Monthly Archives: July 2011

Schedule Negative Time & Worry Less | Health Freedom Alliance

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Pencil in 30 minutes a day to wallow in your anxieties, study suggests

For those concerned with shedding some of their anxieties, it seems planning a certain time every day to worry may help stop the stress-out cycle.

When people with adjustment disorders, burnout or severe work problems used techniques to confine their worrying a single, scheduled 30- minute period each day, they were better able to cope with their problems, a new study by researchers in the Netherlands finds.

The study made use of a technique, called “stimulus control,” that researchers have studied for almost 30 years. By compartmentalizing worry — setting aside a specific half-hour period each day to think about worries and consider solutions, and also deliberately avoiding thinking about those issues the rest of the day — people can ultimately help reduce those worries, research has shown.

“When we’re engaged in worry, it doesn’t really help us for someone to tell us to stop worrying,” said Tom Borkovec, a professor emeritus of psychology at Penn State University. “If you tell someone to postpone it for a while, we are able to actually do that.”

via Schedule Negative Time & Worry Less | Health Freedom Alliance.

Autism, healthcare: Anthem, Blue Shield to cover therapy for autistic children – latimes.com

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Two of California’s largest health insurers have agreed to pay for costly behavioral therapy for thousands of autistic children — services the companies have long resisted covering.

Under pressure from regulators, Blue Shield of California and Anthem Blue Cross said they would pick up the initial cost of a treatment known as applied behavior analysis.

via Autism, healthcare: Anthem, Blue Shield to cover therapy for autistic children – latimes.com.

I’m not familiar with applied behavior analysis, but I have seen what ABM can do for children. (And it’s nothing less than amazing). Wouldn’t it be great if parents could use their insurance to choose the treatment that would give their children the best chance at a happy, healthy life?

Help and information – therapies – The Anat Baniel Method | Disability Charity | Scope UK

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The Anat Baniel Method (ABM) is suitable for people diagnosed with a range of neurological conditions, including cerebral palsy. It uses a gentle, non-medical, learning-based approach to help the brain of the person utilise its natural plasticity to form new neural connections and patterns that take them beyond their current limitations. While it is a continual process, changes begin happening right away and are occasionally quite dramatic.

Movement and enhanced awareness of self are the main tools used for communicating with the brain, and the therapy is conducted very much with the brain and learning in mind. The work done through movement is aimed at facilitating the brain to learn new functions and new ways of acting. So the way of working is a little different to more physically directed therapies such as physiotherapy. Rather than work on the body to produce direct body change, the ABM teacher works through gentle body movements to provide information to the person’s brain which then, in turn, gets the body to change. It is a significant difference and one which means the therapy focuses on increased function and ability of the whole person in areas such as turning, crawling or walking.

via Help and information – therapies – The Anat Baniel Method | Disability Charity | Scope UK.

The Method – by Robert Slatkin > Tablet Magazine – A New Read on Jewish Life

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Feldenkrais’ martial-arts study helped give birth to the Feldenkrais Method, a philosophy of human movement. In Feldenkrais’ first four books on jiujitsu and judo, he began introducing concepts that would reach their apotheosis in Higher Judo. Social constraints, he wrote, have stunted our physical development. We are stuck in an infantile stage in how we use our feet predominately for upright carriage, how we react to falling which begs for a “more adult independence of the gravitational force”, and our lack of a more thorough “development of our space adjustment in all directions from the origins of our movable co-ordinate system.” What is the best way to overcome these liabilities? Judo, he argued, the way of gentleness.

via The Method – by Robert Slatkin > Tablet Magazine – A New Read on Jewish Life.