Having trouble staying focused when you need to finish something at work? There are hundreds of products and strategies that claim to help, but you don’t need to spend money to perk yourself up. Here are a few quick tricks to help your regain focus at work:

Whistle While You Work – Classical music was found to help keep the mind focused and clear if it was played at low levels. The repetition and structure of the music helps keep your mind from wandering, which helps you maintain your focus. Imagine a car that is driving on the highway instead of free wheeling out in the woods.

Peppermint Patties – Peppermint, whether tasted or smelled, was found to increase alertness and memory in office workers. It acts as a stimulant for your nervous system without any of the negative side affects. So if you feel yourself starting to slip, pop a peppermint and keep on chugging.

Coffee Up – Coffee is a classic pick-me-up, but recently it has gotten a bad reputation. However, there may be many other benefits besides the hour-long boost to cognition, problem solving, and concentration. Coffee has more antioxidants than any fruit or vegetable, has been shown to prevent diabetes, certain types of cancer, and may even reduce your risk of developing Alzheimer’s! So pour another cup without feeling so guilty.

Source:

Various articles at MensHealth.com

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Money worries got you down during the holidays? Ninety percent of Americans report insomnia during the holidays. But tired people are also depressed, angry, and hopeless people. If you’re looking for how to make your holidays happy – start with getting back to sleep.

Now, most people turn to the medicine cabinet next for one of a slew of sleeping pills and aids. Not so fast.

Prescription sleeping medications are fine to get us through a difficult day or two, but if there are more serious issues -- like stress, anger, and depression -- pills do not address the underlying problems. It’s like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.

However, a combination of prescription sleep aids and cognitive behavioral therapy for sleeping issues cures over 80% of sleeping problems. Cognitive therapy addresses false beliefs about sleep, teaches techniques for lowering anxiety, helps people not to worry all night long, and relax long enough to drift off to sleep.

Here are a few suggestions from sleep experts combining behavioral and cognitive cues to get you back to sleep:

Regular Schedule: Become disciplined and keep a regular bedtime and avoid naps like the plague. Bedtimes aren’t just for children, a regular bedtime cues your brain and body that it is time to rest and sleep. Naps disrupt your body’s schedule and can really mess up your natural sleep/wake cycle.

Watch What You Drink: Do not drink anything with caffeine within four to six hours before bedtime. Also, an alcoholic nightcap will actually keeps you awake.

Don't Remain in Bed: Restrict the amount of time spend in bed waiting for sleep. If you are unable to sleep, don’t toss and turn all night! Get out of bed and go to another room, do something relaxing, and return to bed when sleep is imminent.

Bedroom for Sleeping: Reserve the bedroom for sleep. If you read, watch TV, or work in bed, your body will become confused and will have trouble shutting down at bedtime.

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Road rage is a national concern with over 45,000 Americans admitting to driving too aggressively. With the holidays right around the corner, stress levels are climbing while patience in traffic is declining.

There are several points to keep in mind when you’re on this road during the holidays:

Road Rage Builds: We do know that road rage is the result of a progression of frustrations throughout the day that culminates in an incident on the road.

Immediate Gratification: Especially with the holidays, we want speed and we want it now--quick purchases, fast service, and a speedy getaway. Time urgency concerns explode during the holidays since we have more to do than we have time to do it in -- a perfect environment for creating road rage.

Holiday Party Circuit: Road rage brews in a mixture of sleep deprivation, too much sugar, and a whole lot of alcohol. With the holidays upon us, many of us are hitting the party circuit and we are just drinking and eating things we shouldn't consume, and as a result, we don't sleep well and we hit the roads tired, irritable, and grumpy.

Here are my tips to avoid road rage this holiday season:

Get Comfortable: Make your car comfortable by regulating the temperature, wearing comfortable clothes and having the seat adjusted for your body.

Distract with Music and Breathe Deeply: It is impossible to be upset if you are listening to great music. Take seven or eight slow breaths per minute from the diaphragm and stop stressing out.

Develop Empathy for Other Drivers: When someone is rude on the road, don't assume you know why. Comfort yourself with a positive explanation.

Take Responsibility: We all like to credit events and other people for our reactions rather than remembering that we have control over what goes through our heads.

Limit that Alcohol: Although everyone likes to party, the sugar surge enhances every emotion. Limit your alcohol and sugar during the holidays and get enough sleep. Remember that the holidays are a time of connecting with others, not a time for losing your temper.

Bad For Your Health: Road rage is lethal for your health. Since rage is a central symptom of Type A, it can extremely harmful over time. Road rage floods the body with harmful stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. The body is in perpetual hyper-vigilant mode and you’ll have an especially hard time calming down and controlling yourself. Try some relaxation techniques or just taking some time off to cool down.

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Thinking Yourself To Sleep

September 10, 2009

Dr. Sylvia Gearing, TXA 21 News

Insomnia strikes 30% of Americans according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and this trend has only worsened during these challenging economic times. Millions of us have turned to prescription sleep aides but a new study from the Mayo Clinic now reports that improving your attitudes about sleep may be the real key to getting that elusive good night’s sleep.

Most of my sleepless patients begin by asking me why it is so difficult to get a good night’s sleep. Here are the facts:

• A Lot on Our Minds: Stress is the number one cause of short term sleeping difficulties and the number of people struggling with sleep has doubled since 2001. Forty million Americans struggle with over seventy different types of sleep problems with insomnia being the most common. You cannot sleep if you have adrenaline coursing through your body while you worry about your job, your school, your kids or your money. Such chronic stress can even erode your immune system.
• Sleepless Youth: Insomnia is not confined to the middle aged or the elderly anymore. The use of prescription sleep medications by the 18 to 24 year old crowd has nearly tripled since 1999. Access to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and texting keep us plugged in and sleepless.
• Insomnia is Progressive: Sleep problems are progressive disorders. Unaddressed, short-term insomnia becomes long term, chronic insomnia. We begin to think that we cannot sleep and adopt attitudes that make it more difficult to sleep. We create an entire personal “culture” around why we cannot sleep.

Now that all sounds pretty bad, but it gets worse when we look at how sleeplessness actually affects its victims.

• Thinking Less Effective: A weary mind cannot process the emotions of today and sleep deprived people overreact, snap at others and fail to concentrate and follow through. We end up with muddled minds and compromised careers.
• Psychomotor Reactions are Compromised: We are simply clumsier when we are tired. Chronic insomniacs have four times the incident of car accidents. This phenomenon costs the U.S. up to $100 million a year in indirect costs. Falling asleep at the wheel causes half of all fatal accidents.
• Increased Substance Abuse: People with sleep problems have 2.4 times more alcoholism than average. If they can’t sleep, many people turn to substances like alcohol and drugs to relax. This is dangerous especially since tolerance develops and we use more alcohol to get the same effect.
• Sleepless and Blue: Insomnia does precede depression in most cases, and studies have shown that if you deprive a normal person of just two hours a night for five nights that they will begin to show symptoms of depression. Up to 90% of depressed patients have insomnia, and insomniacs have 35 times the rate of depression when compared to good sleepers.

The good news is that you can improve your sleeping habits by simply changing how you think!

When insomnia develops, it is often because of temporary circumstances that cause transient sleeplessness. We begin to believe we cannot sleep on our own and with $300 million spent on marketing last year by the top makers of sleep medications, we are often persuaded to take a pill. Unfortunately, experts are now reporting that medication may be more like a band-aid. The crisis may pass but our underlying attitudes and habits have shifted and are never addressed.

Are you ready to take the first step? Here’s what you should do:

Filling our minds with catastrophic outcomes keeps us up at night. The antidote, other than sleeping pills, is to focus on shifting your thinking from stressed to more logical, realistic thinking that is calming. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps you to control or eliminate worrisome thoughts about current stresses and about sleep issues. Remember that 70 to 80% of people with chronic insomnia seem to benefit significantly from CBT. It is natural, reasonably priced and lasting.

Here is an example of CBT steps:

• Step One: Catastrophic Beliefs. Think of a current stressor that is troubling you. List the future-threat catastrophic thoughts that were produced by this adverse situation, and then record all the thoughts and emotions that you experienced. These catastrophic beliefs often “chain together”, meaning that one catastrophic belief will provoke and flow into another catastrophic belief. The downward spiral is difficult to escape.
• Step Two: How Likely Are Your Fears? Most of us worry about what bad outcomes could occur without any concern about likelihood. The key to ending your catastrophizing is to break free of the future-threat beliefs. The best way to do that is to emphasize what you do know as fact. Usually, the only solid fact in the catastrophizing chain is the original adverse event that started it. The rest is guesswork and supposition. Use that fact to estimate the probabilities of your worst-case fears. Just how likely is it that all of the awful events in your negative chain actually will happen? Try to estimate a numerical probability of the likelihood that each event in the chain will occur. Is it 75%? Is it 50%? Is it one in a million?
• Step Three: Best-Case Beliefs. Generate a best-case alternative for each of your worst-case outcomes. This forces you to escape your worst-case scenario thinking, at least temporarily. You are now beginning to think logically and to solve the problem. Suddenly, when you take a break from catastrophic thinking, you will be better able to create the positive outcomes because you’re not dwelling exclusively on the catastrophic outcomes.
• Step Four: Focus on Realistic Outcomes. Often, your identification of the most likely outcomes will be negative, since your mind is already thinking negatively. When you focus on the more realistic probabilities of bad things happening (1 in 10 million), and then compare those probabilities to the odds of good outcomes occurring (such as 50% to 70%), your thinking and mood will automatically shift to the positive. Avoid catastrophic thinking by filling your mind with realistic, positive outcomes with a high probability of occurring. You will then be ready to tackle the problem creatively and forcefully.
• Step Five: Pro-Active Solutions. Now it is time to generate the realistic action steps you can take to remediate the problem. Relax, breath deeply and begin to focus on concrete actions that are reasonably implemented to solve the problem. Implement as soon as possible. Remain calm. Again, stay away from catastrophic thinking since it is just a distraction from solving the problem and is a complete waste of your mental energy. The positive solution is at hand. You just need to problem solve to generate it.

Sources:

“Cost Effective Ways to Fight Insomnia” in the June 6th, 2009 New York Times

“Get A Great Night’s Sleep Every Night” from Good Housekeeping

American Academy of Sleep Medicine

“Insomnia Treatment: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy instead of Sleeping Pills” from MayoClinic.com

“Suffer From Insomnia? Try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” from U.S. News and World Report

“The Resilience Factor” by Karen Reivich, Ph.D. and Andrew Shattle, Ph.D.

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Teen Sleep Crisis: How Sleep Loss Causes Depression

June 11, 2009

Dr. Sylvia Gearing, TXA 21 News

Most of us as parents struggle with getting our teenagers to bed on time. Sports, school and socializing all postpone bedtime in a busy teen’s life but a major new study now reports that sleep loss can be dangerous. A new study of 15,000 teens sends some serious warnings to American parents.

This “just released” study from Columbia University is the first to examine the direct effect of sleep loss on the emotional health of an adolescent.

• More Depression: Teens whose parents allow them to stay up past midnight on school nights are 42% more likely to be depressed than teens in bed by 10 P.M.
• Suicidal Thinking: Less sleep can contribute to suicidal thinking. Kids who stay up late are 30% more likely to have suicidal thoughts in the past year.
• Underestimates of Current Teen Distress: These statistics may underrate the severity of teen distress. With social networking sites and smart phones, kids are more active into the night and often refuse to comply with parental commands. It is easy to play on your iPhone into the next morning!

You may be wondering why lack of sleep is such a big deal for kids. There are a variety of problems when kids don’t get enough sleep:

• Psychological Weakness: Kids who get less sleep are more impulsive, process their environment less accurately, become more helpless and descend into ineffectiveness.
• Slippage of Grades: Academics are a huge problem for sleep-deprived kids — the less focus you have, the more distracted you are, and the less effectively you integrate new knowledge.
• Loss of Emotional Stability: Even if they can tolerate sleep loss and still make grades, there is a psychological price that is paid in interpersonal diplomacy, regulation of emotions, and a general build up of frustration.
• Obesity: Obesity is highly correlated with sleep loss. Teens are less likely to work out and eat moderately when they’re exhausted.
• Driving Safety: Most fatal teen driving accidents involve sleep loss. Since kids need more sleep than adults, they are particularly vulnerable to carelessness on the road and falling asleep at the wheel.

There are a number of ways to get kids to go to sleep earlier. Here are a few ideas:

If you want to know how to get your kids to sleep beyond these tips, the bad news is that there is no magic solution. There really is only one way to get your kids to bed:

• Set Strong Limits: High school and college age kids average around 6.1 hours of sleep a night when they need 9.25 hours a night, on average. There is no way around it – parents must set stronger limits so their kids will sleep more! Your kids will have to experience that disappointment, but in the end you will also see improved performance both in the classroom and on the field.
• Quick Emotional Benefits: Beyond the obvious benefits in school, adequate sleep can have a tremendous effect on your child’s mental health. Everything from mood to concentration to safety in the car can be improved. Even behavioral and academic problems can disappear with adequate amounts of sleep.

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