I was reading an article about the brain, it was all about how the brain  is not equipped to multi-task.  Then, I remembered a conversation I had with my daughter  about her New Year’s resolution:

“Focus more and to block out distractions”.

She felt that she spent too much time reading various websites, taking in information from blogs, news headlines, and a variety of news  sources,  to the point it became a virtual news-knowledge-information fire hydrant slamming her in the mind.  She said while all this information was interesting, it seemed to keep her from actually “doing” anything”.  So  instead of finishing the “Brain:” article I was reading I immediately e-mailed the website to her.  What the!

No, that ain’t right!

I realized,  I was  doing precisely what she was trying to stop.  I was attempting to give her yet, another distraction and a the same time I was distracting myself by not focused on the article at hand.  My mind took off on it’s own trying to be in 10 places at once.  Even now,  at this minute, I just heard the dryer in my apartment stop and my mind is saying, “get up and get the clothes out of the dryer before they wrinkle!”    And yet, I know that my mind is simply creating thoughts that I really do not need to pay attention to.

Who’s the Boss!

My conscious mind is always creating havoc!  There is always drama going on in there!  Thoughts filled with negative messages that may or may not help me get through the day.  Negative thinking.  Thoughts that do not benefit me, making me the “victim”.  A Ha!  the “Brain”  article says, one of the symptoms of multi-tasking too much is “negative” thinking.  See!  Here is proof!

Then the phone rang.

The voice was a woman’s and it was filled with emotion and cracking with the urgency of someone in distress.  She had been referred to me by a friend and she was pacing in a parking lot, smoking and in need of some kind of comfort.  She was filled with adrenaline and she wanted relief!   Man, was her mind racing as she was trying to describe the problems she faced.  Her tongue could not keep up with all the negative thinking that was bombarding her.  She was definitly a victim of her wild mind’s thoughts, and she wanted help….right now!

Hysteria is just a frame of mind!

I told her,
“The first step you can take  is to calm down.”  Hard to do but it is possible if you  understand the emotional process.

Something bad happened.

Someone or something made this happen.

It will continue to happen unless you calm down.

The only way to change about these circumstances is to take control of your own mind.

Because you cannot change anyone else, the only thing you can change is YOU.

So you need to witness, recognize and observe your thoughts.

Before you can focus your attention, you need to take charge of your negative emotional wild thoughts (worry, anger, sadness, irritation).

This is your wild mind, and it  impairs and overwhelms your pre-frontal cortex, the brain’s driver.  When your driver is impaired you can’t make sense of your thoughts.   You can not come to solutions and you have impaired decision making.

Too many negative thoughts and stress damages your ability to focus and it harms your health.  You can change that outcome by taking control of your mind.  Recognize the negative thinking, re-frame thoughts to control the outcome.  For instance, if your thoughts are telling you, “My family is against me, I am the victim of their accusations!  You can re-frame to say, “These accusations are false,  I will present myself and my mind in a rational way to prove them to be wrong”.

How do you get there?  How do you take control of your “wild” thoughts?   You can employ the same things that improve your health.

Breathe!  Sleep well, exercise, do a mindfulness practice, take some time to notice what you are doing in this very moment. When you control your thoughts you will control your brain.

First step?  Stop being distracted, focus on one task at a time.  Finish that task and then take on another.  In other words stop the distractions, and focus.  Because when you organize your life and focus on what needs to be done right now.  You will benefit because your mind will be clear, less stressed and ready for the next task.  Your mind will become more orderly as well.

The payoff is that you will be in control, of your life and your mind.  Why not be the “captain” of your own life the master of your thoughts!

I have never made any secret of the fact that I hate yoga. Mostly because I have spent a lifetime doing sports that compact all my muscles and here comes this ancient exercise or meditation or whatever you want to call it that pulls everything out and forces me to stretch parts of me that don’t want to stretch and twist things that shouldn’t twist and have me assume positions that are just not natural. So when I recently saw an article in the New York Times saying that yoga might be bad for people my initial thought was “yeah, I was right all along.” The article said all that twisting and bending can be bad for you, it can strain muscles, rip tendons, pull your back out of shape.

But then I thought

Why am I doing this?

Wait a minute, any exercise can do that to you. If you haven’t played soccer in years then you can hurt yourself doing that. If you used to love ping pong as a kid and took it up again as an adult you can hurt yourself. And maybe yoga is a slightly exaggerated form of any exercise because it really works every single part of your body, but the basic premise is the same. If you do it properly and carefully and with good guidance it can be safe and really beneficial.

That’s not to mean I like it any more, but it does mean that it isn’t dangerous just because you do it wrong or have a crappy teacher who teaches you bad form or you try to get into a full lotus when you have spent the previous ten hours sitting in front of a computer screen and wonder why your tendons just don’t want to go there.

The point is, exercise in any form can be bad for you if you haven’t done it before – or for a long time – and you do it badly. You need to know what you are doing or work with someone who knows what they are doing and knows how to show you how to do it.

Good form is essential

The other day, the other month actually, I pulled the heck out of my calf muscle playing squash. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done a thousand times before. I wasn’t moving in a way I hadn’t done a thousand times before. And yet this time, for whatever reason, my calf went kablooey. Maybe I was just pushing it too hard, or my form was bad. All I know is that as soon as I hit a great cross court shot and was moving back into position in case my opponent – damn you Austin – got it back, my calf went bang and that was that. I’ve been slowly getting back in shape since then. But it takes time. And patience.

And that’s why when I read that article about yoga being bad for you, much as I wanted to jump on the blog and say “see, the NY Times agrees with me” my own experience taught me otherwise. Yes, of course yoga can be bad for you. Playing tiddlywinks can be bad for you if one of them jumps up and hits you in the eye. Anything, done badly, can be bad for you. But that’s no reason to dismiss the enormous potential health benefits of yoga.

Downward facing “you dawg you”

Don't try this at home folks

I once met an 83 year old man who had become a devotee of Bikram yoga. That’s the kind where they heat the room to 110 degrees so you sweat like crazy. It’s meant to warm up the muscles and tendons in your body so that they are more flexible. It’s also meant to replicate the conditions in India where yoga first was practiced. This gentleman had only taken up yoga when he was 80 and swore by Bikram, saying it gave him more energy, made him feel healthier and happier.

Frankly I think he just liked watching lots of young, cute women bend into positions that in his youth would have been unthinkable.

I still don’t like yoga. But I would never tell other people not to do it. For my 83 year old friend it’s the highlight of his day. And that’s reason enough to do any exercise isn’t it.

We enjoy reading “News” sources in order to be more informed of what happened and analysis on what it all means, however,  since Tina Brown took over as editor of “Newsweek”, it seems to have become “Newsweek Light”, all about Celebrities with a little “relevant news” thrown in.  I probably will not renew my subscription but there is one section that I do like.  So I’m still on the fence.  It’s the last page of the magazine.  “My Favorite Mistake”  which is usually a short interview of an actor like Ben Kingsley being called suburban, or Dr. Phil making a decision on his own that would affect his and his wife’s life which he regretted, or the famous musician, Lars Ulrich, who talks  about the time that Quentin Tarentino sent him a script written with each scene choreographed supported by music of Metallica (Lars’s Group).  It was an honor, Lars knew it in his gut but he simply did not understand the concept !  Lars didn’t get it!  It was for the movie “Kill Bill”! He didn’t do it. Big Mistake!

Sometimes, none of us get it!  We try to be aware of opportunities, make the right decision, or simply understand; but we just don’t get it.

Listen and You Will Hear

The other day, I was in the coffee shop and a young woman walked in, she was  in a hurry.  There was a short line but it seems she was a regular, so she asked the clerk if she could just grab a cup and begin getting her coffee.  She would pay later.  A woman who was in line in front of her said to the Barrista, “She’s in a hurry, let me pay for her coffee.”  Nice huh?

When the harried gal came back, full cup in hand to pay, the barrista said “Your coffee has been paid by that woman”.   This gal was so involved with being in a hurry, she missed the point entirely.  She said, ” Well, I still need change for the bus!”

Really!  There was no “Thank You”, NO Acknowledgement of a random act of kindness.  No nothin’!

She simply could not get out of her experience of  being harried, that she literally could not see a kindness in her path.  It might have changed the way she saw her entire day.  It could have changed her whole attitude about her life… (well, maybe not).

It did make me think, “What do we miss everyday.”  What wonderful things happen each day that we over look.

What did you overlook today?

Magic? Goodness? Perhaps a miracle?

Oh, and here’s what I like about “My favorite Mistake”; it is that reflection that each mistake is a lesson.  We did not understand the lesson at the time, but when it evolves we can see it very clearly in the rear view mirror.  Perhaps if we slowed down just a little we would have a better view of the experience as it happens.

There’s a wonderful old song by Jimmy Durante about the pleasures of reading. It goes like this:

I’ll never forget the day I read a book.
It was contagious, seventy pages.
There were pictures here and there,
So it wasn’t hard to bear,
The day I read a book.
It’s a shame I don’t recall the name of the book.
It wasn’t a history. I know because it had no plot.
It wasn’t a mystery, because nobody there got shot.
The day I read a book ? I can’t remember when,
But one o’ these days, I’m gonna do it again.

I was reminded of that over the holidays when I did just that; I read a book.

Now, there shouldn’t be anything wonderful or marvelous or unusual about reading a book, people do it every day. But I hardly ever seem to have the time to sit down and read a book cover to cover. Every day I read a couple of newspapers, scan several news websites and read a few political blogs. Each week I read several news or current affairs magazines. But read a book? Who has the time.

That’s why it was so delicious to have the time to put all those newspapers and magazines aside for a few days and open a good book (an anthology of Graham Green’s work including “The Heart of the Matter” – if you must know). It was a real treat to get lost in the world that the author created, to get inside the characters and try to understand their motivations and actions. I even enjoyed the little moments when I felt frustrated because I was going to have to stop reading so I could go and do something else fun!

Whenever I read a good book I’m always reminded at just how powerful words are, and how beautiful they can be. Too often in my work the words I write have to take on a very specific role and that’s merely to explain something complex or communicate something important. What little opportunity there is for flare or flourish or – god forbid – humor is quickly snuffed out by the legions of others who then have to approve and edit the work. The end product is frequently very different from the original one – sucked dry of any imagination or creativity and turned instead into a dry – albeit accurate – statement.

But good writing does more than that. It also reminds me that often we fall into a rut when writing, relying on the same words or phrases to explain or describe something instead of searching for some new way of telling the same story. That routine way of working makes for an efficient way of writing but not always for an elegant or the most effective way. It’s a shortcut but one that can produce a less-than-memorable end result.

Maybe it’s unrealistic to think about workplace communications and literature in the same way. One is all about efficiency and directness, and is often governed by legal requirements about what you can and, perhaps even more importantly, what you cannot say. The other is about creating new worlds, or helping you see your world in a different way. One is all about imagination. The other all too often shaped by a lack of it.

But I don’t accept that business writing has to be soulless. On the contrary, I think making it dull and turgid and leaden only makes it all the more likely that no one will read it or, if they do, that no one will understand or care what it’s about. To reach people, to get them to pay attention, you have to engage them, you have to entertain them before you can ever hope to really inform them.  That doesn’t mean that a memo from the boss to all the staff has to be done as a limerick (though that is not a bad idea come to think of it!) or that the annual report can be done in iambic pentameter as a dramatic play. But it does mean that they can be lively and engaging and still informative.

No one ever says their goal in life is to write ‘the great American memo’ but as most of us are more likely to write a memo than a novel, and certainly much more likely to read one then maybe it’s time to change the way we think about how we write at work and make it something someone actually wants to read rather than simply hitting the ‘delete’ button as soon as they see who its from.

When Shirley was growing up her mum once told her “Christmas is just around the corner.” Being a kid Shirley immediately ran out of the house and around the corner to see Christmas. Naturally she was really disappointed to see it wasn’t there and figured she must have run around the wrong corner. She was getting ready to run around another corner when her mum caught up with her to say that wasn’t what she meant to say.

I think of that story whenever I’m around the fabulous Emma Danger. It reminds me to be careful about what I say. Not just to avoid cursing or using rude words – though that’s definitely important – but to make sure that she understands what it is that I think I am saying. Kids that young are like sponges, but without any kind of sophisticated filter.

What you say is what they hear, whether that’s what you intended or not.

And the same applies to so-called adults. So often at work you think you are saying one thing only to have a big misunderstanding because someone thought you meant something completely different.  Or you thought it was clear you were joking only to find out no one else thought it was funny – that’s when you end up with headlines that scream out “Sinead O’Connor: ‘I was only joking about wanting to murder the Pope.’

What you write can be wrong

That’s even more true for email. With in-person conversations you have body language to help guide your understanding; with phone calls you have tone of voice to give you a clue as to meaning. But with email there is nothing to go on except for the words in front of you, and your perception of the person writing them.

Or just your mood at the time you read them.

Words are tools. Use them well and the results can be amazing. Use them poorly and you can be surprised at how quickly they can blow up in your face.

Open mouth, insert foot

That’s a lesson I have learned painfully as a media relations spokesperson. You think you are saying the right thing only to see your words thrown back at you later and used to make you look silly, stupid or duplicitous. Or all three.

It’s not fun. But it’s taught me that it is so much easier to take the time to pick the right words, and use them in the right order with the right tone, than to spend a lot of time later trying to correct a false impression.

And if all else fails I fall back on the old Will Rogers maxim, “never miss an opportunity to shut up.”

It always starts out with the best of intentions. You are going to go online and look for a recipe for something for dinner, or to see how your favorite sports team got on, but as you are looking for that information something else pops up on your computer – latest on Michael Jackson death trial, or which Republican Presidential candidate has a hidden secret – and you think “well, let’s take a look”. Five hours later you stagger away from the computer with absolutely no clue about what you just saw or why you went online in the first place.

It happens to all of us. It’s a like a giant sinkhole that just draws us in. Even if you are aware of the dangers it sometimes feels as if you have no power to prevent it or stop it once it’s happening.

And it’s such a waste of time

I mean how often have you ever needed or even wanted to have a conversation about 98% of the stuff you read online. And yet you read it. So, what’s going on here and how can you break that habit?

Well, procrastination for one thing. You are avoiding doing something you don’t really want to do, by substituting something else – even if it turns out that you didn’t particularly care about that either. All you’ve done is find a meaningless replacement for something that might be useful.

There’s also the ‘sleaze’ factor. We’re drawn to gossip and chit chat about celebrities, to find out their weaknesses and secrets and sins. And the internet makes that easier than ever. You don’t even have to go looking for it, it seems to find you. And once it’s right in front of you it’s really, really hard to ignore.

How do you break it?

Well, it’s not easy. If it were there wouldn’t be books written about how to break bad habits, there wouldn’t be entire professions devoted to helping people change their minds.

But the first step is wanting to. If you have reached a point where you are just bored about being bored then give yourself some credit for at least recognizing the problem and looking for a solution.

After that, come up with any number of different ways of avoiding mindless surfing and staying focused on what you wanted to find out in the first place. It could be something as simple as writing down on a piece of paper (I know, writing, how radical eh!) what it is you are looking for and keeping that in front of you as you work on the computer. It will help keep you focused on what you set out to do and if you start to stray you just look at the piece of paper and get right back to business.

Time to make time

You could give yourself a set time to surf and even have a little alarm set on your watch or phone or computer that goes off after 15 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever, reminding you that the time is up.

You could allow yourself 30 minutes a day for random, pointless, self-indulgent goofing around online. This way you don’t feel deprived, you get to read up on the latest celebrity gossip or whatever it is that is your weakness, and then once you are done you get on with the rest of your life.

None of these distractions are going away. In fact they are only likely to multiply as we become increasingly ‘connected’ in every aspect of our lives. But just because you are ‘connected’ does not mean you have to become ‘disconnected’ from the rest of the world around you.

All you have to do is decide just how much is enough.

Sometimes you just feel the need to get away, to get out of the City and head out to the country, the mountains, the lakes, the seaside, for some peace and quiet. To escape the constant bombardment of the senses by noise and traffic and lights and sounds and smells. So, recently Shirley and I decided to get away, to go camping. And we discovered that the simple life is not so simple at all.

Getting away from it all

Now we always travel light. When we got on vacation we bring one bag each, regardless of whether we are going to Portland for a weekend or Paris for two weeks (if we ever went to Paris for two weeks that is) so we figured camping would be an equally easy thing to do. Boy were we wrong.

Traveling not-so-light!

By the time we had loaded into the car the tent, the cooler with the food/wine/beer, the box with the cooking gear/plates/cups/utensils, the cooking stove, the sleeping bags, the blow up mattress (OK, so I’m a sissy) and of course books and ukuleles there was barely room for us. We thought that somehow we had overdone it but when we got to our campsite we realized that we were traveling light compared to everyone else.

Some of these campsites – and admittedly they had kids – had five or more chairs, extra tents to cover the picnic tables, bikes, assorted toys, umbrellas, even surf boards. In short, their sites were jam packed and you wonder how they managed to cram all that stuff into their cars – until you realized they were all driving massive SUV’s or oversized mini-vans (isn’t that a contradiction in terms, an oversized mini van!)

In the end we looked like the poor kids on the block living a bleak and impoverished existence.

It’s all relative

Looking around at all the campsites, and all the families trying so hard to get back to nature it reminded me of Gandhi. No, really it did.

Ben Kingsley goes camping

Gandhi always tried to lead a life of simplicity, weaving the cloth for his own clothes, eating frugally etc. But of course he also led a national organization and traveled extensively and worked hard to spread the word of non-violence around the world. And all that took a lot of money so it’s no surprise that one of his biggest supporters – a textile manufacturer – always used to laugh when people praised Gandhi for living a life of poverty, saying “It costs me a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.”

That’s how I felt looking around at the campsite. It costs a heck of a lot of money and takes a huge amount of effort and equipment to get back to nature.

Call of the mild

But you know what. It was all worth it. Once we’d set up the tent, got everything unpacked, the fire going, the cooker cooking, the wine uncorked and beer poured, and looked around and realized that we were in a willow grove, on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Pacific Ocean with our only companions being some raccoons and  owls, we realized we were back in nature. That night, with the sound of the ocean rolling in as the backdrop I slept better than I had in ages.

Finding the simple life isn’t simple. But it is definitely worth the effort.

I confess that on the tenth anniversary of September 11th I didn’t pick up a newspaper, turn on the TV news or listen to the radio. I didn’t have the heart to. I’d already heard enough and read enough and certainly seen enough reminders of that dreadful day and didn’t feel I wanted to wallow in it any more. It was just too painful.

Then I came across this email from one of the founders of a group called Meetup. What is wonderful is that it’s a story about how 9/11 had a powerful impact on us – not just in the obvious, tragic sense – and helped inspire some people to create new communities of their own.

Instead of succeeding in isolating us as individuals, fearful for our lives, the attack had the opposite effect. It made us hungry to know our neighbors and our friends. And that is truly something worth celebrating.

Fellow Meetuppers,

I don’t write to our whole community often, but this week is special because it’s the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and many people don’t know that Meetup is a 9/11 baby.

Let me tell you the Meetup story. I was living a couple miles from the Twin Towers, and I was the kind of person who thought local community doesn’t matter much if we’ve got the internet and tv. The only time I thought about my neighbors was when I hoped they wouldn’t bother me.

When the towers fell, I found myself talking to more neighbors in the days after 9/11 than ever before. People said hello to neighbors (next-door and across the city) who they’d normally ignore. People were looking after each other, helping each other, and meeting up with each other. You know, being neighborly.

A lot of people were thinking that maybe 9/11 could bring people together in a lasting way. So the idea for Meetup was
born: Could we use the internet to get off the internet — and grow local communities?

We didn’t know if it would work. Most people thought it was a crazy idea — especially because terrorism is designed to make people distrust one another.

A small team came together, and we launched Meetup 9 months after 9/11.

Today, almost 10 years and 10 million Meetuppers later, it’s working. Every day, thousands of Meetups happen. Moms Meetups, Small Business Meetups, Fitness Meetups… a wild variety of 100,000 Meetup Groups with not much in common — except one thing.

Every Meetup starts with people simply saying hello to neighbors. And what often happens next is still amazing to me.
They grow businesses and bands together, they teach and motivate each other, they babysit each other’s kids and find other ways to work together. They have fun and find solace together. They make friends and form powerful community. It’s powerful stuff.

It’s a wonderful revolution in local community, and it’s thanks to everyone who shows up.

Meetups aren’t about 9/11, but they may not be happening if it weren’t for 9/11.

9/11 didn’t make us too scared to go outside or talk to strangers. 9/11 didn’t rip us apart. No, we’re building new community together!!!!

The towers fell, but we rise up. And we’re just getting started with these Meetups.

Scott Heiferman (on behalf of 80 people at Meetup HQ) Co-Founder & CEO, Meetup New York City September 2011

NOTE: From Shirl, Wow!  I had no idea!  Thanks for letting us know.

When bad things happen people often rush to judgement; they are quick to find fault, to figure out who’s to blame and why, and what needs to be done about it. That can happen in something as intimate as a relationship or friendship, in a broader context in the workplace, or – as recently happened in England – on a national scale after a series of violent and deadly riots.

London's Burning

In the days and weeks following the riots in the UK, the newspapers, TV and radio were filled with the voices of the professional pontificating class all mourning the end of standards and manners and all sense of decency, blaming it on the welfare state, the collapse of the family, too much immigration, too little education, a lack of respect for the social order, too much respect for the celebrity culture, and calling for the return of flogging/hanging/birching, the return of the draft, and calling for all those guilty to be locked up and the key thrown away.

Hang ‘em all

All terribly satisfying to write I’m sure but woefully short on any insight into what happened and why and what really needs to be done about it.

But then that’s not too terribly surprising. Because apparently that’s what always happens after things like this. The Economist magazine had a wonderful article that dug back into past coverage of similar upheavals in British society- and I mean way back into the past, through the 1970′s to the 1930′s and the 1880′s and all the way back to 1751, a time when the US didn’t exist and was still a part of the British Empire. What’s fascinating is that regardless of the era or the event, the way commentators wrote back then was exactly the same way they wrote just now.

In the 1950′s for example the arrival of – shock horror – rock n roll in England had the upper classes appalled, as was evident from this article in the Daily Mail; “It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge.”

Wonderfully lurid stuff

Take a trip a little further back, to 1898, and folks are lamenting the fact that fathers are no longer whipping their kids. I kid you not!

My favorite is from 1913 where one social commentator is warning people of the dangers of – wait for this – silent movies, claiming that watching images of criminals in films will encourage children to copy them. Sound familiar eh! This is what the venerable The Times of London had to say on the subject: “All who care for the moral well-being and education of the child will set their faces like flint against this new form of excitement.”

Like flint.

Boy, they don’t write them like that anymore.

Back in 1862 a crime wave led to the restoration of flogging in England, only a few years after it had been banned. So horrified were the chattering classes back then – and let’s face it we’re talking about rich white geezers – that The Times once again felt obliged to opine on the topic with this editorial; “Our streets are actually not as safe as they were in the days of our grandfathers. We have slipped back to a state of affairs that would be intolerable even in Naples.”

Even in Naples. Clearly there was no such thing as politically correct language back then. (Historical footnote – at the time the English used to consider Naples the epitome of a criminal, dirty, dangerous city; actually, come to think of it they probably thought the same about Glasgow, Lisbon, Vladivostok, Boston and pretty nearly every city in the world except for London – and even then there were certain parts of London they didn’t particularly like)

Don’t rush to judgement

But the point is that there have always been jerks who react with a knee jerk response to anything they don’t understand, or anything that they feel or fear threatens them in any way. That’s not to say that these issues are not important and don’t require serious thought and serious action to make sure they don’t happen again. But just blaming the first group that comes to mind – hooligans, working class youth, thugs, immigrants, people from Naples! – doesn’t do anything to make things better.

Similarly in relationships – personal or professional – just falling back on the same old arguments, the same old reasoning doesn’t resolve any problems, in many ways it just perpetuates them. If something goes wrong and your response is simply to dredge up the past you never get anywhere. You remain stuck forever in the same old manner of thinking. Instead we need to take the time to think about what’s really the problem, why things really are going wrong. Only then can we come up with a solution that will really work.

Otherwise we are no better than people from Naples!

Fast backward

Hey kids!  Want to live longer, have a healthier body and mind, have a better outlook on life, and enjoy an enormous surge in endorphins, serotonins, and even, boost your immune system?  Get yourself a girlfriend! Yes, that is right!  Sisterhood can increase all of the above! That’s not just wishful thinking, that is research from Dr. David  Spiegel (co-chair, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University Medical Center).

A helping hand, or two

Dr. Spiegel studied the effect of emotional, mental, social, spiritual and behavior factors on health. The study was targeting women with breast cancer, one of life’s ultimate stressors.  When diagnosed with breast cancer most women feel like they have just been hit in the face by a fire hydrant.  Emotions, rational, consequences, prognosis, I mean…really, your life races before your eyes in a slow motion cloud of unrelenting scenes of possible outcomes – most of them not good ones. There is no computer generated movie that can duplicate the stuff that fills up the mind when it comes to facing a life threatening disease like cancer. But one of the best things you can do is have a friend to help you face the fire hydrant!

No matter what kind of cancer you have…You have Stress!

Dealing with stress can wear down the body’s ability to fight disease.  That means your immune system, endocrine, and nervous systems are compromised by stress!  How do you relieve stress?  Dr. Spiegel says, “Psychosocial support and stress management to augment medical treatment has been shown to improve cancer outcome and quality of life.”   Translation:  Getting together with friends and family while you are undergoing treatment and after can make your outlook better, increase your immune system to fight the cancer and create a more positive outcome.

Talking, Sharing and Being Realistic Is Healthy

Facing life’s realities with the support of friends, social communities, or a loving spouse, will help you cope and help diminish the feelings of depression and detoxify the fear.  So expressing emotions with friends and family, and clarifying problems brought on by having cancer can help you to cultivate better relationships and share the feelings of crisis with everyone in your inner circle. It spreads the weight of the diagnosis and everyone does a little lifting.  Much better than denial!

You Don’t Have To Have Cancer To Get The Benefits!

But guess what?  You don’t have to have cancer to reap the benefits of this study!  You just have to have friends, someone to talk to when you feel down.  Spiegel reveals in this landmark study that found women with advance metastatic breast cancer who are involved in support groups, not only had less anxiety, depression and pain, but survived an average of 18 months longer.  His conclusion was psychosocial interventions improve not just the quality of life but the quantity of life too.

So diminish your stress, be happier, and prolong your life!  Get some friends!