Posts Tagged ‘Mental Health’

Found on Networked blogs, a cool Facebook application which helps me to keep track what my fellow EFT practitioners and ADD/ADHD coaches write about. I would love you to become my friend on Facebook, so we can share thought and insights! See you on the other side! Click here: http://www.facebook.com/charkamman

The article I want to show you, is named “Make Do-Not-Do Lists for Better Productivity”, and is written by Lisa Hoover.

It is written for adults, but with a little imagination, it is easy to see how we can help our children to keep on track when we use the principles she talks about. My own thoughts are printed in italics, Lisa’s original article is in normal print.

“Nearly every time management system advocates to-do lists in some form to help keep us on track. Consider turning that advice on its head and make a do-not-do list instead.

Success Magazine blogger Chelsea Greenwood says to-do lists can be helpful, but only to a point. Eventually, they can get so long and unwieldy they start to take over our lives and sap our energy to get anything done. After all, who wants to confront a mile-long list of tasks staring them in the face?

Overwhelm is a very common emotion in children with symptoms of ADD or ADHD. They do not always show us, but you can be sure that they do feel that way. EFT tapping can help them to get over the overwhelm, and if combined with time management skills, it is obvious that the benefits will be numerous

Instead, take a hard look at how you spend your day and try to identify where your giant black holes of time are. Too many coffee breaks? Too much time spent surfing productivity sites (though we’ll give you a free pass on that)? Once you figure out where your time sinks are, write yourself a do-not-do list so you minimize how much time you spend doing things that aren’t particularly productive.

Fidgeting, reading comics, playing computer games, talking to friends on MSN… They are all very time consuming. We can help our children by allowing a certain amount of time for each of these activities. Children with symptoms of ADD and ADHD especially, also need time to just relax, preferably meditate and allow their busy minds to slow down for a moment. We need to help them to find this “off-time” – and we can only do that by showing them they do not need to do something the whole day long.

Depending on how drastic your findings are, implementing your do-not-do list may require persistence and teamwork. Post the list in one or more visible areas to remind yourself what you should not be doing, and enlist the support of co-workers, friends or loved ones to keep you on track.

Now, no one’s recommending that you never take a break or waste time during the day—everybody needs a little down time. Instead, use your do-not-do list as a way to stay focused on your goals and realize that the more time you spend avoiding things on your new list bring you that much closer to getting where you want to be.”

So, program the down-time for your child, and allow for this down-time by limiting his activity time!

The Productivity Dilemma: To Do or Not to Do? [Success Magazine]

(Source: http://lifehacker.com

Hit up the post for tips on how to develop your do-not-do list. Do you keep a list like this? Does it help keep you on track? Share your thoughts in the comments!

It seems that the coordination of the left brain and the rigth brain is a crucial factor in the occurrence of the symptoms of ADD, ADHD and of dyslexia.

An Israelian mother discovered a way to help her 17 year old dyslexic son, and found out the underlying technique to help other children too. Neurological pathways in the brain seems to play an important role, whereby the coordination between left and right brain is developed by certain exercises.

Let’s first have a look at what Nili, the mother says about what she discovered and how she uses it; Mother and son in the meantime have trained over 1,000 practitioners in Israel and the UK, and their method is now taught at Bar Ilan University. A pilot study was undertaken in Newport, England with excellent results and in November, a new course for practitioners opens in Irvine California.

Some of the exercises we can use to stimulate the coordination between the right and left brain hemisphere are listed here:

1 Cook’s Hook Up
2 The Cross Crawl
3 The Cortices Technique

1 Cook’s Hook Up

To do the Cook’s Hook-Up, sit comfortably in a chair. Place your feet flat on the floor. Put your left foot onto the top of your right knee. Place your right hand on your left ankle, and place your left hand on the ball of your left foot near your toes. Close your eyes, place your tongue on the roof of your mouth one quarter of an inch behind your teeth. Breathe normally, and hold this position for 30 seconds to a minute.

Keeping the eyes closed, the tongue up, place both feet flat on the floor and bring just your fingertips together like a teepee in front of you. Hold this position for 30 seconds to a minute, breathing naturally.

When you are finished, open your eyes.

 

 

 

 

(Courtesy of Dr. Jerry V. Teplitz, www.teplitz.com)

2 The Cross Crawl

Imagine an exaggerated march step, done on the spot with exaggerated arm swing and vigorous step. Touch hand or elbow to the opposite knee to emphasise the rhythmic crossover. Left arm to right knee and vice versa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Watch a video demonstration here:

 

3 The Cortices Technique

This is an explanation of the technique:

And watch this to see a great example of how to apply these and other brain coordination techniques:

Every morning starts like this at Sunrise School in Bali. The Star of the Day’s first ‘job’ is to lead the class in tapping cortices. We all know about the benefits of BodyTalk at Sunrise…pun intended.

Barbara has seen significant changes in the children’s ability to concentrate, work more harmoniously together and stay happy and content. If they have a problem, or an injury, they know how to balance their own cortices, or their friend will do it for them, and they immediately feel better. This is a technique that will serve them their whole of their lives. They know that they have a tool that they can use on themselves, and their friends and family that will automatically bring the body back to a state of increased ease and balance.

Balancing the cortices resets the nervous system back to growth and healing, and out of flight or flight. Most people get stuck in fight or flight…. and we then ‘cope’ with the stress, which internalizes the energy we would have been using to ‘run or fight’, and send it into the body, which is highly detrimental to our health.

When you balance your cortices, you are balancing the right-left sides of the brain (the right brain= big picture, intuition, imagination, creativity with the left brain= logic, linear, reasoning, details). We need both parts to work together similtaneously so that we are able to use our ‘whole brain’, and therefor be many times more balanced, and effective in all we do. Often in life we get stuck in the details and the logic and loose sight of the big picture.

(Source: Laura Hanes, http://www.bodytalkspace.com)

Omega 3 fatty acids are a vital building blocks for our brain, and many children suffering from symptoms of ADD and ADHD actually have a shortage of essential building blocks in their body.

Why does the ADD/ADHD brain have an extra need for Omega-3 fatty acids?
The brain has the most active metabolism of all the organs in the body, and it uses enormous amounts of energy; it never is completely at rest. The more active the metabolism, the more free radicals, and the brain thus has one of the highest rates of free radical production. These free radicals destroy the connections between the cells, the cells themselves and the structure of the brain. The brain starts to function less and less effectively, if it has not enough resources to repair itself.

If you are deficient in Omega-3 fatty acids, your brain changes it’s structure already within 2 weeks.

The role of sugar in Omega-3 deficiency
Apart from the role sugar plays in the blood sugar level, it also increases free radical generation. Sugar produces cross linking of the proteins in all cells, which means that the free radicals can do much more damage in a much bigger group of cells. Through the influence of free radicals, your cells age faster; and your braincells are even more prone to this process. Research at the University of Connecticut in 1986 by Dr. Jane Goldman showed that sugar, equal to one Coke, produces a significant decline in mental performance. (Students were making twice as many mistakes on tests.)

Other vitamins and minerals also play a role in the health of our brain, and particularly in children with symptoms of ADD and ADHD, one can often find shortages of essential micro-elements and vitamins. On the other hand, ADHD and ADD symptoms have been linked to an overload of toxic substances suchs as lead in the blood of the affected children. Apart from lead, also aspartame, MSG, pesticides, herbicides in food, aluminum in deodorants, fluoride in the water and mercury in vaccines have been proven to have a major role in brain toxicity and brain function decline.

What does this mean in everyday life?
Make sure your child does not eat refined sugar is the obvious step one, because it is easy to do. Avoid aspartame and other additives, buy and eat organic fruit and vegetables, be very cautious with vaccines and get yourself very well informed about the risks and the benefits of every single vaccination.
Give your kid a healthy balanced diet, and give additional nutrients as needed, but be very aware of food colorings and other additives that hide in vitamin pills and other supplements! They will probably increase the symptoms of ADD and ADHD: the detrimental effect of these substances is manyfold bigger than the beneficial effects of the essential nutrients your child is probably lacking.

If you like this article, please share it on one or more of the social bookmarking sites below; that way you help other parents with children suffering from symptoms of ADD and ADHD, to find this information!
I look forward to read your comments, experiences and questions!

Image by Kriss Szkurlatowski

It is getting clearer and clearer, that environmental factors play an important role in the development of symtpoms of ADD and ADHD. Lead is one of the toxic substances which plays a role, together with mothers smoking during pregnancy. Read this article about lead:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071203204513.htm

I can imagine that certain (alternative) treatments manage to lower the lead load in the blood; these would most probably aslo give an improvement in the symptoms of ADD and ADHD as they show in the child.
To me it seems certainly a way to investigate more, I will keep you posted on any new findings!

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• How much lead is too much? (cbc.ca)

EFT is a very interesting tool to treat symptoms of ADD and ADHD. The reason why it works is getting clearer and clearer, and it is getting more and more known that our DNA, cells and our brain are not 100% responsible for defining who we are and how we behave. Cells are capable of changing their behaviour completely, based on the input from their environment, and that makes it also easier to understand why a stress relief method like EFT works wonders with so many different ailments and issues.

My friend Maria, the GP, read a book by Dr. Servan-Schreiber, I think it’s some 600 pages thick or so – very scientific and she loved it. What is great, is that it convinced her that EFT is a scientific way to treat stress-related diseases, which, in her words, are almost ALL diseases and ailments!

I’ve read the book “The Biology of Belief” by Dr. Bruce Lipton, a bit easier to digest I think, and just as interesting maybe.. It makes it certainly more easy to explain why EFT works, for those people who will not see without believing .

An interesting article I found is posted below: Dr. Grohol talks about the way our brain is wired, and about the possible ways to influence the actual outcome. Enjoy, comment, share…!

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Everything Has a Neurobiological Correlate (psychcentral.com)