Come to the calm of a well functioning brain.
The number one thing that can help you to get out of the, hummm, what do I do with this spoon concept, is to improve your social diversity. This means going and finding people that are not the same as you. This means finding people who aren't like us with our values, preferences, and personality traits. When we are forced to use a spoon for digging in the ground or for logging peas at someone, then we are using our brain in a different manner. We are creating new brain connections, in the neurons, and our brains are forced to produce complex and unexpected information. This helps us to look beyond the obvious, which leads to creative thinking.
Some ways of stimulating this new brain arrangement is to go to other countries and see how their social norms differ from us. We can watch foreign films and read books about people from a different social background. We can learn to enjoy the arts, and learn to use the different perspectives of the artist mind. We can try to understand the perspective of people with a different religious perspective. What about someone with a different skin color. This is such a small area of the DNA, it is a wonder that we use the stereotypes that we do. We are not that far away from each other in our genetic makeup. LENS neurofeedback can help to open up the pathways to explore a different way of approaching the world. It is a calmer, worthwhile area to be.
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Our society likes short hand, so let us talk about BFRB, or Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors. There are three categories hair pulling or Trichotillomania, skin picking or Dermatillomania and nail biting or Onychophagia. All of these problems are related to anxiety disorders. This is when someone has the compulsion to pick, pull or scratch the hair, skin or nails. So because it is a compulsion and can be an obsession, then we like to put it in the category of substance abuse or an eating disorder. Because it is an impulse control problem. There is 3% of the population with this problem. There is only a 20% chance of the therapy having any effect, long term. Most of the therapy is centered around cognitive behavioral therapy and medications.
LENS neurofeedback can help the part of the brain that is responsible for these subconscious behaviors without drugs and any side effects. I have seen people without any finger nails and they keep chewing. It is a mess, try it out it is inexpensive and can help in many ways. Grief takes up a lot of bandwidth in the brain. Our brains respond to grief by suppressing emotions and memories that we are not able to process. The stress of grieving will rewire the brain with what is called neuroplasticity. The disruptions in the brain can lead to confusion, disorientation, detachment and increased forgetfulness. With fMRI's researchers are finding that the prefrontal cortex is not functioning at its best. This leads to us being disorganized and not as attentive. Grief will stimulate key areas of the brain such as the amygdala, which is in charge of emotions and the intensity of a threat or if we are vulnerable. Grief is also associated with the cerebellum, which helps us with coordination and balance. Plus a cascade of other brain areas that are related to memory, emotions, impulses and sensory information. The cerebral cortex is also affected, which helps us with emotional awareness and higher thought processes. If there are triggers in the environment then we are continually stimulating the fight, flight or freeze response. This is all related to the amygdala that can keep us in a constant state of arousal, and keep us from getting a good nights sleep.
There are ways to get through this cycle of stress. One is called immersion. This is deliberately exposing yourself to difficult memories and emotions. Why are they there? What keeps them in the cycle of awareness? Distraction is also a way to get yourself back into the game. This is doing things that will keep you engaged with life and not stuck on the couch. LENS neurofeedback will help the brain to heal from this and other traumas. Dr. Alois Alzheimer found the basis for what we now call Alzheimer's. He found plaques and tangles in the brain of a 50 year old women that died. We still hold on to this theory, somewhat. The drug companies are looking into creating a drug that will help to keep the amyloid plaques from growing. However, this approach has not had a good outcome. Scientists are now researching other factors that could be contributing to this age related disease. There is a genetic connection to the classic amyloid plaque formation. However, again this connection is limited to only a few of the people with the problem. What they are now researching is the diminished flow of blood to the brain. This has lead to research about the amount of dementia that is now in progress. There has been a decrease in the amount of dementia of 25%. This can be related to the decline in smoking, people controlling their high blood pressure and cholesterol levels. We are becoming more aware and health conscious. So let's keep munching on those carrots and go out and take a walk.
LENS neurofeedback can help with keeping the brain running in a smoother way. What are you doing in the morning when you first get up? Do you run to the cell phone to see what you need to do? Or is the cell phone next to your bed and waking you up? The blue light from the cell phone can actually cause you to stay awake, no good sleep time, no reset time. The brain needs this time to get all of the debris out. We need our dream time to reset our system.
If your on the internet first thing, then your creating a distracted brain, one that learns to not focus. The cell phone is our new addiction, It can actually cause a dopamine response, which we all crave. However, this is like giving your brain donuts in the morning. We do not function really well on this kind of fuel. So what do we replace it with? We could find some good food. How about a walk? We could find some beauty with nature that is always trying to get our attention. How about a few minutes of meditation? This can tell the brain that we can get on with our life without all of the frenzy of that Adrenalin rush. Besides those adrenals get tired after awhile. How about spending a few minutes with those that we love to send them off to a good day? Simple things that can have a big impact on the way we spent our time and life. LENS neurofeedback helps to find that place of calm. I will last a lifetime and is inexpensive. I just read an article called, "What Cancer Takes Away" in the New Yorker. I am rarely moved the way I was with this article. Please give it a try if you don't mind raw writing.
Here are a few things that I would like to convey to you about this article. When someone gets cancer, in this case breast cancer, they are usually given a drug called doxorubicin. This drug attacks the Central Nervous System or CNS. It can cause infection, leukemia, heart failure, organ failure, and infertility. The damage that it creates can have long term effects, lasting for years. It can induce cognitive effects that look like unhappiness. It causes damage to the pre-motor and prefrontal cortex. This can lead to problems with motor skills,like buttoning a shirt, and problems with thinking. Because of the lose the ability to read, recall works , speak fluently, make decisions and remember are all affected. Some of the lose is with short term memories and memories of lives called episodic memories. This is damage that is caused to the brain matter. There is one other drug that they give people during chemotherapy called cyclophosphamide. This drug is also called mustard gas. It was outlawed in 1925 and made its reappearance in 1952 for drug therapy. LENS neurofeedback can help with the side effects of chemotherapy. Please have people contact me if they are having this kind of therapy, The brain can be damaged with stress. It can make the neurons shrink in size, this is related to the branches of the neuron.
Less than a third of depression patients respond to a drug within 14 weeks. After 6 months and multiple drugs only one-half of patients recover. Thirty-three percent of the patients do not respond to the drug at all. This is from a study called STAR*D in 2006. Suicides are prevalent in the people having a hard time, that we call mentally ill. This population has a rate of 40,000 suicides a year. This is more than car wrecks or murder. Since 2005 suicide rates among U.S. war vets has nearly doubled. Prolonged stress makes the amygdala, the fear center larger. While it shrinks the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. The prefrontal cortex is related to higher thinking and the hippocampus is related to memory. And these two areas of the brain help with self-control and attention. LENS neurofeedback helps the brain to heal from all of this stress. It can create a peaceful, harmonized state of mind. Brain waves happen when several neurons fire at the same time . Their activities combine into one brain activity and that can be measured by a EEG. the brain waves can vary with delta waves at 4 HZ to Gamma waves above 30 HZ. A place that is good for our brain is in the alpha range . This is much like a cat that is relaxing in the sun. We also get this feel good sensation when we are outside laying on the grass, with our eyes closed.
These brain waves control our level of alertness, perceptions and memory. When we work with the LENS system we are creating a pleasant emptiness with the brain functioning at it's best. come and give it a try. |
AuthorHello, my name is Dana Lee Collins M.A.,L.P.C. I am a psychotherapist that has been trained in the art of neurofeedback. This science helps to heal the brain of trauma. I am dedicated to helping people heal. Archives
January 2021
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