If you’re anything like me (and let’s hope for your sakes you’re not), being aware really takes a lot out of you. With ‘aware’ having synonyms like ‘cognizant,’ ‘mindful,’ ‘wide-awake,’ ‘vigilant,’ and ‘wary’ (I took ‘conscious’ alright–I’m pretty sure I’ve got that pegged), expecting me to be ‘aware’ for any length of time seems to […]
Recall in Part I that, although Pfizer’s angina treatment did little for the chest pain, it changed multiple thousands of lives in the bedroom when the scientists reincarnated it as Viagra. And date rape drug ketamine earned itself some points from ‘the good side’ when one study author found it to be “the biggest breakthrough […]
April 4, 2013 by candidaabrahamson
“Up All Night” by Elizabeth Holbert, a nice piece in the March 11 New Yorker, reprises the research of Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, an anthropologist with an alternate model to our 11pm to 7am “ideal sleep schedule.” In The Slumbering Masses” Wolf-Meyer looks at the recent history of sleeping patterns. Before electric lighting, folks went to bed shortly […]
Look, it’s not like I have anything against the crystal ball. In fact, I use the exquisite glasses my mother left me for the holiday of Passover, and they happen to be crystal. But I’m just a wee bit skeptical about its powers to predict how many more years I’ll be spending on this planet. […]
March 18, 2013 by candidaabrahamson
If my hypothesis (see previous post, Part 1) proves correct that fear of insomnia increases insomnia, successful treatment should involve mastery of the fear. We know from both experience and from cognitive-behavioral theory that avoiding the source of fear makes the fear stronger rather than weaker. Conversely, facing down the fear weakens it. Why else […]
March 17, 2013 by candidaabrahamson
What are two major miseries of our well-off modern society? Obesity and sleeplessness. No surprise that they seem to be connected; looks like those who fail to get enough sleep are more likely to be overweight. They’re connected in another way: for some folks, no matter what they try, nothing is effective. Behavioral treatments […]
March 17, 2013 by candidaabrahamson
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in their paper ”Policy Impact: Prescription Painkiller Overdoses,” declared prescription drug abuse “an epidemic” in the United States. By far the biggest factor in prescription drug abuse is an eruption in prescription painkiller abuse. The shocking statistic provided by the Department of Health and Human Services is that almost three of four […]
January 29, 2013 by candidaabrahamson
Georgios Petrides, Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, found in a study of 253 patients with severe depression that the remission rate was 87%. Interestingly the statistics split between those with psychosis and those without: those with psychotic depression had an astoundingly high remission rate of […]
Certain things become trendy. Everyone’s wearing boxy jackets, and anyone cool is drinking Cosmos. Brooklyn itself has become a trend, hard as it is to imagine, and who doesn’t have an iPhone 5? But in a trend much less desirable, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, seems to have become trendy, too. In just 9 years, […]
January 7, 2013 by candidaabrahamson
“My son is miserable in his first few months of high school,” his suffering mother told me. “He’s picked on for being short again.” Jeffrey comes from short parents, but he was little even by their standards. After much thought (and more Teased in middle school, he began a body building campaign so that, […]
January 5, 2013 by candidaabrahamson
Last week I received the following question: “I’m undergoing tests to determine if my cancer has recurred. I won’t have the results for a week or two. Is it best to tell my adult children that I’m worried, or keep the situation from them until I know for sure?” This topic is a 3-fer for […]
January 4, 2013 by candidaabrahamson
My last post stated firmly that you can’t tell your kids what to do since you can’t make them do it. You can, however, make yourself do something (such as go to your room). Only a couple days after the post, a teenage client reported with pride that he did exactly what his father told him to […]
May 10, 2013 by rfinkel
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