How to take change
by
I walked with my friend, a Quaker, to the newsstand the other night, and he bought a paper, thanking the newsie politely. The newsie didn’t even acknowledge it.
A sullen fellow, isn’t he? I commented.
Oh, he’s that way every night, shrugged my friend.
Then why do you continue to be so polite to my him?’ I asked. Why not? inquired my friend. Why should I let him decide how I’m going to act?.
As I thought about this incident later, it occurred to me that the important word was act. My friends acts toward people; most of us react toward them.
He has a sense of inner balance which is lacking in most of us; he knows who he is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return incivility for inactivity, because then he would no longer be in command of his own conduct. When we are enjoined in the bible to return good for evil, we look upon this as a moral injunction which it is. But it is also a psychological prescription for our emotional health. Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but in the world outside him. His spiritual temperature is always being raised or lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at the mercy of these elements.
Part 2
Praise gives him feeling of euphoria, which is false, because it does not last and it does not come from self approval. Criticism depresses him more than it should, because it confirms his own secretly shaky opinion of himself. Snubs hurt him, and the merest suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness.
A serenity of spirit can’t be achieve until we become the masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another determine whether we shall be rude or gracious, elated or depressed, is to relinquish control over our own personalities, which all we possess. The only true possession is self possession.
Figure Out People From Their Words
by john kord lagemann
AFTER a visit from a friend, my mother would review the conversation in her mind, the pauses, inflections and choice of words, then announce the real news the caller mentioned:
“Henry wants to sell his house.’’ “Frank is going to marry janie.’’ “Young Mrs. Cole think she’s pregnant but isn’t sure.’’
Mother was no mind reader, she was pregticing a teahnique we now call “content analysis.’’ It’s a kind of systematic search for the smallverbal clues that, when put together, reveal a larger meaning: attitudes, intentions, behavior patterns, underlying strategy. As Ben jonson wrote more than 300 years ago, “Language springs out of the inmost parts of us. No glass renders a man’s likeness so true as his speech.”
Experts in business and science use highly developed content-analysis techniques to measure changes in consumer attitudes and to diagnose emotional conflicts. Governments keep corps of analysts monitoring other nations’ broadcasts and printed materials to extract useful intelligence. I’ve found- as have many other people- that
Emotions and health
By patricia and ron deutsch
“For two months i’ve had these spells,”Fran Wilson told the heart specialist . “I get short of breath. My herd beats like a hammer and unevenly. I’m dizzy and i tremble .My chest hurts.Twice i’ve fainted.my doctor says that mt blood pressure and electorcardiogram are abnormal.”
“Was there any upset in your routine before the spells be-gan?” the specialist asked.
“My husband was transferred to
I suspect we’ll find,” said the specialist, that you don’t have heart trouble at all. I suspect that your illness is caused by emotion.”
Although the doctor proved correct, fran was not imagining her ailments.Nor was she mentally ill in the usual sense of the phrase.Emotional stress can produce real illness—true changes in the body chemistry and structure of quite normal people.And this phenomenon is amazingly common.Many specialists agree that psysicians hane long known that the mind could make the body ill.But they did not know how to differentiate between psysically caused illness and that caused by emotional stress.
Today answers to this problem are beginning to appear. And many doctors are using this new infornation as regularly as they emoloy their stethoscopes and tongue depressors .
Fran wilson’s case illustrates one of the easiest means of recognizing such ills: identifying characteristic clusters of physical symptoms which often point to emmon cluster called neu-rocirculatory asthenia the heart specialist tried a simple test. For two minutes he had her breathe deeply and rapidly. She grew dizzy . her heart pounded . she gasped that she was having an attack.
When she had rested, the doctor explained: those were some of the physical signs of great anxiety. Rapid deep breath-ing produced many such signs in any person. When we are afraid or angry, a part of the brain called the hypothalamus prepares the body for action. The heart speeds up to rush blood to our muscles. We breathe hard to fill the blood with oxygen hormones are released to bring the nervous system to a pitch of alarmed readiness. Sometimes our conscious mind, seeing no reason to be angry or afraid, may block out our awareness of anxiety .yet all the while the hypothalamus continues the alarm.
Fran’s emotional alarm had evidently been triggered by the temporary separation from her husband.”I feel upset if anyone close leaves me,” fran admitted to the doctor.’’ when I was a child, my parents left on a trip and were both killed in an accident. When Jim left-the first time in our marriage he’s been away more than overnight-I felt real panic. I pulled myself together, but I guess the fear was still three.” Fran was given tranquilizers and saw the doctor three times to talk over her fears. The symptoms vanished in two weeks.
Everyone knows that the mind evokes certain automatic responses from the body. Think about food and you salivate. Words or thoughts can prepare sexual organs for function, and cause a blush or goose-flesh. But more serious effects can be wrought by emotion. Take the case of ruth Chadwick .
Four times ruth had conceived a child but miscarried. On her fifth pregnancy, the obstetrician asked ruth how she felt about motherhood. He learned that, though she wanted a child, girlhood tales of the rigors of labor had terrified her. The doctor decided to let ruth talk out her fears at each prenatal visit. With no other treatment, Ruth delivered a healthy full-term baby.
Why? Researchers at the
How can thought work such changes? There is pathway between the hypothalamus, the brain segment that controls primitive reaction to anger, fear, hunger and sex, and the pituitary gland. This mysterious gland, a lump the size of a sugar cube, located at the base of the brain, had long been known to secrete a growth hormone. But recent research has uncovered a number of other hormones it produces. The front lobe alone was found to create chemical that trigger the making of sex hormones and govern the thyroid, which in turn controls the body’s metabolism. It yields yet another chemical that reg-ulates adrenal secretion.
The middle and back lobes of the pituitary affect the kidneys, contractions of the uterus, and blood pressure. We have just opened the door, says one researcher, and have had only a superficial look at this gland. But we now know one way in which emotion can be translated into bodily changes.
With such clues to very real mechanisms, many doctors have begun to look for signs of emotional stress in patients as a matter of routine. Written tests have been designed to seek out the factors most commonly found among people whose ailments have been proved to be caused by emotion.
one such patient was jean becker , whose low back pain had grown steadily wores for a year , with no apparent cause. the symptoms cannot be seen on x ray. when he had scored it , he asked , have you been depressed iately?.
ever since a year ago, when my father died, she said mother died when i was small, and dad brought me up alone. although my husband and children give me plenty of family, without dad all the joy seems to have gone out of things.
the doctor gave her anti depressant pills and told her to come in for a chat every few days. within a week jean’s back pain had disappeared. moreover , the talks revealed that she felt that her children had little need of her and that her husband and children, and they quickly gave her the assurance of love she needs, and the pills could be stopped . had the back pain persisted once jean’s depression was gone, the doctor would have felt it more likely that the cause was purely physical.
one test devised by doctors at duke university,
sudden changes in life are often found to precede illness. in one study of patients with a wide range of ailments, three out of four of were found to have recently suffered some major loss loved ones jobs homes. even apparently pleasant changes, such as a trip abroad, can cause trouble . the tourist who complains about foreign food or water would probably be wiser to blame the tension of being in a strange place, may be caused by small emotional stresses.
are doctor other than psychiatrists really able to handle such emotional problems? numerous experience show that they are. and some medical schools now are offering short courses in office psychiatry to their graduates . most physicians cannot devote an hour to talk with a patients as psychiatrists do. but so long a time has been found unnecessary in treating most patients with psychogenic illness. they need, primarily, re assurance that their ills can be dealt with.
as doctor learn to incorporate the new knowledge of psy-chogenic illness into their work, some of the responsibility, as always, must rest with the patient . he should make an of effort to protect himself when he knows that stress has made him vulnerable. he can help the doctor by telling him when emotional upheaval has preceded or accompanied an illness. he should be completely frank about his angers and fears, his frustrations and losses. the heroic view that everything is just fine may be good manners with a friend, but it is poor judgment when it is your doctor who wants to know.
Biofeedback: Mind teaches Body to Heal Itself
by john J. Fried
for almost seven years, Mrs. Andrews had been unable to move her head. Her condition-known as wryneck- had started with painful muscle spasms, which grew worse until her head was always pulled to the left. After years of going to doctors, including psychiatrists, she was referred to
“New look at me!’’ Mrs. Andrews said after her fourth treatment. She slowly moved her head from side to side, then held it proudly eyes- forward. “First, the doctors explained that I could learn to relax the major muscle that turns my head. I was skeptical, but willing to try. Electrodes from a small machine were attached to my neck, and the machine made loud clicks. My job was to lower the number of clicks by relaxing my neck muscle. I can’t tell you how I did this, but I did, and the next thing I knew, I could hold my head straight.” Having learned how to relax this muscle, Mrs. Andrews is now able to do it without the aid of the machine.
Biofeedback training is based on the premise that we can modify or gain control over a range of bodily functions once thought to be totally automatic. We all use natural forms of feedback to perfect skills. For example, in learning to serve a tennis ball, we throw ot on the air, hit it, and watch where it lads. If the sails 15 feet past the service line, seeing that constitutes a footwork until we make the ball land where it should. Learning such a skill requires only making an effort, then seeing, hearing or feeling the results.
In many instances if we want to relax a back muscle at will, or move a paralyzed arm, say we can’t carry out the intention. Either nature has not provided us with a feedback mechanism, giving us signals we can use to learn that skill, or disease has destroyed a feedback system. Now, however, researchers have developed a host of sensory instruments that can help bridge the gap.
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