I have a friend, whom I have never met.  He is a young man in (where are you from Henrik?)  Oh, yes, Henrik lives in Sweden.

He is 30 years old going on “Wise” man  and he has spent (how many Henrik?) oh, yes, 5 years training himself in the power of Positive Thinking.  We can all learn something from Henrik!  What you ask?  Well, here  is what he has accomplished - in his own words:

• Switched from a generally pretty negative attitude to a much more positive one.
• Lost 26 pounds during 4 months in the winter/spring of 2009. I did it by using a program called Turbulence Training, check out the review here.
• Become a lot more present. I used to live a lot of my life in my head, in the past and in the future. Today I spend a lot more time living it in the present moment. It’s a wonderful thing.
• I have become a less shy and more confident person.
• I get things done. I used to be a real procrastinating slacker that never got much done. My effectiveness and productivity have shot up quite a bit since then (although I certainly still have room for improvement).
• I have created a highly successful blog. This blog has – in July of 2010 – 32000+ subscribers via email and RSS and hundreds of thousands of visitors each month. How did I do it? How to Build a Somewhat Successful Blog: 16 Lessons I Have Learned has a lot of answers.

Henrik is a man with a mission.  I have never actually met him, but his blog is filled with interesting lessons and lovely positive thoughts.  His picture is perfect for what he advocates.

So it was terrific tonight when I got home and got a message from Henrik.  My day had not been stellar!  It was one of those days when my computer wouldn’t do anything I asked of it, and although I was all set up for my favorite client, she came in and asked for other things which I could not bring up on my computer immediately, which made me feel the fool and a tad inept when she found a spelling error in the very first title page.

Geez, I felt completely disheartened after trying a number of times to burn a DVD of my work for my client, only to send her home with a DVD with “Nothing” on it.  Duh!

Knowing this, I spent another 2 hours trying to burn a “corrected” version of the DVD.  To No Avail!  Sorry, the computer said, No Can Do because the original can’t be found.  What?!!! It’s a Movie!  You Can Burn a Movie, said I…but no.

Then, I opened my g-mail and Henrik sent me this:

Thank you Henrik!   My day changed tremendously!

When my girls were little, every once in a while they got up on “the wrong side of the bed”. Which means, they were cranky, impatient, sleepy little girls. Now me, I rarely get up on the wrong side of the bed. Usually I wake up and I’m awake! Not my girls, nooooooo sireee! In fact, I don’t believe they really woke up till ten o’clock in the morning, but lucky for me I had a magic spell to change their attitudes!

Endorphins! Endorphins are neurotransmitters that live in the brain and they have pain-relieving properties. There are pain killing drugs like morphine and codeine that act like endorphins.

A natural way to increase your endorphin production is through prolonged exercise, that’s why they call it “runners high”.

Another and easier way to make endorphins is to smile. That is it. The secret. Right there. Just smile!

On the way to school I used to tell my daughters, after I was tired of the complaining and bad moods, “Okay kids, it’s time to endorphin your face! Smile, begin now and do not stop till we get to school”
Silly but it worked!

It was silly, it felt silly, but I was totally serious because I know that another way to produce natural endorphins in the body is to smile. Yes! Smile though your heart is breaking and you will build up your endorphin levels which will make you feel better.

Remember the pain-relieving properties? Well, endorphins are also believed to be connected to euphoric feelings (and the release of sex hormones, but that’s not what I was going for). So by the time we got to school my kids were….well not euphoric, but happier than they were when the got in the car.
images-1Don’t believe it! Well I lengthened their lives too!

I can just hear some of you saying…guess what, they were smiling just because they were sooo glad to get out of the car! Okay, I can grant you that, but I can also tell you I probably helped them live longer too!

As it turns out, researchers from Wayne State University in Michigan found out that the bigger the grin and the deeper creases around yours eyes the longer you are likely to live! The study was led by Ernest Abel and published in Psychological Science.

Ernie and his crew studied 230 photographs of US Major League baseball players who began their careers before 1950. They grouped the players into “partial smile”, “no smile”, and “full smile” that’s when the eyes and mouth, the whole face is smiling.

The pictures were taken from the 1952 baseball register - information included was body mass index, birth, career length, marital status which indicated physical fitness. As of June 1st of 2009 those in the ‘no smile’ category lived for an average of 72.9 years; those with partial smiles- (just the mouth smiling) died at average age 75, but the grinning wild looking full face smiley guys died at rhe ripe old age of 79.9.

Now, there are a number of questions that come to my head in this study, like, did the cameraman instruct them to “say cheese” and some did and some thought “nah” or were some just shy and didn’t want to smile.

Nevertheless, we know you can make endorphins by simply smiling, we know they cause euphoria, and I know my girls are going to live a long life.

Wonder what a wink and a smile can do?

OMG, Sarah Palin is going to be around for a long long time!!!!

I was watching the news, which reminded me of the beginning of a Beatles song: “I heard the news today… oh boy..”

…and I was thinking about how we don’t consider what we consume in thoughts.  Right – thoughts.  We consider our diets and what is good for us, we consider our fitness and how much exercise we are getting, (well, some of us do)  but do we consider our daily diet of idea intake?

Consider this, how many negative messages are in your daily life?  Do you really need to know about the tragedy that happened in the news, in your favorite soap opera, in the lives of the “rich and famous”?

Is your intake of negative thoughts and ideas permeating the way you look at life in general?  Is it making you fearful, skeptical, or simply anxious?

We are constantly bombarded by messages that we consume without any thought of how they will affect us.  So, I’m suggesting we start being more aware how many outside negative thoughts fill our lives.  I’ve often written about being observers of our own thoughts, but have you considered the ideas and thoughts we are consuming everyday, without ever being aware of them.

Do you have friends that complain about their lives on a regular basis?  Do you watch too many negative programs?  All of these things affect our emotions and our outlook.

So let’s take a little assessment of  our diet of thoughts and ideas and just be aware of what we are accepting into our minds. And then we need to accept that we don’t have to accept them.

We can hit the delete button, we can decide on how much news and what news we want to hear, and we can cut out toxic relationships that don’t help us maintain a balanced approach to life.

It’s up to you, you have the ultimate control on what ideas and thoughts you want to be exposed to.

Balance presents itself in all kinds of ways,  food, thoughts, and exercise.  We really are sentries for our own lives. We can decide who or what gets in and what stays out.  So remember to say- Who goes there?  Be in charge of the messages that enter your mind.

I don’t know about you - honest, I don’t! - but when I was growing up summers were long, languid affairs. You spent a lot of time just hanging out, doing nothing. It was a time to play soccer with your mates, make up games of your own, and sometimes just hang around staring at the sky.

I didn’t appreciate it then but it was a time to just be, not to think about the future or the past, to simply enjoy the present.

But once you get out of childhood, college and work and family mean the luxury of laziness is not an option. You have to work or when you do take vacation you are too busy trying to cram as much in as possible to really just stop and relax.

Or if you are unfortunate enough to be out of work then you certainly aren’t thinking about a long vacation, and days are filled with trying to find a new job or just worrying about your situation. Either way, not much fun.

But just because childhood is long gone - in my case way way long gone - doesn’t mean you can’t recapture some of that summer-time feeling. You just have to work a little harder at it that’s all.

Take advantage of the longer days, the light, the heat, the warmth. Use those as tools to help you just take a little time for yourself and reflect, even meditate, on your life.

For instance, after work instead of going straight home take 15 minutes to go for a walk; take the time to enjoy the trees, the light, the scent of flowers, the wind, the warmth. Focus on those and not on the problems at work or what you are going to have for dinner, or what activity you have to do with the kids later.

For just a few minutes, pretend you are a kid again with nothing but time stretching out in front of you.

If you don’t have time after work what about first thing in the morning, what about lunchtime. You don’t need long, you don’t need a special environment. All you need is a little time, a little space and a willingness to cast your mind back and clear the thoughts of the present out of your head.

It’s amazing how many problems melt away when you do this. Things that have been bugging you suddenly don’t seem that important. Arguments you have been having with a friend or loved one seem silly so you resolve to forget them or apologize and move on. Problems at work don’t seem that difficult.

There’s nothing magical here. You are just giving your mind some breathing room, some time to push the day-to-day stuff aside and focus on nothing. It’s really quite wonderful how big a difference a little peace and quiet can have on you.

I have a friend who has just undergone a mastectomy. She has cancer.  She recently came to a party we were throwing. Okay, it was our wedding.  I was afraid she would not be able to attend because she was going to have her first chemotherapy treatment the day before the wedding, but she came and had a great time.

In fact, she really had a better than great time. She had a radiant-hippie-free-love of a time!

You see, Cindy is one of my oldest friends.  I mean old as in knowing her for a very long time.

I’ve known Cindy since we were 12. I’ve known Suzanne since we were 8 and I met Suzi when we were 13.  They were all there at the wedding, sitting together warm in the glow of the event and the serene feeling of being with people you love and whom you  have known  “almost” your whole life.

In other words, Cindy was among dear friends who knew her before we all had bras.

I can only imagine how she felt being at a festive celebration like a wedding when just the day before she had to endure  4 hours of chemo. The change of scenery must have been a relief and a welcome experience.

So when, during dinner, Suzanne asked Cindy to pass the salt, Cindy said, “I’m sorry, I can’t…I have cancer.”  At first it was shocking, then we  looked at her face and we all began to laugh.

You see, Cindy said it like it was.  She continued to use this phrase each time someone asked her to do something.  Maybe you had to be there, but kids, it was funny, because Cindy has cancer and she is not running away, hiding it, keeping it to herself or becoming a victim of it.  She has it.  It doesn’t have her.

I’m going on Friday to sit with her for her next chemo.  I feel privileged that she will let me be there with her.  We will talk about everything and maybe even the cancer.  It’s scary.  We are scared but we are strong.

I have to say, I have been with people who are diagnosed with a disease and they become so frightened and alone with it that their life ceases to be defined by anything except the disease.

Dr. Emmett Miller talks about patients he has worked with who are diagnosed with lung cancer. “But doc,” they tell him, “I’ve never smoked! My uncle smoked 2 packs a day and never got it, Why me!”

Dr. Miller says there is anger, tension, and fear when a diagnosis is made.  He talks about the anxiety that takes over a patient, if they let it. Dr. Miller works with hypnosis and guided imagery to help people train the thoughts and tame the fears that disease creates in the mind.

I am beginning to understand a very simple lesson.  It’s not what happens to you, it’s how you react to it.

So when Cindy says, “Sorry, I can’t pass the salt. I have cancer”  She’s actually saying “I’m taking care of myself, it’s okay to talk about it.  Take care, I have cancer. It doesn’t have me.”

Last fall Kevin and I went to Yosemite.  We love living in San Francisco, but it is really nice to take some time to get away from our daily lives of work and urban living and just be in awe of natural surroundings.

I love the quiet of the forest, the sound of the birds and russle of the wind through the trees.  I enjoy my life in the city, but it’s so nice to go somewhere without having to have quarters for a parking meter or wonder if your car is parked on the wrong side of the street on street cleaning day.

It was such fun to watch people making their way up El Capitan, taking up the challenge of climbing skill vs. sheer face of the Cliff.  I was really struck by the  people clinging to the rock mid-way up, they had so far to fall and so far to go to get to the top.

It struck me how really tiny these people were compared to the sheer rock wall.  How really small these precious little lives were and how each one is so important in the fabric of their own life.

As a hypnotherapist I work with people who have challenges all the time -  one wants to lose weight, another wants to be able to get over the phobia or fear of crossing a bridge, others just want to stop feeling anxious and desperate, some become so tainted with problems and things that challenge them that they stop feeling good about life itself.

I wondered if those tiny climbers  looked at life in the same perspective.  Maybe instead of seeing how far they could fall or how far they had to go, climbers have another take on it,  maybe they believe  that they had  already come so far with some success, looked at the challenges and the danger and met it eye to eye. Maybe facing it gives them the courage to continue the climb to the top, expecting success.

I think that’s a better way to look at it.  In fact, maybe it would be good to look at life like that -  “We’ve come this far, I guess we can continue on”.
When we got back to San Francisco there was a new study out by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, about the suicide rate in the United States.  The suicide rate increased for the first time in a decade, particularly among middle-aged white women.  Women between the ages of 40 to 65 are killing themselves in greater numbers than ever.

Why?  The study could not come up with a conclusion, but there are some things to consider.   What are these women up against.  Why are they in such despair to think that it is easier to end life than to continue on.

Maybe they can take a lesson from the climbers. Kevin said that when he looked at the climbers he didn’t think of how far they had to go, he thought about how they were focusing on just the next step, the next hand hold, the stone right in front of them and how they would handle that.

I like that idea too. Maybe we shouldn’t despair about how far we have to go, maybe we should look at how we need to handle things right now.

Maybe women have lost hold of who they are and where they want to go, not all women of course, but too many to lose.

Every time I go to the gym I’m amazed at the sheer variety of different exercises you can do to work out each part of your body. It seems that for each muscle there are a dozen different ways of working it to make it stronger.

That’s good, because variety can help you avoid becoming bored with your workout routine. It’s also useful because if you keep doing the same thing over and over again the benefits are not as great as if you keep trying new things.

That raised a question in my mind. If you can make your physical body better, more efficient and stronger by doing a variety of exercises, can you train and strengthen other things, like memory?

There are lots of studies that show you can give the brain a workout and train it to improve memory, and reduce your risk of dementia. But I was more interested in finding out about emotions, in particular can you learn to control your emotions better or increase your capacity for compassion, forgiveness, or for over-all happiness?

Recently, I saw a news story about a guy who weighed 600 pounds and lost 400 pounds over a 2 1/2 year period with the help of a friend. They asked him, what made him decide to lose the weight, he said, that he was so unhappy he thought, “If I can be this unhappy, why can’t I learn to be this much happier?

Clearly losing the weight made him happier, but an even more intriguing question is in the course of becoming happier did he lose the weight? In effect, which came first, the chicken or the egg?

We may not have an answer to that question just yet but a recent study, in the Public Library of Science One, did help answer another question about our emotions, namely ‘can we train ourselves to be more compassionate? Happily the answer is yes!
This study was done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The researchers used MRI (brain imaging) which showed that loving-kindness and compassion can be learned in the same way as playing a musical instrument or being good at sports. All it takes is practice. Practice, Practice, Practice!

They studied a group of Tibetan monks who cultivated compassion meditations, and some lay people who had only recently learned to meditate. The newbies were asked to think good thoughts about relatives and friends and then (now this is just a thumbnail explanation) they were asked to generate good feelings toward all beings. Guess what? Scans of their brains revealed that the circuits used to detect emotions and feelings were dramatically changed in subjects who were practicing this form of compassionate meditation. Even among the newbies! And the more they practiced good feelings towards everyone, the better they got at it and the more positive feelings of compassion they experienced!

What’s fascinating about this is it shows that our brains, our empathy with others, are not stuck at set points, that they can be exercised and changed. Like our muscles they can be flexed and exercised and strengthened. The end result can be something truly wonderful, a greater sense of happiness and compassion. And you don’t even need to go to the gym to get it!

Lately, I’ve been working with people who are suffering from anxiety.  There is a lot of anxiety out there, and in many cases there is good reason to be anxious.  Loss of a job, money worries, or health issues just to name a few.  But sometimes we create anxiety when we don’t have to.

One client was a young mother who was raising her step-daughter.  When the step-daughter was 8,  the birth mother re-entered the scene and took over as primary caregiver for the step-daughter.

You can understand why the young mother felt anxious.  Her world had changed from primary caregiver for her step-daughter to “Week-end” mom.  She felt anxious because each weekend she dreaded having the step-daughter re-enter the family.  It became unbearable because she felt all the good she did working with the step-daughter had changed and the girl became disruptive in the family dynamics.

The young mother began to dread each weekend.  She expected the worst, and you know what? Each weekend became worse.

Expectations can be extremely powerful when it comes to anxiety.  What you  anticipate is usually what you get.  If you expect bad things to happen you begin to interpret anything that goes wrong as “Bad”.

As Alexander Pope said, ” Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed”.

It’s not only negative expectations that create disappointment, it’s good expectations too.

I’ve seen this phenomenon with contests on television.  One of my friends  tried out for a reality TV show 3 times.  She felt that the third time was a charm and she absolutely thought she would win.  Not only did she think she would win, but she thought that she had the right to win.  When she didn’t win she felt that life was unfair.  She had done all the positive thinking and had the “right attitude” but she still didn’t win!

The loss really threw her whole belief system for a loop.  She had the expectation that life worked in a certain manner and if it didn’t, nothing she believed in was true.  She became anxious and began to devalue herself because she had lost, yet again.

We all have the feeling that life should work the way we want it to and when it doesn’t we question ourselves and our beliefs.  But when you take a closer look we are not prisoners of our beliefs.

The young mother has a choice to see the reality of her situation.  The step-daughter will be coming every weekend.  She can dread it or she can create a new way of being a family that will include the step-daughter instead of just “holding her breath” till Sunday Night.

My friend can  accept that she didn’t win again and see that being on a reality TV show isn’t going to change whether she has a successful life or not.

We are not victims of our expectations.  We are creaters of our lives.  How we react to life can make us anxious or we can simpy change our expectations.

Buy shares in Starbucks. Go and hug your neighborhood barrista. They could be saving your brain!

A new study from Finland found that people who drank three to five cups of coffee a day in middle age were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s or dementia compared to people who drank no coffee or very little.

The study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, followed more than 1,400 people between the ages of 65 and 79 over the course of 21 years. They asked them various questions including how much tea and coffee they drank a day.

They found that people who drank what was categorized as “moderate consumption” - 3 to 5 cups of coffee a day - during midlife had the lowest risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia, compared to people who didn’t drink any coffee or drank two or fewer cups. Drinking more than 5 cups a day didn’t seem to offer any extra protective benefits.

What about tea? Well, this was Finland and apparently there weren’t enough tea drinkers to draw any conclusions about its effectiveness.

The really good news for coffee lovers is that this is just the latest piece of research showing that a cuppa Joe can do a lot more than just provide a quick pick-me-up first thing in the morning (or even last thing at night).

• Harvard researchers found that drinking coffee can reduce your risk of diabetes. A similar study in the Netherlands found the same thing
• Six separate studies found that regular coffee drinkers are up to 80 percent less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease compared to non-drinkers
• Other research has found that coffee can reduce your risk of colon cancer, headaches, and cavities
• There’s even a study from Brazil that shows that children who drink coffee - with milk - are much less likely to be depressed than other children

Altogether some 19,000 different studies have been done on coffee. It’s one of the most widely researched substances in the world. Most of the studies have found some positive benefits, for most people.

Like with any beverage there is a danger in drinking too much. But even there, another study has shown that people who smoke and drink alcohol, but who also drink a lot of coffee, are at lower risk of heart disease than smokers/drinkers who don’t consume coffee.

Think about that the next time you are in Starbucks behind the person who is ordering 7 triple shot extra hot low foam soy-milk white chocolate lattes. Be patient with them, they’re not buying drinks, they’re buying medicine.