people who posed a threat to her very being. 

It was no longer possible for Marian to have a conversation in the usual sense of the word. Our music making took the place of the talking cure, and this song was the best and, perhaps, the only avenue open to her for processing the hard truth of her life.

Senator Mitch McConnell’s silencing of Senator Elizabeth Warren in the debate over Senator Jeff Sessions nomination as attorney general had everything to do with gender and nothing to do with impugning a peer. Warren was reading from a letter written by Coretta Scott King in 1986, in protest of Sessions' candidacy for a federal judgeship (he was not confirmed as a federal judge). Were the letter so inflammatory, Senator Tom Udall would not have subsequently been able to read the letter in its entirety (Robbins 2017).

As I noted in my post on mansplaining, men are more likely to interrupt a speaker than are women, and women are more likely to be interrupted than are men (Anderson and Leaper 1998; Hancock and Rubin 2015). The same male senators who interrupted and silenced Senator Warren granted Senator Udall the respect to read the very same words uninterrupted. This gendered double standard of censorship matters—interruptions are linked to social power (Kollock et al 1985) and thus both reflect and reinforce gender inequality. Fortunately, Senator Warren did not take the rebuke meekly—she promptly read Coretta Scott King’s letter in its entirety in a Facebook Live video.

Opposition to Warren could stem in part from discomfort toward ambitious, confident women. Senator Lindsay Graham stated that silencing Warren was “long overdue” and that “she is clearly running for the nomination in 2020” (Kaczynski 2017). This comment trivializes Warren’s objection to Sessions’ candidacy as a politically-motivated stunt intended to build electoral support, and it also suggests that strong women with leadership aspirations are in particular need of silencing. Even less subtly, Governor Mike Huckabee’s gloating tweet describing Warrens as a “scold” draws on explicitly sexist language—labeling a woman as a “scold” has long been used as a strategy to silence assertive women and trivialize their remarks.  

This animus toward strong, competent woman “intruding” in a male domain is well-documented in sociology. Experimental research indicates that women who succeed in a male gender-typed job are less liked and more personally derogated than equally successful men (Heilman et al 2004). These negative reactions can impact career outcomes, such as performance evaluations and raises (Heilman et al 2004). Penalties for success may be particularly salient for mothers—a role Clinton often referenced in her campaign. Mothers are generally evaluated as less competent and committed employees than non-mothers, but when mothers conclusively demonstrate their competence they are labeled as less warm, less likable, and more interpersonally hostile (Benard and Correll 2010). This phenomenon may explain in part Secretary Clinton’s electoral defeat to now-President Trump—Trump supporters are higher in both overt and unconscious sexism (Bialik 2017). Indeed, much of the popular animus against Clinton may stem from discomfort with women seeking power (Goldberg 2017). In this light, it is not surprising that her competent, poised demeanor is often cited as motivation for dislike or distrust (Goldberg 2017).

Politics remains a strongly-male domain in the US. Women make up 21% of the US Senate and 19% of the House of Representatives and the demographics of state-level elected officials are little better (Eagleton Institute of Politics, 2017). Women who succeed in such a predominately-male setting face both explicit and unconscious sexism, damaging evaluations of their likability. Eliminating this gender bias requires noticing acts of sexism—but overt and subtle—and speaking out against them. Thankfully, Senator Warren did not allow herself to be silenced.

Follow me on Twitter! @ElizaMSociology

(I post about new blog postings for PT, new publications, upcoming presentations, and media coverage of my research. About one tweet every 1-3 months.)

Or check out my webpage: elizabethauramcclintock.com

REFERENCES

Anderson and Leaper. 1998. “Meta-Analysis of Gender Effects on Conversational Inturruption: Who, What, When, Where, and Why.” Sex Roles 39(3-4):225-252.

Benard, Stephen, and Shelley J. Correll. 2010. “Normative Discrimination and the Motherhood Penalty.” Gender & Society 24(5):616-646.

Bialik, Carl. 2017. “How Unconscious Sexism Could Help Explain Trump’s Win” https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-unconscious-sexism-could-help-e...

Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers University. 2017. http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/current-numbers

Goldberg, Michelle. 2016. “The Hillary Haters.” http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/07/the_...

Hancock and Rubin. 2015. “Influence of Communication Partner’s Gender on Language.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34(1):46-64.

Heilman, Madeline E., AS Wallen, D Fuchs, and MM Tamkins. 2004. “Penalties for success: Reactions to women who succeed at male gender-typed tasks.” Journal of Applied Psychology 89(3):416-427.

Kaczynski, Andrew. 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/08/politics/kfile-graham-on-warren/index.html

King, Coretta Scott. 1986. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259988-Scott-King-1986-Letter-a...

Kollock, Blumstein, and Schwartz. 1985. “Sex and Power in Interaction: Conversational privileges and Duties. American Sociological Review 50(1):34-46.

Robbins, Mel. 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/09/opinions/elizabeth-warren-message-robbins/

Link to Warren's Facebook Live video: https://www.facebook.com/senatorelizabethwarren/videos/724337794395383/

Dear Dr. G.,

I read one article and your response to a single mother whose daughter rejected her at 18. My daughter rejected me at 13, lived life "her way" no matter what I did, what therapists said or even what juvenile courts ruled. At 21 she went to prison for five years for repeat DUI's and an accident in which a young man was injured. She's been out of prison for not quite four months now, is still on probation and at 26 still treats me as poorly and as "stupidly" as ever. Will we ever have a decent relationship? I've tried EVERYTHING over the years! I'm so tired of hurting over her! She gets angry at seemingly everything, criticizes me continually, rebukes me, speaks poorly of me to others, says she's embarrassed of me etc. I'm also a "drug addict," in her opinion, as I take prescribed pain medicine for spinal cord injuries from a car accident (after 10 back surgeries, dual TMJs, and shoulder and knee surgeries). Yet, she "admires" an aunt (who never sent a birthday card, nothing, until she was 22), because the aunt has "made it,""makes money," and is helping my daughter with her court fines, etc. I feel like I'm simply repeatedly bashing my head against a brick wall, and have the headache to prove it! I don't know what to do anymore.

A Frustrated Mother

Dear Mother,

I am so sorry about both the pain and the fear about your daughter's wellbeing that you have probably been experiencing for years. It is so sad and unfortunate that your daughter's life trajectory has been so difficult. It seems to me that your daughter has been angry since she was a young teenager. It is also likely that she has been self-medicating her painful feelings with alcohol for many years.

Without having met with you and your daughter and without being more aware of the history of the relationship I can nonetheless speculate about why your daughter is so angry with you. Consider the following possibilities:

1. She probably dislikes herself and those who dislike themselves often are angry with those closest to them.

2. Perhaps she has feelings toward her father that she is projecting on to you.

3. She must feel like a disappointment and it is often easier to be mad than sad.

4.Perhaps there are some aspects of her life that she has not shared with you and secrets breed anger.

AND

5. It is likely that there is some history of conflict and tension between the two of you that hasn't been resolved.

Now the question about what to do needs to be answered. My first suggestion is to get some emotional distance from your daughter. Sometimes "less is more". Her behavior toward you is so mean-spirited and rejecting that it must be extremely painful for you to endure. Give your daughter some space. This may seem odd to you but perhaps you can get develop a relationship with the admired aunt and have her suggest therapy for your daughter. It is clear that your daughter is hurting badly. At some point you may be able to join your daughter in therapy to do the hard work that helps to repair relationships. I wish you the best of luck. Please get back to me.

Dr. G.

For more articles like this see my website.

"If you're not satisfied with the child you already have, try to work things out, don't bring in a younger one." - Honest Toddler

"Try to see your child as a seed that came in a packet without a label.  Your job is to provide the right environment and nutrients and to pull the weeds. You can’t decide what kind of flower you’ll get or in which season it will bloom." -- Anonymous

Source: iStock/Used with Permission

If you're like most parents, there are times when you'd like to submit your child to "Extreme Child Makeover." (That's a reality show playing in a living room near you.)  Maybe you wish your shrinking violet would stop clinging to you when you drop her off at school.  Maybe you're mortified about the way he clobbers the other kids. Maybe her shriek in public makes you cringe. Maybe you just always wanted a girl and you were blessed with two raucous boys. 

But in honor of Valentines Day next week, let's remind ourselves of one thing we know for certain about child development. Children who feel loved and cherished thrive.  

That doesn’t mean kids who ARE loved – plenty of kids whose parents love them don’t thrive. The kids who thrive are the ones who FEEL loved, accepted and cherished for exactly who they are. 

The hard work for us as parents is accepting who our child is, including the things we wish we could change – and cherishing him or her for being that person, even while guiding behavior. How can you do this?

1. Delight in your child. The most important factor in your child's development may be your delight in him. Be sure you tell your child daily how lucky you feel that you get to be his parent, and that you could never love anyone else more than you love him.

2. Really notice your child -- aloud -- so she feels seen: "You've been working for a long time on that tower.""You love being in the water.""That makes you so mad!"  The point isn't to evaluate her behavior, but to let her know that you see and accept who she actually is, by acknowledging what she does and how she's reacting to the world.

3. Use a positive lens. When something about your child's behavior makes you unhappy, remember that weaknesses are always the flip side of that person's strengths. If she has trouble controlling her anger when her brother disrespects her, is she a passionate fighter against injustice? Is his dawdling a sign of the imagination that will someday make him a great novelist? 

4. See things from his perspective.  Maybe his behavior is irritating to you, but it's always understandable if you take the time to see his viewpoint. Ok, so he hit the baby. Do whatever you need to in the future to prevent a recurrence, including not leaving them unsupervised. But punishing him won't help, because that will just exacerbate the terror of losing you that drove him to act so aggressively. (You did get a replacement child, after all. He can be forgiven for wondering if he's lost his place in your heart.) If you can connect deeply with him so that he feels your love is indestructible, his terror will diminish, and his love for the baby will have a chance to bloom.  

5. Empathize. Once children are no longer always on our laps or in our presence, it can get more challenging to stay connected. But every time your child expresses anything, that's an opportunity to connect. Just empathize:

• "You sound disappointed." 
• "It sounds like you wish..." 
• "It's exciting, isn't it?" 

When you welcome your child's emotions, you're giving him the help he needs to learn to manage them: "You're sad that you can't stay up with the big kids. It's ok to cry. It's hard to have to go to bed when other kids are still up. Let's read an extra book tonight so we can snuggle longer and help you feel better."

6. Help your child learn to manage her challenges without negative labeling. How? Describe that you've noticed this wonderful thing about her, but sometimes the flip side of this trait can be a challenge to live with -- both for her and other people.  Ask her if she has ideas about how to manage it so she gets the benefits but not the drawbacks.  If you (or her other parent) have the same trait, point that out and talk about learning to manage it.  Make your story positive and hopeful. That will help her to feel less alone and more optimistic about handling what may seem like a daunting challenge. Be sure to make it clear that everyone changes, and that as we grow up, it gets easier to manage ourselves.

7. Remember that most of what upsets parents is developmentally normal. They act like children because they are children. That doesn't mean they'll grow up to be criminals. Kids need to know that they don’t make mistakes because they're bad, but because they're human, and, in many cases, because they're children: “I know you didn’t mean to yell at your friend when you got upset.  You’ve been working hard not to lose your temper. I had a hard time managing my temper when I was eight too. It will get easier as you get older.”

8. Own your reactions. Sometimes we think it's self-evident that our child should change. But what bothers one parent might not bother another. A high energy kid might might fit right in with some families but exhaust others. And often, it's our stress that makes us over-react. Try expressing your needs as "I" statements rather than criticism: "I see you feel like jumping around right now.  I'm tired and a little cranky, and the noise is too much for me. Do you want to go outside and play or down in the basement to jump on the old mattress?"

9. Look in the mirror. Often what drives us crazy about our child is something that we can't acknowledge about ourselves. If we think our child is obstinate, we might want to look at who he's pushing up against. It takes two to have a power struggle. If we think she's a "drama queen," is that because we had to stuff our own big feelings when our parents told us to stop over-reacting?  If we can stretch ourselves to grow, we often find that our issue with our child melts away. 

10. Remember when you were a child, how vulnerable you were, how much you just wanted someone to see and appreciate you? That's what your child needs. You play a larger than life role in your child's psyche. For the rest of her life, how she hears what you say to her will be her inner voice.

If you always worry that your child isn't quite good enough, he'll always worry, too. But if you can accept him exactly as he is and help him to see himself positively, he'll be on the road to learning how to manage even the most challenging character traits. 

Even more important, he'll feel cherished for who he is. He'll have a big heart, able to love deeply and feel loved in return. And that's a valentine that will last for life. 

As we discussed in Part I of this three-part series on conflicts of interest, it's not exactly a surprise that money can be a powerful influence on scientists' and physicians' behavior. Scientists and physicians who take money from drug companies are prone to design studies in ways that favor the company’s products[1], to minimize adverse side effects the company’s medications cause, and to prescribe the company’s medications to their patients.[2] Organizations that formulate guidelines for the treatment of various illnesses often have financial relationships with companies that make products recommended in the guidelines.[3]

These facts have led to many policies that attempt to make financial relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and the biomedical world more transparent. Journals require disclosure statements by authors of potential conflicts of interest and laws like the federal Physicians Payment Sunshine Act of 2010 mandate that payments by medical product manufacturers to physicians and teaching hospitals be reported to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) and made public on a website.

Source: Shutterstock

Other forms of financial incentives to scientists also frequently make the news. Recently, for example, the media revealed that scientists who concluded that fat rather than sugar is the most harmful part of our diet received money to support their research from the sugar industry. Similar alarms have been raised about the relationships between agricultural scientists who study the effects of pesticides and the safety of GMOs and the companies that make those products.

But is money the at the root of all conflicts of interest? No one can doubt that these financial relationships are troubling and should be examined carefully before we accept the science that emanates from them. But emphasis on financial relationships may mislead us into thinking that these pose the only potential conflicts of interest. In fact, non-financial conflicts exist as well.

Recently, I was asked by a company to which I consult that does not manufacture any products to research the current evidence for the treatment of depression (Note: I have changed the details here to protect the identity of the principals involved, but the story is based on what really happened). Although antidepressant medications are clearly effective and safe, there is also a robust literature on the efficacy of psychosocial treatments and some indication that these may be superior to medications under many circumstances.

I wrote this in my report and was later surprised to see that another consultant who reviewed my work for the same company criticized one of the studies I cited. He called it unreliable because of bias. That study found that a form of cognitive behavioral therapy worked better than medication for a group of adults with depression. The consultant stated that the author of the paper was known to be biased against medication. On the other hand, I know that the consultant has been a strong proponent of medication for depression for many years.

Money does not seem to be involved in this story. The author of the paper showing that CBT worked better than medication did not receive payments from a drug company. The consultant who criticized that paper may have received such money in the past but not for reviewing my work this time. But both the paper’s author and the critical consultant are strongly identified with particular points of view. In fact, their professional identities are in part based on their respective positions of what works best to treat depression. Here, the potential conflicts of interest involve scientific partisanship, not money.

Emotional conflicts of interest are also common. A great example of this comes from a recent review of Paul Bloom's controversial book Against Empathyby Simon Baron-Cohen. In a parenthetical note in the review Baron-Cohen writes, “As someone who has represented the pro-empathy perspective, I have at times been a foil for his arguments — including in this book.” Indeed, Bloom makes several quite disparaging comments about Baron-Cohen’s work.

Source: Shutterstock

Unsurprisingly, the review was quite negative. In this case, the reviewer had a clear emotional conflict of interest. Is the simple acknowledgment of his relationship to the author under review sufficient to deal with that conflict? My guess is that if we challenged the reviewer he would insist that despite his being quite specifically singled out for criticism by Bloom he could nevertheless still be objective in writing his review. Do we believe that is really possible? Should the New York Times Book Review editors even asked Baron-Cohen to review the book? (Incidentally, I agree with many of Baron-Cohen’s criticisms, but that does not obviate the conflict of interest issue).

In another personal example of an emotional conflict of interest surround professional identification, I was recently asked to review a paper submitted to a scientific journal by a research group I highly respect. It did not take me long to realize, however, that the authors interpreted the results of their study as directly challenging a hypothesis I published in 2000 in another journal, that panic attacks involve activation of the brain structure the amygdala.

My first thought was “why did the editors send me this paper given how obvious it is that my work is being critiqued?” Nevertheless, I proceeded to read the paper and recognized that the authors had conducted a methodologically sound and quite elegant piece of research. I even had to admit to myself that their reservations about my original hypothesis were reasonable, and so I recommended the paper be accepted with minor revisions.

Once again, no money is involved in this example. What is involved is reputation. I could easily have vented my emotions by writing a savagely negative review. One might say I successfully suppressed this impulse and dealt with my conflict of interest. But the fact is that no one but me will ever know whether I did that or not. No rules require that we disclose scientific partisanship, bruised egos, or long-held personal dogmas. Yet these sources of emotional bias seem every bit as serious as those that involve financial rewards.

We do not minimize the serious nature of monetary payments to scientists and physicians. These are clearly problematic and as we said in Part I of this series, we need better ways to deal with them than merely demanding disclosures. What we are raising is the notion that conflicts of interest that involve emotions, reputations, and status are equally important but entirely absent from our conversation. They need to be considered.

In Part III of this series we will offer some concrete suggestions about how readers of scientific reports can decide whether conflicts of interest are present and if they are, whether they compromise a paper’s value. In the meantime, there are two great series on these issues that specifically discuss non-financial conflicts of interest, available here and here. 

Last blog I received a comment wondering what is “an I-M thing”?  So glad you asked!

The I-M Approach is my premise that we are always doing the best we can at every moment in time with the potential to change in the very next second to another I-M.  The definition of an I-M is a current maximum potential.  And I am suggesting that all of us are always at an I-M: this is who I am. 

Many people see themselves through a lens of “What is wrong with me?” feeling broken and unsure of one’s value in the world. But I believe each of us is reacting and responding the best we can to the influence of the world around us, and the world within us- and that is the crux of The I-M approach.

The Four Domains of the I-M Approach

Source: Joseph Shrand The I-M Approach

Who we are is influenced by four domains as illustrated in this picture:

The Ic Domain

The Ic Domain, pronounced “I see”, is the first internal domain. The Ic Domain explores how you see yourself and, perhaps more importantly, how you think other people see you.  Together they create the Ic:  your current concept of yourself.  Human beings are interested in what other people think or feel.  We call this empathy. “How ya feelin’?”  we ask.  But what we are really interested in is “What are you thinking or feeling about me?”  This is not just empathy but something more.  We assess our self through the eyes of others.  The result of this assessment is embodied in the Ic domain.

Our Ic Domain is based on our human ability to appreciate another person’s point of view.  In scientific circles this goes by the rather clunky and inelegant term “Theory of Mind”, words chosen to describe the amazing human ability to ‘theorize” what someone else is thinking or feeling, and being able to take someone else’s perspective.  It is a conjecture, a speculation about another person’s perspective.

I see the influence of the Ic Domain all the time, especially in my work as a child psychiatrist.  Kids who have been bullied and begin to believe they are worthless can lead them to feel depressed and even suicidal.  Think back to your days in school.  Was there a time when you knew the answer to a question but were afraid to raise your hand in class?  Stopping you was the worry that both the teachers and other kids might think you were stupid.

All I am trying to do in my work is to remind a person of their value. So many people think that other see them with less value, or no value. I think this has manifested in the election of November 8th: a large group of people felt they had been disrespected, devalued, and lost trust as a result.  

The Biological Domain

All of us are influenced by the biological domain.  If you have ever twisted your ankle in a way that ankles are not designed to twist your biological domain responds the best it can.  The muscle cells in your ankle respond to the change in their environment: some tore while others may have cramped and constricted.  To protect the bone and muscle, surrounding tissue probably swelled with water, creating a cushion designed to minimize further damage.  But the swelling of that tissue placed a new pressure on the nerves of your ankle, causing pain and warning your brain that you had been injured.  But were any of those cells responding in a way that wasn’t the best they could given the fact that you had landed awkwardly on your ankle?

When you sprain your ankle and are limping it changes someone else’s perspective of you, which may change your perspective of yourself.  See how fluidly the domains influences each other?  You know it feels differently when someone says you are amazing than when they say you are worthless. Our biological domain is always, always changing, but always at an I-M.

The Home Domain

The first two internal domains of Biology and Ic are influenced by the third and fourth domains, the Home domain and the Social domain.  These two domains are outside our bodies and refer to the attachments and relationships we make in the world.

I don’t think anyone is going to argue with me that the Home domain, that foundation where many of our ideas, habits, and beliefs are formed has an influence on our I-M even in our adult lives. 

The Social Domain

The things that happen at home influence the choices we make in the Social domain, or the rest of the world in which we live. The Social domain is everything other than the Home domain.  It’s being at work, at school, at a restaurant, walking down the street.  Everywhere other than at home.

The Two Principles of The I-M Approach

1) Small changes can have big effects.Because the four domains are interconnected a small change in any one domain can have a ripple effects through the entire system. 

2) You control no one but influence everyone. Everyone has an I-M and is interested in what you think or feel about them and you are part of someone's home or social domain.  You get to choose the kind of influence you want to be.

The I-M is based on the foundation of respect.  When we can learn to respect others (and they us), it leads to value, that critical core desire we have evolved.  Value leads to trust, and trust is the force of friendship that can connect us all.

Next blog I will pull the domains all together with a simple example.

It’s an I-M thing.

Source: Joseph Shrand, MD, The I-M Approach