After months of work the research article I was working on has been published in Frontiers in Psychiatry. The article describes a new model for stress by breaking stress down into several components. These components are:
Difficulty
Unease
Sympathetic Activation (SMP)
Parasympathetic Activation (PMP)
Reserves
These components affect how we experience the world and how we respond to it. Unease has more influence and so learning to modulate unease is the most important part of dealing with stress.
I have not posted here for awhile because I am working on a couple of research articles, as well as developing apps and a training program. Those have been absorbing all the time and energy I have to spare and will continue to do so for the next couple of months.
After those projects are completed this site will be redone to include new material and to make it more organized. Thanks for your patience.
Our team’s work was just published. We showed that errors in high-stress situations can be reduced by using techniques to increase parasympathetic activity under stress.
I had taken this video down because I have some important revisions to make, however I received a few requests from people who wanted to review it. So I am reposting it. I hope to get the revisions done by next month.
Stress and Resilience
The video here introduces a model of stress, strain, and resilience. It breaks stress down into three components, pressure, strain and feeling, and the processes from which those components arise, assessment, activation and appraisal. It then introduces some methods for developing resilience. Continue reading Stress and Resilience v1→
This is a TED talk from Cathy O’Neill, author of Weapons of Math Destruction.
I think she makes an important critique of how algorithms are too often used to rate people in absurdly biased ways with no accountability on the part of those who create the algorithms and profit from their use. In my field, medicine, the “patient satisfaction” scores are a perfect example of this perversion.
This is a summary of what we covered in the last class on changing habits. I was impressed by how engaged people were and how many ideas they shared. (I apologize for the delay in posting.)
Everyone caught on to the concepts well. We could all see how the various types of stress, i.e. pressure from demands, distress from negative emotions, and strain from sympathetic activation could all make it difficult to change a habit. With this framework people came up with ideas for reducing these different components in order to make developing a healthy habit easier and more successful.
One of the more subtle and more important points that I want to emphasize here is how the feedback between distress from negative emotions and sympathetic activation can be a major source of difficulty.
A short note to communicate why I haven’t posted anything in a few weeks.
I have been developing materials for the International Performance, Resilience and Efficiency Program , iPREP. They use scientifically based training methods to train law enforcement officers and first-responders to make more effective decisions under extreme stress. They are an awesome team and I am excited to be working with them.
I have also been working on an iOS app which just got approved by Apple. The app is HRV Trace and it uses data from a chest-strap heart rate monitor to augment stress-management and resilience training. HRV Trace is being used by the iPREP team as a part of their training program.
We had a lot of discussion in class. Many people talked about how much difficulty they had making a habit of exercising or of avoiding certain eating habits. We came up with some points to help with these.
Some principles involved in changing a habit are:
The habit reduces discontent and that is what reinforces the behavior. The greater the reduction in discontent and the faster the reduction the greater the reinforcement.
Negative emotions increase discontent and so we need to find ways of dealing with them that do not involve the habit we want to change.
Pressure tends to increase discontent, so if the habit causes an increase in pressure then the discontent will come back quickly. We need to make sure that we find new habits that decrease pressure in the long run.
Sympathetic arousal also tends to increase discontent. So when we are feeling tense, stressed or in pain we may be more likely to engage in the habit. We need to work on healthier ways to deal with those.
We need to practice experiencing discontent without having our body respond with tension or strain. We develop discontent tolerance.
Many of us have habits we think we would be better without. Usually we have tried to change those, but too often without long term success. In this and the next two classes we will be looking at habits, the ways that habits develop, and methods and techniques for changing habits effectively and sustainably.
While this story from the CS Monitor is not directly related to health, it has huge implications for public health. And the fact that there are really smart people, working really hard at being helpful gives me a lot of hope.
I am taking a risk here and using a summary of a report rather than digging into the report itself. However, the summary is pretty damning and explains why medical care costs so much. (If I find that the article has misrepresented the death rates between drug group and placebo then I will post a correction.)
This is for the mindfulness class this week. We are going to explore some principles and methods for making unhelpful conversations more effective.
Unhelpful Conversations
We all have conversations which are unhelpful and unpleasant. These conversations often repeat themselves, with consistently unhelpful and unpleasant results.
We try to make the conversations pleasant. So we avoid the real issues and the conversation is pleasant, but still unhelpful.
Or we avoid the conversations altogether, which is still unhelpful.
When I was in college my Japanese professor had an anecdote on his door. The gist was that the purpose of an education was to be able to see through bullshit.
