You breathe slowly in for about 15 seconds, hold breath for about 10 seconds and breathe out for about 35 seconds - mileage may vary. For five minutes.
The impact is not as fundamental and profound as with dedicated daily meditation but it does the trick and actually builds the basis required for actually sitting down and doing more subtle mental work.
Cheers
Homoeopathy has also been discredited, the mind is full of corners the science cannot really explain.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
Programming, or what they call "re-framing" works to some extent, by "unlearning" some wrong concepts acquired through social conditioning and biased perceptions, by re-framing (transforming) them into more closely related to actual reality. Anchoring is already crap (but use of amulets and "things of power" is exactly this). So are the supposed correlations between looking patterns and modes of thinking (while naive people (children) some times show such correlations).
The core ideas of early NLP, including re-framing, were nothing new. The prophets of old times seemingly did exactly this - they succeeded in re-framing of traditional views and beliefs.
The later "technique" stuff, is nonsense. It apparently worked because hypocrisy, manipulations, reading and use of so-called body language are as old as humanity. Again, priests of any kind are famous practitioners of such manipulative techniques. Nowadays businessmen and politicians are using similar tricks, as if we are still in ignorant middle ages.)
By the end of 1980, the collaboration between Bandler and Grinder ended. [...] In July 1996 and January 1997, Bandler instituted a further two civil actions against Grinder and his company, numerous other prominent figures in NLP and 200 further initially unnamed persons. [...] On this matter Stollznow (2010) comments, "[i]ronically, Bandler and Grinder feuded in the 1980s over trademark and theory disputes. Tellingly, none of their myriad of NLP models, pillars, and principles helped these founders to resolve their personal and professional conflicts."
It may not be a very scientific rebuttal, but I always find that interesting. (Kinda similar to how psychics never win the lottery.)
It's true that that most of the NLP community revolves around cargo culting a few of these processes though (which most likely indeed aren't scientifically valid.)
Saying that that discredits NLP as a whole is roughly equivalent to saying a programming language is inherently bad because a lot of shitty software has been written in it though.
It's been shown¹ that red muscle takes away kynurene, which is produced by stress, can enter the brain, and appears to be able to trigger depression and other mental health issues if it is at elevated levels for longer periods:
> “Our initial research hypothesis was that trained muscle would produce a substance with beneficial effects on the brain. We actually found the opposite: well-trained muscle produces an enzyme that purges the body of harmful substances. So in this context the muscle’s function is reminiscent of that of the kidney or the liver,” says Jorge Ruas, principal investigator at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet.
> The researchers discovered that mice with higher levels of PGC-1a1 in muscle also had higher levels of enzymes called KAT. KATs convert a substance formed during stress (kynurenine) into kynurenic acid, a substance that is not able to pass from the blood to the brain. The exact function of kynurenine is not known, but high levels of kynurenine can be measured in patients with mental illness.
Recently the same research group also discovered that kynurenic acid turns white fat (the unhealthy type) into beige fat (more similar to brown fat, which is healthier).
¹ http://ki.se/en/news/how-physical-exercise-protects-the-brai...
'listening to that one song -- "Weightless" -- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in _their usual physiological resting rates'
Normally I wouldn't attack something that someone else feels is helping (even placebos can be helpful for some people), but this is the top comment.
Maybe breathing in a consistent rhythm to get a coherent heart rate variability (HRV) is the sole magic behind meditation, HeartMath, etc?
Here is a good TEDx talk by Alan Watkins on HRV: https://youtu.be/Q_fFattg8N0 (there is also a part 1, but part 2 has the good demo)
I believe the "coherent" HRV curve they claim brings all these benefits is simply the effect of respiratory sinus arrythmia (why your heartrate decreases when you breathe in) while breathing at a very regular interval—the HRV curve just happens to be a good indicator of how regularly you're breathing.
Never hurts to carry around a few 200mg L-Theanine capsules though.
I'm not sure if it's applicable to all, just something that I feel helps me a lot.
I've given up and started again on all of these multiple times to confirm each one. My body seems to have a sensitive withdrawal reaction. I notice symptoms if I eat most of those foods too regularly and then mess up the schedule, and a bad reaction if I stop all together within a day or so. I'm super curious about it medically but don't really have time to work with a doctor and learn why all these foods cause similar reactions. I'll just chalk it up to celiac.
Given other people's stuffy noses and bad digestion, I believe a lot of people have foods that are no good for them. I highly recommend elimination diets. The less I eat, the better I feel. I discovered decongestants a year or two ago, which makes life a lot more bearable when I mess up and eat the wrong thing, but I don't want to rely on that stuff to feel normal when I could just not eat the garbage I was eating.
Wrote a quick post about coffee alternatives https://dailyhealthpoints.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/healthy-a...
Also, your morning fog may simply be early withdrawal symptoms.
But if they do, or if they give an ultimatum,then those places/trainers suck. If you have valid reason to not spar and they still say "come on" leave the gym because it's not healthy.
I began reading Transforming Stress and in two days it has already changed everything my life. I have been going through post-traumatic stress and my abilities to concentrate and function have been crippled. Horrible panic attacks, painful migraines, irrational fear and despair are beginning to wane.
I received the emWave2 today, best $250 I have ever spent. I am bringing up my coherence and the horrible chest pains have been going down in just 3 20min sessions of using the device. I might finally be able to program after all.
If you're interested in understanding more about the interplay between experiences, emotions, physiology and genetics, I can strongly recommend his book, The Biology of Belief [2], and his many interviews and presentations that can be found on YouTube.
His research and writing focuses on the notion that subconscious beliefs are the major influence on our perceptions, which is why for some of us, experiences can trigger pathological health conditions like anxiety and depression, along with auto-immune illnesses and other chronic illnesses that result from chronic stress (which can include cardiovascular disease and other serious conditions).
Inspired by this book, I've had great success improving my emotional and physiological health by undertaking practices that focus on subconscious beliefs. They all seek to achieve similar results to NLP (congruence, non-reactivity, etc), but I've found these ones to be more effective:
- Self Clearing [3]
- Holotropic Breathwork [4]
- Dolores Cannon Hypnosis [5]
All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously.
I can also recommend Stoic Philosophy [6], but for me these practices are tools and systems that enable concepts from stoicism to be implemented most effectively.
[1] https://www.heartmath.org/articles-of-the-heart/personal-dev...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-Unleashing-Consciousne...
[3] http://clearyourshit.com/self-clearing-foundations-1/
[4] http://www.holotropic.com/about.shtml
[5] http://www.dolorescannon.com/about-qhht
[6] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practi...
Going through hard times, and seeing how fragile mental wellbeing can be, has given me a great appreciation for the work that these doctors are doing. I'm grateful you took the time to share.
I think there's definitely some truth to this. Here's a concrete example from my life: I have anxiety in crowded grocery stores, which hampers my ability to shop for food and eat healthy. On the surface, thats "social anxiety", but digging deeper, for me it's about some deeper baggage I have about being ignored. The people intruding my space at the supermarket are activating this subconscious fear/pain because they seem to "ignore" my physical presence.
Very fascinating how the layers of psychology/physiology meet. I will look into Liptons work some more.
I have some very deep-seated subconscious beliefs that have really affected my life for the worse.
Meditation has helped me be aware of them and their nature, but I still need to figure out how to fight back.
Yes, throwing away your critical eye towards the world in favor of starry-eyed credulity can certainly kick the placebo effect into overdrive. If you're constantly questioning whether something is working, it will probably not feel like it's working, whereas if you wholeheartedly believe, you will likely carry that through into your perceptions. This of course has nothing to do with the actual efficacy, it's just that you're selectively perceiving so as to confirm your pre-existing notions; when the object of all of this effort is your own mental state this can be confused with the technique itself being effective. In reality, people like being successful, and feeling like you are winning at one thing makes you more likely to think you can win at other things. Rinse repeat. Confirmation bias is lovely when you can weaponize it like this. The sad thing is you have to kill the most valuable part of your human self in the process. RIP.
The placebo effect is certainly relevant in this discussion, and unfortunately it partly comes down to definition. Some try to claim the placebo means there is no tangible improvement in physiology, just an imaginary feeling of wellbeing. If that's your definition, then I'm guarding against that with thorough lab testing of all accessible physiological indicators, as described below. If your definition of the placebo effect is that there is a real physiological improvement brought about by emotional processes, then I agree with you, and the techniques I've used are just tools for bringing about a more profound placebo effect, which is fine, as long as it leads to a physiological improvement, which seems to be happening for me.
> If you're constantly questioning whether something is working, it will probably not feel like it's working, whereas if you wholeheartedly believe, you will likely carry that through into your perceptions.
For me it's sometimes been the opposite; techniques that I hoped and deeply believed would be effective turned out to do little, and techniques that I had little expectation of effectiveness turned out to make a big difference. Not always though. There's not really much of a pattern. And there's no pattern to this that aligns with practices being "mainstream" or "alternative". I've had positive and negative experiences with treatments/practices from both sides.
But the core point – that employing effective techniques to change unhealthy subconscious beliefs can reduce unhealthy emotions (including anxiety/depression) in the short term and reduce stress-related illness in the long term – has rung true for me and many others. And it doesn't take much reading through scientific studies on the topic, or even just thinking about it from an evolutionary point of view, to realise that it's unsurprising and uncontroversial that this could be the case. The only question is, what techniques are effective. I've listed the ones that worked for me. Different ones work better for others.
> The sad thing is you have to kill the most valuable part of your human self in the process. RIP.
It'd be worth your while to contemplate what motivates you to say something so mean-spirited.
Doing the reverse of empowering your intelligence, and empowering your confirmation bias (as comment parent), tribalism (as Donald Trump/neo-nationalists everywhere), or credulity (as meditationists/"everything is connected maaaaaan" types), is worse than suicide. You're using the power of your brain to enhance its flaws and create a perverted version of a human, progressing, but in the opposite direction; becoming stronger, but in a domain that should be avoided at all costs.
This is somewhat like the process of building a good military sniper by progressively dehumanizing them, stripping them of their empathy and agency in order to use them as an efficient killing machine. But worse, because you can think yourself out of that -- you can't think yourself out of a totally broken mind, and the more intelligent you are, the better you are at keeping yourself broken.
Here's what I'm doing so far:
- Reading a wide variety of scientific sources across the spectrum of thought on these matters: Dr Bruce Lipton - pioneering stem cell biologist, now author and speaker; Rudy Tanzi - Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and researcher behind some of the biggest recent breakthroughs in Alzheimer's research; Lissa Rankin - mainstream physician and author; Bernardo Kastrup - PhD scientist, philosopher, author; Sir Roger Penrose - Physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science; Sam Harris - Neuroscientist/Atheist/Skeptic movement icon; Richard Dawkins - biologist & father of the modern Skeptic movement; Jerry Coyne of https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/; http://www.quackwatch.com/; https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/; Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. - Biologist and Author. Karl Popper - philosopher of science and leading contributor to The Scientific Method. Comparing points of view from all these sources with each other and with my own experiences and what I can establish from publicly available studies in science journals and papers published via NCBI.
- Conducting a variety of lab tests of physiological metrics over almost 10 years, including: blood pressure (was consistently high for a few months about 10 years ago, went low for an extended period around 5-6 years ago, and has been consistently optimal for the past 2 years); cholesterol (improving), blood sugar (normalising), iron & zinc (improving), hormones eg adrenaline, cortisol, thyroid (normalising), inflammation (reducing), white blood cell count (improving).
- Collaborating with acquaintances who have been afflicted with similar illnesses (chronic fatigue, auto-immune illness, depression, etc), particularly those who are strongly scientific/rational in their worldviews. Admittedly my own scientific background is merely limited to high-school chemistry/physics/advanced math, a career as a software developer (self-taught), several years working in the fields of agricultural science and secondary science education, and an upbringing by an electronics engineer father and a mainstream medical practitioner mother. But my most trusted fellow travellers in this journey are minimum Master's-degree qualified in science (one in biotech, one computer science), and are widely reputed as being among the best in their field.
But I sincerely want to be as effective as is humanly possible at avoiding delusion and finding truth; my qualify of life depends on it. Please be forthcoming with any suggestions.
By the way, your challenge is to refute anything I've said without succumbing to the "beg the question" fallacy. Ideally you'll avoid all the other fallacies too (particularly Ad Hominem), but "beg the question" is the trickiest and most important to avoid in this debate.
I notice you don't mention double blinding any of these interventions. Have you tried that? How would you try that for something crypto-religious like meditation?
The only thing that's helped (I am trying to fix without medication) are the tools from HeartMath. Their "Transforming Stress" book has been a god send. It's not a get well fast type thing, but I've been practicing the sessions daily for a month now and am in much better control of my stress and anxiety.
I have practiced Tai Chi, meditation, and visualization via NLP techniques in the past. I'm not a novice when it comes to the types of techniques that HeartMath teaches. However, the way theirs are structured are the most effective I've found for dealing with these issues.
If you're going through hard times I highly recommend using their tools.