By day, I’m a calm, mild-mannered middle school teacher who would do just about anything to motivate my students to do their best work and fall in love with learning. I praise their achievements and efforts, not just their high scores, and then watch those scores improve. When they stumble, I help them see how to pick themselves back up…
Do the aftereffects of traumatic events we suffered as children follow us into adulthood in a physical way? Research about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) proves that enormous childhood stress absolutely leads to increased potential for adult illness and disease. The original Adverse Childhood Experience study (conducted from 1995 to 1997) examined the link between childhood trauma and the likelihood of…
My teenager is home on break from college and my husband quit his job to freelance, so now we both work from home. I love having them around, so I couldn’t figure out why I’d been feeling stressed out. Then I went for a long walk alone and immediately understood what I’d been missing: talking to myself. I talk to…
In World War I a German psychiatrist named Hans Berger was almost killed by a runaway piece of machinery during a military operation. Hundreds of miles away at that moment, Berger’s sister knew for sure that her brother’s life was in danger. How could this be possible? Berger decided to probe the mystery. This research would one day provide new…
I was hunkered down in a digital workstation at an Arizona longevity clinic, testing a brain training game to figure out do brain training games really work? My mind was in overdrive as my fingers chased elusive flashes of light onscreen. I was playing a shrink’s rethink of the game Fruit Ninja, except that this was a test to determine my…
I had the opportunity to speak with the remarkable Gayathri Ramprasad, whose memoir Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within (Hazelden)—called a “a cross-cultural lens to mental illness”—was recently published. Her harrowing experiences with depression, the social stigma depression sufferers endure, and her courage in helping herself and others bring a new perspective to an…
According to Mary’s relatives, she’d had a severe water phobia since infancy. She couldn’t take a bath in a full tub of water or go to the beach. The mere sight of water triggered an extremely disturbing feeling in the pit of her stomach. Mary was so phobic that she was even frightened when it rained and suffered water-related nightmares.…
Our understanding of how heart function affects mental and emotional well-being has been advanced by leaps and bounds thanks to the Institute of HeartMath (IHM). Studies conducted by this pathbreaking research organization show that signals sent from the heart to the brain via the nervous system dramatically affect how we think and feel. As the IHM notes, “These heart signals…
Music is now a government-endorsed painkiller. This is not to say the Food and Drug Administration has approved rock, jazz, or hip-hop MP3 downloads as over-the-counter analgesics. But stretching beyond the labels of “alternative” or “complementary” healing techniques, music and sound have been studied and applied to patients in recent years in well-funded federal labs with impressive and verifiable results.…
