This wordpress.com site is going well, but I’d like a little more control over the configuration, and I also want to start future-proofing what I might want to do with the blog. So, I have decided to migrate this over … Continue reading
Things can feel like they are getting on top of you for many reasons. From the news of death of a loved one or loss of a job – from the collapse of a relationship to financial problems. When you are … Continue reading
The feeling that comes after successfully accomplishing your mission is usually one of satisfaction with a job well done. However, we can sometimes be left wondering, “what now?” Getting yourself motivated after reaching your goals can be hard. In this … Continue reading
During a 27km, 2 hour 45 minute run today as part of my build up to the Great Barrier Island Marathon on October 13, I had plenty of time to think about the most important things I’ve learned about running … Continue reading
In this week’s update on the runrunlive podcast , I give a heads-up on how chronic stress can delay your recovery from an intense workout.
Or you can listen to it here: I’m at the start, after the intro music:
Back in 2009 I was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Society Fellow based at the National Institute of Mental Health in Tokyo. The application process for Fellowships like this can be a bit tricky, but the payoff in the experience and contacts you gain is enormous, both professional and culturally. In this guest blogpost at Profellow.com, I outline some tips for getting through a Fellowship application process. I hope you find them useful.
If you want to optimise your recovery from a hard workout, you need to watch the levels of stress in your daily life. So says the latest research out of the Yale Stress Centre this month. You might use your workout as an outlet for the stresses and strains that you experience in your daily life, or when your job feels like it is getting on top of you. And exercise is a powerful tool in the quest to reduce stress. However, if you get into that workout with high levels of stress, it will take you longer to recover.
This small but interesting study seems to show that during the hour following a lower body heavy resistance exercise task to failure, students with higher chronic stress scores took longer to recover their maximum strength than their lower stressed colleagues. The lower stressed students had regained 60% of their leg strength after 60 minutes – the more stressed students had regained an average of only 38% of their leg strength at the same measurement point. This effect seemed to hold, even when other possible influences such as fitness, workload and training experience were controlled.
The authors hypothesise that the underlying level of chronic stress pre-workout influences the inflammatory response in the body such that it becomes inadequate to facilitate the repair caused by the acute physiological stress of a tough workout. But the differences are probably due to more than just hormonal control of the inflammatory response. Stress means that we are more likely to sleep worse, eat less optimally and generally not take as good care of ourselves – all these factors can influence how the body heals itself. These are likely to be bi-directional relationships too.
So if you’re stressed and need to workout, you can still go ahead because exercise is an excellent stress-reduction too. But remember, that you’re likely to recover better if you can manage your stress in other ways too before you start to work out. Mindfulness techniques, and focusing on your breathing to influence your parasympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system responsible for promoting a calm response) are fantastic ways to bring down the physiological stress indicators in your body. You can see here and here for more tips on that, but here is a simple breathing exercise to try to help bring down your stress levels before you workout:
Getting enough sleep is good for you in so many ways. For example, getting enough sleep is necessary to help you recover and repair muscles after your workouts. Another function of sleep may be demonstrated by the many accounts of how it has helped people to come up with some innovative and creative solutions to problems they were wrestling with, whether consciously or not.
A conversation with Rachel on Twitter made me reflect on research that I knew about on how sleep can help to promote insight and problem solving. Insight signifies a restructuring that leads to a sudden gain of knowledge that is explicit and able to be articulated, and that leads to a change in behaviour. Sleep seems to have the effect of consolidating recent memories and could therefore allow insight by changing or shuffling their representational structures. This reconfiguration could underlie the Aha! moment that we sometimes have when we wake – the problem that we went to bed thinking about now seems to have a possible solution.
In one experiment, researchers asked participants to transform a sequence of 8 digits to a new sequence by applying two simple rules. As the participants got practice at the task, they got faster at it. However, unbeknownst to the participants, there was an additional ‘hidden’ rule which wasn’t mentioned, and was therefore processed at an implicit level of awareness. The participants seem to get this hidden rule suddenly, or develop insight into it, and this was shown by a sudden shift in moving from a sequential, iterative response to jumping to the final solution in advance. Once the participants had training on the task, the training period was followed by 8 hour intervals of either 8 hours of nocturnal sleep, 8 hours of nocturnal wakefulness or 8 hours of daytime wakefulness.
When tested again on blocks of the learning tasks those participants who had slept seemed show insight into the hidden rule at almost double the probability of the wakefulness groups. Sleep seems to facilitate insight into rules that explicitly hidden from us – we seem to be able to make the leap to solve the problem much better once we have slept. Dreams seem like they might be important in this process in that they might help to reformulate problems in ways we can’t fathom when we are awake. They may help us to reconceptualise the problems before us, the issues we are wrestling with in different ways, enabling insight.
So, the next time you are up working late on a problem, and the solution isn’t coming to you, go to bed and get some sleep. Chances are that you’re more likely to have found a way forward after having slept than staying up all night continuing to work on the problem. And your body will love you for it too.
It’s true that the way people feel think and decide can be altered by their circumstances. This field of ’embodied cognition’ explores the theory that a person’s physical experiences subtly and unconsciously influence their psychological states. Underpinning this is the notion that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind. In practice, what this means is that our cognition, our representation and understanding of our world is not entirely defined by what is going on in our brains in terms of actual physical activity. Rather, our experiences in the physical world are an important influence. It is also related to the idea that the brain circuits responsible for abstract thinking are closely tied to those circuits that analyze and process sensory experiences received from the body — and its role in how we think and feel about our world.
This approach has important implications. By expanding the resources available to solve a task from simply the brain to include the body and the brain circuits that processes sensory information received perceptual and motor systems, we’ve opened up the possibility that we can solve a task in a very different way than a brain by itself might solve the task. A classic example that is often cited is the baseball outfielder problem where the informational problem of catching the ball is solved by moving in a particular way – a solution that requires both the body and the brain.
Recently, researchers used an adapted embodied cognition approach to examine whether seemingly unrelated experiences affect individuals’ preferences for stability. Although this study is still in press, a write-up about it can be found here and in a recent edition of The Economist. The researchers split a group in two, assigning one half to a slightly wobbly table and chair, while others had stable furniture. When asked to rate the stability of four celebrity couples, those in the ‘wobbly’ group rated the couple as significantly less stable that the ‘non-wobbly furniture’ group. Moreover, when asked to rate their preferences for traits in potential romantic partners (all participants were romantically unattached), those in the ‘wobbly’ group said that they valued stability in their own relationships more highly to a statistically significant level.
It seems that even a small amount of wobbliness in your physical environment seems to be able to influence the desire for more stable surroundings, including potential partner choice. So the next time you find yourself making seemingly strange decisions that you are having trouble understanding, ask yourself how much you are being affected by the context you find yourself in. And perhaps change your context if you want to experience a different outcome.
If weight loss is your goal, you may have been discouraged by the amount of exercise you might need to commit to in order to make a meaningful difference. It’s the sort if thing that can put you off your workout altogether if you’re not careful. Not any more. This research seems to indicate that 30 minutes of exercise is just as effective as 60 minutes in promoting weight loss.
In a sample of 60 heavy – but healthy – men over 13 weeks, half the group were set to exercise for 60 minutes a day wearing a heart rate monitor and a calorie counter, whereas the half of the group only exercised for 30 minutes per day. Both halves of the group had to exercise enough to raise a sweat.
On average, those who exercised for 30 minutes per day lost 3.6kg over the 13 weeks – the average weight loss in the 60 minutes per day exercise group was 2.7kg. Actual fat mass was reduced by similar amounts for both groups – approximately 4kg. A bonus for the 30 minute a day group was that they seemed to burn more calories than expected for the training programme that was set for them. Another key factor was that there did not seem to be any statistically significant changes found in energy intake or non-exercise physical activity that could explain the different responses between the 30 mins v 60 mins exercise per day groups.
A few explanations were put forward by the Danish researchers, though we can’t be certain about any of them. Amongst them, they suggest that perhaps 30 minutes of exercise felt so ‘doable’ that the participants had energy left over to start exercising more intensely within their 30 minute allocation per day.
A feature of this research is that it focuses on a group of moderately but not severely overweight men – a group that now makes up 40% of the Danish male population. It certainly adds data to the general evidence that 30 minutes of aerobic exercise on most days – even if you break that up into smaller chunks – is a worthwhile and beneficial goal to set yourself.
In this week’s update, I give a verbal summary on whether athletic tape that you see on runners and athletes – the brightly colored tape – works to improve recovery or performance. You can also read a verbal report here.
Or you can listen to it here: I’m at the start, right after the intro music:
The runrunlive podcast really is an excellent running information and edutainment resource and has a massive back catalogue. Well worth a listen if you haven’t already tried it.
We’re all busy people, and many of us don’t have time (or are unwilling to make time) to practice being mindful. But we can do this as we engage with activities throughout the day. Here are a couple of exercises to help you to practice being mindful – being involved the present moment – during your morning routine, or around the house.
1) Mindfulness in your morning
Pick something that you do that makes up part of your daily morning routine, such as brushing your teeth, shaving, or having a shower. When you do it, totally focus on what you are doing: the body movements, the taste, the touch, the smell, the sight, the sound etc.
Again and again, your attention will wander. As soon as you realize this has happened, gently acknowledge it, note what distracted you, and bring your attention back to the shower.
2) Mindfulness in domesticity
Pick a chore that you normally try to rush through – one you would usually try to distract yourself from. Or maybe one for which you just ‘grit your teeth’ and try to ‘get through it’. Ironing clothes? Vacuuming floors? Washing dishes? I’m sure you can think f something. Aim to do this domestic task as a mindfulness practice.
Let’s take ironing clothes as an example
If boredom or frustration arises, simply acknowledge that it is there, and bring your attention back to the chore at hand. No matter what you are focusing on, when thoughts arise, acknowledge them, let them be, and bring your attention back to what you are doing. Again and again, your attention will wander. Don’t fight it. As soon as you realize this has happened, gently acknowledge it, note what distracted you, and bring your attention back to your current activity.
(Adapted from Russ Harris’s The Happiness Trap)
I’ve got nothing against cats. Indeed, cats are some of my best friends. But there is an emerging strand of research linking a parasite that cats harbour to all kinds of mental disequilibrium. No, this is true. Let me run you through some of the highlights.
Toxoplasma gondii is a species of parasitic protozoa that has longed been known as the cause of toxoplasmosis. It can be carried by cats (and humans too), and can result in what is usually a minor and self-limiting disease that results in flu-like symptoms. However, it can also be lethal to unborn children, and this is why they say that pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems should avoid cats. Up to a third of people carry the parasite but our immune systems usually cope well enough with it so that very few people actually develop symptoms.
A new study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry seems to add to the evidence that the effects of the Toxoplasma gondii parasite might be far more wide-ranging than we ever imagined. In this admittedly cross-sectional study (which significantly reduces its explanatory appeal), blood serum evidence of having been infected with this parasite was positively related to a history of nonfatal suicidal self-directed violence. Does T.Gondii have a role to play in behaviour that seems to be self-destructive? Our research designs in this area are not yet powerful enough to answer this question, but it does seem worthy of more detailed investigation.
For many years, the theories concerning the influence of T. gondii on human behavior have been considered in the realm of conspiracy and UFO sightings. When the results of this line of research first started to come through, they were considered so bizarre that the data were thought to be flawed. However, this is starting to change as studies investigating its influence starts to move into the mainstream, including its possible influence in triggering episodes of schizophrenia and / or epilepsy. A number of independent studies seem to indicate that T.gondaii infection could be a factor in work and traffic accidents, as it can negatively influence attention and reaction times.
We don’t yet know if most people just carry along with the parasite unaffected, or if it affects some people more than others. Some studies seem to indicate that infection can make rats less fearful, or can even changes human personalities e.g a pattern appeared in infected men: the longer they had been infected, the less conscientious they were.
What we know from this is that sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know. Ideas that can seem outlandish at one point in time can suddenly be mainstream and part of everyday life in a very short period. Evolution, perhaps? Or on a slightly more minor scale, the potential to use probiotics to treat mental illness?
It also tells us that it is sometimes worthwhile taking another look at what explains behaviour that we are struggling to understand. Sometimes the causes may come from places we may never have expected – but this isn’t to let us completely of the hook. I don’t want to hear any ‘the cat made me do it’ excuses.
What we have suspected for some time – that constantly being bombarded with pictures of skinny people – may have a negative impact on our own thoughts, feelings and behaviour after all. Indeed, despite the images of super-thin bodies become omnipresent and infecting more and more of our waking moments, at a population level we are becoming more overweight and obese.
It looks like the kind of comparison that this ubiquitous imagery could encourage has a significant impact. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have found that normal weight teenagers who perceive themselves as fat are more likely to grow up to be fat. This is the first study to look at the relationship between perceived weight and actual weight in a longitudinal study of teenagers and young adults. 1196 normal range weight adolescents were followed up as young adults 11 years later. After controlling for covariates such as age, sex etc, adolescents who perceived themselves as overweight had a significantly larger weight gain into young adulthood that adolescents who perceived themselves as having a normal weight (0.66 BMI units; 3.46cm waist circumference). This was unrelated to levels of physical activity.
Thinking that you are fat as an adolescent – even when you are not – can lead to become significant fatter as an adult. 22% of girls rated themselves as overweight as teens, compared to 9% of boys – this might be due to media focus on body image focusing on girls – especially at the time that these young adults were teens. Worryingly, 59% of girls who felt fat as teens became overweight as adults. If we consider waist circumference, 78% of teens who initially perceived themselves as fat later became overweight as adults.
It’s difficult to know what causes the increase in weight, and it is likely to be complex. We know that stress can cause an increase in weight – the authors suggest that the psychosocial stress of not being your ideal body type (wherever that idea may come from), as well as thinking of yourself as overweight can lead to weight gain. Perhaps another explanation is that seeing yourself as fat can lead to skipping of meals – and we know that dropping breakfast has been linked to obesity through various mechanisms.
The lesson I take away from this is the importance of anchoring our self-perceptions of weight in fact, rather than glossy imagery that we come across every day. This is even more important in the crucial developmental years of adolescence, where we try to understand and balance the plethora of information telling us how we should be adults and how to be acceptable to ourselves and others. Challenging this information, and developing alternate pathways through healthy diet, exercise and mental wellbeing is so important, and is a set of skills that needs to be taught.
Dr Sarb Johal - Complete Coach 