emotion management Archives - Amazing Health Advances https://amazinghealthadvances.net/tag/emotion-management/ Your hub for fresh-picked health and wellness info Mon, 11 Jul 2022 05:58:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.1 https://amazinghealthadvances.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/AHA_Gradient_Bowl-150x150.jpg emotion management Archives - Amazing Health Advances https://amazinghealthadvances.net/tag/emotion-management/ 32 32 The Surprising Benefits of Disappointment + How to Embrace Disappointment & Use It to Your Advantage https://amazinghealthadvances.net/how-to-embrace-disappointment-8028/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-embrace-disappointment-8028 https://amazinghealthadvances.net/how-to-embrace-disappointment-8028/#respond Mon, 11 Jul 2022 07:00:42 +0000 https://amazinghealthadvances.net/?p=14815 Dr. Caroline Leaf– In this podcast (episode #392) and blog, I talk about managing feelings of disappointment before they negatively affect our mental wellbeing. Disappointment is the feeling we get when an expectation that we have isn’t met. It is an emotional signal, a messenger, telling us that something is out of balance in our lives—what we want doesn’t reflect our reality. If we take the time to analyze feelings of disappointment, we will notice they are attached to three other signals: behaviors, bodily sensations, and perspective. This means that we don’t just feel disappointment as an emotion; it can also impact how we feel physically, how we act, and our perception of ourselves and the world around us. The key to managing feelings of disappointment is going beyond awareness and learning how to make our feelings work for us instead of against us. Disappointment can quickly become toxic if we immerse ourselves in it for too long, which is why it is so important to learn how to manage our minds. Disappointment tends to breed more and more disappointment, and before we know it, we may develop a “disappointing mindset” that becomes our outlook on life. Remember, whatever we think about the most grows! By seeing disappointment as a messenger, a way of gathering data about what is going on in our lives, we can actually make life easier and become more resilient. In fact, the decisions we make after we experience a major disappointment can transform the eventual outcome(s) and help us make better decisions. By putting our disappointment in perspective and learning from it, we can reconceptualize what happened (think about it in a different way), thereby gaining a new perspective that enhances our creativity and develops our intelligence as we learn over time to have a more diverse range of expectations. Disappointment provides an opportunity for growth! We can learn to manage disappointment in the moment by embracing, processing and reconceptualizing what has happened to us, which is known as mind management or self-regulation. To do this, I recommend using the mind management technique I have researched, developed and applied clinically over the past three decades, which is called the Neurocycle. (I discuss this in depth in my latest book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and my app Neurocycle.) The kind of self-regulation that is achieved using the Neurocycle is a great way to deal with the root of the toxic generational cycles in your life, reconceptualizing them and how they impact your genetic expression. It is done in 5 steps: Gather awareness of what you are feeling emotionally and physically as you work on a toxic cycle in your life. Reflect on why you feel the way you do—be as specific as possible. Write this down—this is way to help organize your thinking and gain clarity. Recheck what you have written. Look for patterns in your work life, your relationships, your responses, your attitudes and so on. Take action. I call this step an “active reach”. It is essentially an action you take to reinforce the new, reconceptualized pattern of thinking you want in your life (which is replacing the old, toxic cycle). In terms of managing disappointment, the 5 steps could be: Gathering awareness of your disappointment. This means embracing the aforementioned signals, including how you feel emotionally and physically. Processing how your disappointment is affecting you by describing what you are disappointed about in as much detail as possible, reflecting on the “why” and writing all this down to help organize and clarify your thinking. Reconceptualizing how your disappointment is affecting you by looking at what you have written down and thinking deeply about it. This will help you gain perspective, allowing you to better to see things for what they really are instead of getting stuck in the highly emotional state of disappointment. This, in turn, will help you find ways to practice thinking about your feelings of disappointment in new ways, which will build a new mindset that will make you more resilient to depression in the future. To read the original article click here.

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]]> https://amazinghealthadvances.net/how-to-embrace-disappointment-8028/feed/ 0 How Sleep Helps to Process Emotion https://amazinghealthadvances.net/how-sleep-helps-to-process-emotion-7964/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-sleep-helps-to-process-emotion-7964 https://amazinghealthadvances.net/how-sleep-helps-to-process-emotion-7964/#respond Mon, 16 May 2022 07:00:30 +0000 https://amazinghealthadvances.net/?p=14565 University of Bern via Newswise – Researchers at the Department of Neurology of the University of Bern and University Hospital Bern identified how the brain triages emotions during dream sleep to consolidate the storage of positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative ones. The work expands the importance of sleep in mental health and opens new ways of therapeutic strategies. Rapid eye movement (REM or paradoxical) sleep is a unique and mysterious sleep state during which most of the dreams occur together with intense emotional contents. How and why these emotions are reactivated is unclear. The prefrontal cortex integrates many of these emotions during wakefulness but appears paradoxically quiescent during REM sleep. «Our goal was to understand the underlying mechanism and the functions of such a surprising phenomenon», says Prof. Antoine Adamantidis from the Department of Biomedical Research (DBMR) at the University of Bern and the Department of Neurology at the Inselspital, University Hospital of Bern. Processing emotions, particularly distinguishing between danger and safety, is critical for the survival of animals. In humans, excessively negative emotions, such as fear reactions and states of anxiety, lead to pathological states like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). In Europe, roughly 15% of the population is affected by persistent anxiety and severe mental illness. The research group headed by Antoine Adamantidis is now providing insights into how the brain helps to reinforce positive emotions and weaken strongly negative or traumatic emotions during REM sleep. This study was published in the journal Science. A Dual Mechanism The researchers first conditioned mice to recognize auditory stimuli associated with safety and others associated with danger (aversive stimuli). The activity of neurons in the brain of mice was then recorded during sleep-wake cycles. In this way, the researchers were able to map different areas of a cell and determine how emotional memories are transformed during REM sleep. Neurons are composed of a cell body (soma) that integrates information coming from the dendrites (inputs) and send signals to other neurons via their axons (outputs). The results obtained showed that cell somas are kept silent while their dendrites are activated. «This means a decoupling of the two cellular compartments, in other words soma wide asleep and dendrites wide awake», explains Adamantidis. This decoupling is important because the strong activity of the dendrites allows the encoding of both danger and safety emotions, while the inhibitions of the soma completely block the output of the circuit during REM sleep. In other words, the brain favours the discrimination of safety versus danger in the dendrites, but block the over-reaction to emotion, in particular danger. A Survival Advantage According to the researchers, the coexistence of both mechanisms is beneficial to the stability and survival of the organisms: «This bi-directional mechanism is essential to optimize the discrimination between dangerous and safe signals», says Mattia Aime from the DBMR, first author of the study. If this discrimination is missing in humans and excessive fear reactions are generated, this can lead to anxiety disorders. The findings are particularly relevant to pathological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorders, in which trauma is over-consolidated in the prefrontal cortex, day after day during sleep. Breakthrough for Sleep Medicine These findings pave the way to a better understanding of the processing of emotions during sleep in humans and open new perspectives for therapeutic targets to treat maladaptive processing of traumatic memories, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) and their early sleep-dependent consolidation. Additional acute or chronic mental health issues that may implicate this somatodendritic decoupling during sleep include acute and chronic stress, anxiety, depression, panic, or even anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Sleep research and sleep medicine have long been a research focus of the University of Bern and the Inselspital, Bern University Hospital. «We hope that our findings will not only be of interest to the patients, but also to the broad public», says Adamantidis. To read the original aritcle click here.

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