Archive for category: Neuropsychological Health

While to epidemiologists the disorder is a medical condition, anxiety is starting to seem like a sociological condition, too: a shared cultural experience that feeds on alarmist CNN graphics and metastasizes through social media.

This past winter, Sarah Fader, a 37-year-old social media consultant in Brooklyn who has generalized anxiety disorder, texted a friend in Oregon about an impending visit, and when a quick response failed to materialize, she posted on Twitter to her 16,000-plus followers. “I don’t hear from my friend for a day — my thought, they don’t want to be my friend anymore,” she wrote, appending the hashtag #ThisIsWhatAnxietyFeelsLike.

Thousands of people were soon offering up their own examples under the hashtag; some were retweeted more than 1,000 times. You might say Ms. Fader struck a nerve. “If you’re a human being living in 2017 and you’re not anxious,” she said on the telephone, “there’s something wrong with you.”

It was 70 years ago that the poet W. H. Auden published “The Age of Anxiety,” a six-part verse framing modern humankind’s condition over the course of more than 100 pages, and now it seems we are too rattled to even sit down and read something that long (or as the internet would say, tl;dr).

Anxiety has become our everyday argot, our thrumming lifeblood: not just on Twitter (the ur-anxious medium, with its constant updates), but also in blogger diaries, celebrity confessionals (Et tu, Beyoncé?), a hit Broadway show (“Dear Evan Hansen”), a magazine start-up (Anxy, a mental-health publication based in Berkeley, Calif.), buzzed-about television series (like “Maniac,” a coming Netflix series by Cary Fukunaga, the lauded “True Detective” director) and, defying our abbreviated attention spans, on bookshelves.

With two new volumes analyzing the condition (“On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety,” by Andrea Petersen, and “Hi, Anxiety,” by Kat Kinsman) following recent best-sellers by Scott Stossel (“My Age of Anxiety”) and Daniel Smith (“Monkey Mind”), the anxiety memoir has become a literary subgenre to rival the depression memoir, firmly established since William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation” in the 1990s and continuing today with Daphne Merkin’s “This Close to Happy.”

Excerpt from New York Times. read the full story here

The Pathways team of professionals has helped thousands of people with brain injuries. We are Dedicated to effective and compassionate care for individuals with neurological challenges.

Since ancient Hindu and Chinese times, meditation has been promoted as a medicine for health and success. But does meditation have any basis in Western science? The answer, based on multiple recent peer-reviewed studies, has been overwhelmingly “yes!” Meditation, or mindfulness, can have significant effects on frontal-brain activity that control emotion and concentration. These cognitive changes are not merely spiritual: scientists have demonstrated effects of neural connectivity in association with mindfulness exercises. By imaging the brain, neuro-researchers have looked at frontal brain activity that is associated with executive functions, or the ability to take a pro-active approach in controlling one’s actions. Such improvements garnered from meditation may improve working memory, multi-tasking, and concentration ability.

The research makes intuitive sense if one thinks of mindfulness as the ability to concentrate. If one “exercises” mindfulness via meditation, then cognitive ability can increase as if a muscle during a physical workout. Neuroscientists are beginning to unlock the complex mechanisms in which behavior can affect brain activity.

Scientists at Stanford University and UCSF made a profound step towards connecting a form mindfulness exercise with effects at the cellular level (“neurons” are cells of the brain). In the study, researchers examined the effects of deep breathing on higher-order brain function, specifically relating to arousal. The researchers targeted a specific region of the brain that is known to control regular breathing rhythms. They then keyed in on a specific group of neurons within the breathing regulator region that, when disabled, led to dramatic decreases in alertness and response. The study implicated this region of breathing control to a region of the brain that deals with alertness, attention, panic, and arousal. The studies raise the possibility that controlled, deep breathing could promote mental calming and other effects relating to higher cognitive function.

The Pathways team of professionals has helped thousands of people with brain injuries. We are Dedicated to effective and compassionate care for individuals with neurological challenges.

Can Meditation and Relaxation Boost Your Memory and Improve Attention?

Definitely! Research has shown that meditation can physically change brain structure to increase mental efficacy the quality associated with a higher intelligence. Anxiety and stress are frequent causes of memory and attention difficulties. Biofeedback is an effective way to combat these problems.

Contact us and Schedule a Biofeedback appointment