Bust Your Bad Mood with Exercise

Use Fitness, Not Food, to Change Your State of Mind
— By Jason Anderson, Certified Personal Trainer

from http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/articles_print.asp?id=1276

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–>Some days, I am just in a mood. I don’t know what you call it, maybe stressed, bored, lonely, angry, sad, anxious, or tired. I call it “getting into a funk.” When it happens, I have allowed my circumstances to dictate my attitude and my thinking and then—bam! Before I know what hit me, I’m in a full-blown funk. While I like to exercise when a bad mood rises, others turn to unhealthy habits like emotional eating or smoking. When you’re upset, stressed or otherwise not feeling like yourself, exercise—and the mood-enhancing endorphins it produces—can be the best thing for you. Don’t you believe me?

The next time you feel that mood coming on, identify what you’re feeling and why. Are you bored because your best friend is out of town? Are you feeling lonely since the kids have left the nest? Or maybe you are stressing over finances. Whatever it is, pinpoint it. Then use the specific ideas below to bust your bad mood with a feel-good exercise prescription.

Your Mood: Angry
Your blood is boiling! You want to take this anger out on someone before you explode!
Mood Busting Exercises: Kickboxing, boxing, shadowboxing, or martial arts.
Whether you follow a kickboxing video or take a group class, you’ll release anger with every punch, kick and jab. Imagine the target of your anger as you do a set of 12 front kicks! Besides getting your anger out you’ll blast calories with these cardio workouts. Any form of martial arts, often overlooked as a form of exercise, will also work. Besides actually making contact with pads, targets, and shields (a major stress and anger releaser!), you’ll gain gaining confidence, discipline, and focus.

Your Mood: Bored
You’re stuck in a rut and want to do something interesting, but you’re not sure what.
Mood Busting Exercises: Spinning class, step aerobics, or a new fitness DVD
Beat boredom (without food) by taking a high-energy Spinning class at your local gym. Set to great tunes, you’ll be surprised how quickly an hourlong class flies by. Step aerobics is another great workout when you’re bored because it’s always changing. You have to concentrate on the choreography—sort of like learning a simple dance that involves a step. You’ll build skills and feel really accomplished when it’s over! Lastly, head to the library or video rental store and pick up the first workout DVD that looks interesting to you. Do it at home or invite a friend over to try your newest exercise venture!

Your Mood: Lonely
When you feel lonely, throwing a pity party for one will only make it worse. Sometimes the best thing for you is to get out and socialize.
Mood Busting Exercises: Any group fitness class
Exercising with a group of people who are all following the same routine and all have similar goals can really make you feel like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. No matter what type of class you choose, there are plenty of reasons why group classes are so popular: They offer social support, a friendly environment and an opportunity to meet people who have similar interests.

Your Mood: Depressed
Depression is no joke. Millions of people suffer from depression that is debilitating and emotionally painful, but exercise is scientifically proven to help treat depression. While finding the motivation to take the first step is the hardest part, the right activity can help.
Mood Busting Exercises: Outdoor walking, biking, or running
There’s something restorative about nature. Getting outside to breathe in fresh air and admire the scenery can make a world of difference in your perspective. Plus, regular exposure to sunlight can boost your mood and ward of seasonal depression, too. No matter what outdoor pursuit you enjoy (think outside of the box and try canoeing, climbing, or team sports, too), moving your body can help improve your outlook and symptoms.

Your Mood: Stressed
We’re all busy, often taking on more responsibilities than we can handle. When life gets crazy and you want to throw in the towel, you can wind down without giving up on your obligations.
Mood Busting Exercises: Mind-body exercises like yoga, Pilates, or Tai chi
Mind-body exercises take focus, patience, and attention. Because of the complexities of maintaining the correct form and breathing, which connects the mind and body, it’s almost impossible to think about your to-do list while you’re in the middle of a good yoga or Pilates class, for example. The quiet, meditative atmosphere in these classes (and videos) allows you to tune in to the present moment—something that the overly stressed should do more often! If you’re thinking that you’re too busy or overwhelmed to try a class, then take advantage of short video workouts that are often broken up into 10- to 30- minute segments.

Have you ever finished a workout and thought to yourself, “I wish I hadn’t done that! I really just wasted my time.” Probably not. Chances are you feel better physically and mentally. Regardless of your funk, exercise can be a useful tool to get you back to bust your bad mood and get back to your normal self. What are you waiting for?

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Yoga and Mediataion to where it is Needed

The NYC based Lineage Project supports at-risk & incarcerated youth, their families & communities, by offering yoga, meditation and other awareness-based practices. We are called Lineage Project because we believe that we all share the same Lineage: the lineage of the heart, and that wisdom teachings must continue to be passed down from one generation to the next. www.lineageproject.org

Change your Mind Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions…

If happiness is an inner state, influenced by external conditions but not dependent on them, how can we achieve it? Ricard will examine the inner and outer factors that increase or diminish our sense of well-being, dissect the underlying mechanisms of happiness, and lead us to a way of looking at the mind itself based on his book, Happiness: A Guide to Life’s Most Important Skill and from the research in neuroscience on the effect of mind-training on the brain.

Speaker Bio: Matthieu Ricard, a gifted scientist turned Buddhist monk, is a best selling author, translator, and photographer. He has lived and studied in the Himalayas for the last 35 years…

Mindful Eating

from The Center for Mindful Eating

Mindful eating has the powerful potential to transform people’s relationship to food and eating, to improve overall health, body image, relationships and self-esteem. Mindful eating involves many components such as:

• learning to make choices in beginning or ending a meal based on awareness of hunger and satiety cues;

• learning to identify personal triggers for mindless eating, such as emotions, social pressures, or certain foods;

• valuing quality over quantity of what you’re eating;

• appreciating the sensual, as well as the nourishing, capacity of food;

• feeling deep gratitude that may come from appreciating and experiencing food

read more

Mindful Eating Practices

Vote for our video!

Check out this video that I and several other students worked on. It came out pretty good, I am happy with it, especially considering that it was very last minute and none of us really knew how to edit or shoot video. We did have help of course, with out which this wouldn’t have been possible.

Go check it out and vote for it, even if you have to sign up!

http://www.gogreentube.com/watch.php?v=NDgzOTY3

Coming to Our Senses

Mindfulness Stress Reduction And Healing

Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn

Jon Kabat-Zinn: Coming to Our Senses

Curing the Therapeutic State

Thomas Szasz on the medicalization of American life

Lifted from http://www.reason.com/news/show/27767.html Click on over to read the entire interview!

Reason: You may have seen the TV commercials in which drug companies urge people suffering from “social anxiety disorder” or “generalized anxiety disorder” to ask their doctor for a certain brand of pill. These ads reinforce the idea that anxiety and other kinds of psychological problems are medical issues, and they highlight the physician’s role as pharmacological gatekeeper. But they could also be seen as empowering individuals by encouraging them to be assertive with their doctors. On balance, do you see this kind of message as a positive or a negative development?

Szasz: This phenomenon illustrates what I call the creeping therapeutic state. I see it as insidious, especially given the cooperation between the government and the media. This is allowed on television. But advertising Scotch, a legal drink, is not allowed. This subtly undermines the rule of law, the principle that if something is legal, then it’s legal, and if it’s illegal, then it’s illegal. A prescription drug is illegal; pharmacists cannot sell it to you unless you have a prescription. These are illegal drugs, but nobody calls them illegal drugs. So I see this as pernicious, as an example of what F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises talked about–that the opposite of freedom is not brutal tyranny but capriciousness.

Reason: Suppose someone feels depressed, and he finds that when he takes Prozac he feels better. Or suppose he’s anxious, and he finds that he calms down when he takes a Xanax. He can get these pills from his doctor. Is he doing anything wrong by taking these drugs?

Szasz: I don’t think he’s doing anything wrong, except I think he should be able to buy these drugs in the free market so he can compare them to opium, marijuana, or other drugs. There is no competition now between the prescription drugs and the traditional drugs which people took when they felt bad. After all, people have medicated themselves since time immemorial. I suspect that opium in small doses is safer over a long period of time than these complicated organic compounds.

Reason: In recent years, we’re told, this country has been hit by an epidemic of “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” What are the roots of this epidemic?

Szasz: I would first say that the epidemic doesn’t exist. No one explains where this disease came from, why it didn’t exist 50 years ago. No one is able to diagnose it with objective tests. It’s diagnosed by a teacher complaining or a parent complaining. People are referring to the fact that they don’t like misbehaving children, mainly boys, in the schools. The diagnosis helps tranquilize the parent, tranquilize the school system. It offers them the sense that they are doing something about the problem, that they are dealing with it in a rational, scientific way. It’s a kind of pharmacological magic.

Reason: What do you think the consequences of prescribing Ritalin for all of these kids will be?

Szasz: We may not know all of the medical consequences for another 20 or 30 years. In social terms, it gives the impression to people that behavioral problems are medical and should be handled with drugs; it imposes a certain stigma on the child, possibly on the family. It medicalizes educational and child- rearing problems, and it may cause biological problems in the person taking the drug. I don’t know if the average person on Main Street realizes that if a 30-year-old man has a pocketful of Ritalin, he can go to jail for years. This is called “speed.” And this is what they give as a treatment to schoolchildren when there’s absolutely no laboratory or medical evidence that they are sick.

Reason: Recently we’ve heard Tipper Gore and other people say that health insurers should be forced to cover mental health treatment on the same terms as medical treatment. What do you think the consequences of such “parity” will be?

Szasz: We are talking about a situation where the government is mandating that an ostensibly private insurance company provide coverage for a disease which doesn’t exist. There is so much to say about it, I don’t know where to begin. The people who clamor for this–mainly politicians and psychiatrists–want parity for mental illness, but they don’t want parity for the mental patient, because ordinary patients can reject treatment.

They don’t mean therapy; they mean getting a foot in the door for involuntarily treating people and having these huge bowls of money going into psychiatry and psychiatric drugs. Again, cui bono: Who profits from this? It finally came out that Eli Lilly is a big donor to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and they have millions of dollars to propagandize their views. The critics don’t have any money to propagandize their views. This is a completely one-sided, government-sponsored movement.

Study Skills: Making Mistakes

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

everything fell apart

Pema Chödrön- Why I Became a Buddhist

The truth is I didn’t know it was Buddhism that I was attracted to initially. In 1972, I read an article by Chögyam Trungpa, who would become my principal teacher. The article made terrific sense to me, but I had no idea that he was describing Buddhism. I was living a countercultural life in northern New Mexico. There were a lot of communes around, and I explored them all. One week there’d be a Hindu swami in the neighborhood, the next a Zen roshi, the next a Native American teacher, and the next a Sufi master. I really didn’t distinguish between them, and no one encouraged me to do so.

Then my marriage ended and-I’ve realized since then that this is fairly common-it was one of those crises where everything fell apart. I couldn’t feel any ground under my feet. It was devastating.

The word depression was not used much back then, but I think I went into a major depression. At the time, however, I had no words for it. All I knew was that the pain was intense, and there was nothing I could do to get out of it. Any of the usual strategies for entertaining myself or finding comfort only exaggerated the pain. Going to a movie, eating, smoking dope-it all somehow made the pain worse.

I started looking for ways to deal with my anger, which seemed unfamiliar and out of control. The groundlessness I felt had a fearsome and panicky quality to it. I was offered plenty of advice, but it all seemed to boil down to a similar message: “Turn toward the light” or “Chant yourself into a higher consciousness.” It was useless to me. If I could have simply turned toward the light, I would’ve done so happily.

I had two children and was teaching school at the time, and one day I came out of work and got into a friend’s pickup truck. On the front seat was a magazine that Chögyam Trungpa had published in the 1970s. It lay open to an article titled “Working with Negativity.” The first line was something like: “There’s nothing wrong with negativity.” I took this to mean: “There’s nothing wrong with what you’re going through. It’s very real, and it brings you closer to the truth.” The article explained that when you find yourself caught in extreme discomfort or negativity, the negativity itself is not the problem. If you can have a direct experience of that pain, it will be a great teacher for you. The problem is what Chögyam Trungpa called “negative negativity,” or reacting against negativity and trying to escape it. It was the first sane advice I had heard for someone in my situation. As I read, I kept nodding and saying to myself: This is true. I didn’t even know that Chögyam Trungpa was a Buddhist teacher, or that it was Buddhism I was reading about. Once I connected with it, though, I never looked back. I felt-and I still feel-as if I had connected with an unfinished story, or rediscovered a path that I’d lost long ago.

read more . . .

Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason With Pema Chodron

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/portraits_chodron.html