Adios y Buenas Dias Amigas Intelligente (Just Wanted to Get Your Atttention!)

Hi Friends of Intelligentwomenonly.com

I've moved my web site and blog, and you arrive there via the usual http://intelligentwomenonly.com It looks a little different, and zippier I think, but not a whole lot. I have short hair and have added brain fitness to my list of topics. Lots of new stuff coming up although I'm not ready for a webinar I'm sorry to say. But I'm going to webex.com to see if I can figure it all out. See you soon at the new site with the same good stuff about negative self-talk, brain fitness, gender differences psychosocial, cultural stuff, and odds and ends about books, movies, sex, trends, and life's transitions.

Sleep is Important to Body/Mind and Everything Else I Guess

A Wall St. Journal article, June 5, about sleep, gender differences and similarities, and import for relationships. It reminded me about how ever health care person I've seen in the last 6 months has reminded me how important sleep is to my teeth, energy level, lung capacity, running capability, brain function, and heart disease. And I don't have anything wrong with me except routine dental stuff plus I sleep like a log. Must be a new trend. Here are a couple of interesting facts and quotes.

• Men tend to be night owls. Women are 50% more likely to be insomniacs than men.

•  Most adults need about 7-9 hours of sleep a night.

•  Twenty three percent of people with partners sleep in separate beds because of too much sleepus interuptus (made up phrase of course); caused by preferences for differing room temperature, or sheet steeling, too much movement, lights on late. Sleeping together is still best for overall health.

• No surprise that we don't sleep as well with our partner if we've had a run in during the day.

" . . . the psychological benefits we get having closeness at night trump the objective costs of sleeping with a partner," according to sleep expert Dr. Wendy M.Troxel.

"Newddhists' — A Coined Word (by James Atlas) for Westerners Hungering for Balance

Also called, "nightstand Buddhists" by the author of the NYTimes Op-Ed, 6/17/2012 as he writes about a spiritual retreat he attended in northern Vermont. Atlas sounds like a rank newbie to the concepts of bare attention, psychological distance, the no-self, and the rest of the many values of meditation, whether it is based on Buddhism — or not.

I was uncomfortable with the author's approach — making it all sound mystical and strange, though beneficial.  As many of you know, meditation, mindfull or mindempty, is a great route to brain fitness. It improves immune response and mood, reduces stress, increases resistance to distraction and strategic allocation of attention, plus generally increases emotional self-regulation. How else can you get so much for so little effort and time?

Running in Moderation Provides the Most Benefits

Most of my assets, I attribute to running: emotional level headedness, coping skills, general low level of anxiety, good immune system and general health. Now I find that even though I'm not running marathons, or even running 5 days a week. it's a good thing! An Argument for the Slow-but-Steady Approach 

People who ran 1 to 20 miles per week at a pace of 10 or 11 minute miles reduced their risk of dying than those who ran more than 20 miles a week and those that ran faster than 7 minute miles. Regular jogging increases longevity. Hurray!

Since I'm now understanding that brain fitness improves with aerobic activity, I'm  jogging more frequently, but for shorter periods of time, and worrying less about speed. And I'm feeling sharper. The placebo effect?

In a week, the new site will be up and running. You'll get to it the same way, www.intelligentwomenonly.com and it will look similar, and have all the old posts, plus new pictures and information. Remember change is good for brain function!

Hi visitors and friends of intelligentwomenonly.com The new, upgraded, redesigned web site and blog should be done by the end of next week. All will be pretty much the same, with posts from the last two years still available and continuing Monday, Wednesday, Friday posts on the same and/or slightly different topics for intelligent women.

Meantime, I'll keep putting up current articles on topics of interest: sharp brains, eliminating negative self-talk, gender, women's psychology, stress reduction, brain/physical fitness, the newest research on thinking, translated into application for today.

Good Health for Brains by Alvaro Fernandez

Here are 5 habits to increase your brain's good functioning. The tips come from Alvaro Fernandez, founder of Sharpbrains.com. Good stuff. I only copied the first five because they're the best, but you can see the others if you're interested at sharpbrains.com
  I'm working on this stuff with intensity and delighted to forget about crossword puzzles.

The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains

By: Alvaro Fernandez

Let’s review some good lifestyle options we can fol­low to main­tain, and improve, our vibrant brains.
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1. Learn what is the “It” in “Use It or Lose It”. A basic under­stand­ing will serve you well to appre­ci­ate your brain’s beauty as a liv­ing and constantly-developing dense for­est with bil­lions of neu­rons and synapses.
2. Take care of your nutri­tion. Did you know that the brain only weighs 2% of body mass but con­sumes over 20% of the oxy­gen and nutri­ents we intake? As a gen­eral rule, you don’t need expen­sive ultra-sophisticated nutri­tional sup­ple­ments, just make sure you don’t stuff your­self with the “bad stuff”.
3. Remem­ber that the brain is part of the body. Things that exer­cise your body can also help sharpen your brain: phys­i­cal exer­cise enhances neurogenesis.
4. Prac­tice pos­i­tive, future-oriented thoughts until they become your default mind­set and you look for­ward to every new day in a con­struc­tive way. Stress and anx­i­ety, no mat­ter whether induced by exter­nal events or by your own thoughts, actu­ally kills neu­rons and pre­vent the cre­ation of new ones. You can think of chronic stress as the oppo­site of exer­cise: it pre­vents the cre­ation of new neurons.
5. Thrive on Learn­ing and Men­tal Chal­lenges. The point of hav­ing a brain is pre­cisely to learn and to adapt to chal­leng­ing new envi­ron­ments. Once new neu­rons appear in your brain, where they stay in your brain and how long they sur­vive depends on how you use them. “Use It or Lose It” does not mean “do cross­word puz­zle num­ber 1,234,567″. It means, “chal­lenge your brain often with fun­da­men­tally new activities”.

I'm still reeling from much information and many mental gyrations as a result of sharpbrains.com virtual Summit. Here are a couple of new surprising facts:

• Multitasking isn't good for your brain. The word toxic was used which seems like overkill to me, but . . .

 The impression I got was that brains are wired to work quickly and efficiently. When you're working on several different projects and types of thinking at one time, (watching TV, talking on the phone, knitting OR taking notes on a lecture, planning an upcoming meeting, and thinking about your new blog logo), your neural pathways have to make detours, take longer to arrive at planned destinations, and your attention, my guess without fMRI.

 I am finding that I am doing much better with one mental project at a time, although there are definitely seemingly mindless tasks that I can do simultaneously. e.g. watching a boring TV program and a reading a boring newspaper article. Of course I don't remember much of either, but it doesn't matter other than for me to wonder why I'm bothering with boring stuff.

 I'd like to hear what other women' experience is with more single focus, less multifocus. My experience is that men are generally more single focused than we are — and it can sometimes be annoying, particularly when I'm multifocusing.

Here's a part (the conclusion) of an article about problem solving by Art Markman, a PT blogger.  So right on!

 May 21, 2012
  Is There a Formula for Smart Thinking?

" In gen­eral, an impasse feels so frus­trat­ing, because you don’t know what to do next. That feel­ing of being stuck makes you anx­ious. Get­ting anx­ious and stressed when try­ing to solve a prob­lem is not usu­ally a recipe for suc­cess­ful thinking.

Prob­lem solv­ing can be stress­ful in part because you have a lot of men­tal habits that you have gen­er­ated through years of prac­tice think­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, not all of those men­tal habits are con­ducive to smart thinking.

The think­ing habits you have are not part of some fixed men­tal toolkit that you were born with. Those habits were cre­ated by going to school for years and then they were rein­forced by all of the think­ing you have done since then. Smarter think­ing requires devel­op­ing new habits to com­ple­ment the ones that have already brought you suc­cess. It also requires chang­ing habits that are get­ting in the way of smart think­ing. When you reach an impasse, you need to have habits that allow you to do for your­self what I helped my son to do. You have to develop habits to cre­ate high qual­ity knowl­edge and habits to help you find it when you need it."

Gender Pay Gap Thrives from 22-65

 While intelligentwomenonly.com is recharging, I'll send out links to articles of interest for smarties.



"On average, women with college degrees or higher see their pay stop growing at about age 39, while men continue to see wage increases until they’re 48, according to a new report by PayScale, an online compensation data company."

 http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/04/11994886-gender-pay-gap-persists-as-women-age?lite

I'm at Sharpbrains.com Summit — Virtual Conference

I'm going to attend the sharbrains.com virtual conference the 7th and 8th of June. I'm not quite sure what to expect, but I'm looking forward to it. Lots of great speakers on topics all related to brain health and fitness, thinking, for people of all ages, all stages. I'll be Tweeting about it daily. If you're interested, my Tweets come to intelligentwomenonly.com or you can follow me on Twitter, @drtingley

Update on Intelligentwomenonly.com

Hi readers, regular and new —

I'm going to take time off (a week, or possibly two) from  posting as I redesign, rewrite, and reorganize, intelligentwomenonly.com — with help from web designer, Debbie Hulbert. In the meantime, I'll post previous popular posts for your consumption and links to articles that might be of interest. You can always browse the categories (in the red boxes) and find ideas: about eliminating negative self-talk, new research about thinking and the agile mind, fluid intelligence and brain training, an occasional article about women and sex ( why are men, rather than women, generally researching and writing about women and orgasms?), lots about intelligent women's psychology, making and breaking habits,.

I'll still Twitter @drtingley and be back with the recharged blog in a week, or maybe two with an upcoming series about positive, negative and realistic thinking — maybe a webinar, maybe not!

Judy 

Meditation, Brain Training, and the Detachment Technique — More

 Here's a previous post that ties in with the post of May 30, 2012. I'm doing all the stuff that's suggested by the new neuroscience. I have to acknowledge improvement in my intuitive thinking — but not enough yet. I have to notice those flashes more and write them down. Just listened to The Queen's Fool by Philippa Gregory on a long drive. It upped the ante on intuitive thinking. I'm doing well with wandering thinking, but not keeping close track of what the wandering produces. Plus, the process of breaking old habits to supplant with new does not come easily or quickly, as several of my earlier 2012 posts point out.


The cover headline, Newsweek, January 10, 17, 2011 — "Grow Your Mind: The Truth About How to Boost Your Brain's Performance" by Sharon Begley. She asks, "Can You Build a Better Brain?" The answer of course is YES — or else there would be no article. I've enjoyed Begley's articles and books over the years.  She writes clearly about neuroscientific topics and always supports what she says with the newest research findings.

Begley describes what she labels as the holy grail of brain training, which has become the newest trendy training for Boomers and beyond: exercise, meditation and specific video games. Meditation, like mindfulness is a slightly altered state of consciousness and both are forms of detachment, a technique that can be useful in eliminating negative self-talk. Begley points out that there's a difference between reaching your natural potential by removing impediments such as stress and actually raising that potential. Meditation delivers a double whammy. The technique helps reduce impediments such as NST and it also augment's the brain's skills, leaving you relaxed and attentive.

According to Begley, meditation increases the thickness of regions that control attention and processes sensory signals from the outside. She cites  mindfulness-based mind-fitness training at U of Miami which builds concentration by focusing on, for example a particular body sensation over a period of time. The result is enhanced  mental agility and attention caused  " . . .  by changing brain structure and function so that brain processes are more efficient. She also points out that the brain starts diminishing at age 20. S-o-o-o,  it's never too early to start training the brain and increasing opportunities to augment your already good thinking skills. 

Here's the link to the complete article that I'm referencing.http://rewireyourbrainforlove.com/can-you-build-a-better-brain/ http://rewireyourbrainforlove.com/can-you-build-a-better-brain/

N-Back Games to Increase Intelligence Still Iffy

Do you know what the N-Back game is? I didn't either but now I do because it and its cousins are the mainstay of brain training, aimed at improving memory and attention for all ages. I tried one brain training game, about a 9 months ago, although I don't remember the brand name (ironic). Actually I bought it as a gift for my husband with the idea that we could use it together. The information about the brain training was on sharpbrains.com

 I returned the game fairly quickly because neither of us had the patience or boredom tolerance to practice 20 minutes a day, a problem that I later learned was also a concern of manufacturers and researchers. Players have to summon their own motivation and willingness to delay gratification, which is tough for adults, but even harder for kids as you can imagine.

The basis for this type of brain function enhancement is based on research that showed that improvement in n-back training could result in improvement in fluid intelligence: "the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and get to the bottom of things." Sounds like problem-solving thinking to me. The NYTimes Magazine, 4/22/2012 article by Dan Hurley noted, "To find that training could result in an increase in fluid intelligence would be cognitive psychology's equivalent of discovering particles traveling faster than light." The early mission of the training aimed to increase kids' intelligence. The later added goal was to build working memory and  attention for adults, young and old.

Problems arose. Researchers couldn't come up with the same excellent results that the pioneering research found. And again, the problem of how to build and maintain a habit that doesn't have immediate rewards, involves strategic allocation of attention on the training game for 20 minutes every day,  and requires patience, focus, and determination still hasn't been solved.

Nonetheless, I think the N-Back games training is something for adults, particularly parents, to keep on their radar. In the next year or two,  developments may bring this intelligence enhancing tool to an effective level, an adjunct to everyday life for kids and adults.

Men/Women and Different Experiences of Sexual Arousal and Desire

 Women's sexual desire and arousal is the topic of Leon F. Seltzer's PT blog article, "Paradox and Pragmatism in Women's Sexual Desire". He bases his thoughts on Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s comprehensive volume A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Sexual Desire (2011).
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the-self/201205/paradox-and-pragmatism-in-women-s-sexual-desirehttp://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolution-the-self/201205/paradox-and-pragmatism-in-women-s-sexual-desire

Women and men have differing experiences of desire and arousal. Not surprising. Men's subjective experience of desire is accompanied by objective experience — an erection. Women can subjectively not feel desire, but still objectively experience lubrication and even orgasm according to the Internet research conducted.  The researchers say that this female disconnect between body and mind results from “wisdom inherited from millions of sexual transactions conducted by women over a period of a few hundred thousand years.”
They conclude that women are more pragmatic and less romantic in matters of sex than men, stemming from evolutionary necessity.

 H-m-m-m. Maybe so? Maybe not? I would also guess that there would be differences among women depending on ages and stages of life. For example, an 18-year old college student,  a 24 year-old single woman, a 30 year-old married women with children, a 50-year old post-menopausal women, would all have different ratios of pragmatism and romanticism, desire, arousal, and frequency of orgasm. Maybe that's covered in A Billion Wicked Thoughts, but I'm probably not going to get around to reading it.

Interesting to me is that all three authors, book and article, are men. I'd like to see female sexuality research and writing done by women. Is it just the same old stuff? Men are more interested in sex than women, therefore more interested in researching and writing about it than women? Women are reserved, awkward, uncomfortable about their sexuality, at least publicly if not privately?

Zip-zapping Brains Can Increase Saving $$ Behavior?! So Far, Just in the Lab

Neuroscience is covering the behavioral waterfront like algae in warming seas. Now it's about rebooting hard-wired spending habits. Noticeable differences in the brain anatomy and action was noted for savers and spenders. Which are you? Or are you in the mid? Sharon Begley's article in Newsweek calls the summary research findings, the "moneybrain."

Much of the concepts about problem-solving thinking, will power, strategic allocation of attention, and delay of gratification all are part of the interactive process that determines what and how we spend and save.  Begley notes that, "Identifying the regions of the brain that control impulses, is a first step in learning how to strengthen them and, ultimately to enjoy saving."

 Yes, I'm sure that's true, but then what? Makes sense that we're more likely to spend impulsively than to save impulsively, but maybe there are addictive savers as well as spenders. Tight-wads? Frugalites? Obsessive-compulsive people focused on money? Just plain sane, folks with common sense and olf-fashion values? Debt-haters?

Regardless, I don't want someone zip-zapping around my brain to figure out exactly how to get me to save or spend more, whether it's "noninvasive" or not! Just in case you're more adventuresome in this realm than I, the technique is called TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation. The procedure has been conducted only in labs so far, but . . .

Besides hard-wiring for one or another end of the s-s spectrum, ages and stages as well as the realities of life must have some effect. E.g. saving has increased and spending has decreased during the recession for obvious reasons. Reminds me of the habit stuff I was just posting about: cues trigger a routine/habit which is rewarded, whether sooner or later. Also as Begley points out in her article, one-click shopping, Twittering,  instagrams all encourage instant gratification.

Good news for women and money comes from the Journal of American Science (2011) and World Bank research.

 • College women demonstrate better financial management and spending management than men. They focus on cash flow. Men do a better job of planning for the future with savings and investments.
 • Women, as has been true for decades, are still more cautious and risk aversive. They manage the day-to-day well. Generally, they don't do a great job planning for the future.

Break A Habit? Change the Routine, the Reward, the Cue

I'm out of my element, geographic and daily living, for a few weeks and realize that it's even harder to maintain a new habit (my meditation almost habit) when there are no longer the same familiar cues, such as NPR waking me up. It serves to remind me to wander from bed into the living room, set the stove timer for 20 minutes, wrap myself in an afghan against the cold early morning, hunch over on the couch and empty my mind. Why am I doing this? To decrease my reactivity to stressors, to increase intuitive problem-solving, and to acquire greater inner peace. I'm now in the 5th month of acquiring the habit, to which I'm strongly committed. And I've already felt the rewards — and yet I haven't meditated, morning, or noon, or night, for the last week or more.

I'm back looking at Duhigg's, The Power of Habit. He wrote about a habit that he wanted to alter. I'm looking at one that I want to acquire, but it appears that the steps for changing a habit are somewhat the same.

 Step 1 is Identify the Routine, meaning the behavior that I want to or don't want to engage in. I've done that with meditation and asked readers with the negative self-talk habit to do so also.

Step 2 is Experiment with Rewards. Duhigg suggestion relates primarily to habits that you're trying to undo. After you notice that your uber critic is hammering you, immediately write down 3 potential "rewards" that come to mind. I've wondered often about the rewards of NST and have only guesses. E.g. Punishment creates some relief; it will make a good story when friends gather and empty out their "bads" to each other; self-esteem rises with self-awareness of your faults?

 Check out  http://intelligentwomenonly.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-do-women-continue-with-nst-nasty.html 
for more "whys" about the negative self-talk habit.

For me and meditation, I have definitely experienced the rewards, which unfortunately don't seem to sustain my behavior/routine.

Step 3 is Isolate the Cue that triggers the habit. Duhigg says that almost all habitual cues fit into one of 5 categories: location, time, emotional state, other people, immediately preceding action. My guess is that with NST, the cues are both emotional state (stress, depression, anxiety) and/or immediately preceding action, an interaction didn't go well.

I have to find a different cue than NPR radio as the alarm, because it doesn't generalize to not being in my usual daily life, when I probably need to meditate moreso than usual.

Step 4 is Have a Plan to change the behavior by changing the cue and changing the behavior that triggers the REAL reward you're seeking. I can see how this might work for breaking a habit, but not for acquiring a habit. I'll be pondering.

" . . . weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time"

I'm diverting briefly from The Power of Habit, but staying on the topic of habits. An article about a mathematician, Carson Chow, who works on obesity for a branch of the National Institutes of Health caught my attention. (May 15th, NYTimes) Here are the high — or low lights. A new perspective that can be a bummer or can be a relief.

• It's not true that 3500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of fat. The number of calories depends on many factors.
• The fatter we get, the easier it is to gain weight, the thinner, the harder.
• Huge variations in daily food intake won't cause variations in weight because weight generally averages out over a year.
• The body responds very slowly to more food — or less food; it takes a long time to gain weight and a long time to lose it.
• The mathematical model Chow and colleagues have developed, predicts that if you eat 100 calories a day fewer than you do now, in three years you will on average lose 10 pounds!

Yes, it's slightly depressing, but according to Chow, it's realistic. Maybe better than buying lots of diet cookbooks, reading all the pop psychology books about weight loss, or buying tons of magazines with the "secret" to weight loss, is the recognition that it's a slow, unexciting process, but not difficult or demanding. Maybe if you cut out 200 calories a day and stick with it , you can lose 20 popunds in 1.5 years? I'm beginning to get the drift. This is the way of changing all habits — "it takes a very, very, long time." I started in January — not losing weight, but meditating 5 days a week first thing in the morning. Five months later, I still "forget" and jump into my old habit of making coffee, feeding the cat, getting the paper, dressing, making breakfast, reading the paper. I suddenly remember that I have "forgotten" the new habit I'm trying to acquire and have returned reflexively to my previous long-time AM ritual. Now I know it'll take me 3 years to get it right, I'm actually relieved.

What's Your Habit Routine?

Why Do We Do What We Do in Life and Business is the subtitle of The Power of Habit, which I wrote about on Monday. I've never been as interested in the whys as in the hows. Insight doesn't produce change, which I've known early on in my days as a therapist. Even if we know why we smoke, or are negative self-talkers, or fall in love with the same, wrong type of partner, it doesn't help us to STOP smoking, NSTing, or falling for the "bad" guy. If instead we ask, how can I stop this smoking habit, this NST pattern, this wrong partner pick, we might make progress.

(We hardly ever ask why do I look so good today? Why did I do so well on that test? Why am I such a fast runner? OK I'm off on a tangent, but it's interesting. When you ask yourself the why question about yourself, you're usually into self-criticism, not really self-awareness or insight.)

Back to the point. Duhigg's book is not a self-help book. However, he does include an Apendix, which he titles "A Reader's Guide to Using These Ideas", by which he means the ideas he's put forth in the book about altering habits. He says that any habit can be reshaped with time and effort.

The first step is to identify the routine. Whether it's eating 10 cookies, rehashing negative self-criticism, or clenching your jaws and teeth you have to know you do it and begin to think about what is the cue, what's the trigger? A preteen I asked a month or so ago said a bad test grade or a missed soccer goal was the usual cue that sent her into self-criticism. I just found myself with clamped jaws and tight shoulders as I'm writing this blog. I never noticed feeling stressed writing before, but maybe it has become so habitual that it feels natural. Now that I know a bit more about my routine, maybe I can figure out how to lessen the discomfort and the pattern.

I'll keep working on the clamped jaw habit and I'd like you to work on any habitual routine you'd like to weaken, although I'm particularly interested in the negative self-talk habit. I don't do it, so I can't notice. Let me and readers know what you find out about your NST routine as you begin to consciously NOTICE.

Neurosmash the Negative Self-Talk Habit?

"The Amygdala Made Me Do It," says James Atlas in his 5/13/12 article in the Sunday NYTimes Review. He describes the recent plethora of neuroscience books as "the invasion of the Can't Help-Yourself" books, which made me laugh. He cited Imagine, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Subliminal as books that tell us we have little or no control over our brains, our will — most of what's going on is unconscious. "We are not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism."

For anyone who is big on the new stuff about brain plasticity and the old stuff about lifelong learning and self-improvement, who likes change and challenge, the theme of the "There is No Self-Help for Thinking, Decision Making, or Free Will" books is downright dispiriting.

Fortunately I had started reading Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit. It too is a neuroscience based book, but it proposes that there's hope in changing habits, but it's not easy — of course. His simple and clear explanation of the habit loop reminds me of Pavlovian training and the later behavior modification theories developed from dogs and bells, rats and shocks.

• a cue — a trigger tells the brain to go into automatic mode and find the right route to the right routine
• a routine — the neural pathways light up, showing the way for the physical, emotional, and/or mental response to the trigger/cue
• a reward — the outcome of the routine, the positive reward, helps the brain decide whether to remember the loop for the future

Duhigg makes the point that the brain undertakes the same performance whether the habit is good or bad. No discernment takes place. He  points out that habitual patterns often exert more influence on our behavior than intelligence or common sense. And they can be rewired; not broken or detonated, dissolved, or diluted. They endure forever. BUT, a stronger habit pattern can be established, with a different cue, routine and reward, which overrides, the previous pattern.

Next post will look at how Duhigg's book might contribute to weakening the negative self-talk habit. I might have to change the title of my book project from Handbook #1 for Intelligent Women: Break the Negative Self-Talk Habit to : Neurosmash NST.

Find a Way to Detach — It's a Key Survival Tool

     "Don't waste time," concluded a reading at this morning's meditation group. One of the members of the group found the phrase  harsh and prescriptive, unusual in the Zen tradition. Another became embroiled in thought. "How do you know if you're wasting time? Is being a couch potato wasting time? That really worries me. I must waste a lot of time." Others mentioned a myriad of time-wasters and lots of negative self-talk followed — an unusual outpouring for this group of women, who all aim to be non-judgmental and non-reactive to themselves and others.

     Detachment is one of the most effective techniques to eliminate or reduce NST; a form of psychological distancing which can take many forms. Meditation is one effective form of creating distance, by strategically allocating attention AWAY from negative self-talk and self-criticism, from the noise of the outside lawnmower, from mental pictures of traumatic memories, or any thoughts interfering with being "in the moment" and attending to breathing. Meditation is also a useful tool for stress reduction.

There are lots of ways to detach in addition to meditation: distraction, diversion, visual images for sending unwanted thoughts or pictures into outer space, turning the volume down on your self -talk, counting from 1 to 1000 by even or odd numbers. Allocating your attention to something other than negative, stressful thoughts, events.

 How do you detach?  If you don't own a method of getting psychological distance, find  at least one that works for you — even watching TV mindlessly. The goal is to be able to return to your stress, your problem, and be able to view it differently as a result of getting distance from it. Yes, the source of the stress will still be there, but you will have robbed it of power by inattention.
  

More Agile Mind on SharpBrains.com

 

Here’s a link to a recent post (of mine), http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2012/05/07/why-agile-minds-deploy-both-rational-and-intuitive-problem-solving/

 published 5/7/12 on sharpbrains.com 

I'm suggesting you go there, rather than republishing it again here because it's a unique site — IF you're interested in the topic, brain health and training. I'm tuned in to the upcoming June SUMMIT, but it's not for all I'm sure. The founder, Alvaro Fernandez, a bright Stanford MBA, a recently annointed Young Global Leader, has created an interesting forum for dissemination and discussion of the latest stuff about the brain and mind.

Fluid intelligence? Can You Turn Up the Heat?

     Fluid intelligence: "the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things."
From Dan Hurley's article, "Can You Build a Better Brain?" in the NYTimes magazine. So many different words, phrases, to describe different kinds of thinking. How is fluid intelligence different than mental agility, creative problem-solving, design thinking? I guess it doesn't really matter what you call it, if you have it. If you want to acquire it because you don't have it, you need to know about N-back games.
    This new method of training, focused on improving attention and working memory, ultimately increases fluid intelligence, the basic cognitive ability underlying all mental skills, in children and seniors. This isn't pop psychology or positive psychology. It's real and it's neuroscience, although of course not all researchers or neuroscientists embrace the upbeat research findings with the same enthusiasm. E.g. A recent  NYT Op-Ed article by David Z. Hambrick an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, is titled "I.Q. Point For Sale Cheap."  Hambrick is skeptical of the major research completed and is looking for replication of the results before hopping on the bandwagon.
   I'm not sold yet, but I think the idea of increasing IQ through training is a fascinating possibility. In the vein of the more things change, the more things stay the same, one of the practical obstacles to success is motivating people to do the training. It's not such fun, not too interesting. Not much short term gratification in the effort, just like going to the gym. Ah, yes. Human nature prevails.

A Comfy Approach to Reducing Negative Self-Talk

 An earlier post (4/25/2012) quoted Kristin Neff's entire article about "The Power of Self-Compassion". Neff is a PT blogger. I like her writing and her perspective about being compassionate to one's self. She calls self-criticism what I label negative self-talk, but it's pretty similar. I suggest problem solving, realistic thinking, and detachment for reducing NST while she suggests self-compassion. Her approach sounds warm and comfy; a blanket that you could wrap around yourself in front of the fireplace. My approach is a bit more prickly and effortful. My meditation overlaps a bit with Neff's mindfulness. Here's Neff's description of self-compassion.

"But what is self-compassion exactly? Drawing on the writings of various Buddhist scholars, I have defined self-compassion as having 3 main components:
(a) self-kindness
(b) a sense of common humanity
(c) mindfulness.

Self-kindness refers to the tendency to be caring and understanding with oneself rather than being harshly critical or judgmental. Instead of taking a cold ‘stiff-upper-lip' approach in times of suffering, self-kindness offers soothing and comfort to the self. Common humanity involves recognizing that all humans are imperfect, fail and make mistakes. It connects one's own flawed condition to the shared human condition so that one can take greater perspective towards one's personal shortcomings and difficulties. Mindfulness involves being aware of one's painful feelings in a clear and balanced manner so that one neither ignores nor obsesses about disliked aspects of oneself or one's life. The three together combine to create a self-compassionate frame of mind: a compassion that can be extended toward the self when suffering occurs through no fault of one's own - when the external circumstances of life are simply too painful or difficult to bear - or else when our suffering stems from one's own mistakes, failures or personal inadequacies."

As we all know, one size never fits all, so neither does one approach for eliminating self-criticism and negative self-talk. Invest some time in trying out whichever approach sounds and feels workable for you, Neff's, mine, or something totally new and different. But do start. Now.

Flexible Thinking Helps Eliminate NST — More from The Agile Mind

No surprise that I found a link between a flexible mind and negative self-talk in The Agile Mind. According to author Wilma Koutstaal Ph.D, rumination may reflect a trait of "global mental inflexibility" rather than an emotional process. Although research demonstrates that short-term rumination can enhance single goal maintenance, acquisition of the habit of rumination was "detrimental in a task that required rapid and flexible movements between goals." Many of us need to bounce around between markedly different goals, attempting to use both intuitive and rational problem-solving skills, and multitasking physically and mentally in everyday life. Hard to think of an instance when I'm focused single-mindedly on a goal — even writing this post. More reason to break the negative self-talk habit!

Koutstall mentions an 8-week program of meditation and cognitive therapy as a researched, effective approach to decreasing stress and negative self-talk. Both increase flexibility of thought and create psychological distance between the person and the thoughts/feelings about a stressful event. Meditation and cognitive restructuring are both forms of detachment, both effective ways to distance yourself from the negativity. Read more about detachment on this blog by checking the Techniques, Eliminating Negative Self-Talk red boxes, or just search all posts for the word "detachment."

Hand-in-Hand, Up and Down, Back and Forth For Best Problem Solving Results

 I'm hooked on The Agile Mind by cognitive neuroscientist Wilma Koutstaal Ph.D. and am planning to drop quick pieces of information, quotes, useful techniques, and interesting research findings from her book about thinking on the next several Mondays.


 Koutstaal tells us that highly effective problem solvers know how to move flexibly from intuitive to rational and back again and from specific to abstract thinking — and back again — regardless of what type of problem needs solving. Intuitive problem-solving, a preferred mode of thinking for a majority of women, has been soundly validated as equal to, but different than rational problem-solving (preferred by a majority of men) in producing creative solutions to problems. But using both is best; all the time.


 Intuitive thinking is an unconscious process and therefore difficult to describe or explain, even for the person who comes up with the great aha solution. Rational problem solving is conscious and easily learned, taught, and described, so for years it seemed more real, serious, and academic. Intuitive women can probably learn rational problem-solving more easily than rational men can learn intuitive thinking, just because of the less explicable process but still, learning to do the mental gymnastics that agility of problem-solving requires seems almost impossible.


I know that some of you out there already know how and have a preference that includes both styles of problem-solving.  Please comment with a story, a success experience, or a tip on how to do what Koutstaall suggests — move flexibly between levels of control (automatic and intentional) and levels of representation (abstract and concrete.) I'm still in the novice stage, working on upping my intuitive thinking. So far it's still random for me!

Kristin Neff on Self-Compassion as a Way to Reduce NST

 

Here's a different (than my approach) perspective on eliminating negative self-talk, although the principles remain the same. Self-talk, self-criticism is a bad habit and needs to be altered: self-compassion, problem-solving, detachment, or whatever works for you to reduce, diminish, demolish, evaporate, explode and/or eliminate the NST habit and replace it with a good habit like self-compassion. I like Neff's stuff  in general although I haven't read her book yet. If you want to read more she's a PT blogger.

 The Power of Self-Compassion

The path to caring for yourself.

by Kristin Neff, Ph.D.

Is it self-indulgent to be self-compassionate?

Motivate yourself with love not fear

Published on April 17, 2011 by Kristin Neff, Ph.D. in The Power of Self-Compassion

When people ask me what I do and I tell them that I study self-compassion, they often get a hesitant expression on their face. I guess self-compassion is a good idea, they say, but can't you be too self-compassionate? In fact, the number one reason people give for why they aren't more self-compassionate is that they're afraid if they're too soft on themselves, they'll let themselves get away with anything. They really believe that their internal judge plays a crucial role in keeping them in line and on track. In other words, they confuse self-compassion with self-indulgence.

     As I've defined it in my academic writing, self-compassion involves three components: being kind and caring toward yourself rather than harshly self-critical; framing imperfection in terms of the shared human experience; and seeing things clearly without ignoring or exaggerating problems. Self-compassion also enhances rather than undermines motivation. While this may not be obvious at first, it's easier to see if we think of how a mother might best motivate her child. Let's say her son comes home with a failing exam grade, and she tells him "you're so stupid and lazy, you'll never amount to anything!" Will that be an effective motivator? Of course not. It might make him work harder temporarily, but ultimately it will just depress him and make him lose faith in himself. The mother would be more successful if she emotionally supported her child. "I know this is disappointing for you, but everybody messes up sometimes. It's important that you improve your grades if you want to go to college, so let's see if we can figure out a new study routine that works better. I know you can do it." This type of kind encouragement will be more efficacious and long-lasting because it will give her child the confidence and backing needed to succeed.

 
      It's exactly the same with ourselves. When we are kind and supportive when we fail or notice something we don't like about ourselves, we'll want to make changes for the better. Not because we feel inadequate or worthless as we are, but because we care about ourselves and want to alleviate our own suffering. While the motivational power of self-criticism comes from fear, the motivational power of self-compassion comes from love. When we care about ourselves, we'll try to change any behaviors that are causing us harm. We'll also be much more likely to admit those areas of needed change because it's emotionally safer to see ourselves clearly. If we're harshly self-critical, we're likely to hide the truth from ourselves - or even better yet - blame our problems on someone else, in order to avoid self-flagellation. If it's safe to admit our own flaws, however, we can more clearly see the areas that need work.
 
 Research strongly supports the idea that self-compassion enhances motivation. For instance, many studies show that people who are self-compassionate are less depressed and anxious than self-critics, meaning their state of mind is more conducive to putting forth effort. They also have higher "self-efficacy" beliefs, which means they have more confidence in their ability to succeed. Also, self-compassion has a strong negative association with fear of failure, whereas self-criticism exacerbates this fear. Who wants to take risks in life when you know failure will be met with harsh self-judgment? It's much easier not to try. When you have self-compassion, however, you'll trust that any failures will be met with kindness and support. You'll remember that failure is part of life. This means you'll be able to learn from your mistakes and grow from them.
  
In fact, research indicates that self-compassionate people are more likely to take personal responsibility for past mistakes than self-critics, but are also less emotionally upset by them. Other studies show that when people have self-compassion after failing at a task, they're more likely to pick themselves up again and work towards new goals. Research demonstrates that self-compassionate people tend to set goals related to personal learning and growth rather than trying to impress others. They're also more successful at their goals: self-compassion has been shown to help people remain motivated to exercise, quit smoking and to stick to their diets.
So don't worry. If you start treating yourself with compassion you won't sit around all day watching TV and eating buckets of Kentucky Fried chicken. Rather than encouraging self-indulgence, self-compassion helps motivate us to reach our full potential. And it sure feels a lot better than the whip!

 To learn more or to order Neff's new book "Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind," go to www.self-compassion.org

Rebuttal to "The Brain on Fiction" article

I had posted an article about neuroscience and fiction previously. http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5630711609871539058#editor/target=post;postID=730063957582045987Here's a rebuttal of that original article; a broad criticism. The author of The Pseudoscience of Neuroscience in the Media, says that her problem is "the flippant use of neuroscience as it is bandied about in our popular consciousness by the media." She coins the phrase "neuro-pop crowd" and adds, "While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this neuro-pop mania is particularly dangerous, it’s misleading." 

Although I hadn't given it a thought when I read the original article, this rebuttal made sense. Neuroscience, well translated into practical information and how-tos is most relevant for clinical diagnosis and treatment and/or learning about thinking, emotions, behavior, and their interactions — not for the arts and humanities. It was fun to see both articles by good writers, smart women, making good points, but in strong disagreement.

 

 

The Pseudoscience of Neuroscience in the Media

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Katheryn Rivas

The New York Times and many other respected, well-known newspapers seem to have an unending love affair with the fMRI machine and what it can supposedly tell us about who we are. In the past two weeks alone, we were blessed with the following gems—“The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction” and “The Brain on Love,” both of which try to explain complex human phenomena, like the pleasure of reading or the feeling of being in love, using brain scans. Now don’t get me wrong. Neuroscience is indeed a fascinating field that has and will help tremendously in discovering how the brain works and the reasons which cause it to malfunction. The brain has historically been a mystery to scientists, so to knock neuroscience as a legitimate field is not at all what I’m trying to do.
Most of these “Your Brain on X” or “The Neuroscience of X” articles use the same exact formula—they talk about a study using brain scans, and then they triumphantly conclude that a subjective experience is “real” because parts of the brain light up on the scan. For example, an article will suggest that because the region of your brain that processes pleasure lights up with activity when you eat something fattening, it means that –wait for it—fatty foods really are pleasurable!

Another common thread among the neuro-pop crowd is the mixing of often irreconcilable disciplines to come to some sort of higher truth about both disciplines. Almost no humanistic field of study has escaped the scourge of someone or another trying to explain the field in terms of firing neurons. There’s neuroeconomics, neuro-literary criticism, even neuro-aesthetics. While conciliense—the attempt to unify different bodies of knowledge—can yield interesting results, it’s only possible if the two different fields ask similar questions. Neuroscience and literary criticism do not have the same aims. Raymond Tallis most engagingly criticized this in his article “A Suicidal Tendency in the Humanitiies”:

A mode of literary studies that addresses the most complex and rich of human discourses, not with an attention that aims to reflect or at least respect that complexity and richness, but with a simplifying discourse whose elements are blobs of the brain (and usually the same blobs), wheeled out time after time is the kind of contempt that, along with the mobilization of other disciplines half-digested, in this case bad biology rather than bad philosophy and worse linguistics that we saw in Theory. If literary criticism is to serve any worthwhile function, it won’t be concerned with putative mechanisms of grotesquely reduced and traduced neuralised reader responses or Darwinised authorial motives but with helping readers to make sense of, and put into larger context, a work that repays careful attention.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this neuro-pop mania is particularly dangerous, it’s misleading. It incorrectly reduces both the human self and the field of neuroscience to something simple and easily digested in a 500 word newspaper article. In a world saturated in skin-deep media, this is not what the public needs.

What do you think about neuroscience in the media?

Do You Know What A Breadwoman Is?

I'd never heard the term breadwoman before I read the NYTimes book review of The Richer Sex by Liza Mundy. I've grown to laugh with it as a shortened version of female breadwinners. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "wives are breadwinners or co-earners in about two-thirds of American marriages". Of course we also know that marriage is a shrinking institution and many income producing single women choose to have kids on their own; needing only a sperm donation not money.

Questions came to mind!

• Does more money brought home equal more power in many relationships?
• Is this a seismic change that will alter the culture for centuries like global climate change?
• Do men feel emasculated when women make more money than they?
• Are women overly concerned that men will feel emasculated — and thus men will look for a less powerful sweetie on the side?
• What are the causes of this apparent change in economic coupling?
• What are the unintended consequences in the business world?
• Will women increase practice of some of the egotistical, greedy, and devious behavior that men, with power and bucks, have engaged in over the decades?
• How will the relationship between women and men change when the coin(s) of the realm change? Who needs/wants what from each other?
• Will money and the power that comes with it finally get women to stop negative self-talk? Will they take credit graciously for their skills and accomplishments?

H-m-m-m. Makes me think. I have been in two very different relationships with men where I made more money. Neither partner seemed bothered in the slightest. What about you?

Code to Joy Book Review

If you’re a flexible thinker, a self-help aficionado, intrigued by new approaches to solving life’s problems and eager to move toward daily, stable happiness, Code to Joy may be your new cup of tea. If your mind is already full of other  successful approaches to increasing the joy in your life, there may not be room for this full-to-capacity teapot of a book.

George Pratt and Peter Lambrou, psychologists and innovative thinkers, have developed a specific four-step approach to rediscover the happiness that they believe we are all designed to experience. The first step, identify your strongest self-limiting beliefs, feels familiar to readers who have experienced therapy or high levels of self-awareness. However, the authors focus on energy psychology rather than cognitive psychology, a more traditional approach for treatment of anxiety and depression. "Energy Psychology (EP) is a family of evidence supported modalities that balance, restore and improve human functioning by combining physical interventions (using the acupuncture system, the chakras and other ancient systems of healing) with modern cognitive interventions such as imagery-based exposure therapy."*

Starting with step two, rebalance your body’s energy system and prepare it for repatterning, the advocated process emphasizes the significance of the biofield, “a conductive medium that overlaps and integrates body and mind together.” The authors introduce and explain the science of energy psychology: body polarity, the electromagnetic field of the body, meridians, and chakras.

Step three, release negative beliefs and install new empowering beliefs in their place, can feel comfortable to cognitive therapy buffs, because the techniques are similar to dismissing negative thoughts and substituting new realistic thoughts. To ensure that the results of the first three steps are deep and long-lasting, step 4, describes regular refreshing of previously suggested techniques such as crosshand breathing, balancing polarity, and visualization. Code to Joy contains interesting and unusual ideas for getting happy, putting together a unique approach that combines aspects of yoga, hypnotic communication, psychology, kinesthetics. The book contains diagrams along with clear explanations of the how-to’s:  crosshand breathing, alternate nostril breathing, and grounding, for example. 

As a believer in self-help, I’m confident interested readers can follow the four steps easily. It might be more fun and productive to go through the process with a like-minded friend. As you know, with any learning, disciplined practice is required — and more easily acquired when you’re committed to the process with a buddy.

The book’s elaborations about the anatomy of the brain and energy psychology left me with a wandering, wondering mind. Do I really need to understand this? If I do, I would have liked better instructions for using the “Notes” at the back of the book — and an index. If I don’t need to know, then perhaps the explanations could have been shorter and snappier.

 Readers may be as successful with the energy psychology approach as the authors' 45,000 successful patients, but from my experience as a psychologist, one size, one approach doesn't fit all, whether it's fitness, diet, therapy, or a self-help book. However, if this fits your style and need, you'll find Code to Joy fascinating.

* From the web site of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology

 Here's a whole article about writing and neuroscience, followed later this week by a whole article rebutting this article. The honeymoon with neuroscience my be already s-o-o-o over, although not for me and intelligentwomenonly.com Here's a quickie overview if you don't have time or interest to read the details.

• "Your Brain on Fiction" describes what regular readers may already know. Good writing, using metaphors and adjectives which appeal to the senses increases the activation of the brain in general and specifically in the areas of the sense. e.g. "The muddy, grimy flavor of the coffee reminded Hal of camping days with his high school buddies."

• More brain activation occurs with unusual combinations of words, phrases, and in metaphors. E.g. "The water felt icy on his feet", vs. "The mountain stream numbed his feet".

• A friend, quoting college professors, sent me some random quotes to illustrate the article's point. "The improbably named professors,  Jordan, Virtue, and Maddox,  cited, intoned, and lingered lovingly over lines from prose and poetry which I still remember and treasure today."  I'm looking for more on my own. Here are a few of her favorites.

     *"Margaret are you grieving over golden grove unleaving"  *"the ocean's long withdrawing roar"  *"a drowsy numbness steals my soul"   *"squeeze the universe into a ball" 

Your Brain on Fiction

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

Published: March 17, 2012

AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.

Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

Back to flexibility — the buzz word in the world of cognitive science as well as social science. In our world of change, change, change, sticking to beliefs/formulated as children or young adults doesn't work. e.g. CEOs (just heard this Monday at a presentation) who have relied on administrative assistants to keep up with technology.

• Familiar only with Blackberries, these CEOs are flummoxed when required to deal with an i-pad or i-phone.
• In my own field of psychology, I maintained a firm grip on the belief that rational problem-solving thinking was the only, the best, the king; intuitive thinking was sub par. I was wrong for years.
• Buyers of hybrid cars often go back to the old standard gasoline cars in part because of familiarity.

Cognitive science has recently demonstrated that people who speak two languages are smarter than people who speak only one — primarily because they have learned brain flexibility. Interference can occur between the language systems, necessitating the brain to resolve the conflict, which ultimately strengthens the brain's function and flexibility.

" The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age . . . " according to Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. Here's the link to the whole article:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html

I'm searching for specific ways that we can acquire greater brain flexibility and help our kids, or students, our clients or coworkers gain more flexibility in their thinking even if they're monolingual. A fantasy? Perhaps.

Real Life, Everyday, Negative Thinkers

Just finished informal interviews with women of different ages and stages, all of whom I consider regular, un-neurotic, intelligent women.
Here's a sample:

 12 year old Ella doesn't know what negative self-talk is until it's explained to her — then quickly recognizes the pattern. She says that she gets into NST particularly when she goofs up in sports or when she gets a bad grade on a test or paper at school. It's a rare occurrence for her and she can usually move on fairly quickly from the yuk. Now that she knows what it is, she's aware of how much her mother gets into the negative thinking zone, particularly about appearance.

17 year old Lucy knows immediately what I'm talking about and acknowledges quickly that she engages in NST at a mild to moderate level, as do most of her friends. They do much of their negative self-talk out loud together, sometimes followed with reassurance, other times with laughter, never with affirmation of the self-criticism. Lucy says that her stuff never gets to the rumination level. She finds that distraction, purposefully arranged or randomly occurring, often works to change her thinking. If the NST hangs around for too long, she realizes she needs to "fix it", which basically means to do some problem-solving. Both techniques produce psychological distance enough so she can shed the NST, although not eliminate it. It does come back, perhaps in a different outfit.

Lucy added that she has a friend who has been a heavy duty NSTer for the last couple of years and is now on medications for depression and anxiety. Her friend became almost obsessed with the negative self-talk and wasn't able to develop skills to reduce or eliminate it.

50 year old Gwen identified herself as a Moderate negative self-talker, particularly about appearance and could quote her own stuff very specifically. " I look dumpy." "I should exercise more." "I'm looking old." "I need to lose weight and get more fit." On and on.
The general distractions of life, work, schedule, kids, generally move her beyond the moment's NST — or she moves herself out of the dressing room, away from the mirror, and abandons the shopping trip. Gwen understands, doesn't like the NST tendency, and has been too busy to make a plan for eliminating the nasty habit.

I'm continuing to interview people of different ages and life stages, occupations, and yes, maybe even of a different gender to find out if they have a goal, a plan to get rid of the NST habit, and what techniques they are using.

For Ann Patchett fans Only — The Getaway Car, Reviewed

Here's an article I wrote for fictionebooks about Ann Patchett's book, The Getaway Car. I heard her speak at Town Hall Seattle last year when her book State of Wonder came out. She was a very real, accessible, down to earth person altogether; open, funny, unaffected.

The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing by Ann Patchett.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Ann Patchett, starting years ago with Bel Canto and continuing through 2011’s State of Wonder.  I heard her speak at Town Hall Seattle and was wowed by her comfortable, open, engaging presentation. She was real and pleasantly confident as is this memoir of her writing life. “I was always going to be a writer,” she announces. She knew even before she could tie her shoes.

Patchett begins by giving us lots of advice, based on her experience of course. She’s careful to say that this e-book is not an instruction manual but a disclosure of how she writes fiction.

• She maps out every book in advance, often taking a year of two to get the full picture. This is her happiest time. There are no written notes or outlines, just mental mechanisms, gyrations, decisions. She says, “In short, the story is in use, and all we have to do is sit there and write it down. But it’s right about there, the part where we sit, that things fall apart.”

• The difficult part comes when the writer decides to “. . .reach into the air and pluck the butterfly up.” . . . “Suddenly, all the excitement, the color, the movement is gone.” Patchett explains how tough it is to get a two –year old vision translated into words. “The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.”

• Her love of poetry has been useful to Patchett and should be mandatory for all writers in her opinion

Patchett goes on to tell readers about her studies and mentors. She attributes much credit to Allan Gurganus at Sarah Lawrence, who dictated the necessity of hard work and disciplined practice. “Had I been assigned a different sort of teacher, one who suggested we keep an ear cocked for the muse instead of hoisting a pick, I don’t think I would have gotten very far.” Teachers and their lessons changed her life.

Patchett’s next message is one that follows my own strong beliefs, in different words. My blog http://intelligentwomenonly, although touching on many topics, focuses on women and the necessity to give up negative self-talk, a bad habit. She touts forgiveness as the key to finding happiness in life. “I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I’m capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.”

 “I am a compost heap and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know, and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow. I could make a case for the benefits of wide-ranging experience, both personal and literary, as enriching the quality for the compost, but the life of Emily Dickinson nearly dismantles that theory.”

And from my perspective, so does the life of Ann Patchett; a Catholic girl from the South who went to Sarah Lawrence, lives in Nashville, and recently opened an independent book store.

“Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.” No wonder I like her as a person and as a writer. She’s smart, forgiving, normal, expressive, appreciative, and practical; not arrogant, not silly, down to earth, sane, sound. Can’t wait for her next book.

Sian Beilock Touts Alcohol as a Route to Creativity

Yes, we've been talking about the benefits of flexible thinking, the agile mind on IWO, but whoa — getting drunk as a technique to increase creativity? Here's the whole article, followed in the near future by more details about developing a better (it depends, I guess) path to creative thinking that doesn't require a hangover! Interesting too in all the research past and present — smart, knowledgeable flexible thinkers do better than smart, knowledgeable rigid thinkers. Not a surprise. If your mind-popping is going along well and you can dip into rational problem-solving when needed, you're in the swing, you're cool, even without alcohol.

Here's Beilock's article. Interesting — and a bit odd.

 Alcohol Benefits the Creative Process

Being moderately intoxicated gets people to think “outside the box.”

Published on April 4, 2012 by Sian Beilock, Ph.D. in Choke Creative thought is something we often aspire to. Whether it’s in terms of artistic products, scientific discoveries, or business innovations, creative accomplishments drive advancement in much of what we do. But what sorts of things enhance creativity?

A popular belief is that altered cognitive processing, whether from sleep, insanity, or alcohol use, sparks creativity among artists, composers, writers, and problem-solvers. Perhaps due to the fact that the rarity of great accomplishments make them hard to study, however, little research has actually shown how creative processes change when people, for example, have a few drinks.

Why might being intoxicated lead to improved creativity? The answer has to do with alcohol’s effect on working memory: the brainpower that helps us keep what we want in mind and what we don’t want out. Research has shown that alcohol tends to reduce people’s ability to focus in on some things and ignore others, which also happens to benefit creative problem solving.

Think about the flip side of the coin. Having a lot of working memory means that a person is good at screening out peripheral information. This screening can be very useful for solving analytical problems—problems that require the solver to grind out the solution by systematically working towards a goal, incrementally narrowing down the problem search space. However, being good at blocking out extraneous information may actually be a disadvantage in situations where gathering information only loosely related to the problem at hand, or even outside the perceived problem space, is useful. This seems to be even more true the more you know about a given subject.

When people with lots of baseball knowledge, for example, are asked to come up with a word that forms a compound word with “plate,” “broken,” and “shot,” they are pretty bad at this task. Baseball fanatics want to say the word is “Home” (home-plate, broken-home, home-shot ?!?). This isn’t correct. The real answer is “glass” (glass-plate, broken-glass, shot-glass). What’s interesting is that baseball fans who also have a lot of cognitive horsepower relative to their peers—those higher working memory baseball fans—are the ones most likely to dwell on the wrong baseball-related answer. It’s as if these guys (and girls) are too good at focusing their attention on the wrong baseball information. As a result, they have trouble breaking free of their knowledge and coming up with the correct answer that has nothing to do with baseball. Baseball fanatics high in working memory have problems moving beyond what they know.

So, could being intoxicated really help people to think more creatively? In a recent study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, psychologist Jennifer Wiley and her research group at the University of Illinois at Chicago set out to find an answer to this question.They recruited people (ages 21-30) who drank socially, via Craigslist, to come into their lab and, well, they got some of them drunk. Some people were served a vodka cranberry drink until their blood alcohol level was approximately .075 and others were kept sober. The researchers then had everyone complete a creative problem solving task similar to the baseball example I gave above. People were given a series of three target words such as "peach", "arm", and "tar," and were tasked with finding a fourth word, such as "pit," that forms a good two-word phrase with each of the target words. This puzzle is thought to involve creative problem solving because the most obvious potential response to the problem is often incorrect, and people must look for more remote words in order to reach a solution.
What Wiley and her colleagues found was that intoxicated individuals solved more creative word problems, and in less time, than their sober counterparts. Interestingly, people who drank also felt that their performance was more likely to come as a sudden insight, the answer came all at once, in an “Aha!” moment of illumination.

Research has shown that the more working memory people have at their disposal, the better they perform on all sorts of analytical tasks that pop up at school and at work. But, interestingly, wielding more working memory may hinder performance whenever thinking creatively or “outside the box” is necessary. Simply put, people’s ability to think about information in new and unusual ways can actually be hampered when they wield too much brain power. What Dr. Jennifer Wiley and her team have found is that one way to get around this is to have a couple of drinks.
For more on the link between brain power and performance, check out my book Choke.

Are you a Mind-Popper?

Ideas that occur to us in moments of non-focused attention are identified as "mind-popping" in The Agile Mind.  I like the term because it's so descriptive. Occasionally, a thought literally pops up or a light pops on without a clear link to anything. It's a sign of intuitive problem-solving thinking, although it can be "released" even when you're deeply engaged in rational problem-solving — if you have an agile mind.

Most women have experienced a bright idea appearing out of nowhere and apparently connected to nothing of the moment: in the shower, watching the kids play at the park, just waking up in the morning, watching a boring TV program.  The passive "pop" isn't preceded by a purposeful intent to solve a problem or be creatively innovative. It tends to happen when people are in activities that don't require great concentration or focus: the mind can wander because the activity is routine, repetitive, habitual.

In contrast, concentrating on a new, unfamiliar topic, learning a new language for example, can cause your brain to unconsciously reach out to varied, divergent, loose associations in your mind —  and link them up in an unusual way to create a mind-pop. Because it isn't a conscious process, you can't figure out how you came up with this crazy, smart, far-out, wild thought, problem solution, or possibly useless idea, but it's fun.

Keeping a quick daily list of mind pops creates a game and maybe a strategy or solution to a problem. Go forward or backward. Where did the pop come from? What does it lead to? Maybe from nowhere and to nothing. Maybe the mind pop comes from a variety of old memories of mothering people in your life and leads you to solving a parenting problem in your life. Exercising and massaging your brain is as good and maybe more fun than exercising and massaging your body?!

The Agile Mind Means Intuitive Problem-Solving Gains Credibility and Pizaz

 The Agile Mind, by Wilma Koutstaal Ph.D, an encyclopedic description of brain processes and functions, supports the benefits of flexibility in thinking. What's an agile mind do for you, you might wonder? Koutstaal promotes collaborative processing of problem-solving rather than the intuitive vs. rational problem-solving thinking, the topic I've posted about recently, spoken about publicly, and have obsessed about privately.

In my informal research, and also in academic research, women are in the majority of people who state and demonstrate a preference for intuitive, automatic, System 1 thinking, all somewhat similar. Men are in the majority of those preferring rational, deliberate, System 2 thinking. Before neuroscience research burst  into public awareness, rational, step-by-step problem-solving was the generally accepted "correct" thinking process for intelligent thinkers. Other styles were often dismissed: far out, la-la land thinking, silly, certainly unscientific —  and female.

"What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency," is an old saying. Even in the second decade of the 21st century, you don't hear about men's intuition and women's logical thinking.

 "The struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner prompting is the greatest challenge of all. His conditioning has been so powerful that it has all but destroyed his ability to be self-aware."

"Men have been found to deny woman intellect; they have credited her with instinct, with intuition, with a capacity to correlate cause and effect much as a dog connects its collar with a walk."

"I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason."

( all quotes above from http://www.wisdomquotes.com/topics/men/)

The good news for women is that the intuitive style is gaining credibility — and pizaz. You might even find men asking you to teach them how to be more intuitive. Unfortunately, it's a tough thing to teach, but some bright woman out there will figure out a way to do so and become a rich, famous guru!