ANSWER PAGE
Answer # 1 Anxiety Attacks: The number of people suffering from panic, anxiety, & agoraphobia has reached more than epidemic proportions. If we add to this number those people suffering additional anxiety due to specific disease processes such as heart, cancer, diabetes, elevated blood pressure & pain-related disorders such as arthritis, fibromyalgia,, one wonders if anyone is anxiety-free. A large majority hold full-time jobs, many at executive & managerial levels where they experience a relatively high degree of workplace stress. Many are taking medications of some sort, from tranquilizers to anti-depressants & sleeping pills. Others are addicted to other substances including alcohol, nicotine, sugar & drugs. Many complain of poor concentration & memory recall, tending to be absent from work quite frequently. Few can remember the last time they felt well physically, emotionally or spiritually.
Managing anxiety & panic is like anything else. There are many facets to be considered & once these are defined, a workable program needs to be put in place & then worked with persistence! It is always a good idea to have a medical examination to rule out any disease processes. In my practice as a Lifestyle Change Educator, my clients play the game of "inner baseball" to manage & prevent anxiety disorder. First base is always managing the nutritional link. Most people pay little attention to what they put in their bodies, or don't put in their bodies. For example, sometimes the body gets breakfast & sometimes it doesn't. Many days it is loaded with junk & on other days it is put on a stringent diet. People with a tendency to hyperinsulinemia often report anxiety problems. This is a physiological issue & can be managed with proper diet. Second base is learning to work with the actual body sensations, thoughts & emotions. Whenever we feel tension, the body is attempting to let us know it is under physical stress. Most never pay attention to this cell phone message on low levels, but attention is certainly paid once the sensations begin screaming such as in an anxiety attack. Third base is learning to reprogram past experiences & negative expectations with the tools of imagery or Interactive Self-Hypnosis. The images we play in our mind become the goal of the subconscious mind. It is important for people with anxiety disorder to notice their negative programming patterns triggers & to place new images in these inner files.
Answer #2 Irritable Bowel Syndrome First, I do want to thank you for being such a good sport in sending in this question & with such good humor. Indeed, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Gastric Reflux & other gastro-intestinal problems do appear to be on the rise, but we really should not be surprised. Each week I see several patients here in my office sent by their gastroenterologist with this very diagnosis. Most have had a colonoscopy & a complete l check-up which is very important to rule out other medical diagnoses, such as cancer of the colon. Once this is done, my job is to help them manage the symptoms & hopefully to get off symptomatic medication. I'm glad you asked about prevention, because this condition is very preventable. My first order of business is to review the nutritional intake of the patient. I never cease to be amazed at what people eat all day long & without thinking about the outcome from these behaviors. Most diets are filled with low nutritional foods, sugars, high-glycemic carbohydrates or starches, artificial sweeteners, sugared drinks, etc. Some people over-eat foods that have a high level of fermentation & then wonder why they have a problem. So, the long & short of it is to really police your nutritional plan. This doesn't mean you have to be a bore about it, but try to take a good balanced approach & learn to observe your body reactions to what you eat. People who have been on antibiotic therapy often have problems with IBS due to the imbalance of intestinal flora & need to pay special attention to their food intake.
IBS & it's relatives are helped greatly by interactive self-hypnosis, mental biofeedback & awareness training. This special approach to mindbody stress management allows the patient to relax specific parts of the body utilizing the mind. The gastro-intestinal tract including the esophagus, stomach & it's sphincters, small & large intestine all respond well to deep relaxation imagery. Patients learn to do this type of training for themselves. Good symptom management & healing can be achieved when a sound nutritional plan is coupled with this type of practice. A sound program of prevention will certainly keep you with a healthy inner environment!
Answer # 3 Holiday Weight Gain Tthese are very good questions & I’m sure many people will thank you for asking them. While you ask about losing weight, I would like to address this as "burning fat." This is not merely a matter of semantics, but a look at a metabolism that burns fat, not sugar, and preserves the lean body mass. Fat burning is the ideal metabolic state for high level functioning of both mind and body. The crux of the matter is as we get older the body naturally becomes more sensitive to the higher glycemic carbohydrate foods, and produces more insulin in response to these foods. As we age, the cells can become more resistant to insulin, and we store fat easily. This is also a precursor to diabetes.. Some of the offending foods include refined foods, potatoes, white flour products including pasta and bagels, rice, fruits, and even some vegetables. If you have a family or personal medical history of diabetes, heart disease, circulatory disease, high blood pressure, obesity or yo-yo weight gain, your body can be even more sensitive. You might find that you store fat more readily, and that you have more difficulty in losing it. Women generally add this extra adipose tissue around the lower waist and hips, while men store this around their true waist.
In order to burn fat your body must have sufficient food intake, and it must be balanced based on your personal needs. Many people have cut way back on protein in their attempt to cut fat. The body needs protein to function, and it also needs fat. The amount depends on the lean body mass size and the amount of aerobic exercise. Some lifestyle scenarios that get people in trouble include dieting, over-exercising while under-eating, eating too many carbohydrate foods, and eating too frequently. If you suffer from mid-morning and late afternoon blood sugar drops, insatiable hunger, and the desire to eat very frequently you might want to keep a food log for a few days to review your intake. Poor diet is also connected to concentration problems, as well as poor memory and recall. There can also be emotional imbalance, sometimes with anxiety and/or depression. The good news is that once a sound nutritional program based on "fat burning" is in place, a person can actually eat everything they enjoy every day and stay at their ideal body fat percentage, as well as function better at all levels.
Walk-by, as well as emotional eating is a big problem in our society, and is responsible for much of our weight problems. Foods and beverages are chemicals, and each time we eat or drink , a reaction takes place in the body. The body recognized the food and produces insulin, the hormone largely responsible for storing fat. Even if the food you are eating is completely fat-free, the insulin will still store it as fat. Even something as simple as a breath mint, or diet soda can upset the balance. If you do this many times a day, you are setting yourself up for gaining weight. It is in the best interest of your health to keep from yo-yoing. As you learn to work with the food connection, you will begin to feel better physically and emotionally. You will develop your own internal motivating system.
Some tools for long term success include 1) awareness of food/beverage choices and how they react in your body 2) awareness meditation techniques for emotional and thought management and 3) imagery or self-hypnosis for success. Once you learn to work with your mindbody connection you can change your inner biochemistry right in the moment, and program for change. Managing your walk-by and emotional eating becomes a reality. Inner confidence and self-control brings success in the moment, and in turn this success brings more in moments that follow. You are on your way to a true healthy lifestyle change.
Answer # 4 Smoking: No butts about it, there is nothing good to be said for smoking. Even if you have been smoking for years, your mind and body will benefit from each cigarette you do not smoke. As you stop smoking utilizing a holistic plan, as written below, you will reduce your production of stress chemicals while helping your body produce healing chemicals. This process will bring your body to a higher level of health. Most smokers will agree that smoking is a health hazard, but the idea of stopping can be very frightening and over-whelming for some. It is interesting to note that some smokers have less difficulty than others when trying to stop this killer habit, and this phenomena seems to be connected to a genetic link. The stronger the link, the more difficult it is to stop smoking and to stay a non-smoker, but when the genetic link is well managed, it actually helps the smoker to stop and stay stopped. I suggest you read the question and answer in this month’s column. Smokers seem to have this sensitivity to certain carbohydrate foods. The difficulty in stopping the habit often depends on the severity of the carbohydrate sensitivity, and not so much on the number of cigarettes a person smokes per day. Even something as innocuous as a diet soda or breath mint can actually trigger the desire to smoke. I recommend the following tools to help you stop and stay free of addiction.
There are two special emotions that need attention during the smoking cessation lifestyle change process. One is perseverance. Most of us need to enhance that one! The other, instant gratification, needs to be diminished in most of us. The simple act of self-awareness will help you to achieve these goals.
Answer # 5 Early Retirement I was very happy to receive your question, & to have the opportunity to address it in this column. In my private medical hypnosis & lifestyle change practice, I see many people, men & women alike, having the very same issues following retirement. They usually seek my help for some stress related disease process, or may have been sent by their physician for high blood pressure, irritable bowel, gastric reflux, weight, smoking, or sleep disorders. They may be drinking more than usual, or find that their addictions or compulsions are ruling their lifestyles. The reason for coming might also include poor concentration on the golf course or tennis court. During the taking of the medical/personal history, I often find the situation you described above, or some variety of it. Due to the space constraints of this column, I will be addressing different management tools over the next few months. I suggest you clip the articles as each one will build on the other, as they form your personal management tool box.
Just the act of retiring proves very stressful for many people, especially those who have not thought deeply about the day to day business of being retired, how they will manage the many personal and professional changes, as well as their new roles as a retiree. If a person had been "married" to their career, they will now be moving into an entirely new role. Most have not practiced the actual playing out of that role, nor prepared how their new role fits into the scheme of things with their partner. Perhaps they haven’t looked at their new short and long-term goals, both for themselves and in their relationship. More than likely, the partner has not done this work either, and their has been little discussion about their new "production."
Retirement is a very big production, and the roles played by the participants may be very different indeed from previous roles. Some of those early roles were played out over decades, either with the same partner or with a set of partners. Nevertheless, the retiree is coming to the production with a past history and usually a set ideas of how retirement is going to be for him or her. However, remember these are just ideas, not yet reality, and we all know what that means. In addition, many just assume the other partner will go along with these ideas or new script, and will fall in madly in love with the new "character ". Neither has played their role before, and as each day unfolds with unexpected happenings, old automatic emotional responses appear, and needed adjustments must be made. Many people tell me that they feel they are married to an absolute stranger, even though they may have been married for decades, and confess they really don’t know their mate, and had no idea of what it would be like to be with them day in and day out. In their minds they often saw retirement as an extended vacation, painting that mural with happy vacation times past. If they knew how to look very closely at the individual frames of those inner memory movies, they would have noticed a winding down adjustment time at the very beginning of vacation. A sort of settling in. If they were an A type personalities, or married to one, they may notice that the individual brought plenty of tasks along, finding the separation from the Board Room too much to take. They would have also noticed a subtle, or perhaps not too subtle excitement about returning to their usual pattern of work and family life at the end of vacation. One can then see that retirement is not at all like being on vacation, and just as we had to develop a new set of skills when going off to college, getting married, or getting divorced, it is necessary once again to develop a brand new set of skills to manage retirement. These skills become even more important, as retirees are at the age when stress related and chronic diseases can surface. The killer diseases, including heart, diabetes, circulatory, high blood pressure, auto-immune and cancers are greatly affected by high level stress, and the ability to cope is often decreased. The older individual is often more susceptible to infections, and other stress-related immune deficiency problems. Learning to decrease stress in daily life is an absolute necessity for retirees wanting to live at a high level of health, and enjoy the fruits of their decades of work.
The first order of business is to begin to practice high level nutrition and emotional management. These are closely linked, one greatly effecting the other. Retired people often throw nutrition to the wind, and get hooked into lots of old bad behaviors and addictions. Regular meals are often skipped as they run off to the golf course, and once in the clubhouse they eat anything that appeals to the eye. Their is little thought to the actual needs of the their body. In fact, most people give little thought at all to what their particular body needs. The body does send messages, but it is like no one answers the phone or pager. It is not uncommon to eat a high-glycemic or sugar diet, and then wonder why the body stores fat easily, why the cholesterol levels are up, why the body falls asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and why the mind refusing to concentrate when reading or on the golf course. Eating eat out frequently, and many believe that once in a restaurant, the idea of nutrition is forbidden.
It is important to remember that every "body" has different nutritional needs. The amount of food, and the amount of protein is determined by the lean body mass, which is like the engine of a car and how far it is going to be driven. It is not a matter of choosing between high protein, low protein, high carbohydrate, low carbohydrate diets. Each individual body has a medical history, and a particular set of needs. The body needs nutrition, and it is never a good idea to skip meals, especially as a person ages. If a person has a strong family or personal medical history of diabetes, heart disease, circulatory disease, high blood pressure, yo-yo weight gain, and any addictions including alcohol, smoking or sugar, the types of carbohydrate food choices may need some adjustment. Some common trouble makers include processed cereal, sweetened yogurt, pasta, rice, potatoes, and white flour products. Many people eat too much fruit for their internal environment, and find it hard to understand why others can do this with no problem and they seem to gain weight easily, feel fatigue, or increased hunger. While it certainly is possible to enjoy all foods, one needs to know how and when to eat those to best benefit the body. When this is done, the body burns fat, and even if someone is at their ideal body fat percentage, burning fat is a healthy metabolism. It also improves concentration and brain functioning. Lots of memory loss is related to diet, and of course, stress. As we get older our ability to manage high sugar foods and large meals decreases. To manage hunger and burn fat it is necessary to understand what the individual body needs are.
Self-hypnosis and awareness meditative tools allow us to make changes more easily, and to manage emotions. I will address these tools in another answer column. There you will learn specific ways to diminish stress chemical production found in emotional states. These same tools are the basis of pain management, and as we learn to decrease brain waves and stress chemical production at will, it is possible to reduce chronic pain. Individuals who learn these skills can often decrease their pain medications, or change to one with less side-effects. So, be sure to look for this column next month .
I hope you enjoy our new column and will participate by sending any questions you might have to Elizabeth Bohorquez, R.N., SRN, CPH, President, Sarasota Hypnosis Institute, 1715 Stickney Point Road, Sarasota, FL 34231. Private consultations are available by phoning 923-5763. Ms. Bohorquez can also be reached by email at Ebohorq207@aol.com. Further information is available at her web site, www.hypnosis-audio.com. Schedule of online workshops discussing Disease Prevention & Mindbody Health available by email.