#and so physically ill and I still get protracted withdrawals from it

[pathologictwo]

my brain is incapable of not obsessing over things that happened a long time ago. i lost both of my days off to just ruminating on it over and over and it’s probably not even a big deal outside of my own head. maybe i should be medicated again idk

[djgblogger-blog]

To prevent the next global crisis, don't forget today's small disasters

http://bit.ly/2l089sv

In an era of seemingly ceaseless tragedies, it can be hard to stay on top of the news. This week, six wildfires have burned up over 141,000 acres in California – an area larger than the cities of New York and Boston combined – killing two people.

A few weeks prior, the headlines were on Iran’s deadly earthquake. Before that, it was the Rohingya refugee crisis.

You may have managed to stay on top of all that news. But do you know about the November plague outbreak in Madagascar that has infected 2,119 people and killed 171? What about flooding in South Asia a few months back, which affected more than 41 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal?

If it’s all new to you, you’re hardly alone. According to the International Federation of the Red Cross, 91 percent of global crises go unnoticed.

As a researcher at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, a Harvard University center dedicated to advancing the science and practice of humanitarian action, our aim is to change that. Why? Evidence shows that ignoring all these small crises is a recipe for global disaster.

The many sides of world crises

Crises can take many forms, from hurricanes and floods to epidemics and complex emergencies like war. They also have varying levels of intensity: Taking only Latin America and the Caribbean, between 1994 and 2014, for every one large-scale crisis, there were approximately 177 smaller crises.

November 2017 saw not only a 7.1 magnitude earthquake kill over 400 people in Iran and Iraq, for example, but also flash floods, a typhoon and earthquakes in Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia, among other countries.

People generally pay less attention to these events, in part because there isn’t much data on them. Still, while the impacts of an individual small crises may be less – both in terms of death toll and physical damage – together minor crises can have huge human consequences.

According to a 2015 United Nations report, the accumulated losses from small and recurrent events like flash floods, fires and drought account for 42 percent or more of total economic losses in low- and middle-income countries.

For particularly disaster-prone nations, the toll can be much higher. In Madagascar, for example, the annual economic losses from minor crises between 2001 and 2011 were equivalent to 75 percent of annual public investment during that same period. This is a serious economic erosion challenge for any country, but especially a low-income nation like Madagascar.

Plus, even in places where insurance exists, such events are rarely covered. As such, small crises can plunge families into debt. They also create food insecurity, drive environment damage and hurt mental health.

Small crises may also lay the foundations for greater tragedy to come. Before the Syrian civil war began in 2011, for example, drought and food shortages were compelling out-of-work farmers to leave rural areas starting in 2007.

Over several years, people from the countryside migrated en masse into big cities like Damascus. This influx, in turn, exacerbated Syria’s existing political instability and contributed to the initial waves of political unrest that began rocking the country in 2011.

The end result is now one of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time.

Neglected crises

I call the kind of incidents that occasionally grace international headlines but tend to fade quickly into the background “neglected crises.”

Currently, repeated famines in Somalia and Ethiopia fall into this category, as do the ongoing civil wars in Yemen and the Central African Republic.

Protracted violence and displacement in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda have also made brief appearances in international news, only to disappear for those not suffering through them.

These problems aren’t just neglected in the news – they’re also critically underfunded. From 2016 to 2017, the United Nations fell short of its requested US$22.8 billion in global humanitarian assistance by fully $20.1 billion.

Consequently, neglected crises tend to get little economic and humanitarian support, even when great human suffering results from them. More than a million people have been uprooted by conflict in the Central African Republic, yet budget shortfalls compelled aid workers distributing food to displaced people to withdraw in early 2017.

Silent crises

Then there are what I call “silent crises.” These events may be noteworthy for local government and the United Nations, but less so internationally.

Zika is a case in point. For two years before this mosquito-borne illness exploded across Latin America in 2015, it infected 30,000 people in French Polynesia. But as no deaths were reported and the consequences of infections remained uncertain, almost no one paid attention.

Unseasonably wet or dry weather is another issue that both the media and humanitarian relief organizations tend to neglect. That, too, is short-sighted.

The United Nations has found that between 1990 and 2014, the cumulative effects of droughts and floods in Latin America “generated more than half of all human losses due to climate events.” Bad weather during those 15 years damaged the homes, crops and land of 115 million Latin Americans.

And because climate change-related disasters are strongly associated with poverty and inequality, these aberrant weather phenomena disproportionately hurt people in low- and middle-income countries.

Neglected rural problems often culminate in big urban crises. Take the 2010 Haitian earthquake, for example.

Its epicenter struck near Port-au-Prince, a city that had doubled in size between 1986 and 2006 as government neglect of agricultural policy and the well-being of people in the countryside forced millions of farmers to relocate to the capital.

By 2010, 86 percent of Port-au-Prince residents lived in dense informal settlements, many of them located on mountainsides, along rivers and in other fragile areas.

Urban crises

Haiti’s exploding urban growth echoes a global trend. In 1950, only 30 percent of people lived in cities. Today, the global urban population exceeds the rural population. Exploding urban populations, combined with poor planning, have led to overcrowding, insufficient public services and rising urban inequality.

When disaster then strikes in such cities, the death toll can be astounding. Haiti’s 2010 earthquake claimed approximately 310,000 lives, including 25 percent of all the country’s civil servants, and displaced more than 1.5 million. Today, 2.5 million Haitians still subsist on humanitarian assistance.

Seven years later, more than $13.5 billion in international aid money has gone into funding the country’s recovery, including the added toll of 2016’s Hurricane Matthew.

That’s because post-disaster response is incredibly expensive. In 2013, the Red Cross calculated that for every $1 spent on preparedness activities, $4 could be saved in response internationally

So, if saving lives is not reason enough to pay more attention to small crises, perhaps money will be.

Tilly Alcayna does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

[psychotherapyconsultants]

How Yoga Helps with Depression, Anxiety and Addiction

Aerobic movement of any kind helps to relieve depression and anxiety by boosting our brain’s dopamine levels and providing endorphins. But some types of exercises are superior for healing chronic conditions, mood disorders, and addiction. Yoga’s therapeutic benefits have been studied in recent decades, with much of the research being in randomized controlled trials — the most rigorous for proving efficacy.

There are many types of yoga, of course — from the more aerobic power yoga to a meditative gentle yoga. Hatha yoga, the most studied, combines physical postures (asanas) and controlled breathing with short periods of deep relaxation. I have found the most benefit from Bikram yoga, or hot yoga, a sequence of 26 Hatha yoga positions and two breathing exercises designed by Bikram Choudhury to engage and heal all of the systems of your body.

According to Sara Curry, Bikram yoga instructor and creator of the Sober Yogis program in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, medical miracles can happen when a person commits to a regular practice. In her TEDx talk, she tells the story of David, one of her yoga students who had a pacemaker surgically implanted in his chest. Six weeks after surgery, he began to practice with her six days a week. After only four weeks of yoga, David returned for a checkup with his cardiologist, and the doctor took him off three of his six medications and cut the remaining dosage of the other three in half.

“Our bodies can recover from tremendous amounts of trauma and chronic abuse,” Curry explains in her talk.

Curry and a team of counselors work with addicts on using Bikram yoga, group therapy, and meditation to help them stay clean. According to her exploratory study, hot yoga appears to decrease the length and intensity of symptoms of post-acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS). These protracted withdrawal symptoms that include depression, anxiety, irritability, and sleeplessness can last up to two years after a person gets clean, and are the primary reason for relapse. Participants reported significant reductions in PAWS symptoms that negatively correlated to the number of classes taken a week.

I’m fascinated by the science of yoga — what specifically is happening in our bodies that makes these changes in us. Why is yoga more beneficial in relieving depression and anxiety, and controlling addiction, than, say, CrossFit? What about hot yoga, in particular, is so transforming?

Yoga Helps With Detoxification

“Ninety-five percent of all disease is a result of nutritional deficiency or toxicity,” explains Steven J. Saltzman, MD, an anesthesiologist with an interest in integrative medicine who practices Bikram yoga himself, in a question-and-answer session about the medical benefits of hot yoga that I recently attended. Most of our toxins are stored in fat cells just beneath the skin, so we release them by sweating the way we do in a 105-degree room.

It Gets the Blood Flowing, Boosting Your Health

Yoga redistributes blood flow, increasing oxygen delivery and improving the circulatory system. All of the postures in the Bikram sequence work to increase the flow of fresh, oxygenated blood to every part of the body. Bikram calls it extension and compression. In all of the postures, we are creating a tourniquet effect — cutting off the blood supply to different organs and glands. Then, after 20 seconds holding the posture, the blood’s volume and pressure have reached maximum capacity and the newly oxygenated blood rushes in and floods our system. According to Bikram, “no other form of exercise can create this volume and force.” Until listening to Dr. Saltzman, I was unaware that the recovery phase of yoga or any interval training program is as important as the maximum performance phase. The built-in Savasana in yoga trains and establishes our heart-rate variability, a predictor of heart health and of general health.

Yoga Helps You Control Your Breath and More

Learning how to breathe is a critical component of the yoga practice. If we stay on our mat and don’t lift a leg, but can maintain calm, stable breathing in the hot room, we are still receiving medical benefits from the class, a yoga teacher told me recently. Why is the breathing so important?

“By voluntarily changing the rate, depth, and pattern of breathing, we can change the messages being sent from the body’s respiratory system to the brain,” explain Richard P. Brown, MD, and Patricia L. Gerbarg, MD, in their book, The Healing Power of the Breath. “In this way, breathing techniques provide a portal to the autonomic communication network through which we can, by changing our breathing patterns, send specific messages to the brain using the language of the body — a language the brain understands and to which it responds.”

Bikram designed a breathing exercise, pranayama, to introduce each class because he believes that “improving the function of the lungs is almost always the first repair that needs doing.” Properly functioning lungs send fresh oxygen throughout the body, purifying our blood.

It Tames the Stress Response

Unlike some aerobic activity that increases cortisol levels, yoga tames the stress response by priming the parasympathetic nervous system. “It is established science that yoga destroys and metabolizes stress hormones,” explains Dr. Saltzman There is a meditative element of yoga that promotes mindfulness (helping us to stay in the present moment) that is effective therapy for depression and anxiety. Yoga moderates our stress response systems which, in turn, decreases physiological arousal — like reducing heart rate and lowering blood pressure. As mentioned above, yoga also increases heart rate variability, which can be an indicator of the body’s ability to respond to stress and an overall gauge for emotional resilience.

Yoga Provides You With a Caring Community

“The yoga community is one of the most supportive communities of compassionate individuals you’ll ever meet,” explains Sara in her TEDx talk. “We all struggle, thrive, fail, and persevere on the mat together. That’s how to learn what we say in yoga, Namaste, ‘the light within me acknowledges the light within you.’”

I have found this to be the case with my own group of yogis. There is a group of us that show up at 9 a.m. almost every day to fight together. Many of us are battling some kind of chronic illness, and all of us are trying to clear the mental clutter from our brains to make room for more positive and peaceful emotions. It’s extraordinarily encouraging to me to have them beside me as I meet my demons on the mat.

Join Project Beyond Blue, the new depression community.

Originally posted on Sanity Break at Everyday Health.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2017/03/01/how-yoga-helps-with-depression-anxiety-and-addiction/