Take Responsibility for Your Happiness

In previous postings, I’ve alluded to The Art of Happiness, a tome of collaboration between the Dalai Lama and psychologist Howard C. Cutler, M.D.

The most revealing passage from the book was something Dr. Cutler noted – that in canvassing his colleagues in the psychiatry field, none had ever noted “being happy” as a therapy goal. That seemed telling to me, because once you move away from the tactical treatment of various conditions and issues, shouldn’t being happy be the ultimate goal?

So, if doctors and therapists aren’t putting happiness on your To-Do list, how do you get there? The short answer is to take responsibility for your own happiness. But that seems like a daunting task. How does one go about charting a course to happiness?

Urban Monk has an enlightening piece (pun intended) by guest blogger John J. Patton that examines this very topic. In a section titled A Light Unto Yourself, Patton lays out some very simple and easily managed rules of the road for taking charge of your own happiness. As in most things of a Buddha nature, everything revolves around being accountable and responsible on your own, instead of looking toward outside forces to provide what you are seeking.

Here are a couple that resonated with me:

I value my inner peace more than I do winning, defending my identity, proving my point, or reactively expressing momentary emotions.

I understand that my feelings are natural, and so make no apologies for them.

I make plans for the future, but remain open in order to respond to each moment directly.

I learn from the past, but do not allow it to interfere with the present.

Though I cannot always control my thoughts, I can control which ones I pursue and give energy.

Patton’s list is a must-read for anyone who is ready to take advantage of the massive power that lies within the self. If you haven’t added being happy to your list of goals and objectives, perhaps now is the perfect time. If so, Patton’s piece is an excellent way to kick off your journey.

A Light Unto Yourself / In Case of Emergency , via Urban Monk

Germany Building a Better Anxiety Drug

Via Reuters, German scientists believe they have found a new drug for panic disorders that works effectively without many of the effects of current compounds such as Valium (drowsiness, forgetfulness) and that work much more quickly than SSRIs that can can weeks to build up effective blood levels.

The new drug, termed XBD173, appears to work by targeting a much different “panic button” in the brain than other medicines. It also appears to be both safe and fast-acting. Studies showed XBD173 began to work as quickly as one hour after being administered, which would be ideal for people having acute panic attacks.

Also promising is the discovery that there are no withdrawal symptoms once patients discontinue use of the drug. Valium and other similar compounds are well-known to present dependency challenges and unpleasant withdrawal.

Let’s hope research continues on XBD173 and we see it on the market sometime in the near future.

German research points way to better anxiety drug , via Reuters

Repressing Trauma Not Harmful?

Anxiety Insights has the details of a Geisinger Health Center study that suggests certain people exposed to traumatic events may not suffer harm when they repress memories of those events.

“Going back to the days of Sigmund Freud, psychiatrists and mental health experts have suggested that repression of traumatic memories could lead to health problems,” Dr Boscarino said. “Yet we have found little evidence that repression had an adverse health impact on combat veterans exposed to psychological trauma many years later.”

One thing that leaps out in the article is the view that the use of exposure therapy – where people are asked to relive painful or traumatic events – may actually serve to trigger PTSD symptoms and psychological distress in those who had otherwise been doing just fine, thank you very much.

“While the dominant therapy model for PTSD should not be abandoned at this point, emerging research suggests that it might need to be seriously re-evaluated, at least for some PTSD patients,” Dr Boscarino said. “More research is clearly needed.”

Repressing traumatic memories may not be harmful to some , via Anxiety Insights

Paxil Might Handicap Your Little Sperms

Great – as if taking an SSRI didn’t come with enough side-effects (erectile dysfunction, problems with ejaculation, your girlfriend no longer calling you Zeus), now comes word that up to half of men taking the compound paroxetine may suffer from increased DNA fragmentation, a predictor of compromised fertility.

First, let’s look at the bright side – since you’re medicated, you probably won’t be as anxious about this as you might have been, so that’s a plus.

From the study:

Lead author Dr Cigdem (Cori) Tanrikut explains that while the exact mechanism isn’t understood, the evidence points to the drug slowing sperm as it travels through the male reproductive tract from the testis to the ejaculatory ducts. Sperm gets “hung up,” she says, allowing it to get old and its DNA damaged.

Ack! My boys hit roadblocks and get punished on the way to the dance, so when they arrive, they’ve already got rumpled suits and tousled hair! They’ll never make it with the cute cheerleader now!

Since about half of all reproductive troubles are on the male side, this will be of particular interest to men who are looking to start (or increase) a family at the same time they are taking certain SSRI meds. Since the half-life of SSRIs isn’t very long, the study was able to show that guys returned to normal within a month of ceasing the medication.

It’s good information to have if you happen to be in that category of male patients being treated with SSRIs who are also trying to make a baby – certainly something to discuss with your doctor.

Paroxetine (Paxil®) may affect sperm quality , via Anxiety Insights

Mindful Parenting

Over at his Psychology Today blog, Jonathan Kaplan has quite the essay on how the Buddhist concept of mindfulness can help you be a better parent.

Anyone who has been around small children can tell you that achieving the perfect alignment between what the adult thinks should be happening and what the child wants to happen is nearly impossible. That doesn’t stop a lot of parents from trying to force this convergence via sheer force of will, or failing that, misdirection and/or manipulation. More often than not, frustration sets in for the parent, the child, or both.

In Jonathan’s case, he attempts to get his two year old son to help decide on what he would like on his daycare blanket, but is repeatedly thwarted by his son’s focus on trains, apple juice, and jumping on the bed. Who can blame him? Jumping on the bed is awesome!

Jonathan shares one of his lessons learned:

Fortunately, I learned a few things from this experience. First, parenting can be a quite a fruitful area for informal mindfulness practice. At a conference recently, Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn described parenting as an “18 year retreat.” They noted how kids “push our buttons”, which can prompt us to react negatively. As Myla stated, “Sometimes, we don’t live love. We live fear and anxiety and the thoughts that take over us.” In this instance, I started to feel anxious about my son’s unhelpful replies and became lost in my own reactions. By seeing this circumstance as problematic and trying to fix it, I unfortunately missed out on some fun play time.

That’s a lightning bolt observation for me – “Sometimes, we don’t live love. We live fear and anxiety and the thoughts that take over us.” Being present, being mindful, especially when it comes to family, was a huge struggle for me, as I detailed in my postings The Struggle To Be Present and Teaching A Kid To Listen .

As I worked through becoming more mindful and present, it was readily apparent that my parenting style was undergoing a tweaking. Rather than becoming frustrated in dealing with my young son, I began to look at things from his perspective more, and the key question I started to ask myself during these sorts of situations was if what I was wanting him to do was important, or if it was only important to me.

More often than not, the latter was true, and that’s just plain silly. As noted in Jonathan’s essay, I was missing out on wide swaths of my child’s experiences because of my narrow focus on achieving the goal at hand. Kids take a very circuitous route through life, much like a butterfly fluttering around a meadow, and that’s part of the beauty of youth. I should encourage that, not restrict it, either knowingly or unconsciously.

Extrapolating that even further, if I was caught in this pattern with parenting, undoubtedly it was applicable in other aspects of my life. So, by practicing mindfulness in all aspects of my day-to-day interactions, I would be appropriately focused. Parenting turned into a daily reminder and exercise.

It’s also a good prompt to see and interact with our kids as they are, not how we want them to be, or how we see them to be. It’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing everything through a parental filter, and then all events and decisions downstream are based on clouded, unrealistic information.

Letting Go of Expectations: A Lesson in Mindful Parenting

Living a Happy, Anxious Life

Paul, over at AnxietyGuru, asks the question, “Can You Live A Happy Anxious Life?”

It’s an interesting question, and I had to sit down for awhile and think about what my answer would be.

Paul posits:

Relative happiness is the kind you get when you buy something, say shoes or a motorcycle or whatever. It is temporary and subject to the whims of external change. Whereas inner happiness is yours no matter what, like all those fabulous bits of information you learned in school that you can’t use anywhere else, but yours they are.

I’m talking about inner peace and happiness. Now, admittedly you can be a Buddhist monk and never get there, but you can if you try. The fact that you can try should be, I hope, a signal that you can do more to be happy than you’re doing right now.

Dictionary.com has the following entry under happy:

1.         delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing: to be happy to see a person.

2.         characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy: a happy mood; a happy frame of mind.

3.         favored by fortune; fortunate or lucky: a happy, fruitful land.

4.         apt or felicitous, as actions, utterances, or ideas.

5.         obsessed by or quick to use the item indicated (usually used in combination): a trigger-happy gangster. Everybody is gadget-happy these days.

Anxiety, by the very nature of its presence, makes it difficult to achieve #3, since we anxious folk are generally skeptical of fortune or luck. But if we use #2 as our guiding light, which is what I think Paul was doing, then the answer is a resounding yes.

One of the very best things I learned in my treatment was to acknowledge and embrace the reality that things happen that are out of my control, and all of those years of pre-planning and proactive worrying didn’t change that a bit. It certainly gave me the illusion that nothing would go wrong, or if it did, I would be able to rapidly respond to the crisis. But it burned up energy and time for no good reason.

The downside of that – well, there were scores of downsides, but this is one of them – was that I was never in the moment during those times, because my mind and my emotions were perpetually skewed toward scanning the horizon for the next bad thing.

Once I began to let myself be present in the moment and feel the emotion that was appropriate for that snapshot in time, it became much easier to feel happy in an enjoyable way, not in the “if I let myself feel joy or peace, it will be crushing when it ends, because it always does” manner of my high anxiety years.

So when I stop to think about the things that make me happy, it’s much easier now to have clarity around what that means. I find great joy in time spent with my family, and I now allow this sense of calm, contentment, and happiness to wash over me like a waterfall, soaking me for as long as possible. Will this moment end, and will I eventually dry off again? Of course. But for that moment, that hour, that day, I’m drenched and soggy, which feels so much better than before.

I would call out these instances, these events, as reminders of my happiness, not happiness itself. I’m not engaged in some zero-sum game anymore, where I need to track and measure my level of joy, peace, and tranquility. I’m just me, a pretty happy guy, who often gets reminded of my happiness by people, places, and things. Other times, things don’t go as well, and rather than dwell on that, I seek out those very same people, places, and things that I know will keep me going until the dark cloud of anxiety passes over me.

Anxiety and Insomnia – Thanks, Mom

US News and World Report has posted an abstract that details the findings of researchers in the U.S. that there might be a genetic link between anxiety, depression and insomnia.

As a result, researchers advise that adolescents who suffer from anxiety and depression should also be screened for insomnia. That seems like an excellent idea.

I’ve often wondered if my occasional (but more frequent as I get older) insomnia and my anxiety are somehow connected, and if so, if my lack of sleep problems in my youth were in any way a signal of impending emotional struggles that didn’t start until later in life.

From the article:

The researchers’ analysis of data from 749 monozygotic twin pairs and 687 dizygotic twin pairs, aged 8 to 17, and their parents revealed that 19.5 percent of the children had insomnia.

The results indicate that, as has been seen in previous studies of insomnia in adults, diagnosable insomnia in children aged 8 to 16 years is moderately likely to be inherited, according to a news release about the study. The shared genetic effects between insomnia, depression and anxiety suggest that these disorders are linked.

Since genetics plays such a key role in so many disorders, it’s not surprising that insomnia might fall into that category, and 19.5% doesn’t seem to be outside of expectations. It’s also not shocking that there’s a link between insomnia and anxiety, but I wonder if this might not qualify as a “which came first – the chicken or the egg?” scenario. Are the teens more prone to anxiety and depression because they are so worn down due to insomnia, or is one of the symptoms of anxiety the inability to exhibit normal sleep patterngens? Or both?

Not much detail in the online article, but it’s an interesting topic nonetheless.

Insomnia and Anxiety May Be Genetically Linked, via US News and World Report

Napping and Anxiety

There’s an old saying that “if you snooze, you lose.” When it comes to anxiety and depression, that might not necessarily be true.

A study conducted on children between the ages of 4-5 (what, 4 1/4, 4 7/8 – that’s how kids count it) found that kids who stopped daytime napping between these ages had parent-reported higher incidence of anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity than kids who continued to take happy naps.

Reported during SLEEP 2009, an annual meeting of sleep professionals (sure wish I qualified for that), the results shed some new light on the benefits of daytime napping. The connection between poor sleep patterns and anxiety or depression are well-documented, but many believed that children could make up for the lack of daytime napping via nighttime sleep.

The quoted study demonstrated the potential for napping to be significantly more beneficial to children’s daytime functioning compared to nighttime sleep only. Any parent can provide anecdotal evidence that kids who nap tend to be less moody and more easily entertained than children who don’t nap.

Not mentioned in the article was any connection or bias on the part of parents whose children stay awake all day. If the study relied on parental reporting of the child’s anxiety or depression, I could easily see a situation where a parents’ own emotional state could impact on the reporting, as parents of kids who don’t nap can be every bit as frazzled as the children.

The article further points out that there’s still no data to suggest an optimal age to stop napping. I’d like to recommend that we never stop napping. In fact, if I had a cot in my office, and support from management, I’d nap every day. But that’s just me.

Napping, hyperactivity, anxiety and depression linked in preschoolers, via Anxiety Insights

Internet Psychotherapy Proving Effective

You know, there might just be one good thing that comes out of Internet webcams after all!

Anxiety Insights links to an Australian study that demonstrates online therapy can be just as effective as face-to-face sessions. What’s interesting is that patients only required an average of 111 minutes of clinician contact over an eight-week period, which is far less than most patients spend in office therapy sessions over the same timeframe.

The online program centers around treatment for depression, and 34% of patients felt they were no longer depressed after the two-month program, while 82% reported being either very or mostly satisfied with the treatment regimen at completion.

This bodes well for those who avoid seeking treatment due to social stigma, transportation, and provider availability issues, and since most of the program involves email contact and homework lessons, high-speed Internet connectivity isn’t a requirement – sorry to disappoint you webcam fiends.

Technology is opening new treatment vectors all the time, and the online experience can help with one of the sticky aspects of conditions like depression, which is the tendency to withdraw and avoid contact. Online therapy is a good middle step between no treatment and office visits.

On-line psychotherapy as effective as face-to-face therapy, via Anxiety Insights

No Holding Back the Tears

Wednesday night was “graduation” night at my son’s Montessori school, where parents, grandparents, friends, and family pack into the gym and celebrate educational milestones such as moving from kindergarten to lower elementary, lower elementary to upper, becoming big-kids-on-campus by heading to middle school, and finally, the 8th graders departing as they head out for their high school experience.

It’s nice that they celebrate important transitions such as these, and it really builds a sense of community and continuity. The mere fact that an eight year old wants to go sit in the gym for an hour for this demonstrates how much the kids benefit from the event.