Posts Tagged ‘MTT’

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!

In today’s world we eat much more high-carb foods than ever before. Refined (white) carbohydrates turn quickly into sugar in our body, and sugar gives a boost of energy. For children with symptoms of ADD and ADHD not exactly what they need…

Sugar causes hyperactivity and irritability in many normal healthy adults – if you are on the low carb / no sugar diet now, you will feel the effect when you take a sugary treat of any kind. It makes me restless, I have a kind of unpleasant tingly feeling all over my body, and my concentration definitely goes way down. These are often the symptoms that children with ADHD describe when you ask them! If sugar does that to me, just imagine what it’s effect will be on a child – with a much smaller body and less control over it. Apart from leaving the sugar out (with the exception of 1 day per week) it helps a lot to have a critical look at the pastas, bread and other carbohydrates you serve. Wholegrain bread, crackers, pasta.. they all help to stabilize the blood sugar levels – instead of creating a peak. Have a critical look at breakfast cereals too, most of them are not suitable for any children if you are honest, let alone for children that are as sensitive as ours for symptoms of ADD and ADHD…

I more and more discover the devastating effect of food colorings, preservatives and other additives. We ourselves have opted for a food pattern without any of those, and the whole family feels much more energized and with a more stable mood. So, additives are a big no-no if you ask me! This, by the way, includes artificial sweeteners!

Protein should be an important part of your child’s diet. Fish generally has a good influence on the symptoms of ADD and ADHD – due to it’s content of essential Omega-3 and 6 fatty acids and other vital ingredients. Eat fish once per week – not more often, because the oceans are so polluted that we would get a too high mercury intake.. Which in itself is sad enough.

In addition to the diet, you might try some of the following herbal supplements: St. John’s Wort, Passion Flower, Ginkgo Biloba, Green Tea Extract, Chamomile, Lemon Balm, or American Ginseng. Obviously, you try them out one by one, and see how your child reacts. Some of them might work, while other’s won’t in your specific case. Be careful about the other ingredients of the pills or capsules, read the list of ingredients carefully, and if you have any doubt, don’t do it. I discovered that in the Centrum vitamines for children, which I used to give to my daughter, E-124 is part of the formula – which is exactly the food coloring where most ADHD children are extremely sensitive for. Unbelievable but true. They assured me they were about to take it out, but still… And then they did not talk about the sweeteners in the pills, which are almost as suspected… Even in scientific literature.

Do not forget to include the daily routine of EFT tapping into your day. Alongside the diet this is the powerful bit which makes your child not only behave normally without medication, but which will make him or her thrive – and your family as well!

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

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)

The other day, my eye fell on a press release about an experiment with TM, Transcedental Meditation used with children with ADHD and ADD symptoms. I don’t have experience myself with TM, although I have some friends that do. I went on a quest to see if I could incorporate the idea of meditating into my way of treating symptoms of ADD and ADHD. I’m always learning and searching for ideas to improve even more!

I decided to make a list of the techniques I use myself (some not so much, others daily), to share them with you. Only when you are informed, you can decide for yourself and for you child what fits best. Remember: no cookie cutter solutions here

Let’s first read the press release:

Meditation seen promising as ADHD therapy
Mon Jan 5, 2009 12:32pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The practice of transcendental meditation may help children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder manage their symptoms, research suggests.

In a pilot study, researchers found that lessons in transcendental meditation, or TM, appeared to calm the anxiety of children with ADHD, and improve their behavior and ability to think and concentrate.

TM is considered to be one of the simplest meditation techniques. Practitioners sit comfortably for 10 to 15 minutes with their eyes closed, silently repeating a mantra — a sound, word or phrase — to calm the mind and body. Some researchers believe that meditation affects the nervous system in a way that can alter a range of bodily functions, including breathing, blood vessel dilation and stress-hormone regulation.

The current findings indicate that children with ADHD can not only learn the TM technique but also benefit from it, the researchers report in the online journal Current Issues in Education. “The effect was much greater than we expected,” lead researcher Sarina J. Grosswald, a cognitive learning specialist in Arlington, Virginia, said in a written statement. “The children also showed improvements in attention, working memory, organization, and behavior regulation,” she added.

The study included 10 children between the ages of 11 and 14 who were attending a school for students with language-related learning disabilities. All had been diagnosed with ADHD and, though most were taking medication, were having problems at school and home. The students were taught the TM technique and then practiced it at school twice a day, for 10 minutes at a time. After three months, Grosswald and her colleagues found, the students reported lower stress and anxiety levels, while their ADHD symptoms also improved, based on questionnaires given to teachers and parents. “Teachers reported they were able to teach more,” Grosswald said, “and students were able to learn more because they were less stressed and anxious.”

Larger studies, she and her colleagues write, are now needed to see whether TM can be used as an ADHD therapy, either in addition to standard treatment or by itself. “TM doesn’t require concentration, controlling the mind or disciplined focus,” Grosswald noted. “The fact that these children are able to do TM, and do it easily shows us that this technique may be particularly well suited for children with ADHD.”

SOURCE: Current Issues in Education, December 2008.

When I read this, I realised that I often use EFT as a way of easy getting into a meditational state. The reminder phrase serves as a kind of mantra, and I often use Theta Brainwaves to reach the inner focussed state easier. (The CD I use can be found at Amazon:

I found that in my quest for focus and inner peace, I needed two elements in place:
1. An easy, usable meditation technique.
2. An easy, workable technique to balance my energy; whereby I needed to reach first a certain state of awareness about what happened inside of me.

1. Meditation techniques

I started off with Vipassana meditation. Below I will share with you a simplified form of it, but I recommend that you search for the term on Google, and get yourself familiar with the basics of the technique. Vipassana is a very good way to start your meditation practice. After Vipassana, I proceeded to Holosync (Centerpointe), not so much for myself, but because I have clients who do better in a guided meditation.

Vipassana: Easy simplified version
Make yourself comfortable. Make sure you have at least 15 minutes for yourself: no phone, doorbell, children etc. Now you start observing your own thoughts. At first they come very fast, they kind of come together, one thought has not yet left before the other one already arrives.

Just observe it.
No judging!

Then you start picking a thought, you place it in a little cloud, and you let the cloud drift away to your left.
When the next thought arrives, you also put that in a cloud, and let the cloud drift away again to your left.
The next thought: same thing.

Over and over again.

After a couple of minutes, you will observe that your thoughts are actually slowing down a bit.
This is the first sign that your brainwaves are slowing down.
Just keep putting your thoughts in clouds:
“Oh, a thought. Let’s put it in a cloud.”
Remember, no judging!

Every time you play this game with your mind, your mind will become faster in slowing down.
After some days, you will actually get little spells with no thoughts at all in between the clouds.
That is meditation.

Simple, isn’t it?

Centerpointe, an easy meditation technique.
Bill Harris, Centerpointes founder, created a series of audios that teach your brain to go in meditative state.
So if normal meditation is not for you, or you do not have the patience to learn it, Holosync, as it is called, is a good way to get round it. They do a free CD, so just try it out for yourself.

2. Balancing your energy

Most of you will remember Einstein’s e=mc2 . Many will not remember exactly what it means, but for now it is enough to remember that “Everything is Energy”… What does this mean?

Quantum physics discovered that even the most solid material, if looked at under a big microscope, exists of mainly space. The actual particles only are a very smart part of the volume of the object, and even those particles will turn into energy fields if we magnify the picture even more. Imagine a big tornado: If you try to drive through it with your car, it will feel as if you hit a brick wall. Now, if you imagine an enormous amount of very tiny little tornados, spinning around with a very high velocity, that would be more or less the most accurate picture you could make of the energy field and thus the matter of which your body exists. This means that everything basically is made of the same material, namely energy. Your body, your car, your house, the tree in your garden… everything.

And, even more: All these energy fields resonate with one another. This has widespread consequences, which no one on earth has yet fully understood. It means that whatever we do or think towards another being or object, resonates with ourselves in the first place. Any energy we send out, reflects immediately and strongly on our own energy field.
Working on this energy field consist of two steps: First we have to be aware of what energy we radiate, and then we can clean and protect our own energy field.

1. Awareness.
I used Karim Hajee’s Creating Power. This is an example of an inexpensive but very effective step by step course, and I can full heartedly recommend it. His website is http://creatingpower.com.

2. Cleaning and Protection.
EFT is a great way to celan and balance your energy field, together with The Healing Codes and the Sedona Method.

EFT – Emotional Freedom Technique
Founder Gary Craig developed this method some 20 years ago, and it is all free available on his website http://emofree.com. You can download the free manual there.

The Healing Codes
The Healing Codes is an expensive, but very thorough treatment. I managed to overcome serious and long term ailments, under which a severe tinnitus (following a bad concushion 5 years previous), debilitating headaches and allergies. A warning beforehand: You need perseverance to go through the first phase.
Unlike with EFT, the symptoms did not subside straight away, but took some time to dissolve. The healing, in my experience, took place on a deeper level than with EFT: I simply did not reach the deeper levels with EFT I discovered later, because I was too happy with the first results to actually persist.

The SEDONA method
This one is not free, but I had great results with it too. IF you still have emotional issues after using EFT, or if you need some more guidance, the Sedona method is a good bet. Sometimes it can be difficult to “look in your own neck” (or in you own ear!), and where with EFT you might need a practitioner to solve those issues, the Sedona method generally helps you without outside help. The training course is not cheap, but parts of it you can find for free on the internet. Check the free DVD and CD out at http://sedona.com.
The Sedona method is a very easy way to resolve emotional stress.

I encourage you strongly to investigate the possibilities of using meditation for your child AND for yourself. If you have a child with symptoms of ADD or ADHD, your own peace of mind certainly is challenged too; and because many hyperactive children are hypersensitive too, they do react extra strong on the emotional state of their parents. So, you have homework to do too!

The simplest way is to incorporate EFT into a simple mediation technique: Just use the simple Vipassana technique and tap the points at the same time. Alternatively, you can explore TM, and tap the points while meditating. The Theta Brainwaves CD is highly recommended in either case.

And don’t forget to share your experience!

Charlotte