Conditioning Research

Here is one for Monte . ......... it seems social rejection could trigger diseases linked to inflammation . Psychologist George Slavich of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues asked 124 volunteers to give speeches and perform mental arithmetic in front of a panel of dismissive observers. Saliva analysis showed they exhibited elevated levels of two inflammation markers. A quarter of the volunteers then played a computer game in which other players were instructed to exclude them. here is the paper: Neural sensitivity to social rejection is associated with inflammatory responses to social stress Although stress-induced increases in inflammation have been implicated in several major disorders, including cardiovascular disease and depression, the neurocognitive pathways that underlie inflammatory responses to stress remain largely unknown. To examine these processes, we recruited 124 healthy young adult participants to complete a laboratory-based social stressor while...

I thought this was an interesting study Dr. Lee S. Berk, a preventive care specialist and psychoneuroimmunology researcher at Loma Linda University's Schools of Allied Health (SAHP) and Medicine, and director of the molecular research lab at SAHP, Loma Linda, CA, and Dr. Stanley Tan have picked up where Cousins left off. Since the 1980s, they have been studying the human body's response to mirthful laughter and have found that laughter helps optimize many of the functions of various body systems. Berk and his colleagues were the first to establish that laughter helps optimize the hormones in the endocrine system, including decreasing the levels of cortisol and epinephrine, which lead to stress reduction. They have also shown that laughter has a positive effect on modulating components of the immune system, including increased production of antibodies and activation of the body's protective cells, including T-cells and especially Natural Killer cells' killing activity of...

So my backpain. I have also on this blog highlighted my contention that there is a big psychological aspect to all this. I read Sarno years ago and was pretty convinced by his argument. Sometimes your mind will kick off pain to divert your attention from something psychological that it really finds threatening. I interviewed Monte here too who builds on that argument. My personality is such that I do worry. Relaxed on the surface but often quite stressed out underneath. So all this makes sense....and I can correlate back pain with stresses in my life. I am still working on the mental stuff to get over this but I'm getting there. Anyway, remember Z health and mc ? The mc seminar was useful in that it built on the psychological element in a different direction. It accepted that much pain / muscular tightness was due to psychologically perceived threats. Z health is about physical ways to modulate that threat, to persuade your mind through movement that the threat is not seri...

I've posted in the past about the way in which emotional issues and stress can give rise to pain. I know in my life episodes of chronic back spasm correlate closely with periods of stress in work or in my personal life. The topic was covered well by Monte and Adam also. Anyway, this caught my eye: Abuse in childhood linked to migraine and other pain disorders Researchers from the American Headache Society's Women's Issues Section Research Consortium found that incidence of childhood maltreatment, especially emotional abuse and neglect, are prevalent in migraine patients. The study also found that migraineurs reporting childhood emotional or physical abuse and/or neglect had a significantly higher number of comorbid pain conditions compared with those without a history of maltreatment. Full findings of the study appear in the January issue of Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain,

I have previously interviewed Monte and put up a couple of other posts from him. (His site is here ) He now has a series of videos up which are worth watching. Here is the first, but the full set are here .

I've posted some stuff in the past about back pain , particularly looking at TMS - the pain being real but a physical manifestation of something going on psychologically. Your mind creating real pain in your body to distract you from subconscious worries and anger and other emotions. Your mind is giving you real physical pain to distract you from what is really stressing you.... My interviews with Monte and Adam explain this all in more detail. Then I was at that workshop with mc last week and she was talking about how the body reacts unconsciously to threat....health is about threat modulation....Emotions effecting, causing something physical.....now something physical can affect emotions..... Things connect...that there are emotional factors at play, even at an unconscious level. In my interview with Frank Forencich he alluded to something similar: Depression is epidemic. The World Health Organization forecasts that, by 2020, “depression will be second only to heart disea...

It is worth checking out Monte Hueftle's comment to Koen on the post here .

Here is another guest post from Monte Hueftle (you may remember my interview with Monte recently ). Monte talks again about stress and tension causing physical pain. This update is geared towards runners or active people who are battling what they think are over-use injuries, muscle imbalances, or having a body that is out of alignment. I can confidently state to you that in most cases (90%+) your injury is being caused by inner stress and tension and it is not a physical problem. Let me qualify that statement. I am speaking about chronic pain or a chronic injury pattern. Meaning you have had your injury on and off for 2 months or longer. Or you have a chronic injury like sciatica for three months and then it goes away but now you are battling pain in your hip or back or butt. You win these injury battles but there is always a new one challenging you. You have tried numerous treatments and medical specialist but no one knows exactly what is wrong or how to fix it. If they do, what t...

Last week I posted an interview with Monte Hueftle , a runner and writer who specialises in running injuries generated by emotional factors, following in the teaching of Dr John Sarno There are other writers that have traced their own pain to emotional factors too. This is a guest post from one of them - Adam Rostocki . Adam is a martial artist who has battled with pain and finally conquered it through following Sarno's approach. I am convinced that much pain is emotional at its root. Mind Body Conditioning Physical Conditioning vs Psychological Conditioning I welcome the opportunity to speak to you about conditioning. As a serious martial artist for over 34 years I am well aware of the demands we all place on our bodies. In the course of training, I learned to use physical conditioning to make my body strong and increase my endurance and overall physical abilities. However, the type of conditioning I want to share with you today has nothing at all to do with the body. Inste...

In a recent post I talked about my back pain and about the idea that much of it is not due to physical injury, but to emotional factors ( TMS or Tension Myoneural Syndrome as the originator of the theory - Dr Sarno - now calls it). It is still real physical pain – not imaginary – but the cause is emotional. Public speaking can make you blush – a real physical reaction – but the cause is emotional. Physical pain can be the same thing. In this post I interview a guy called Monte Hueftle , a long distance runner who has also battled back pain. He explains where his pain came from, how he finally identified the cause and - crucialy - how he has managed to cure it. I first read Monte’s book – Get Rid of the Pain in your Butt Now! – a few years ago when my own back was playing up. My pain has returned recently and I have gone back to Monte’s book and one or two others. You may find this stuff a bit challenging and but I’d urge you to read and consider what Monte is proposing. ...

You may have picked up from reading this blog over the years that I have – occasionally - a bad back. Pain that ranges form stiffness after sitting for a while, to tightness that distorts my posture through to extreme spasms that will grip with great force and pain literally stopping me in my tracks and bringing me to me knees. Debilitating and depressing stuff for someone like me for whom exercise is fun, rewarding and an escape from life stresses. I first remember hurting my back after deadlifting, not a maximum weight by any means, but just before I was to give up my job to return to university. Ever since the back has been there. Sometimes – for months at a time there is no pain and I’ll train, run and climb mountains – sometimes it returns with a vengeance and sees me floored, carried out of the office and taken home. Hence my interest in keeping my back healthy, in mobility, in posture…. However as I’ve also hinted here a few times, I am personally convinced that stress a...

Bryce Lane put up a good article recently on stress and it made me think. Stress. It is all over the place. From work, relationships and often from our own personalities. Stress is there especially for those of us involved in exercise or fitness training. We tend to set ourselves goals: I want to lose fat, run faster, get stronger, climb more munros ... These goals are not always bad. I think sometimes that without goals and aims I would just become literally aimless....I don't like people who go through life as spectators , tourists. I want to be doing something - walking, cycling, climbing, whatever. Not even anything massive, just something. Going through life as a spectator doesn't appeal.... However...all these goals can just be a source of extra stress. I want to climb all the munros eventually. But sometimes the desire to do that spoils the enjoyment of other things. If the weather or circumstance mean that a day in the hills doesn't happen for a while t...