08.07.07

Internal And External Motivators For Addiction Recovery

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:36 am by Jenny

The following are some of the internal motivators and external motivators to aid with healing from addictions, listed in no particular order.

Internal Motivators

Many decide to kick their addictions based upon interior motives like love, a sense of achievement, competition, responsibility and a number of other reasons.

A love for a child can make some stop the denial process dead in its tracks, allowing recovery to step in.

Watching a close friend or relative who is farther along the addictive path of destruction can also be an eye-opener, resulting in some addicts adopting the “I can do it” attitude to kick the habit.

Some simply want their own self-respect back and respect from others. While other addicts prefer better health and a sharper mental state, and decide to overcome their addictions and recover.

Regardless of the reasons, internal motivators can be welcome stepping-stones in the path of recovery.

External Motivators

Other motivators along the way are external, like money, work, housing, etc. For example, an addict is generally well aware of the money needed for the continued purchasing of the addictive substances.

Someone not used to living in less desirable conditions because income is lacking, may not need much of a jolt of reality other than the first eviction notice, to spur him or her to quit spending hard-earned money on drugs, gambling, porn or cigarettes, etc.

And some who may really value their jobs and are striving to maintain good work standards and ethics, may see reality when they are passed over for a promotion or annual raise because of tardiness, sloppiness, mishandling of money, etc., and may seek help to get their work act together promptly.

To help with internal and motivators, addicts and their support people can turn to recovery tools like books, videos, movies, healing music, speakers and events focused on addiction and recovery.

A good place to begin is at your own local library or favorite bookstore. Online you can search Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble (BN.com) or even your favorite search engine.

Type in terms like “addiction recovery” and / or add the addictive substance or behavior (“gambling recovery” “overcoming cigarette addiction”).

Recovery Books

Some popular recovery books are:

• Addiction & Recovery for Dummies, by Brian F. Shaw, Paul Ritvo, Jane Irvine, M. David Lewis; For Dummies; (December 13, 2004).
• 7 Tools to Beat Addiction, by Stanton PHD Peele; Three Rivers Press; (July 27, 2004).
• The Addictive Personality: Understanding the Addictive Process and Compulsive Behavior, by Craig Nakken; Hazelden Publishing & Educational Services; 2nd edition (September 1, 1996).
• The Addiction Workbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Quitting Alcohol and Drugs (New Harbinger Workbooks), by Patrick Fanning, John T. O’Neill, John O’Neill; New Harbinger Publications; (June 1, 1996).
• Bridges to Recovery : Addiction, Family Therapy, and Multicultural Treatment, by Jo-ann Krestan; Free Press; (March 15, 2000).

For online chat rooms and message boards where recovering addicts seek fellowship, simply type “recovery message board” or “recovery chat room” in your favorite search engine. Include specific addictions like gambling and cocaine for more focused groups.

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08.06.07

Areas Where You Do Have Control In Your Life

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:37 am by Jenny

Conscious, deliberate, purposeful control works well in the external world outside your skin wherever the following rule applies: “If you don’t like what you are doing, figure out a way to change it or get rid of it using your hands and feet. Then go ahead and do it.”

Unfortunately, this rule does not apply to internal events that occur inside your skin, such as angry feelings, painful thoughts, and other emotions.

Rather than trying to change these, you are far better off refocusing your attention and expending your energy on the three areas where you do have control: your choices, your actions, and your destiny.

You are the Only One Who Has Control Over the Choices You Make

You alone have full responsibility for the choices you make. Understanding this can feel both sobering and liberating. For example, you cannot choose whether you feel hurt or angry. However, you can decide what you do with that hurt and anger.

You can choose to dwell on your hurt and anger, run from it, or bury and hide it. You also have the option of doing noting about the feelings and thoughts. You can decide to let them be or actively meet them with compassion and patience.

As you learn to recognize that every moment of your life is about choices, you free yourself from being a slave to your impulses, your resentments, and your anger. In essence, you’re free to choose how you respond to triggers for anger and what you do with your emotional pain and anger when you feel it.

It’s your choice whether you behave in a kind, forgiving, or accepting manner while recognizing your painful feelings; or whether you give in to your impulse to either deny your anger or act on it.

Where You Have Response Choices

Take a look at some specific areas where you have the power to choose your response choices:

• Meeting your hurt and anger with compassion and forgiveness versus struggling with it to deny it.
• Hearing what others have to say (even if you disagree with them) versus refusing to listen and giving them advice they don’t want.
• Speaking words of acceptance and understanding versus words of judgment and blame.
• Letting go of old hurts, resentments, and painful memories versus holding on to them.
• Practicing patience with others and yourself versus blowing up in anger and frustration.
• Acting in ways that uphold your humanity and dignity as well as that of others or acting in ways that shame and degrade.
• Moving forward in your life with anger or struggling with it and remaining stuck.

Exercise: Brainstorming Alternatives To Anger Behavior

For this exercise, recall an upsetting situation that brought on feelings of anger, blame, rage, and other unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Once you have the scene clearly in your mind, go ahead and list the main triggers (whether people, thoughts, or feelings), bodily sensations and emotions that you felt, and, finally, how you coped or behaved in this situation. Be as specific as you can.

Take a look at how Melinda, a nineteen-year-old retail sales clerk, completed the first part:

People Trigger: My mother criticized me.

Feeling Trigger: Feeling frustrated and hurt.

Emotions and bodily sensations: Irritable, Anxious, Heart is racing and pounding in my chest, Surge of adrenaline, Tense in neck and shoulders, Feeling sad and humiliated

My anger behavior (how I coped): Acted cold. Told her to “shut the hell up.” Called her “a miserable old hag and a lazy, good-for-nothing bitch.” I left and drove to my friend’s house and vowed to keep away from my mother.

Spent time venting with friends about how much of a witch she is. Spent a lot of time trying to think about reasons why my mom has to be so mean.

Brainstorming alternative choices to anger behavior:

• Start with the triggers and see how they ultimately led to self-destructive anger behavior.
• Rewind the tape, and for each trigger, see if you can brainstorm other choices, apart from anger behavior, you had available to you in that moment.
• For a hint, take a look at your coping strategy. You’ll want to come up with fundamentally different choices than the ones you listed under coping strategies and anger behavior.
• As you do, be aware that there is no right or wrong answers here. These are your choices—what you do and can do for yourself.
• Later on, you’ll be guided through this process more deeply. With practice, you’ll find that you do have a broad range of choices when anger and hurt show up. Acting on anger is one choice among many other choices.

After Melinda analyzed this scene, she then went back and brainstormed other choices she had available to her.

The complete brainstorming part of this exercise is:

People triggers:

I had absolutely no control over what my mom decided to say. My mother’s choice of words and her actions are not my responsibility. She can say or do as she wishes.

I can choose to simply listen. I’ve heard this stuff before. I don’t have to let my triggers by engaged. I can just let the words be words without reacting to them.

Feeling triggers:

The frustration and hurt I feel are my own. I can simply notice what my body is doing here. I can decide not to push the feeling away, but not to use it as fuel for anger. I can just let it be, and experience it for what it is.

Emotions and bodily sensations:

There is really nothing I can do about what my body is doing right now. What I’m feeling is unpleasant, but I don’t need to run from it. I can choose to sit still with the energy and do nothing to make it go away. I can allow the energy to go away on its own.

My anger behavior (how I respond):

• I can see that I have lots of choices here.
• I can choose to listen to my mother or leave.
• I can choose to respond to her in a calm voice by letting her know that I feel hurt and sad when she says those things to me, even though I’m enraged inside;
• Or I can confront her with a loud voice, name-calling, screaming, and leaving.
• I can extend compassion to my mother and let her know that I do love her, even though her words drive me crazy. Or, I can act in ways that do not reflect my love for her as another human being.
• I can decide not to run from my mother, because this relationship is important to me.
• I can choose to carry the hurt and pain with me to my friend’s house, or let it go.
• I can choose to gossip and vent with my friends about my mom, or I can choose not to do that.
• Venting really did nothing to resolve the situation with my mom.

Above all, Melinda began to appreciate that how she responded to this situation was her own responsibility. Only she could do things to meet her needs and uphold her values. The same is true for you. The choices you make can lead you to anger and misery or the life you want to create and nurture.

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08.04.07

Effect Of Low Blood Sugar Or Hypoglycemia On Brain Power

Posted in Uncategorized at 6:05 am by Jenny

Low blood sugar, or hypoglycemia, is an often overlooked but significant metabolic culprit in poor brain function.

It can cause a wide range of mental symptoms, including lack of concentration, short-term memory loss, mood swings, physical and mental exhaustion, mental fatigue, mental fogginess, depression, and the inability to learn or comprehend new information.

Glucose

Because of the sugary diets we eat today, Hypoglycemia is epidemic. Your brain needs glucose to form the energy that fuels its processes. It gets glucose from the food you eat - mainly carbohydrates, which the digestion process breaks down into sugar.

Researchers have found that too little sugar in the form of glucose hinders memory and learning. But you should know that too much sugar does the same thing before you reach for that candy bar.

Hypoglycemia is one of the most undiagnosed conditions in America. Many people who suffer from it are totally unaware that they have this trouble, and even their doctors confuse their symptoms with those of other conditions.

Eating too much sugar and other simple carbohydrates is not a good idea for your overall health, but it is particularly bad for memory.

Sugar Overload

Hypoglycemia or “insulin resistance,” can be caused with sugar overload in which your cells do not recognize insulin and thus sugar cannot enter them. According to the Merck Manual of Medical Information, prolonged hypoglycemia can permanently damage your brain cells.

It is significant to have the right kind of fuel available to promote optimum brain functioning because the brain runs on energy derived mostly from carbohydrates.

A healthy program will help you substitute simple carbohydrates with healthy complex carbohydrates, such fruits, as vegetables, and whole grains, which can bring about remarkable enhancement in your thinking and overall health.

An Example

One of my friends, Mandy, was a patient that went to her doctor with a host of health problems, but what worried her most was that she had been fainting regularly, and, although she had been mentally sharp all her life, was now “losing it.” She had been to many specialists and none of them could explain these symptoms.

She found out she was addicted to sugar and often would have a piece of cake or a candy bar for breakfast. Her blood sugar would then roller coaster all day.

She not only did her cognition improve, but, much to the surprise of her physician, her fainting problem completely vanished, when she switched her breakfast to oatmeal with a small amount of tofu or other protein food.

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08.03.07

What Are The Symptoms of Depression?

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:49 am by Jenny

Managing the symptoms of depression can help you better relate to what you experience when feeling depressed.

Managing the symptoms of depression can also help you get a grip on your emotions, which is the sparker of emotional responses and reactions that can cause depression.

Symptoms Of Depression:

• Sadness comes from grief, deplorable thinking, regret, dullness in perceptions, and unhappiness with something or someone.
• Helplessness means you lack in support and protection, thus you are defenseless. Helpless means you are marked through inabilities to react or act to something.
• Aches and Pains may not be a figment of your imagination, and while the doctor cannot find an answer, answers do exist that causes the problem.
• Hopelessness means you have no expectations of good coming to you, or success in your future. Hopeless is despair, which means you think no cures or remedies are available to help you out of your state of depression.

Definitions For Various Symptoms Of Depression

• Despair makes you feel hopeless.
• Misery is the state of where a person suffers, which results from poverty and afflictions. When you feel miserable, it often stems from circumstances, conditions, thing, or environment, which causes discomfort. Thus, it is emotional distress.
• Moody puts you in submission to gloomy states of the mind.
• Reduction in Energy could mean that your metabolism is off balance. Metabolism is your life-sustaining force, which interrelates, sequences of chemicals, which interact and take place by correlating with the living organs. Particular nutrients and metabolism promoters could help you reduce this portion of depressive symptoms.
• Powerless is lack of energy.
• Headaches come from excessively stress, biological issues, and can characterize through severe pains around the eye and/or temple area of the head, which tends to reoccur through sequences of attacks.
• Fatigue occurs when the cognitive disorders or dysfunctions occur. Thus, depression causes the headaches.
• Worthlessness is a feeling of triviality, which means we have no relevance in life, and are unimportant.
• Meaninglessness means we have unassigned functions in language and its system, thus it is lacking in significance of character.
• Emotional relates to the emotions. Emotions touch our sensitivity and arousals, which sends sparks through reaction and responses.
• Suicidal means we are deep in desire, desperate and cannot find a purpose to live.
• Pessimistic thinking leads to negative thoughts, which consumes the mind. The thoughts come from feelings of gloominess.
• Mentally challenged means we have difficulties in learning, and are, affected by conditions, which limit our abilities to learn, as well as function independently. The results stem from congenital (inborn), brain injuries, or else disease.
• Unloved is revile, detest, or despicable state, which means you cannot tolerate realities, which include loves definition. Often the feeling of unloved stems from passions, longings, and/or desires, which human touch is lacking, thus love converts to sexual gratifications unwarranted.
• Weight loss and gain: When the mind is, consumed, you will experience anorexia and/or bulimic symptoms, which often last a short time. Setting and sticking to a diet plan can help.
• Isolated is a feeling of individuality, which feels withdrawn and/or removed from people or society.
• Boredom is the state of mind where a person feels restless and weary, which prompts lack of interest.
• Loss of interest is the inability to persuade the mind or participate in activities or entertainment. Thus, it is temporary disassociation from things of interest.
• Mind chaos: Depressive symptoms cause the mind to feel chaotic, since the thoughts are, clouded, which makes it difficult to concentrate, or focus.

While additional symptoms are included in depression, the primary symptoms link the other symptoms together and all boil down to one big problem.

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08.02.07

Is It Possible To Get Rid Of Stress With Music?

Posted in Uncategorized at 6:42 am by Jenny

Music is the soundtrack to our lives. Music elevates our moods and it makes us feel happy and animate.

You strength have driven your first car while the Go-Gos blared on the radio.

You may keep-in-mind singing “memory” at your high school graduation, or you might have had the organist play sonnet to happiness at your marriage.

You may keep-in-mind the first time you heard Madonna, or the last time you heard Bruce Springsteen.

Whether your musical tastes are modern or classical, chances are you do have a favorite form of music. And you also most likely have a favorite band or artist.

Music can serve a significant function as a stress reliever. In addition music is enjoyable. It is no surprise that surgeons play it during operations, or that dentists regularly play music in their offices. Baseball players during their warm-ups, as do Transportation Bus drivers play music to decrease stress.

Musicologists say that music can have a calming effect, an effect that might have begun when we first heard music while still in our mother’s womb. As a result, music may, in fact, remind us of our mothers, from whom we draw comport and strength.

It has been shown in studies that music where the goblet predominates, such as Celtic or Native American music is often the most comforting. In reality, research indicates that any music performed in person helps to coordinate the right and left brain hemispheres.

Music can be especially beneficial to the individual persons performing it. It provides a sense of attainment, which can, in turn, reduce stress. Music increases the body’s serotonin levels, which are connected with good feelings.

Also, music tends to enhance deep breathing, making a person feel more relaxed. Also, background music at work has been shown to cut stress levels. In addition to causing heart rates to decline, music boosts the body’s hotness.

One preferable way to relax is to lie down with a set of headphones and allow the music to wash over you. In this way, you’ll be intimately involved in the music; you’ll feel as if you are part of the music.

It is easy to forget the cares of the world when you can escape into music. You should select music that has a slow beat, preferably slower than 72 beats a minute, the standard heart rate.

You should focus your attention to the silence that is usually built into musical selections in order to maximize your relaxation. Another well-liked technique is to use a Walkman while doing your morning walk.

This way, you join the stress-busting effects of music with those of exercise. This provides a one-two hit, which is guaranteed to reduce your stress level. You might also try tuning into nature sounds.

Music: Nature sound stress reduction

Sit in your garden, close your eyes, and concentrate on the sounds you hear. You’ll be listening to the music of crickets and songbirds, leaves rustling in the storm and storm bells swaying in the gentle storm.

You can also buy a CD, which offers the sounds of the ocean or the woods. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll be carried away with the sounds. Just ten minutes sitting silently and listening can put you in an entirely different frame of mind.

If you never liked the Beach Boys, chances are that playing a “Best of the Beach Boys” CD will not tranquil you down. Moreover, if you like classical music, but can’t stand Beethoven, limit your listening to Mozart instead.

You’ll find you’re better able to cope with the demands of the day if you’ve spent some time listening to music-whether it’s man-made or made by nature. It is highly important that you listen to music those appeals to you.

The significant thing is that you feel happy with your musical selections. It is tough to imagine a world without music, yet most of us do not take full advantage of the art shape.

Music can be incredibly effectual in reducing stress and improving relaxation. It is no wondered that women have been known to select their preferred music to give birth by. Music elevates our mood; it makes us feel happy, active and animate.

You are under stress; you may play music just in the morning, in the afternoon, or all day. The important thing you remember that music time should be relaxation time.

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