Men and Stress: Saving Your Sanity and the Only Brain You’ll Ever Have

August 2, 2012 By 6 Comments

Although we have known for some time that stress can cause damage to the heart, the gastrointestinal tract, and other parts of the body, we have recently learned that stress can actually damage the brain.  J. Douglas Bremner, M.D., is Director of Mental Health Research at the Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center, and is editor of Trauma, Memory, and Dissociation and Stress Disorder.  In Bremner’s book Does Stress Damage the Brain? he explains, “Research in only the past decade or so has shown that extreme stress has effects on the brain that last throughout the lifespan.”

As a result many of those emotional distresses that we have, in the past, viewed as purely psychological, may be the result of physical damage to the brain.  “A group of psychiatric disorders related to stress, what I call trauma-spectrum disorders,” says Bremner, “could share in common a basis in brain abnormalities that are caused by stress.”

Bremner continues saying that “Trauma-spectrum disorders are those that are known to be linked to stress, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociative disorders, borderline personality disorders, adjustment disorder, depression, and anxiety.”  I would include the Irritable Male Syndrome as another one of these trauma-spectrum disorders.

Trauma-spectrum Disorders and Gender:  Why Women Cry and Men Run Away 

One of Dr. Bremner’s experiments helps us understand the difference between the way men and women experience these disorders.  He gathered a group of former depression patients.  With their permission, he gave them a beverage that was spiked with an amino acid that blocks the brain’s ability to absorb serotonin, the neurotransmitter that allows us to feel upbeat and happy.

Using the new brain scan techniques he took pictures of the subject’s brains to see if he could pinpoint the areas that were associated with depression. If we knew the areas of the brain associated with depression, he reasoned then we could come up with better medications and treatment approaches.  In looking at the color brain scans he was able to show that a loss of serotonin affects all three major areas of the brain.

What I found even more fascinating were the gender specific differences in the way men and women reacted to the potion that blocked the effects of the serotonin.  Typical of the males was John, a middle-aged businessman who had fully recovered from a bout of depression, thanks to a combination of psychotherapy and Prozac. Within minutes of drinking the brew, however, “He wanted to escape to a bar across the street,” recalls Bremner. “He didn’t express sadness … he didn’t really express anything. He just wanted to go to Larry’s Lounge.”  Contrast John’s response with that of female subjects like Sue, a mother of two in her mid-thirties. After taking the cocktail, “She began to cry and express her sadness over the loss of her father two years ago,” recalls Bremmer. “She was overwhelmed by her emotions.”

So we see a very real contrast in the ways men and women respond to a loss of the brain chemicals that keep our emotions in a healthy balance.  Men tend to withdraw and go for the alcohol to prevent us from feeling our pain.  Women tend to share their emotions with others.  I have found that chronic irritability is one of the principal ways men withdraw, rather than dealing directly with our feelings.

 Men and Stress:  What’s a Man to Do?

Men and stress can be a killer combination.  We can make decisions that help eliminate or decrease the stress response in life by once again paying attention to the physical, emotional, and chemical components of our health. Physical stressors include accidents, physical inactivity, and changes in temperature. Chemical stressors include sugar, high fat foods, cigarettes, alcohol, and toxic work or environment. Emotional stressors include fear, anger, guilt, depression, anxiety, and loneliness.

When we get out of balance with our lives, many of us overload on all aspects of our stress capacity, stopping our regular exercise regimen, eating poorly, and navigating family get-togethers or loneliness. Come up with a plan for how you can circumvent illness by planning ahead.

Make sure you are able to identify when your stress levels are high, and have some ways of interrupting the process. An increased heart rate, sweat, tense muscles, irritability, moodiness and dilated pupils are clear signs of fight or flight and an increased stress response.

When you notice these signs stop what you’re doing and check in with yourself for at least five minutes. Check in and see if HALT is a problem.  These letters stand for hungry, angry, lonely, tired.  These are some of the more common ways that stress manifests.  Ways to re-set the system are going for a brisk walk, taking a few deep breaths, visualizing yourself somewhere refreshing, relaxing tight muscles, and shifting your perception to a different space. This does not have to be a long task. Just check in and re-set every hour until you get the hang of it and feel some shift in your overall tension pattern.

You can practice using the energy healing tools I describe in my book, MenAlive:  Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools.  Learn about Earthing, Heart Coherence, Attachment Love, and Emotional Freedom Techniques (Also known as EFT or Tapping).  These simple tools combat stress in men and the women who love them.  You can get your brain back in balance and allow you to more effectively deal with the ups and downs of life without becoming overwhelmed or stressed out.

Please share your story or experience.

Together we heal.

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The Masculine Mystique and Male Depression: Embracing Your Vocation of Destiny

May 17, 2012 By 13 Comments

 

There is something amiss with men today, and I’m still trying to figure it out.  I’ve been working with men, and the women who love them, for more than 40 years.  Actually, I’ve been on a quest to understand what is happening to men since 1948.  I was five years old that year and my father was 42.  I knew he was unhappy, but I never understood what troubled him.  He would disappear for long periods of time and when he was home he seemed irritable and angry much of the time.  My mother was perpetually worried—about him, about me, about money, about the state of the world.

The Masculine Mystique

I still remember the day my mother told me my father had been hospitalized.  She might have been crying, but she covered her emotions and simply told me my father was in a hospital.  She never explained exactly why he was there or when he would be coming home.  It was years later, when I was already in graduate school, that I found out he had tried to commit suicide.   My father was a writer and had boxes of journals with plays, poetry, radio shows, and short stories of all kinds.  I had read many of them, but they were hand-written and not easy to decipher.  When I came across a big box with personal journals I read them with a mounting excitement and apprehension.

Here is a note from my father’s first journal, written when he was his old self, full of hope and joy for life:

“I feel full of confidence in my writing ability.  I know for certain that someone will buy one of my radio shows.  I know for certain that I will get a good part in a play.  Last night I dreamt about candy.  There was more candy than I could eat.  Does it mean I’ll be rewarded for all my efforts?  Has it anything to do with sex?”

Journal number three was written a year later.  The economic depression of the time and the depression going on within his mind had come together.  His entries are more terse, staccato, and disheartening.  I still get tears when I feel how much was lost in such a short time.

“June 4th:

Your flesh crawls, your scalp wrinkles when you look around and see good writers, established writers, writers with credits a block long, unable to sell, unable to find work,  Yes, it’s enough to make anyone, blanch, turn pale and sicken.

August 15th:

Faster, faster, faster, I walk.  I plug away looking for work, anything to support my family.  I try, try, try, try, try.  I always try and never stop.

November 8th:

A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out.  Middle aged, I stand and gaze ahead, numb, confused, and desperately worried.  All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education.

I see them all, a whole army of them, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying.  Yes, on a Sunday morning in early November, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain is about to descend.”

Six days after his November 8th entry, my father tried to kill himself.  Though he survived physically, emotionally he was never again the same.  For nearly 40 years I’ve treated more and more men who are facing similar stresses to those my father experienced.  The economic conditions and social dislocations that contributed to his feelings of shame and hopelessness continue to weigh heavily on men today.

The Feminine Mystique:  The Problem That Has No Name

I’ve been reading Birth 2012 and Beyond:  Humanity’s Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution by Barbara Marx Hubbard.  In the book Hubbard, talks about those key figures that had influenced her personal and professional life.  The two primal people she mentions, the psychologist Abraham Maslow and feminist author Betty Friedan, also had a profound influence on me.

The Feminine Mystique

I was in college when I read The Feminine Mystique.  I still have my original copy written in 1963 with a quote of support from anthropologist Ashley Montague, “the wisest, sanest, soundest, most understanding and compassionate treatment of contemporary American woman’s greatest problem.”  In her book she talked about the fact that in the years following World War II American women seemed to have it all.  She described “the American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the angers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother.  She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home.  She had true feminine fulfillment.”

Yet, with all that she had—a husband, children, a nice house, T.V. and new “labor-saving devices,” she was becoming increasingly unhappy.  In the secret confines of her heart and soul she knew there was more to her life than a husband, house, and children; and she felt ashamed for wanting more when she had so much.  “She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction,” said Friedan, “that she never knew how many other women shared it.  If she tried to tell her husband, he didn’t understand what she was taking about.”  When she’d go to a psychiatrist for help, he didn’t understand either.  Until Friedan called it “the feminine mystique,” it was a “problem that has no name.”

Barbara Marx Hubbard remembers her reaction to The Feminine Mystique.  “When I read that book, I realized that I was depressed because I had accepted the role of wife and mother as my exclusive identity….Once I read Betty Friedan, I was encouraged by one major thought:  I knew I wasn’t alone.  And I wasn’t willing to accept this depression as normal for me.  The meme of the feminine mystique liberated and encouraged me to keep seeking.”  She shared the feelings of so many women of that time.  “So much was given to me, yet there was this feeling of depression caused by a loss of identity—a deep longing for something more.”

The Masculine Mystique:  Why Men Are Angry and Depressed

It doesn’t take social science research to prove that men are angry and depressed.  One measure of this trend is the increase in the rates of homicide and suicide we see in males.  According to Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), homicide rates for males are 3 to 4 times higher than they are for females.  Among persons aged 20–24, the male homicide rate is 6 times higher than it is for females and it is much worse among minorities than among whites.   For those ages 10-19, the homicide rate is 10 times higher for blacks than for whites.

Differences in suicide rates are even more dramatic, according to the CDC.   Overall, males kill themselves at rates that are 4 times higher than females.  But as with homicide, certain groups are even more vulnerable.  The suicide rate for those ages 20-24 is 5.4 times higher for males than for females of the same age.  In the older age groups suicide is predominantly a male problem.  After retirement, the suicide rate skyrockets for men, but not for women.  Between the ages of 65-74 the rate is 6.3 times higher for males.  Between the ages of 75-84, the suicide rate is 7 times higher.  And for those over 85, it is nearly 18 times higher for men than it is for women.

Why are men so unhappy?  The Feminine Mystique told women that they should be satisfied with being wives, mothers, and homemakers.  The Masculine Mystique told men that they should be happy to compete with other men to find a woman and then compete with other “breadwinners” to create ever greater material wealth for themselves and their families.  We were told that “he who dies with the most toys, wins” and “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”  Both women and men become depressed trying to fit into roles that no longer work for us.

Men are losing out on three fronts.  First, as women become more self-sufficient, men don’t feel they are needed as the sole “breadwinner.”  Second, as the economy continues to move from one based on continued material growth to one based on sustainable living, more males are losing their jobs.  Third, as stresses from economic and ecological imbalances continue to increase, men are no longer able to succeed in love and work.  More women are seeking divorces than ever before and more men are stuck in dead-end jobs working longer and longer hours for less and less pay.

Anti-depressants and psychotherapy aren’t the answer.  Both the feminine mystique and the masculine mystique would have us believe that we are depressed because there is something wrong inside us—with our brains, our serotonin levels, or self-esteem.  The “experts” tell us that we need to take something or do something to better fit into the world as we know it.  Liberation for men and for women requires that we break free of the old constraints and find our true purpose and direction in life.  Depression isn’t merely an illness.  It is a wake-up call from the soul.

Depression is More About Loss of Love Than Loss of Serotonin

We’ve all seen the pharmaceutical ads for the latest antidepressants.  They show two nerve fibers greatly magnified with a few little black dots representing the neurotransmitter, serotonin, in the synapse between the nerves.  The ad informs us that too little serotonin causes depression and when we take their anti-depressant we immediately see many more little dots of serotonin flooding the synapse and connecting to the next nerve.  But as usual, there is more to the story than the pharmaceutical companies would have us believe.

Depression is About Loss of Love

Andrew Solomon is a well-known writer who has dealt with depression in his own life. Although he acknowledges that anti-depressants can be of help to some people who suffer, he describes the problem in much different terms than the simplified view we see in the ads.  In his comprehensive book, The Noonday Demon:  An Atlas of Depression, he begins the book this says:  “Depression,” says Solomon, “is the flaw in love.  To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.  When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection.  It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself….In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident.  The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.”

The Male Vocation of Destiny:   How to Love Ourselves, Each Other, and Embrace Our Calling in Life

Many men are ready to shed old roles, but don’t know what it means to be a good man in these changing times.  Barbara Marx Hubbard says we must embrace our “vocation of destiny.”  I suggest that our work requires that we learn to devote ourselves to three, inter-related, grand, causes.

  • We must learn to love and accept ourselves just the way we are.
  • We must learn to love our partner (wife, spouse, lover, or “special someone”)
  • We must learn to love and embrace our calling in life.

Part of the masculine (and feminine) mystique is that men must be a certain way and women must be different.  In fact, it tells us that the very things that men must be women cannot be and vice versa.

For instance, psychologist Ann Neitlich says that men must be and women cannot be:  Cool, stoic, economically powerful, physically strong, logical, aggressive, athletic, hairy, muscular, outspoken, rugged, and tough.

She says that men cannot be and women must be:  Nurturing, tender, feeling, loving, beautiful, soft, curvy, thin, passive, receptive, nice, sweet, hairless, quiet, giving, and apologetic.

It’s not easy going against the mystique of masculinity, but we must do so if we are going to truly love ourselves.  “When I get to heaven,” said the Hasidic rabbi Susya shortly before his death, “they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ but ‘Why were you not Susya?  Why did you not become what only you could become?’”  The first grand cause is to learn to love ourselves.

When I first heard Ann Neitlich talk about the things that women must be and the things that men cannot be, I wasn’t surprised to hear words like “beautiful, soft, curvy, thin, passive, receptive, and hairless.”  But I was surprised to hear words like “tender, feeling, and loving” included.  But the more I thought about it, I realized it was true.  Even qualities as important and universal as these, we are taught are for women, not for men.

I hate to admit it, but learning to love my wife and even my children at the same level that my wife loves me and our children, has been a real challenge.  The second great cause of our lives is to learn to love those we are closest too.  If we’re not married or “in relationship,” we all have someone special in our lives that we need to love more fully and unconditionally.

Finally, we have to learn to embrace and love our calling in life.  I believe that we each have a calling, something that goes far beyond our job or career, something that we were born to do.  It isn’t always easy to find, embrace, and love, but we must do so if we are going to be the men we’ve always wanted to be.  Barbara Marx Hubbard says, “So, the question for each of us is, ‘what is my unique way of expressing my essence that is both self-rewarding and of service to others?”

I’ve found that for many of us our calling emerges out of our wound.  It was my father’s attempted suicide when I was five that started me on the path of my life’s calling.  It wasn’t always obvious to me, but became more and more clear that my calling has to do with awakening the masculine soul and helping men, and the women who love them, to live long and well on this beautiful planet we all share.

As men, we must come home to the essence of who we are in order to love ourselves, our partner, and our calling.  We live at an important transition time in human history.  An old way of life is coming to an end and a new path is opening before us.  David C. Korten, author of The Great Turning calls it the transition from Empire to Earth Community.  Psychologist and philosopher Sam Keen puts the challenge we face simply:

“The radical vision of the future rests on the belief that the logic that determines either our survival or our destruction is simple:

1.    The new human vocation is to heal the Earth.
2.    We can only heal what we love.
3.    We can only love what we know.
4.    We can only know what we touch.”

Are you ready to step up and embrace the challenge to accept and love yourself?  Are you ready to reach out to others and love more fully and unconditionally?  Are you ready to seek out and embrace your life’s calling?  Let me hear from you.  We can help each other on our journey.  As my friend Joseph Jastrab reminds us, “The world needs a man’s heart.”

Jed

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The Simple Solution the Richest 1% Hope You’ll Never Find

May 8, 2012 By 8 Comments

 

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that we humans in the world are experiencing some serious problems.  Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, two research scientists working through The Equality Trust in the U.K., have identified the following fourteen problems and one simple solution.  When I first read about their work in their book, The Spirit Level:  Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, I was immediately interested.

The fourteen problems they identified for study include the following:

  1. Physical health—Too many people die too young from diseases that could be prevented.
  2. Mental health—Too many people suffer from anxiety, depression, and other mental ills.
  3. Drug abuse—Too many people abuse drugs and many die before their time.
  4. Education—Too many children leave school too soon and others stay, but do poorly.
  5. Imprisonment—Too many people are in prison and prison does little good to prevent future crime.
  6. Obesity—Too many children and adults are overweight and suffer many ailments, including diabetes, as a result.
  7. Equal opportunity—Too many people feel locked into the lower classes with no way to escape.
  8. Trust in community—Too many people divide the world between “us” and “them” and fear there is not enough of us and too many of them.
  9. Violence—Too many people live with the fear of violence, both in their home, in their communities, and in the world.
  10. Teenage Births—Too many young males and females are bringing children into the world, while they are children themselves.
  11. Child health—Too many children die young or fail to thrive and grow in health.
  12. The end of growth—It used to be true that economic growth was good and more was better.  But too many people live as through we could grow without limit, even though we live on a finite planet.
  13. Foreign aid—Too many people suffer because too many rich countries give too little to aid to others.
  14. Climate change—Too many people in the world face calamity as we continue to heat our planet and weather becomes increasingly weird.

The Simple Solution to Many of Our Most Difficult Problems 

After years of research Wilkinson and Pickett have found that all these problems can be improved if we narrowed the income gap between the rich and the poor.  The following diagram shows the health and well-being of those in wealthy countries on the vertical axis and income inequality on the horizontal.  As you see the USA has the highest level of social problems and also has the highest level of income inequality.


Evidence shows that:

1) In rich countries, a smaller gap between rich and poor means a happier, healthier, and more successful population. Just look at the US, the UK, Portugal, and New Zealand in the top right of this graph, doing much worse than Japan, Sweden or Norway in the bottom left.

2) Meanwhile, more economic growth will NOT lead to a happier, healthier, or more successful population. In fact, there is no relation between income per head and social well-being in rich countries.

3) If the US were to reduce income inequality to something like the average of the four most equal of the rich countries (Japan, Norway, Sweden and Finland) evidence shows we could expect the following:

    • Trust within the population would rise by 75%;
    • Mental illness and obesity would be cut by two thirds;
    • Teen births could be more than halved;
    • Prison populations could be reduced by 75%;
    • People could live longer while working the equivalent of two months less per year.

4) It’s not just people in poorer communities who would do better. The evidence suggests people all the way up would benefit, although it’s true that the poorest would gain the most.

5) These findings hold true, whether you look across developed nations, or across the 50 states of the USA.

Dr. Wilkinson offers a compelling summary of years of research at a recent TED talk.

The Rich Are Getting Richer But It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way

In the introduction to The Spirit Level:  Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Robert B. Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, says “Most American families are worse off today than they were three decades ago.  The Great Recession of 2008-2009 destroyed the value of their homes, undermined their savings, and too often left them without jobs.

“But even before the Great Recession began, most Americans had gained little from the economic expansion that began almost three decades before.  Today, the Great Recession notwithstanding, the U.S. economy is far larger than it was in 1980.  But where has all the wealth gone?  Mostly to the very top.  The latest data shows that by 2007, America’s top 1 percent of earners received 23% of the nation’s total income—almost triple their 8% share in 1980.”

Martin Luther King said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  As Bob Dylan reminded us “the times they are a changin.’”

Look over the list of problems such as poor physical health, poor mental health, drug abuse, obesity, violence, etc.  Which ones are you most concerned about?  Would you be willing to work to reduce income inequality if these problems could be significantly improved?

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3 Little Known Stressors Killing Men and the Women Who Love Them

May 1, 2012 By 18 Comments

 

It’s no secret that stress levels are on the rise.  Much of our present-day stress involves our minds going around and around worrying about what could happen. “Stress—or as I like to think of it, the mind that’s running on overdrive—is now considered to be a leading factor in numerous illnesses,” says Woodson Merrell, MD, chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center and author of The Source. “By some estimates, up to 80 percent of all illnesses are stress induced.”

Although stress impacts everyone, men are particularly vulnerable.  We see that in the fact that men die sooner and live sicker than do women.  A chart that I shared in my last post is worth sharing again.  It contains  statistics from the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that men have a higher death rate for the ten leading causes of death (numbers are deaths per 100,000 population):

 

These statistics show, for instance, that for every 100 women who die of heart disease 150 men die.  For every 100 women who commit suicide 400 men kill themselves and for every 100 women who are killed in a homicide 390 men are killed.

Since we know that stress is implicated in most causes of death, what are the most common stressors?  We often think of such things as time pressures, unhealthy lifestyles, traffic jams, and financial worries.  But major new research reported by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book, The Spirit Level:  Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, indicates that more important stressors are ones we probably are not even aware exist.

The Three Killer Stressors Few People Know About

If we take a moment to think about it, the stress that impacts us the most strongly have to do with other people, particularly those who are close to us. Wilkinson and Pickett say that “the most powerful sources of stress affecting health seem to fall into three intensely social categories.”

  1.  Trauma experienced when we were children.
  2.   Low social status.
  3.   Lack of friends.

Early Trauma Affects Health Years After It Occurs

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study has demonstrated that childhood experiences affect adult health decades after they first occur.  The ACE Study is a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego.  They found that childhood abuse, neglect, and exposure to other adverse experiences are common. Almost two-thirds of study participants reported at least one ACE, and more than one in five reported three or more.

Further, it was found that each adverse childhood experience increased the risk of health problems later in life.   For instance, compared to people with an ACE score of 0, those with an ACE score of 4 or more were twice as likely to be smokers, 7 times more likely to be alcoholic, 10 times more likely to have injected street drugs, and 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

 Low Social Status Is Stressful 

Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny, both psychologists at the U.C.L.A. found that the stressors that most impacted our health were ones that threatened our sense of self-worth in the eyes of others.  They collected findings from 208 published reports of experiments in which people’s cortisol (stress hormone) levels were measured while they were exposed to an experimental stressor.

They classified all the different kinds of stressors used in experiments and found that “tasks that included a social-evaluative threat (such as threats to self-esteem or social status), in which others could negatively judge performance, particularly when the outcome of the performance was uncontrollable, provoked larger and more reliable cortisol changes than stressors without these particular threats.”

Lack of Friends Can Be a Real Killer

“All the usual risk factors for heart disease—smoking, obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, and a high-fat diet—account for only half of all cases of heart disease,” says heart expert Dr. Dean Ornish. “Every so-called lifestyle risk factor laid at the door of cardiovascular illness by the medical community has less to do with someone having a heart attack than does simple isolation—from other people, from our own feelings and from a higher power.”

Thomas Joiner, author of Lonely at the Top:  The High Cost of Men’s Success, calls men “the lonely sex.”  And it points out that it gets worse as we age.  “Men’s main problem is not self-loathing, stupidity, greed, or any of the legions of other things they’re accused of,” says Joiner. “The problem, instead, is loneliness; as they age, they gradually lose contacts with friends and family, and here’s the important part, they don’t replenish them.”

As the suicide statistics verify, men often feel increasingly alone as they get older, even when they are surrounded by those who care about them. “A postmortem report on a suicide decedent,” says Joiner, “a man in his sixties read, ‘He did not have friends…he did not feel comfortable with other men…he did not trust doctors and would not seek help even though he was aware that he needed help.’”

The importance of friends reminds me of the refrain from Desperado by the Eagles.  “You better let somebody love you, you better let somebody love you, you better let somebody love you…before it’s too late.”

What do you think?  How have these categories impacted your stress levels?

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Energy Healing – Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)

April 20, 2012 By 1 Comment

 

The following is an excerpt from my new book, MenAlive:  Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools.  The book is scheduled for release in June, 2012.  If you’d like to be notified when it is released and to keep up with my latest work, please sign up for my free e-newsletter in the box to the right.

I wrote MenAlive to offer specific tools that were easy to learn and use, scientifically sound, and effective in preventing and treating stress that harms us all.  The emerging field of Energy Healing offers many different approaches.  After reviewing the field, I chose to offer four:  Earthing, Heart Coherence, Attachment Love, and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).  This article provides an overview of EFT.

I first heard about EFT when I was having serious pains in my shoulder.  I was told it was like “acupuncture without needles.”  I tried it and found that it worked wonders to relieve my pain and allow greater movement in my shoulder.  I was convinced it had helped me, but I didn’t understand how it worked.  I got some answers in the book The Promise of Energy Psychology:  Revolutionary Tools for Dramatic Personal Change written by EFT founder Gary Craig and Energy Psychology and Energy Medicine Experts David Feinstein and Donna Eden.

In the foreword to the book, neuroscientist Candace Pert says, “The Promise of Energy Psychology is a synthesis of practices designed to deliberately shift the molecules of emotion.  These practices have three distinct advantages over psychiatric medications.  They are noninvasive, highly specific, and have no side effects.”

This is the kind of medicine that makes sense to me.

“What excites me most about EFT,” says Craig, “is its application to physical health and wellness.  I’m convinced more than ever that Modern Medicine has walked right by a major contributor to chronic and acute diseases.  Our unresolved angers, fears, and traumas show up in our physical bodies and manifest not just as back pain but as rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and hundreds of other illnesses.”

“In essence, EFT is an emotional version of acupuncture wherein we stimulate certain meridian points by tapping on them with our fingertips,” says Craig.  “This addresses a new cause for emotional issues (unbalanced energy meridians).  Properly done, this frequently reduces the therapeutic process from months or years down to hours or minutes. And, since emotional stress can contribute to pain, disease and physical ailments, we often find that EFT provides astonishing physical relief.”

How EFT Works

Dr. Feinstein has expanded on the theories of how acupuncture works and has developed a 10-point theory of how EFT and other “tapping” therapies can heal:

1.  Energies—both electromagnetic energies and more subtle energies—form the dynamic infrastructure of the physical body.

2.  The health of those energies–in terms of flow, balance, and harmony–is reflected in the health of the body, mind, and spirit.

3.  Conversely, when the body, mind, and spirit are not healthy, corresponding disturbances in our energy fields can be identified and treated.

4.  Flow, balance, and harmony can be non-invasively restored and maintained within an energy system by tapping specific energy points on the skin.

5.  Tapping specific energy points while holding fearful or anxiety-provoking memories can permanently change the way these memories are processed and stored in the brain.

6.  When you bring to mind an anxiety-provoking memory, thought, or related cue, an alarm response is activated in the amygdala.  (The amygdala is an almond-shaped group of nuclei located deep within the brain    which helps in the processing and memory of emotional reactions).

7.  The simultaneous stimulation of acupoints sends deactivating signals to the amygdala, initiating an opposing process.

8.  The signals sent by the acupoint stimulation turn off the alarm response, even though the trigger is still present.

9.  With a few repetitions the trigger no longer evokes fear, and this innocuous experience, which becomes the defining memory about the trigger, is stored in the long-term memory banks of the brain.

10. We still remember the event or situation that triggered the negative emotional response, but it no longer causes us problems.

If you’d like more information on EFT or the other Energy Healing tools you can use to reduce stress drop me an email at Jed@MenAlive.com.

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Help Me Keep A Million Men Alive

April 19, 2012 By 10 Comments


“If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer.”  Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.

When I was five-years old and my father was forty-two, he tried to commit suicide.  The stresses of trying to earn a living and provide for his family during difficult economic times overwhelmed him.  Though he didn’t die physically, he was crippled emotionally and our lives were never the same.  I grew up wondering what happened to my father and to so many other wounded fathers.

According to the National Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, each year nearly 35,000 people kill themselves.  28,000 (nearly 80%) are male.  Eleven times that number attempt suicide.

But suicide isn’t the only way men’s lives are cut short.  “80 percent of all illnesses are stress induced,”   says Woodson Merrell, MD, Chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center.   Although stress impacts everyone, men are particularly vulnerable.  According to social scientist Dr. Thomas Joiner, “Males experience higher mortality rates than females at all stages of life from conception to old age.”

Statistics from the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that men have a higher death rate for the ten leading causes of death (numbers are deaths per 100,000 population):

“Over 330,000 lives would be saved in a single year in the U.S. alone if men’s risk of dying was as low as women’s,” says University of Michigan researcher, Daniel J. Kruger, PhD.  “Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death,” says Kruger’s colleague, Randolph M. Nesse, M.D.

I grieve for the men and boys whose lives are cut short and for the women and families left behind.  I’ve been looking for a way to reduce stress that is simple to learn, easy to practice, scientifically sound, and, most importantly, effective.  I’ve found what I’ve been looking for, have tested it extensively, and now want to get this life-saving information to as many men as I can.  My new book, MenAlive:  Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, gives men what they need to stop the stress that shortens lives and destroys relationships.

Do you know of other resources you believe could help save men’s lives?  Let’s work together to make them available to men and the women who love them.

Here’s my simple idea:  We know stress kills, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  If we can reduce men’s risk of death to the same level as women’s, we can save nearly a million men within three years.  Let’s get started.  Please comment on this blog post with your idea or resource.  You can also contact me directly at Jed@MenAlive.com

Photo Credit: math.unl.eduCreativeCommons

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Energy Healing Tool – Attachment Love

April 16, 2012 By 6 Comments

I wrote MenAlive to offer specific tools that were easy to learn and use, scientifically sound, and effective in preventing and treating stress that harms us all.  The emerging field of Energy Healing offers many different approaches.  After reviewing the field, I chose to offer four:  Earthing, Heart Coherence, Attachment Love, and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).  If you’d like to learn about the other tools described in the book, send me an e-mail:  Jed@MenAlive.com and put “Energy Tools” in the subject line.

When I first met Sue Johnson she had just completed a tremendous amount of research on Attachment Love and was releasing her new book, Hold Me Tight:  Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love to the public.  The conference was held in Los Angeles and triggered old memories of growing up there.  Like Johnson, my early experiences were colored by the pain and suffering I saw in my family.   My parents rarely fought, but I can still picture my father’s angry eyes and my mother’s shaming whispers to her friends about my father’s inability to make a good living.  Many therapists go into the field to try and understand their own parents, what happened to them, and what is happening to so many families today.

As I developed my therapy skills, it became evident to me that a lot of the problems people come to therapy to address have to do with their relationships with loved ones—a spouse, a parent, a child.  It is clear that couples work is helpful, but working with them had been difficult and not always successful.  Dealing with two people, two sets of hot emotions, and escalating fights, is not for the faint of heart.

Sue Johnson had similar experience, but has found answers that are changing the way we see ourselves, our relationships, and how we can help ourselves and others.  Couples therapy is in the midst of a revolution.  The key element in this revolution is the development of a new science of love and love relationships. As baseball legend Yogi Berra told us, “If you don’t know where you are going, you wind up somewhere else.” Without a clear model of love and the process of connection and disconnection, it is difficult to know how we can heal our past and have the kinds of loving relationships we want in the present.

The most recent scientific studies on love offer surprising understandings.  They tell us that the nature of our emotional attachment with our partner is the foundation for the kind of love we truly long to have—a love that is secure, intimate, and gets better as time goes on.

In their book, Attached:  The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help you Find—and Keep—Love, Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller tell us that “dependency is not a bad word.”   They go on describe the key findings from the new science of love:

  •     Your attachment needs are legitimate.
  •     You shouldn’t feel bad for depending on the person you are closest to—it is part of your genetic makeup.
  •     A relationship, from an attachment perspective, should make you feel more self-confident and give you peace of mind.  If it doesn’t, this is a wake-up call!

This certainly wasn’t what I learned in graduate school when I was studying Freudian theory and being taught t psychotherapy for individuals and couples.  I was taught that maturity means being independent and self-sufficient. If I felt afraid or needed to be held and comforted, I felt I was acting like a baby.  I was sure if I didn’t “act like a man,” I’d have no chance to find a woman who would want me or to hang on to one once I found her.

I now understand that my desire for nurture and connection had been based on science, not sentimentality.  It was one of those life-changing “ah, ha” moments.  My whole life I had been putting myself down whenever I felt I needed love, touch, and nurture.  I told myself, and others told me, that if I acted “needy,” I wasn’t a real man.

  •   “Quit acting like a child.”
  •   “Don’t look so defeated.”
  •   “Man-up!”

These were some of the words that would cut me to the core and enveloped me in shame. I learned early on, as did most men, to keep my feelings locked inside and show the world that I could “take it” like a man without flinching or showing any weakness.       It was truly an experience of emotional freedom to realize there wasn’t something wrong with me.  The real problem isn’t our desire for emotional nurturing and intimacy, it is a culture that denies our real needs and teaches people that to be “normal” is to be distant and independent.

Activating Attachment Love In Your Own Life

In her book, Hold Me Tight:  Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Johnson tells us how to understand the true nature of love and how we can all express it more fully in our relationships.  In Dr. Johnson’s program the key to a lifetime of good sex and love is “emotional responsiveness.”  The basis of Dr. Johnson’s approach is to teach people the secrets contained in the phrase “How ARE you really?”

  •  A is for Accessibility:  Can I reach you?

This means staying open to your partner even when you have doubts and feel insecure. It often means being willing to struggle to make sense of your emotions so these emotions are not so overwhelming.  You can then step back from disconnection and can tune in to your lover’s attachment cues.

  • R is for Responsiveness:  Can I rely on you to respond to me emotionally?

This means tuning in to your partner and showing that his or her emotions, especially attachment needs and fears, have an impact on you.  It means accepting and placing a priority on the emotional signals your partner conveys and sending clear signals of comfort and caring when your partner needs them.  Sensitive responsiveness always touches us emotionally and calms us on a physical level.

  • E is for Engagement:  Do I know you will value me and stay close?

The dictionary defines engaged as being absorbed, attracted, pulled, captivated, pledged, involved.  Emotional engagement here means the very special kind of attention that we give only to a loved one.  We gaze at them longer, touch them more.  Partners often talk of this as being emotionally present.

True Connection:  Using Your Attachment Love Tool

Thich Nhat Hahn, a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, is an internationally known author, poet, scholar, and peace activist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr.  His view of love is not based on scientific study, but he offers simple practices that fit well with what Sue Johnson and other attachment clinicians and researchers have found.

In a wonderful little book, True Love:  A Practice for Awakening the Heart, he offers a simple, yet powerful process for expressing the emotional heart connection that can help us express our true love for our partner.  “In Buddism we talk about mantras,” says Hahn.  “A mantra is a magic formula that, once it is uttered, can entirely change a situation, our mind, our body, or a person.  But this magic formula must be spoken in a state of concentration, that is to say, a state in which body and mind are absolutely in a state of unity.”  He offers three love mantras that we can use every day.

  • Mantra #1:  Being present for your loved one.

When you are thinking about your loved one or when you are in their presence you say this simple phrase:  “Dear one, I am really here for you.”  When say this simple phrase when I think of Carlin, I can feel my heart open to her.  It makes us both feel wonderful.  Even when she’s not physically present this works.  “Dear one, I am really here for you.”  Of course we can say these little mantra’s out loud in our own words.  I’ve often said with deep feeling when I see Carlin is hurting, “Hey, babe, I’m really here for you” and give her a hug.

  • Mantra #2:  Recognizing the presence of the other.

When you are really present for a loved one, you have the ability to recognize and “see” your partner in all their beauty.  One of the greatest gifts we can give another person is to recognize and appreciate who they really are.  As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “To love is to be; to be loved is to be recognized by the other.”

When we are loved, we wish the other to recognize our presence.  You must do whatever is necessary to be able to do this.  Take a deep breath in and release it.  Do this several times.  Then say the second mantra:  “Dear one, I know that you are here, and it makes me very happy.”  Again, we can put this in our own words.  I’ve often looked at Carlin with tears in my eyes and told her, “I’m so glad to be married to you.  Having you in my life makes me feel warm and safe.”

  • Mantra #3:  Being there when someone is suffering. 

We’ve all experienced how good it feels when someone is there for us when we’re in physical or emotional pain.  We also know how awful it is when we’re hurting and our partner is not there for us.  I know I’m not a very good patient.  When I’m sick in body, mind, or spirit, I often get irritable and angry.  It isn’t easy for Carlin to be there for me when I’m like that, but that’s when I need her the most.

“When you are living mindfully,” says Hahn, “you know what is happening in your situation in the present moment.  Therefore it is easy for you to notice when the person you love is suffering.”  At such a time you go to him or her, with your body and mind unified, with concentration, and you offer the third mantra.  “Dear one, I know that you are suffering, that is why I am here for you.”  Recently Carlin found out that she had a small breast tumor that was found early and removed.  During the months of testing, preparing, and having the surgery, I repeated this mantra many times.

I’ve expanded on these mantras and use a simple set of Attachment-Love practices that allows us to connect deeply with our needs for love and support in our intimate relationships.  If you have a love partner you can use it deepen your connection.  If you don’t have one, you can imagine the kind of person you would like to be in love with, or to remember a time when you felt intimate and close to another person.  This tool draws on what I’ve learned in my own love life, as well as what I’ve learned from Sue Johnson, Thich Nhat Hahn, and others.

  • Accept that we are deeply dependent on the love of our partner.  

Close your eyes and take in a number of deep breaths.  Slowly let them out.  Allow yourself to feel your emotional need for your loved one.  Say to yourself, “I know you love me and I need your love and support.”  Remember a time when you were deeply and completely loved.  If you don’t remember ever having felt loved so completely, imagine what it would feel like.

  • Remember that our partner is deeply dependent on our love. 

Take in and release a few deep breaths.  Remember that your partner needs your love and support.  Say to yourself, “I love you deeply and know how much you need my love and support.  Remember a time when you allowed yourself to be totally open and loving with your partner.  If you don’t remember ever having been so completely loving, imagine what it would feel like.

  • Allow your partner to respond to you when you are hurting.

Take in a few deep breaths and release them.  Remember that we often need our partner the most when we are hurting inside.  Recall a time when you were feeling scared, hurt, or wounded and your partner responded with warmth and support.  If you don’t remember ever allowing a partner to see your hurts and offer support, imagine what it would feel like.

  • Allow yourself to respond to your partner when she or he is hurting.

Take a number of deep breaths and let them out.  Remember that your partner may need you the most when they are hurting, but their hurt may come across as irritability, anger, or some other emotion that may cause you to become more distant.  Recall a time when you were totally there for your partner when they were hurting or if you haven’t had that experience, imagine what it would feel like.

The Attachment Love Tool is simple and effective, but it isn’t easy to use.  Many of us don’t have a lot of experience being emotionally supportive to our partner.  We often feel inept and so don’t reach out to them.  We may also have a difficult time allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to our partner.

Photo Credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/ngmmemuda/4473916695/in/photostream/lightbox/

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Heart Coherence

April 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I wrote MenAlive to offer specific tools that were easy to learn and use, scientifically sound, and effective in preventing and treating stress that harms us all.  The emerging field of Energy Healing offers many different approaches.  After reviewing the field, I chose to offer four:  Earthing, Heart Coherence, Attachment Love, and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).  In this article I will provide an overview of Heart Coherence.

For centuries, the heart has been considered the source of emotion, courage and wisdom. At the Institute of HeartMath (IHM) Research Center, they are exploring the physiological mechanisms by which the heart communicates with the brain, thereby influencing information processing, perceptions, emotions and health. They are asking questions such as:

  • Why do people experience the feeling or sensation of love and other positive emotional states in the area of the heart and what are the physiological ramifications of these emotions?
  • How do stress and different emotional states affect the autonomic nervous system, the hormonal and immune systems, the heart and brain?

Over the years Dr. Rollin McCraty and the researchers at the Institute of HeartMath have experimented with different psychological and physiological measures, but it was consistently heart rate variability, or heart rhythms, that stood out as the most dynamic and reflective of inner emotional states and stress. It became clear that negative emotions lead to increased disorder in the heart’s rhythms and in the autonomic nervous system, thereby adversely affecting the rest of the body. In contrast, positive emotions create increased harmony and coherence in heart rhythms and improve balance in the nervous system. The health implications are easy to understand: Disharmony in the nervous system leads to inefficiency and increased stress on the heart and other organs while harmonious rhythms are more efficient and less stressful to the body’s systems.

Our heart beats in a rhythm. Research at the Institute of HeartMath found that when we are over-stimulated, overloaded, stressed, frustrated, worried or anxious–that rhythm becomes jagged and irregular. The more stressed we are, the more chaotic and incoherent the heart rhythm becomes (see top half of graph below). When our hearts are “incoherent,” everything gets out of whack, from our sleep patterns to our ability to function well at work.

So what can make our heart rhythm smooth out fast? Research shows that sincere positive feelings, like love, care, gratitude, appreciation, compassion or joy, smooth out our heart rhythm into a harmonious coherent pattern. (See bottom half of graph above).  These nurturing feelings also reduce the stress hormone cortisol and increase DHEA (the vitality hormone) to help us sleep more soundly and wake up feeling more refreshed.

What’s interesting here is that both of the above graphs are of the same person feeling one way and then the other within a period of a few minutes. This smooth, coherent heart rhythm is the pattern that naturally occurs during deep, restful sleep. And what’s exciting for those of us who are sleep deprived is that we can learn to move intentionally into this smooth pattern.

But heart coherence can do more than help us sleep well.  Positive emotions create increased harmony and coherence in heart rhythms and improve balance in the nervous system. The health implications are easy to understand: Disharmony in the nervous system leads to inefficiency and increased stress on the heart and other organs while.

The word “emotion” (E-motion) literally means “energy in motion.”  It’s derived from the Latin verb meaning “to move.”  While a “feeling”—a closely related concept—is any conscious experience of sensation, an emotion is a strong feeling.  A feeling such as love, joy, sorrow, or anger literally moves us.  Big changes occur in our bodies when we are experiencing strong emotions and they move us to interact with others.

In their book, The HeartMath Solution, authors Doc Childre and Howard Martin say, “Emotions serve as carrier waves for the entire spectrum of feelings.  When our hearts are in a state of coherence, we more easily experience feelings such as love, care, appreciation, and kindness.  On the other hand, feelings such as irritation, anger, hurt, and envy are more likely to occur when the head and heart are out of alignment.  Our emotional experiences become imprinted in our brain cells and memory, where they form patterns that influence our behavior.”

 How You Can Use the Simple Heart-Coherence Tool to Reduce Stress and Improve Health

Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and all four branches of the U.S. Military, are now using HeartMath techniques to teach employees how to become more mentally and emotionally balanced, and provide for individual and organizational transformation. In addition, educators have found that school children can better manage their behavior, and improve their ability to absorb academic information by using the techniques pioneered by Doc Childre and Rollin McCraty at the Institute of HeartMath.

We’ve all heard about the many benefits of meditation. It can calm the mind and body, release tension and reduce the negative effects of stress. Meditation also helps us gain more inner balance and peace. More medical professionals are recommending meditation to patients as a way to decompress and relieve stress.  A 2004 Center for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that 19 million people in the United States practice some form of meditation. Even though many of us know the benefits of meditation, we don’t always take time to do it.  I’ve found that I can use the quick Heart-Coherence Tool to reduce stress even when I’m too busy to take time to relax.

You can use the Quick Coherence Technique to bring your heart rhythms into coherence and enable your brain to synchronize with your heart’s coherent rhythm. You can start by learning how to shift into a heart-focused, positive emotional state with three simple steps.  Create a coherent state in about a minute with the simple, but powerful steps of the Quick Coherence® Technique. Using the power of your heart to balance thoughts and emotions, you can achieve energy, mental clarity and feel better fast, no matter where you are. Use Quick Coherence especially when you begin feeling a draining emotion such as frustration, irritation, anxiety or anger. QC will allow you to Find a feeling of ease and inner harmony that’s reflected in more balanced heart rhythms, facilitating brain function and more access to higher intelligence.

The Quick Coherence® Technique helps you create a coherent state, offering access to your heart’s intelligence. It uses the power of your heart to balance thoughts and emotions, helping you to achieve a neutral, poised state for clear thinking. It is a powerful technique that connects you with your energetic heart zone to help you release stress, balance your emotions and feel better fast.  I’ve found that the Quick Coherence® Technique is easy to learn, has solid science to back up its value, and is a very effective tool for reducing stress in your life.

There are three steps:

Step 1: Heart Focus. Focus your attention on the area around your heart, the area in the center of your chest. The first couple of times you try it, place your hand over the center of your chest to help keep your attention in the heart area.

Step 2: Heart Breathing. Breathe deeply but normally and feel as if your breath is coming in and going out through your heart area. As you inhale, feel as if your breath is flowing in through the heart, and as you exhale, feel it leaving through this area. Breathe slowly and casually, a little deeper than normal. Continue breathing with ease until you find a natural inner rhythm that feels good to you.

Step 3: Heart Feeling. As you maintain your heart focus and heart breathing, activate a positive feeling. Recall a positive feeling, a time when you felt good inside, and try to re-experience the feeling. It may be a memory of your family or your children when they were young.  One of the easiest ways to generate a positive, heart-based feeling is to remember a special place you’ve been or the love you feel for a close friend or family member or treasured pet. This is the most important step.

Quick Coherence® is especially useful when you start to feel a draining emotion such as frustration, irritation, anxiety or stress. Using Quick Coherence at the onset of less intense negative emotions can keep them from escalating into something worse. This technique is especially useful after you’ve had an emotional blowup to bring yourself back into balance quickly.

You can do the Quick Coherence® Technique anytime, anywhere and no one will know you’re doing it. In less than a minute, it creates positive changes in your heart rhythms, sending powerful signals to the brain that can improve how you’re feeling. Apply this one-minute technique first thing in the morning, before or during phone calls or meetings, in the middle of a difficult conversation, when you feel overwhelmed or pressed for time, or anytime you simply want to practice increasing your coherence. You can also use Quick Coherence whenever you need more coordination, speed and fluidity in your reactions.

I’ve found that this is a deceptively simple technique.  Like many of you will learn, it seems so easy even a child could do it.  It is very effective for children as well as adults.  But don’t be fooled by its simplicity.  It produces amazing results.   Try it on for size and see how it fits you.  If you find you’d like to learn other, related techniques for reducing stress you can learn more by visiting the Institute of HeartMath website.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Do you remember the joke about the guy in New York who is stopped on the street   with the question, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”  The answer, of course, is “practice, practice, practice.”  Well, I don’t think I’ll ever become a great musician and open at Carnegie Hall to a packed house.  But I can practice heart coherence.  It has become a well-used Energy Healing Tool.

When I’m having a bad day things often start to escalate.  I may have slept poorly the night before and wake up with a headache.  My wife is harried and I leave home feeling slightly irritable.  The client I had been hurrying to meet cancels on me.   You know the kind of day I mean.  Each little imbalance seems to contribute to the next.  By the end of the day, I’m about ready to explode and the next person I encounter gets the brunt of my frustration.

When I use the Quick Coherence® Technique, I’m able to head off these “days from hell” before they ever get started.  When I first feel those “ticklings of tension,” as I call them, I whip out my Quick Coherence tool and I can feel my heart and soul relaxing.  As we become more attuned to the rhythms, we begin to learn more about love and how to reduce stress in our relationships.

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Earthing – Stop Killer Stress

April 14, 2012 By 5 Comments

I wrote MenAlive to offer specific tools that were easy to learn and use, scientifically sound, and effective in preventing and treating stress that harms us all.  The emerging field of Energy Healing offers many different approaches.  After reviewing the field, I chose to offer four:  Earthing, Heart Coherence, Attachment Love, and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).  In this article I will provide an overview of Earthing.

The basic idea of “Earthing” has been with us for a long time.  Throughout history, humans have strolled, sat, stood, and slept on the ground—the skin of our bodies touching the skin of the Earth—oblivious to the fact that such physical contact transfers natural electrical energy to the body.  Modern lifestyle has disconnected us from the Earth’s energy, making us more vulnerable to stress and illness.

Many health-enhancing discoveries are made by regular people who put two-and-two together and come up with an insight that is obvious and simple, but one had thought of before.  Clint Ober, who “discovered” Earthing, is one of those guys.  He grew up on a farm in the Midwest.  As he remembers his early years he ways he chased cows, baled hay, and spent long summer days walking barefoot up and down long rows of beets and beans pulling weeds.  When he grew up he worked in the cable T.V. field.   He reflected on his years in television and cable and some thoughts began to come together.  “Before there was cable, you commonly had lots of flecks (‘noise,’ we call it) in the TV picture.  Or you had ‘snow’ or lines of all kinds of electromagnetic interference.  In the cable industry, you have to ground and shield the entire cable system in every home to prevent extraneous electromagnetic signals and fields from interfering with the transmission carried through the cable.  That’s how you provide the viewer with a perfect signal and a crisp picture.”

Like many discoveries that revolutionize how we see ourselves and the world, this one was sparked by one of those “aha” experiences that seem to grab our hearts.  “My ‘lightbulb’ went off one day in 1998,” Ober recalls.  “I was sitting on a park bench and watching the passing parade of tourists from all over the world.  At some point, and I don’t know why, my awareness zeroed in on what all these different people were wearing on their feet.  I saw a lot of those running shoes with thick rubber or plastic soles.  I was wearing them as well.  It occurred to me rather innocently that all these people—me included—were insulated from the ground, the electrical surface charge of the Earth beneath our feet.  I started to think about static electricity and wondered if being insulated like that could have some effect on health.”

After years of research he teamed up with cardiologist Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D. and health writer Martin Zucker to write the book, Earthing:  The Most Important Health Discovery Ever? James L. Oschman says that “Earthing seems to do away with or dramatically improve so many health challenges common in this day and age:  Insomnia, the chronic pain of multiple diseases and injuries, exhaustion, stress, anxiety, and premature aging.”

How can Earthing help with so many chronic illnesses?  One answer seems to be that it helps reduce inflammation in our bodies.  Inflammation is now believed to be the underlying cause of more than 80 chronic illnesses, and more than half of Americans suffer currently from one or more of them.  “Inflammation may turn out to be the elusive Holy Grail of medicine—the simple phenomenon that holds the key to sickness and health,” says William Meggs, M.D., Ph.D. of East Carolina University in his book The Inflammation Cure:  How to Combat the Hidden Factor Behind Heart Disease, Arthritis, Asthma, Diabetes & Other Diseases.

Earthing May Be the Original Energy Healing Power Tool 

We live on a planet alive with energy.  Ober, Sinatra, and Zucker describe it as a “six sextillion (that’s a six followed by twenty-one zeroes) metric ton battery that is continually being renewed by solar radiation, lighting, and heat from the molten core at the center.  Just like the Earth, your body is mostly water and minerals, and both are excellent conductors of electrons.  As we move upon the Earth our bodies are able to transfer these electrons from the Earth to our bodies.

Our ancient ancestors knew nothing about the science of how this works, but they had a firm understanding of the importance of being in connection with the Earth.  For them the Earth was sacred.  It was the Mother that brought life to all.  Throughout human history we have tuned into the cycles of Nature for survival and health. Qi (pronounced chee) is a central principle in the long history of Chinese wisdom and is seen as the energy or natural force that fills the universe.  From India’s Vedic tradition the equivalent concept is prana, or “vital force.”

All natural things, plants, animals, and humans, grow and are influenced by the natural cycles of energy coming from the Earth.  Native Americans honored and recognized the importance of being connected to the Earth.  The late Ota Kte (Luther Standing Bear), a writer, educator, and tribal leader from the Lakota Sioux tradition, described our relationship to the Earth this way:  “The old people came literally to love the soil.  They sat on the ground with the feeling of being close to a mothering power.  It was good for the skin to touch the Earth, and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with their bare feet on the sacred Earth.  The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing.”  It is time we reconnected to the power of Earth.

What is Earthing?

Earthing involves coupling your body to the Earth’s eternal and gentle surface energies.  It means walking barefoot outside and/or sitting, working or sleeping inside while connected to a conductive device that delivers the natural healing energy of the Earth into your body.

What isn’t Earthing?

You are not in any sense being electrocuted.  In fact, when you “plug in” the Earthing devices into the electrical outlet, you’re only using the ground plug (for those of us not electrically inclined, that’s the fatter prong at the bottom).  So, there’s no electricity at all, just the connection through the ground plug to the earth.  Earthing is among the most natural and safest things you can do.

What happens?

Your body becomes suffused with negative-charged free electrons abundantly present on the surface of the Earth.  Your body immediately equalizes to the same electric energy level, or potential, as the Earth.

What do you feel?

Sometimes you feel, a warm, tingling sensation and often feelings of ease and well-being.

Will you feel better?

Usually, yes, and often rapidly.  The degree of improvement varies from person to person.  The important thing is to make Earthing a long-term addition to your daily routine, and to do it as much as possible so as to gain maximum benefit.  When Earthing is stopped, symptoms tend to slowly return.

What does Earthing do?

Observations and research indicate the following benefits from Earthing.  We expect many more to emerge with ongoing studies.  Earthing:

  • Defuses the cause of inflammation, and improves or eliminates the symptoms of many inflammation-related disorders.
  • Reduces or eliminates chronic pain.
  • Improves sleep in most cases.
  • Increases energy.
  • Lowers stress and promotes calmness in the body by cooling down the nervous system and stress hormones.
  • Normalizes the body’s biological rhythms.
  • Thins blood and improves blood pressure and flow.
  • Relieves muscle tension and headaches.
  • Reduces or eliminates jet lag.
  • Protects the body against potentially health-disturbing environmental electromagnetic fields (EMFs).
  • Accelerates recovery from intense athletic activity.

Look over the list.  Which benefits would you like to have in your life?  If this were a new wonder drug, you’d probably be willing to pay a lot of money to get these benefits.  But as you’ll see, you can have all of this without the cost or side-effects of “miracle drugs.”

Ready to Start Earthing?  Here’s What You Do. 

This may be the simplest Energy Healing tool you can use.  But remember I warned you that even knowing the scientific basis for Earthing, you may fall into the trap of thinking “This is too easy.  It can’t really help with pain or inflammation.”  But hang in there.  Once you’ve tried it and see the results produced you’ll be glad you stayed with it.  You may not be a world-class professional athlete who will do anything to stay in shape, but you know how good it feels to have all your parts working and how miserable you feel when your body is out of whack.

1.  Take your shoes off.

We intuitively knew what was right when we were young.  As soon as we were out of school we took off our shoes and spent the summer barefoot.  Now science validates our youthful wisdom.  The late Dr. William Rossi, a Massachusetts podiatrist, footwear industry historian, scientist, and author said in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management, “A natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person.  It took four million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering.  Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement heat to foot.” So, when you can take off your shoes.  You’ll walk better and feel better.

But shoes aren’t only bad for our mechanics.  More importantly our modern rubber-soled shoes, made from petrochemicals, prevent us from receiving the healing energies from the Earth.  “The sole (or plantar surface) of the foot is richly covered with some 1,300 nerve endings per square inch,” Dr. Rossi wrote in a 1997 article in Footwear News.  “That’s more than found on any other part of the body of comparable size.”  Getting our feet back in touch with the Earth may be the simplest and best medicine we can take.

2.  When you wear shoes, wear leather-soled shoes.

“Why are so many nerve endings concentrated there?” asks Dr. Rossi. “To keep us ‘in touch’ with the Earth.  The foot is the vital link between the person and the Earth.  The paws of all animals are equally rich in nerve endings.  The Earth is covered with an electromagnetic layer.  It’s this that creates the sensory response in our feet and in the paws of animals.”

Even if we decide to walk barefoot more, there are times when we need to wear shoes to prevent injury and keep our feet warm.  What can we do?  Get back to wearing leather soled shoes.  Dr. Rossi bemoaned the fact that modern shoe soles have separated us from the energy of the Earth and feeling of the ground, which is so important to our health and well-being.  He wrote, “the bottoms of our footwear are virtually ‘deadened.’  A cross section of a shoe reveals several layers:  outsole, midsole, insole filler material, footbed, cushioning, sockliner.  An almost total blockout of sensory response.”

We forget that prior to World War II most everyone wore shoes with leather soles.  But as cheap oil became available, even shoes were made of oil-based products.  Dr. Sinatra notes that even makers of fancy men’s dress shoes are increasingly switching to rubber, plastic, and other non-conductive material, just as casual and work shoes before them.

I still remember wearing moccasins when I was a kid.  I loved playing cowboys and Indians and much preferred to be the Indian.  I recently bought a pair of sturdy moccasins which I can wear.  It turns out that I stumbled on to the original “earth shoe.”  As Ober, Sinatra, and Zucker say in their book, Earthing, “Leather (processed from hides), a conductive material when moist, has been the traditional source of shoes and sandals.  The original lightweight, softsole, heal-less and simple moccasin—a piece of crudely tanned leather that envelops the foot and is fastened on with rawhide thongs—is possibly the closest we have ever come to an ‘ideal’ shoe.  It dates back more than 14,000 years.”

3.  When you’re at home and work, get “barefoot substitutes.”

Another way we can get the health benefits of grounding is by using simple devices that were originally used for research studies on Earthing, but are now available to the public.  They provide inside connectivity to the Earth outside.  They are connected by a wire to a ground rod placed directly in the Earth or plugged into the ground port of a grounded electrical outlet.  They can be utilized during sleep, work, and even while watching TV.

There are Universal chair/desk/mouse/bed/floor mats and pads that can be used interchangeably to fit any setting.  A pad placed on a desktop conducts through your forearms or wrists, on the floor through your feet, and on your chair through your butt.  And on the bed through any part of your body that makes contact with it.  Normal perspiration through layers of clothes, such as a dress, pants, socks, or long sleeves, permits varying degrees of conductivity.  The pad utilizes a metallic fiber mesh and conductors coupled to a wire connected to a grounded outlet in the wall or an outside rod.

I tried it out and it’s pretty nifty.  They include a little test devise that insures that the outlets in the house have a proper ground.  Then you plug into the ground slot.  There’s no connection to the electricity so it’s totally safe.  On their site they have a good description of each product and a question and answer section that tells you what you need to know.  As a special bonus to those in my community, they offer a 5% discount.  Simply type in the word “menalive” when you buy something and you get your discount.  Visit:  http://www.earthing.com/

 

 

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The Four Hidden Energy Healing Secrets Your Doctor Hopes You’ll Never Learn

April 13, 2012 By 2 Comments

I went to medical school at U.C. San Francisco to fulfill my dream to help people.  When my father tried to commit suicide when I was five years old, it started me on a path to understand the human mind, why we suffer, get sick, and more importantly, how we can heal.  But I found that medical school focused more on body parts than the whole human being and left out a whole lot about how we can prevent illness and cure the many problems facing humans during these stressful times.  I dropped out of medical school and went on to get my master’s degree in social work and PhD in International Health.

I first heard about Energy Medicine from Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2000 when I was writing my book The Whole Man Program: Reinvigorating Your Body, Mind, and Spirit After 40. Dr. Oz was one of the top heart surgeons in the world, working at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia Medical Center. I wanted to find someone with the best scientific credentials to help me better understand heart disease so I could help other men. Dr. Oz was a wonderful resource. He is still one of the best surgeons in the world, but he has since expanded his view of what constitutes good medicine.

Dr. Oz is now advocating a kind of medicine that does not require a scalpel. In 2007, Dr. Oz rocked the health world by proclaiming to a worldwide television audience on the largest stage in the world, The Oprah Show, that we are entering a new era of medicine.

“We’re beginning now to understand things that we know in our hearts were true but could not measure. As we get better at understanding how little we know about the body, we begin to realize that the next big frontier in medicine is energy medicine. It’s not the mechanistic parts of the joints moving. It’s not the chemistry of our bodies. It’s understanding, for the first time, how energy influences how we feel.”Dr. Mehmet Oz, November 20, 2007, The Oprah Show

The Encyclopedia of Energy Medicine by Linnie Thomas, with a foreword by James L. Oschman, PhD, author of Energy Medicine:  The Scientific Basis, lists more than 65 different approaches.  I have found four that are simple to learn, easy to practice, and scientifically sound and can help people effectively alleviate stress which is at the root of most of our medical problems.  Most doctors and other health-care practitioners don’t know about these practices.  Since they are easy to learn and inexpensive, they aren’t likely to tell you about them.

Practice #1: Earthing

For millions of years, our ancestors moved across the landscape either barefoot or in moccasins made from the hides of animals. The women walked to gather food. The men walked to find animals for food. We slept connected to the Earth. But in modern times we’ve begun wearing rubber-soled shoes that keep us insulated from the healing energies of the Earth.

According to cardiologist Stephen Sinatra, MD, coauthor of the book Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?, “Earthing involves coupling your body to the Earth’s eternal and gentle surface energies. It means walking barefoot outside and/or sitting, working, or sleeping inside while connected to a conductive device that delivers the natural healing energy of the Earth into your body.”

In some ways, all the major problems we face today—from global warming to peak oil, from obesity to depression, from joblessness to the increase of divorce—could be helped if we were able to re-establish our connection to the Earth. Social psychologist Sam Keen put it simply: “The radical vision of the future rests on the belief that the logic that determines either our survival or our destruction is simple:

1.         The new human vocation is to heal the Earth.

2.         We can only heal what we love.

3.         We can only love what we know.

4.         We can only know what we touch.”

Practice #2: Heart Coherence 

Heart disease is still the major killer of men and women.  Millions of us are taking medications to treat or prevent heart disease. And once again, there is another choice to consider. According to David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD, author of The Instinct to Heal: Curing Stress, Anxiety, and Depression Without Drugs and Without Talk Therapy, there is an intimate connection between the heart and the emotion centers in the brain, and by learning methods that produce heart coherence, we can not only protect our hearts but the rest of the human body as well.

The Institute of HeartMath, founded in 1991 by stress researcher Doc Childre, has been doing cutting-edge research on heart coherence under the leadership of research director Rollin McCraty, PhD. Researchers found that people could maintain extended periods of physiological coherence by actively generating positive emotions.

Practice #3: Attachment Love 

Attachment love is the energy essence of a successful relationship. Attachment love is based on the latest scientific findings that show we are emotionally attached to and dependent on our partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Most of us understand that children need a secure attachment to their parents in order to grow up be healthy and happy. But many of us believe that we outgrow these dependency needs when we become adults. Men, in particular, are taught that maturity means “standing on our own two feet” and not needing others in order to fulfill our needs

Learning how to develop and maintain a deep attachment to a spouse or partner allows us to overcome our isolation, reduce our levels of stress, and keep our love lives growing more fully as we age.

Even practitioners who are familiar with the field of energy healing may be surprised that I view “attachment love” as an essential tool for keeping stress from killing us. But I’ve found it to be essential. Without love, we are lost, and without being securely attached to our mate, love can easily die.

Practice #4: Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)

EFT is a powerful new discovery that combines two well-established sciences so you can benefit from both at the same time:

1.         Mind/body medicine

2.         Acupuncture (without needles)

I learned about emotional freedom techniques (EFT) when an acupuncturist I had gone to for shoulder pain told me about EFT. I wanted help in the worst way, but I couldn’t tolerate the needles. She assured me they wouldn’t hurt (and in fact, they didn’t hurt), but I still got light-headed and nearly passed out. I faint at the sight of blood and needles. You can fully understand why I dropped out of medical school.

I was immediately drawn to EFT because the founder, Gary Craig, was a hands-on kind of guy. He says, “I am neither a psychologist nor a licensed therapist. Rather, I am a Stanford engineering graduate.” EFT has been found to be effective in treating physical as well as emotional problems.

To learn more about these practices, drop me an e-mail Jed@MenAlive.com and I’ll send you a more detailed description of each of these four practices and how you can learn to use them.  My book on energy medicine for men, MenAlive:  Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools.

Photo Credit:  Boz Bros Creative Commons

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