How is it that so many couples end up having knock down, drag out fights? How can seemingly rational people end up saying things that just don’t make any sense? Several people that I’ve seen recently have told me a similar story. As in every relationship, they have had certain long-standing issues in their relationships, areas where one or the …
Stress and Your Brain
Stress has a major affect on our bodies and our brain. The release of catecholamines (adrenaline and related chemicals) and cortisol causes significant changes throughout our body that are designed to prepare us for “fight or flight.” By shutting down all non-essential functions the stress response system prepares us for a life and death struggle Nowadays there are no life …
Nature’s Cycles
It should be raining. It is March in the San Francisco Bay area, and we have had hardly any rain for the past three months. It’s a funny thing, but even though I have been taking advantage of the good weather to go out bicycle riding and hiking, there’s a part of me that doesn’t feel quite right about this …
Kindling
What do small sticks used to start a fire have to do with bipolar moods? Not much… Kindling in the context of this post refers to a phenomenon that is well documented in some people with seizure disorders and which may have relevance to some people with bipolar moods. Bob Post, who was for many years Chief of the Biological …
WorkSurfing
The New York Times recently published an intriguing article entitled “Relax, You Will Be More Effective.” It arrived at just the right time. Preparing for an upcoming vacation had made me particularly hectic. And then, while I was on vacation and writing this post, I got a blog post from MoodScope which was devoted to the importance of taking regular …
Trickster Brain
If you want to figure out if something is true or not, you’re probably better off not going to a psychiatrist. Therapists really have no greater ability to decipher what the truth is than anyone else. On the other hand, if you go to see a decent, “good enough” therapist, with enough experience working with people, he or she might …
Sleep and Memory
An interesting story published in the New York Times suggests that the reason we are less able to remember things as we get older is that we sleep less well. The article is based on a report posted online on Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The report suggests that as the brain ages, changes take place that interfere with sleep quality, which …
Borderline Emotions
Originally, the label “borderline personality disorder” was applied to patients who were thought to somewhere between patients with neurotic and psychotic disorders in terms of psychopathology. Increasingly, though, this area of research has focused on the heightened emotional reactivity observed in patients carrying this diagnosis, as well as the high rates with which they also meet diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic …
Of Two Minds
This morning I was thinking about the relationship between your pre-frontal cortex and your limbic system. I know, it’s a little strange to be having these thoughts while out riding a bicycle in the morning… a hazard of the profession I guess. The reason I was thinking about this subject is that people’s moods appear to be affected by both …
Relationship Fear
I have been working with a couple of young women who seem to be unable to move beyond a recently ended relationship with a young man. In both cases, there’s no question that the young man is coming back, and yet their thoughts keep turning back to trying to analyze the failed relationship, wondering what might have gone differently and …
Mindfulness in the News
A number of people called my attention to the December 15 NY Times The Power of Concentration article written by Maria Konnikova on the topic of mindfulness. As I read it, I noticed certain parallels with my December 8 2-Minute Meditation blog post, mainly that there is recent research that shows that as little as 5 minutes of mindfulness per …
How Could Light Help?
There has been considerable skepticism about the value of light therapy for people with seasonal depression, despite a very compelling research literature. Perhaps this might, in part, be because the way that light might affect mood has not been clear. In a recently published animal study, change in light exposure increases stress hormones, depresses mood, and impairs learning through changes light …
Depression: “I Can’t Do This”
One of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about is the “I can’t do that” process. How it is that someone can’t get out of bed, or take a shower, or any number of other things… It is actually a step forward often when the other person says, “I can’t do that” directly. Most of the …
Fallow Fields
Farmers will sometimes leave a field “fallow” – they won’t plant anything in it but rather let native plants grow in it – as a way of rejuvenating the land. Then when they do plant the field it is often very productive. We were talking with one of our clients this morning about the topic of seasonal variability in mood …
Parenting and Oxytocin
Those of us who have been parents probably remember moments of incredible attachment to our children. Times when we were happy to just hold them while they were sleeping, and nothing else in the world seemed important. It is a state that is somewhat like the experience of new love. Recent research suggests that part of what creates that state …
Bipolar Brains
After years of trying, a group of researchers down at UCLA (led by Lori Altshuler) may have succeeded in identifying important changes in brain function that are associated with bipolar moods. They have found two specific areas of the brain that show pretty consistent changes associated with bipolar. One area (the orbitofrontal cortex) is generally less activated in bipolar, no …
Learned Helplessness
This is an animal model of the human experience of depression. In the learned helplessness model an animal is repeatedly placed in a situation where it has no ability to avoid a painful outcome After a while the animal begins to look depressed (listless, passive). At that point if you place the animal in a situation where it could escape …
Self-Consciousness: You Can’t Fool Yourself
Many years ago we read a book by renowned social psychologist George Herbert Meade entitled Mind, Self and Society. In it Meade wrote about the origins of self-consciousness in childhood experiences. If you follow the development of children you notice that at first they act as though they and the world are one, with no apparent sense of others (especially …
What Happens in Depression?
We were just getting ready to write a post about brain imaging findings that help to explain what happens in depression when we got the latest copy of the American Journal of Psychiatry and found an elegant meta-analysis (review of many other studies) that does much of the work for us. If you want to read the article you will …