According to a study of healthy women by Dr. Philippe R. Goldin and associates of the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, published in Biological Psychiatry, emotional suppression strategies actually increased the activity of the emotional areas of the amygdala and insula. In contrast, re-evaluation strategies in which one reconsiders the meaning of an event or situation, tended to significantly lower the activity of these brain regions.

Basically, when you suppress an emotion, you still feel it and your body must account for the increased chemical activity – usually resulting in illness or later increased emotional expression. On the other hand, re-evaluation of the judgment one gives their experience tends to significantly decrease the chemical activity of emotional brain areas – and leads to far less emotional expression later.

I recommend the same for men as well. When you feel angry for whatever reason, if you will take a step back in your mind, disengage with the object of your anger, and reconsider your judgments about it, you may find that you’ll feel better. And even more importantly, you’ll feel better later.

Perhaps the greatest emotion generating judgment we have is the need to be right. The energy we expend on our crusades rivals those of the middle ages – often giving us similar results: less energy overall, impoverished relationships, and overall poorer health. It’s wise and prudent to reconsider your positions in relation to others. It may be okay for more than one person to be right. It may be okay to let someone else have their opinion.

If you find you’re having trouble reconsidering your judgments, you might find value in a therapy like Rapid Eye Technology, EFT, hypnosis, or CBT.

In the largest experiment of its kind to date, 1162 patients aged 18 to 86 years (mean ± SD age, 50 ± 15 years) with a history of chronic low back pain for a mean of 8 years were randomly assigned to receive acupuncture, sham acupuncture, or conventional therapy (a combination of drugs, physical therapy, and exercise) for their chronic back pain. Patients underwent ten 30-minute sessions, generally 2 sessions per week.

After six months, patients answered questions from the Von Korff Chronic Pain Grade Scale questionnaire and the back-specific portions of the Hanover Functional Ability Questionnaire to determine their chronic level of pain after treatment.

In the real acupuncture group, 47 percent of patients improved (defined as 33% improvement or better on the Von Korff Scale or 12% better on the Hanover Questionnaire). In the sham acupuncture group, 44 percent improved. In the conventional care group, 27 percent got relief.

Study Conclusion: Low back pain improved after acupuncture treatment for at least 6 months. Effectiveness of acupuncture, either real or sham, was almost twice that of conventional therapy.

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The June 8th, 2009 issue of Life & Style Magazine reveals that Matt Hoover (Season 2 Winner of NBC’s The Biggest Loser) gained back most of the weight he lost on the show!

Perhaps you, too, read the article revealing that Matt Hoover (Season 2 Winner of NBC’s The Biggest Loser) gained back most of the weight he lost on the show!

My guess is that without the isolation, the cooks, and the drill sergeant personal trainers, he couldn’t keep up the strict regimen.

“When I got home, I quickly realized I wasn’t equipped to deal with the temptations of the real world.”

In January 2009, Matt discovered a 4 CD Hypnosis Program created by Dr. Roberta Temes, who is on the Department of Psychiatry at the SUNY Health Science Center Medical School and the editor of the first hypnosis textbook used by thousands worldwide in medical schools.

A meta-analysis published in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (1996) reveals that hypnosis with a credible practitioner, “can increase weight loss by an astonishing 146% over the long term.”

Matt’s story certainly confirms this:

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What you imagine in your mind impacts what you perceive in the world.

New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the “mind’s eye”—directly impacts our visual perception. The research was published online June 26 by the journal Current Biology in a paper titled, “The Functional Impact of Mental Imagery on Conscious Perception.”

“We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception,” says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study. “This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on.”

“These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself,” Pearson and his co-authors write. Read the rest of this entry »