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Category Archives: Mind Building
Your Social Communication Spectrum
Yesterday I was conversing with Rachelle about how to communicate with someone who has what you might call lower than average emotional and social intelligence but is otherwise extremely bright. (It’s not a member of this community by the way, and our interactions are normally short and infrequent.)
Rachelle noted that he, “seems to have no clue about interacting with people.” The rest of our conversation proceeded like this:
Star Trek geekiness aside, the point is that it’s best to present an interface to him that he understands if we are to have any hope of communicating with him. He doesn’t seem to grasp emotional communication, so if we expect compassion or caring from him, we’re only setting ourselves up for disappointment or frustration.
However, if we limit ourselves to a narrower subset of the human communication spectrum, like if we talk to him like we’re speaking to Alexa or Siri, he responds to that perfectly fine. Other people might find such communication too curt or bossy, but he wouldn’t take offense. Being too gentle is more likely to offend him.
Now consider that other people will likely learn to offer a communication interface that they believe will be acceptable to you. If they see you as a compassionate and caring person, they’ll be more willing to open up about their feelings. If they see you as as very logical person, they may seem your rational advice more often.
Where people detect awkwardness and discomfort from you with a certain mode of communication, they’ll be more likely to avoid interfacing with you on that basis. Consequently, you won’t necessarily connect with people as much in the ranges where you convey resistance and discomfort. This means that the range of human communication you typically experience will have some gaps. Other people may communicate a great deal within those gaps, but they’ll probably avoid interfacing with you within certain subranges.
Now when you’re on a path of personal growth, you’re likely to open up and expand your frequency ranges over time. Areas that were once outside your comfort zone may become comfortable for you. Sometimes you may need to communicate and reassure people that you can handle a range that they might think is beyond you. Now and then it’s good to let people know that they won’t offend you or make you feel uncomfortable if they try to interface with you in some part of the spectrum where they may otherwise be cautious or hesitant.
When I was younger, some frequency ranges felt uncomfortable to me, but now I feel a lot more comfortable with them, partly due to deliberate stretching and partly due to racking up more practice.
Many years ago I’d have felt uncomfortable if someone cried while talking about an emotionally vulnerable issue with me. I’d have tried to dodge and escape such conversations, not wanting to go into that range with anyone. Today I feel the opposite. Not only does it not bother me when someone shares something emotionally vulnerable, I tend to see tears as an indication of trust, authenticity, emotional honesty, and depth I feel honored that people trust me as someone they can share their feelings with. Sometimes I even comment that I “love making people cry,” and I’m only half joking when I say that. It’s nice when people feel safe enough to express this range of emotion. I’d actually like it if more people felt comfortable with tears and less embarrassed or stigmatized by them.
Another area that took some practice was learning to communicate about topics you might call spiritual or woo-woo. At first I felt a little hesitant writing about such topics publicly, but as I leaned into this, I gradually felt more at ease, especially as so many people in my audience responded positively and wanted to see more on those topics. Lately we’ve been having some really interesting discussions about the Law of Attraction, manifesting, and the nature of reality in Conscious Growth Club. On this morning’s coaching call, we started testing a new intention experiment to see what, if any, effect it has on us.
Two areas where I’ve had a lot of practice are talking to people about their problems and their desires. People have told me details about all sorts of problems they’ve experienced – financial problems, relationship problems, business problems, family problems, health problems, emotional problems, and more. They’ve also opened up about many different types of desires and needs, including some personal and intimate desires they don’t normally share with other people. So I’ve had plenty of time to become comfortable with this range of communication. I actually find it rewarding to gain this perspective on humanity. One insight I’ll share is that people who are struggling are often a lot more aware of their deficits and less certain about their desires, whereas people who are thriving tend to be more in tune with their desires and less concerned about areas where they aren’t doing so well.
I’ll also note that when you communicate publicly with a wider spectrum, you’re more likely to make someone uncomfortable. It’s hard to avoid stepping outside of someone’s comfort zone sooner or later. One way to deal with this is to back off and restrict your range. I dislike that approach because it makes me feel stunted; it’s harder to feel like I’m being honest if I hold so much back. So instead my approach was to learn to feel comfortable with other people’s discomfort. Then I can write about more topics, knowing that someone may feel uncomfortable with that range of communication, and just accept that it’s going to happen repeatedly. Another useful frame is to also consider that people are choosing to read, watch, or listen to what I publish; it’s not being forced upon them.
In one-on-one conversations, I usually prefer to constrain myself by respecting someone else’s comfort zone. So if I know they aren’t comfortable with a particular range of topics or communication style, I won’t push them to go there. But when communicating with a bigger audience publicly, I don’t find that approach tenable. It’s too constricting to limit myself to topics or communication styles that won’t make anyone feel uncomfortable. You’d be surprised at the sorts of things people find objectionable.
When your social interactions start feeling a bit stale, boring, or predictable, you may want to broaden your range. One good approach is to start communicating about topics that make you feel uncomfortable. Step into your own range of awkwardness, and explore that for a while. This isn’t easy, but it works. Many people will respect you more for simply trying to communicate about something that makes you feel uncomfortable.
Imagine how impressed Rachelle and I would be if the guy we referenced in the beginning of this article started opening up about his feelings or if he said that he wanted to be nicer to people. We’d be shocked initially, but we’d also really respect him for just making the effort. We’d be super supportive as well.
I too have noticed this reaction from people when I’ve made a genuine effort to expand my range. While some people won’t follow me into a range that feels awkward to them, many more are delighted by my efforts to stretch.
Just realize that no matter how wide you think your range is, it’s still limited. The full range of human communication occupies a wider spectrum than any individual can experience in a lifetime. There’s always more to explore and experience. You probably won’t have to look very far to find additional subranges that make you feel awkward or uncomfortable. Challenge yourself to explore one of those awkward parts of the spectrum now and then, so you can enjoy the rewards of expanding your comfort zone over time.
Coronavirus: The great contact-tracing apps mystery
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Health24.com | ‘Good bacteria’ might help fight a common gynecologic infection
A dose of healthy bacteria could give women the upper hand in ridding themselves of a common but annoying vaginal infection, a new clinical trial reports.
Women treated with Lactin-V – an experimental vaginal suppository containing live bacteria – were much more likely to end their recurring bouts of bacterial vaginosis than women treated with a placebo, the researchers said.
“What we’re doing essentially is knocking down the bad bacteria and then replacing the good bacteria, allowing them to grow and keep at bay the bad bacteria as part of an optimal balance,” explained lead researcher Dr Craig Cohen, a professor of obstetrics, gynaecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.
Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is the most common vaginal condition in women aged 15 to 44, affecting nearly 30% of women of reproductive age in the United States, researchers said in background notes.
Antibiotic therapy
Every vagina is colonised with different strains of bacteria, Cohen said. Vaginosis occurs when “bad” bacteria overwhelm the normal “good” bacteria.
Symptoms include a thin white or grey vaginal discharge, itching or burning of the vagina, and a strong fishlike odour, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The condition also increases the risk of premature birth or low birth weight among newborns, as well as upping a woman’s risk of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, the CDC says.
Standard therapy is to treat the infection with a six-month course of a topical antibiotic gel called metronidazole, said Dr Taraneh Shirazian, director of global women’s health at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.
As Cohen and his team see it, there’s a problem with that standard therapy. Once the antibiotic therapy is done, there’s nothing to prevent the bad bacteria from overwhelming the vaginal microbiome again.
Because of that, as many as 75% of women have their infection recur within three months of treatment, researchers said.
“They’re doing what their provider recommends, they’re taking antibiotics, and even though they’re doing that, it’s coming back,” Cohen said.
Recurrent infections
In the study, 228 women who were diagnosed with bacterial vaginosis were treated with a five-day course of metronidazole gel. Two-thirds of those women were then assigned to receive Lactin-V for 11 weeks.
Lactin-V is a powder that women self-administer with a vaginal applicator. It contains Lactobacillus crispatus, a strain of bacteria that naturally occurs in the vagina. This bacteria produces lactic acid, which inhibits the growth of bad bacteria.
By the end of the initial three months, 30% of women in the Lactin-V group had experienced recurrence of their infection, compared with 45% of women in the placebo group, results showed.
“Essentially, it’s associated with a 34% reduced risk of recurrence during that 12-week time period,” Cohen said.
The women were tracked out for six months total, and those who received Lactin-V continued to do better, Cohen said.
“We also found approximately 80% of women who were in the Lactin-V arm were successfully colonized with Lactobacillus crispatus, the actual strain we tested,” Cohen said.
The findings were published on 14 May in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Shorter therapy
Shirazian said this new treatment looks promising, given that it took three months as opposed to the standard treatment of six months. Currently, women apply antibiotic gel for seven days, then twice weekly for six months to treat recurring bacterial vaginosis.
“That’s a lot shorter, which is advantageous,” said Shirazian, who wasn’t part of the study. “It’s hard to continue a therapy for six months. It’s hard to maintain it.”
However, Shirazian said future trials of Lactin-V would produce stronger results if they compare the new treatment against the current standard therapy as well as placebo.
Researchers are discussing proceeding to stage three clinical trials with the maker of Lactin-V, California-based Osel, Inc., Cohen said. There’s currently no timeline for getting the new treatment to market.
“I know there are a lot of women suffering from BV, and this product is not available now. It’s a long timeline to go through the drug approval process with the [US Food and Drug Administration],” Cohen said.
Image credit: iStock
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Health24.com | Home alone: Will pandemic’s changes harm kids’ mental health long-term?
- Like adults, young children need to engage with each other socially
- The reduction in social interactions during the pandemic could harm the mental health of particularly children
- Parents and teachers are therefore advised to prioritise children’s emotional needs
The isolation of the coronavirus pandemic might be stunting the social growth of young children, experts say.
Since schools closed across the United States this past spring to stem the spread of Covid-19, kids have been deprived of experiences that are essential to their emotional development – playing at recess, sharing lunch with classmates and learning together in the classroom.
In a recent HealthDay Live! interview, Dr Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and Dan Domenech, executive director of The School Superintendents Association, discussed how children might be impacted by the closure of their schools and the disruption of time spent with their peers.
Humans are “social animals”, and the limitations placed on social interactions during the pandemic may harm mental health, particularly among children, they said.
Long-term effects of isolation
“We didn’t evolve for this kind of interaction with each other,” Christakis explained. “You can see it in young children. An infant as young as six months will attend to another infant. They want to engage with them socially. So, withholding all of that from children is making them pay a price, at least in the short term.”
When schools open up, Christakis and Domenech said teachers and administrators should be prepared for a surge of mental health concerns among their students.
“We’re working for our teachers to be instructed and trained to, if not physically embrace students, emotionally embrace students and let them talk about their experiences,” Domenech said.
Still, it’s hard to say exactly what the long-term effects of this period of isolation will have on children, since the circumstances are unprecedented, Christakis added.
Children who experience loneliness and isolation might be more likely to develop depression and other mental health problems, according to one review of 63 studies and more than 51 000 participants, published recently in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
The review’s British researchers, led by Maria Elizabeth Loades from the University of Bath, found that loneliness was associated with mental health problems up to nine years later, and longer periods of loneliness were more reliable indicators of future mental health issues.
Engaging in person
To combat current and future distress, Christakis and Domenech advised parents and teachers to prioritise children’s emotional needs.
“It’s more important to deal with the emotional needs of the students, and not necessarily their academic loss. The academic loss can be corrected with time, but their emotional learning and the trauma that they have been undergoing, that’s key,” Domenech said.
What can parents do who are struggling to support their children during the summer?
Christakis advised parents to take full advantage of every opportunity for their children to engage in person with other kids, while still being mindful of their local public health recommendations. Since different areas of the country are at different stages of the pandemic, some parents might be able to act on this advice more, depending on where they live.
“There’s a social learning deficit that needs to be closed,” Christakis said. “Children are going to need more time outdoors with playmates. If [summer] camps are open where you live and you have the resources, I would try to make that available to your children, and support them through the summer as best you can.”
Image credit: Unsplash
Spinal stimulators repurposed to restore touch in lost limb
Imagine tying your shoes or taking a sip of coffee or cracking an egg but without any feeling in your hand. That’s life for users of even the most advanced prosthetic arms.
Although it’s possible to simulate touch by stimulating the remaining nerves in the stump after an amputation, such a surgery is highly complex and individualized. But according to a new study from the University of Pittsburgh’s Rehab Neural Engineering Labs, spinal cord stimulators commonly used to relieve chronic pain could provide a straightforward and universal method for adding sensory feedback to a prosthetic arm.
For this study, published today in eLife, four amputees received spinal stimulators, which, when turned on, create the illusion of sensations in the missing arm.
“What’s unique about this work is that we’re using devices that are already implanted in 50,000 people a year for pain — physicians in every major medical center across the country know how to do these surgical procedures — and we get similar results to highly specialized devices and procedures,” said study senior author Lee Fisher, Ph.D., assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
The strings of implanted spinal electrodes, which Fisher describes as about the size and shape of “fat spaghetti noodles,” run along the spinal cord, where they sit slightly to one side, atop the same nerve roots that would normally transmit sensations from the arm. Since it’s a spinal cord implant, even a person with a shoulder-level amputation can use this device.
Fisher’s team sent electrical pulses through different spots in the implanted electrodes, one at a time, while participants used a tablet to report what they were feeling and where.
All the participants experienced sensations somewhere on their missing arm or hand, and they indicated the extent of the area affected by drawing on a blank human form. Three participants reported feelings localized to a single finger or part of the palm.
“I was pretty surprised at how small the area of these sensations were that people were reporting,” Fisher said. “That’s important because we want to generate sensations only where the prosthetic limb is making contact with objects.”
When asked to describe not just where but how the stimulation felt, all four participants reported feeling natural sensations, such as touch and pressure, though these feelings often were mixed with decidedly artificial sensations, such as tingling, buzzing or prickling.
Although some degree of electrode migration is inevitable in the first few days after the leads are implanted, Fisher’s team found that the electrodes, and the sensations they generated, mostly stayed put across the month-long duration of the experiment. That’s important for the ultimate goal of creating a prosthetic arm that provides sensory feedback to the user.
“Stability of these devices is really critical,” Fisher said. “If the electrodes are moving around, that’s going to change what a person feels when we stimulate.”
The next big challenges are to design spinal stimulators that can be fully implanted rather than connecting to a stimulator outside the body and to demonstrate that the sensory feedback can help to improve the control of a prosthetic hand during functional tasks like tying shoes or holding an egg without accidentally crushing it. Shrinking the size of the contacts — the parts of the electrode where current comes out — is another priority. That might allow users to experience even more localized sensations.
“Our goal here wasn’t to develop the final device that someone would use permanently,” Fisher said. “Mostly we wanted to demonstrate the possibility that something like this could work.”
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Health24.com | There’s another benefit to hand-washing during pandemic
- Halogenated flame retardants used in the manufacture of TV cases can find their way onto many things you touch every day
- Being exposed to these chemicals can put especially children’s health at risk
- This is another reason why we should all take care to wash our hands regularly and thoroughly
Washing your hands more often may do more than slow the spread of Covid-19: New research suggests it also lowers your exposure to toxic flame retardants.
How? Scientists found that halogenated flame retardants used in plastic TV cases can travel from the TV to indoor air and dust, then to hands, and then to electronic devices such as cellphones.
That means that you can be exposed to these chemicals every time you touch your cellphone, according to the study published on 9 June in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
Halogenated flame retardants, such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, are known to be a health risk to children. Previous research has shown that exposure to these chemicals can cause lower IQ and behavioural problems in children.
Reducing toxic chemicals
“It’s well-known that viruses are transferred between surfaces and hands,” said study co-author Miriam Diamond, a professor in the University of Toronto’s department of earth sciences.
“Our study shows that toxic chemicals like flame retardants do the same. That’s another reason we should all wash our hands often and well,” Diamond said in a university news release.
Study co-author Lisa Melymuk, an assistant professor of environmental chemistry at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, noted that “if a flame retardant is used in the TVs, we then find it throughout the house, including on the hands of the resident”.
And even though regular hand-washing can reduce your exposure to these chemicals, Arlene Blum, executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute in Berkeley, California., suggested that “to reduce health harm from flame retardants, the electronics industry should stop their unnecessary use”.
Blum said, “Fire safety can be achieved by innovative product design and materials instead of the use of toxic chemicals that can remain in our homes – and in us – for years to come.”
Image credit: iStock
Health24.com | More evidence sugary drinks harm women’s hearts
Women who drink a lot of sodas, sweetened juices and other sugary drinks are at greater risk of developing heart disease, a new study finds.
Those who drink one or more a day have nearly a 20% higher risk than women who never do. And it’s not just soda that’s problematic: Fruit drinks with added sugars are also a culprit, researchers say.
Though the study does not prove cause and effect, researchers suspect there are several reasons sugar can increase heart disease risk, according to lead author Cheryl Anderson, interim chair of Family and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego.
“It raises glucose levels and insulin concentrations in the blood, which may increase appetite and lead to obesity, a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease,” she said in a news release from the Journal of the American Heart Association, where the study was published on 13 May.
Different types of drinks
“In addition, too much sugar in the blood is associated with oxidative stress and inflammation, insulin resistance, unhealthy cholesterol profiles and type 2 diabetes, conditions that are strongly linked to the development of atherosclerosis, the slow narrowing of the arteries that underlies most cardiovascular disease,” Anderson noted.
More than 100 000 female teachers in California took part in the study.
Those who drank one or more sugary drinks a day were 26% more likely to need surgery such as angioplasty to restore blood flow and 21% more likely to have a stroke, compared with women who rarely or never drank sugary beverages.
Differences were also found in the type of drinks consumed.
Water is best
Those who drank one or more sugar-sweetened fruit drinks a day had a 42% higher risk of heart disease than women who seldom or never consumed sugary beverages. Those who drank sweetened soda every day had a 23% higher risk of heart disease.
Women who consumed the most sugar-sweetened drinks were more likely to be younger, smokers, obese and less likely have a healthy diet, the researchers found.
Diet soda is sometimes seen as an alternative for people trying to cut back on sugary drinks. But diet drinks contain artificial sweeteners such as saccharin, aspartame, sucralose and others that also have been associated with health risks.
Water is the most accessible and healthy drink, according to the American Heart Association. It has no sugar, no artificial sweeteners and no calories.
Image credit: Shutterstock
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