Leslie Glass's Blog, page 307

What Is Denial

From Rachel Fast for Reach Out Recovery: Denial is the most common reaction to problems with substance and alcohol abuse. The number of people who acknowledge that they have a problem with alcohol is a tiny fraction of those who think they don’t. If you are someone who drinks in excess and worries about it, or even gives it a thought now and then, you may be on the road to recovery.

There are people who drink a bottle of wine, or more, or sometimes a little less (or the equivalent of beer, or hard liquor) a day and consider the consumption of that amount absolutely normal. Told that they have a problem, they would scoff, wave you off, tell you you’re nuts, maybe to mind your own business.

Should You Tell People They Have A Problem

Just recently, I squelched the impulse to tell an old and close friend that she drank too much, facing as ludicrous, the idea that she would immediately concur, run out to get help, and live soberly ever after. Trouble is, aside from the physical damage the drug–yes, alcohol is a drug–does to you, it also makes you boring, or irascible, or inappropriately amorous, or silly, or embarrassing in any number of ways, AND YOU DO NOT KNOW IT.

Alcoholics Think They Are Fine

You, in your cups, are convinced that whatever way you are is just fine, often even better than fine, while all those around you are dismayed in one way or another, and some may be considering whether or not they even want you around any more.

You in your cups have the same amount of realistic recognition of reality as a person having an auditory or visual hallucination; to the mentally-ill person, that sound and/or sight is as real as a clap of thunder or the earth under his or her feet; to the drunk, the behavior is appropriate, justified, necessary, even brilliant.

Why Do They Think That

The distortion of reality brought on by alcohol makes it easy to deny its negative effects, a happy fact for the people who sell the stuff. The drinker all too often does not know how his or her behavior is changed by drink. True, occasionally, he or she will look back with remorse, but then decide, not that drinking is a problem, but to be more careful while drinking in the future.

The woman mentioned above, who had been charming and delightful while regaling the company around her with stories of her recent adventures on a cruise ship in the Baltic, suddenly turned her attention to matters political, and when asked, somewhat firmly by someone at the table, not to discuss politics, she saw violent rage in the request and reciprocated in kind. She slumped over, shook with fury, looked up occasionally to state facts about which no one had any interest, because everyone was distracted by her condition, which was scary.

No Remorse for Bad Behavior

She later acknowledged only that the person who had requested a cessation of political conversation was a dangerous maniac. She had not only ruined a lovely evening but afterwards distorted completely the events that turned it grim and even scary. If she read this now and recognized herself, she would be furious, not at herself, but at me for wrongly criticizing her. Denial is sometimes useful, in cases such as this, dangerous.

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Addiction Hurts Families By Keeping Them In Denial

Joe was divorced a few years ago and had a secret he couldn’t share with anyone, not his friends, family, or even his lawyer: His wife, Alice’s, drinking had made him feel alone, unhappy, worried, and finally frustrated and lonely enough to leave. It was confusing because Alice thought her drinking wasn’t her husband’s business. She insisted Joe was no fun, and it was he who had changed, not her. She was in denial. He secretly wondered if the divorce was really his fault?

His Wife Denied There Was A Problem

How do you reason with someone who says nothing’s wrong? Joe told me, “I knew my wife was drinking too much. I knew she wouldn’t listen to my concerns. I knew my marriage was over. But I didn’t know what had happened or why. I didn’t know how alcoholism works or how deeply it had hurt me. I searched the web but haven’t seen another site like ROR.”

Thanks for the kind words, Joe. ROR stands in your shoes, and our mission is to open everyone’s eyes. No one affected by addiction should to feel confused, helpless, and alone. We’re all family members who need support.

Many People Don’t Know What’s Going On

One of the saddest components of addiction is the incalculable number of family members and friends impacted by the disease who don’t know the reason for their suffering. Joe did not encourage Alice to drink. He’s not co dependent (like some of us), so he didn’t rush to get Alice drinks at parties. He didn’t drink with her to mollify her, or take her to bars so she could imbibe. He did tell her about his concerns, but Alice surrounded herself with others who liked to party, so her behavior seemed normal to her and Joe seemed like the killjoy determined to stifle her fun. Alice told Joe he was a control freak and didn’t think falling down or slurring her words was a big deal. And she got worse.  

How Long Does Alcoholism Take

It takes seven or more years for an adult to become a full-blown alcoholic. Those years for a family member can be really lonely and confusing if you don’t know what you’re looking at. If your family member becomes abusive or belligerent when you bring it up and you’re forced to enter a reality that seems crazy to you, it’s a real red flag. Denial has entered the building. That’s the time to explore the reality of addiction and how it changes people.

Denial Keeps Friends and Family Isolated And Alone

The isolation that addiction breeds may be the most insidious part of the disease because loved ones tend to look to each other for resolution and comfort, and not to outsiders. If your wife or son, or daughter or boyfriend is drinking too much, and you’re unhappy about it, you’re more likely to try to reason with them, negotiate with them. Most everything on the web is geared toward managing the addict’s behavior, or dealing with the addict and finding solutions for them. Family members have their lives turned upside down, and need support to understand it’s not their fault, and it’s all right to find their own solutions. 

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This Brain Circuit Is Key To Both Depression And Addiction

From Medical News Today:

New research conducted in mice identifies a neural pathway crucial to both depression and addiction. Can we treat these problems by simply manipulating this pathway?

The pleasure and reward system is one of the most important systems governed by the brain.

It spurs us to enjoy the activities that have contributed to our survival as a species, such as eating, drinking, and having sex, so that we feel motivated to pursue them.

The activity of the reward system, however, is also a key factor in various types of addictive behavior.

Now, a team of researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore — led by Prof. Scott Thompson, Ph.D. — has discovered that brain regions involved in addiction may also play a role in depression, albeit in an opposite way.

The researchers, who recently published their findings in the journal Nature, identified an increased strength of signals sent between the hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens — two brain regions that form part of the reward system — as a sign of addiction.

“These two parts of the brain are known to be important in processing rewarding experiences,” notes Prof. Thompson. “The communication between these regions is stronger in addiction, although the mechanisms underlying this were unknown,” he adds.

In the current study, the team also tested a new idea, namely whether the same signals grew weaker in people with depression.

“We also suspected that opposite changes in the strength of this communication would occur in depression. A weakening of their connections could explain the defect in reward processing that causes the symptom of anhedonia [a loss of pleasure in usually pleasurable activities] in depressed patients.”

-Prof. Scott Thompson

Influencing the reward systemThe researchers worked with mice, focusing on the brain circuitry that plays a crucial role in goal-directed behavior and trying to see if they could change its activity.

To do so, the team introduced light-sensitive proteins into the neurons that form part of this circuitry. With this method, the researchers hoped to either block or boost the signals between the hippocampus and the nucleus.

In the mice that had received the light-sensitive protein, the researchers first created a false reward memory by exposing them to light for 4 seconds. This meant that the mice now associated pleasure with the location of the light exposure.

Essentially, the technique activated the pathway between the two regions and boosted the signals transmitted between them.

After 1 day, the researchers returned the mice to the places where they had received the false reward memory, then exposed them to light again. This time, however, the goal was to shut down signaling between the hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens.

Following this experiment, the investigators confirmed that this pathway is crucial in reward association. Once the pathway was silenced, the mice stopped favoring the location in which they had received the reward memory.

Having established that they could alter the signaling of the reward pathway, the researchers shifted their focus to mouse models of depression.

They tried the same technique, hoping to boost the relevant brain activity in depressed mice, but this time, the experiment did not succeed.

The researchers could only boost the activity of the reward system circuitry after first administering anti-depressant drugs to the rodents. This step allowed the investigators to “imprint” artificial reward memories in the brains of this group of mice as well.

“These exciting results bring us closer to understanding what goes wrong in the brains of clinically depressed patients,” comments the dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Dr. E. Albert Reece, who was not involved in the research.

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What Pot Advocates Hide

Marijuana seems to be on an unstoppable march to legalization in the United States.

New York and New Jersey are racing to join the 10 states that already allow recreational use of cannabis. Some 65 percent of Americans favor legalization, and several potential Democratic candidates for president support ending federal prohibitions on marijuana.

This huge shift in public attitudes comes even though most Americans do not use the drug. Only 15 percent of people over 12 used it even once in 2017, according to a large federal survey. That year, only three million people tried it for the first time.

Instead, the change has been largely driven by decadeslong lobbying by marijuana legalization advocates and for-profit cannabis companies.

Those groups have shrewdly recast marijuana as a medicine rather than an intoxicant. Some have even claimed that marijuana can help slow the opioid epidemic, though studies show that people who use cannabis are more likely to start using opioids later.

Meanwhile, legalization advocates have squelched discussion of the serious mental health risks of marijuana and THC, the chemical responsible for the drug’s psychoactive effects. As I have seen firsthand in writing a book about cannabis, anyone who raises those concerns may be mocked as a modern-day believer in “Reefer Madness,” the notorious 1936 movie that portrays young people descending into insanity and violence after smoking marijuana.

A strange disconnect has resulted.

With large studies in peer-reviewed journals showing that marijuana increases the risk of psychosis and schizophrenia, the scientific literature around the drug is far more negative than it was 20 years ago. Comparing two major reports from the National Academy of Medicine, the nonprofit group that advises the federal government on health and medicine, makes the difference clear.

In a report in 1999, the academy (then called the Institute of Medicine) reported that “the association between marijuana and schizophrenia is not well understood.” It even suggested the drug might help some people with schizophrenia. But in its next major report on marijuana, released in 2017, the academy reached a very different conclusion: “Cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of schizophrenia and other psychoses; the higher the use, the greater the risk.”

Yet the change in the scientific consensus has gone unnoticed. Americans in general are far more likely to believe the drug is safe, and even medically beneficial, than they once were. As a result, support for legalization has doubled since 1999.

Making matters worse, the ways Americans use cannabis are changing in ways that further increase its risks.

Many older Americans remember marijuana as a relatively weak drug that they used casually in social settings like concerts. They’re not wrong. In the 1970s and 1980s, marijuana generally contained less than 5 percent THC. Today, the marijuana sold at legal dispensaries often contains 25 percent THC. Many people use extracts that are nearly pure THC. As a comparison, think of the difference between a beer and a martini.

And though legalization hasn’t led to a big increase in Americans trying the drug, it has meant that those people who already use it do so far more frequently. In 2005, about three million Americans used cannabis every day. Today, the figure is eight million. Put another way, about one cannabis user in five uses it daily. By contrast, only one in every 15 drinkers, about 12 million Americans, consumes alcohol every day.

Scientists must do much more research to understand how cannabis can cause psychosis, and the strength of the link. But hospitals are already seeing the effect of these new use patterns. According to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in 2006, emergency rooms saw 30,000 cases of people who had diagnoses of psychosis and marijuana-use disorder — the medical term for abuse or dependence on the drug. By 2014, that number had tripled to 90,000.

Federal surveys also show that rates of serious mental illness are rising nationally, with the sharpest increase among people 18 to 25, who are also the most likely to use cannabis. The surveys and hospital data cannot prove that marijuana has caused a population-wide increase in psychosis, but they do offer intriguing evidence.

I am not a prohibitionist. I don’t believe we should jail people for possessing marijuana. But the advocacy community has sharply overstated the level of marijuana-related incarceration.

Many people are arrested for marijuana possession, but very few end up imprisoned. California reported in 2013, the most recent year for which this data is available, that only 441 of its 134,000 prisoners were incarcerated for all marijuana-related crimes. If arrests for marijuana possession are a major racial justice concern, the solution is decriminalizing possession, turning it into a violation equivalent to littering.

But advocacy groups don’t view decriminalization as an acceptable compromise. They want full legalization, making marijuana a state-regulated and -taxed drug that businesses can sell and profit from.

States that allow recreational marijuana have found that legalization doesn’t end the black market in unregulated cannabis. But it does lower prices, increase availability and acceptability, and drive up use.

Worse — because marijuana can cause paranoia and psychosis, and those conditions are closely linked to violence — it appears to lead to an increase in violent crime. Before recreational legalization began in 2014, advocates promised that it would reduce violent crime. But the first four states to legalize — Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington — have seen sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults since 2014, according to reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Police reports and news articles show a clear link to cannabis in many cases.

As Americans consider making marijuana a legal drug, it would be wise to remember the choices that fueled the devastating opioid epidemic. Decades ago, many of the same people pressing for marijuana legalization argued that the risks of opioid addiction could be easily managed.

A half-million deaths later, we have learned how wrong they were.

Marijuana’s risks are different from opioids’, but they are no less real. Let’s remember that hard truth as we listen to promises that allowing the use of this drug will do no harm.

Content originally published in the NY Times by Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter, is the author of the forthcoming “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.”

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Easy Self-Care For Tired Moms

When I first found recovery, my self-neglect was extreme. Caring for other people left me worn-out, stressed-out, and beyond exhausted. I’ve healed a lot since then, but my self-care often lags behind the rest of my recovery. This year, I’m stepping up my game.

What Hard-Living Looks Like For A Codependent

Time hasn’t been my friend. I’m in my 40s, but when I wake up, I feel and look 50. I was an anxious stress eater with a lot of addiction in my family of origin. I’m also a working Mom of a teenager! Plus, I struggled with infertility for almost a decade, and I had NO boundaries. Years of sleepless nights worrying about other people’s problems and then comforting myself with Chips Ahoy have finally caught up with me.

Self-care fertilizes every other aspect of my recovery, but putting the focus back on me has been slow. Lavish self-care in my early recovery days entailed 5 minutes of alone time to put body lotion on my arms and legs. My clothes were ratty. I hated leaving my family for even an hour to go to meetings. (Think Sylvester clinging on to Porky Pig.) It took me four weeks to make tea the way I liked it, for crying out loud!!

My physical health also suffered immensely. I’ve had Shingles, an adrenal tumor, a hysterectomy, and now psoriasis. All of these physical ailments can be triggered by stress. So naturally, the experts recommend to reduce stress. Sure. I’ll get right on that. To date, recovery is the only effective program I’ve found to manage my stress. To undo some of my hard-living, I’m taking these two steps.

Step One: Damage Control With Quick Fixes

St. Jerome says, “Eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.” While he may have been talking about facial expressions, dark shadows and puffy eyes regularly betray me. Every day I fight back with these quick makeup tricks.

Dark Circles

For bags under the eyes, concealers work best, but I don’t want to be bothered with this extra step. I do however, love using one of those eye masks you put in the freezer. On really tough days, I strap that on while I’m drying my hair. I also have an amazing citrus under the eye cream (by Origins) that soothes tired eyes.

Eyebrows

Twenty year-old trend-setters have changed ALL the rules on eyebrows. Apparently now we want bold bright colors on wide, full brows. There are gels, glitter, and who knows what else.

I’m too tired to play by all of these new eyebrow rules, but I do give mine some simple love with a quick dusting of eyeshadow. A medium brown best matches my hair color.

Eyelids

As you get older, all of the natural oils in your body begin to collect in your eyelids. Taking the time to put on eyeshadow is futile unless you first put on an eyeshadow primer. Mine (from Ulta Beauty) has a little sparkle and a pretty pale peach shade, so most days, I just use that as eyeshadow. Because I’m tired!!

Lashes

A few weeks ago, I bought a new shade of purple eyeliner.  Every time I put on this eyeliner and mascara, my coworkers ask me how much weight I’ve lost. Seriously.

Step Two: Healing My Immune System

I am not a scientist or health practitioner. I’m a busy Mom who’s reluctant to spend time and money on myself. I also HATE going to the doctor or seeking professional advice. I am however, willing to research and do what I can at home to take better care of myself. My answer is to increase Vitamin A & D.

Vitamins A and D are essential for helping stressed out Moms look and feel better, but both are fat soluble. This means taking too many of these vitamins could harm you. Vitamin A includes retinol, much like the very expensive anti-aging creams. Not only does Vitamin A help rejuvenate your skin, according to Dr. Josh Axe,

It plays a critical role in maintaining vision, neurological function, healthy skin and more. Like all antioxidants, it’s also involved in reducing inflammation through fighting free radical damage.

Dr. Axe further explains,

Vitamin D impacts not only our skeletal structure, but also our blood pressure, immunity, mood, brain function and ability to protect ourselves from cancer.

Did you catch one of the most important elements here? Vitamin D helps regulate our moods. Our bodies can make enough Vitamin D on our own by converting the sunshine that lands on our skin. The best way to increase your Vitamin D is to spend 10-20 minutes per day outside in the sun – WITHOUT sunscreen. Sunscreen blocks the helpful UV-B rays.

Simple At Home Treatments

First, I am eating two medium sized raw carrots every day for 30 days. According to Dr. Axe, just one medium sized carrot has approximately 204% of my recommended daily allowance. Since I’m an over-achiever, I’m doubling up. Carrots are relatively cheap, and I buy the organic ones so I can eat them without peeling. Because who has time to peel carrots? Yuck.

Second, I spend 10-20 minutes sitting outside in the sun. I am lucky enough to live in sunny Florida. For those who live in the north, where it is cold and windy, you may have to seek alternative therapies. When I lived in Illinois, I bought myself a sun-lamp and took over-the-counter Vitamin D3 supplements in the winter.

Now, Dear Readers, it’s your turn to give a tired Mom a hand. What works for you? Any tips or tricks you’re willing to share?

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Being Bored Can Be Good for You—If You Do It Right. Here’s How

From Time:

If you’re waiting for brilliance to strike, try getting bored first. That’s the takeaway of a study published recently in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries, which found that boredom can spark individual productivity and creativity.

In the study, people who had gone through a boredom-inducing task — methodically sorting a bowl of beans by color, one by one — later performed better on an idea-generating task than peers who first completed an interesting craft activity. (The task: to come up with excuses for being late that wouldn’t make someone look bad.) The bored folks outperformed the artists both in terms of idea quantity and quality, as ranked by objective outsiders who assigned uniqueness scores to each one.

Those findings are likely no surprise to Sandi Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. Mann is the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good, and a proponent of embracing the emotion, negative connotations and all.

Here’s why being bored can be a good thing for your mind, imagination and productivity, and how to do it right.

Boredom sparks creativity

At its core, boredom is “a search for neural stimulation that isn’t satisfied,” Mann says. “If we can’t find that, our mind will create it.” As demonstrated by the new study and plenty others before it, boredom can enable creativity and problem-solving by allowing the mind to wander and daydream. “There’s no other way of getting that stimulation, so you have to go into your head,” Mann says. You may be surprised by what you come up with when you do.

Boredom is good for your mental health

Daydreaming can be “quite a respite” and provide a brief escape from day-to-day life, Mann says. But it’s also beneficial to simply step away from screens, work and other stressors long enough to feel bored. Studies have shown, for example, that modern tools including work emails, social media and dating apps can strain mental health — so taking a break can be a valuable opportunity to recharge.

How to be bored the right way

Mann says it’s important not to conflate boredom with relaxation. A purposefully tranquil activity, such as yoga or meditation, likely doesn’t meet the definition of trying and failing to find stimulation.

To tap into true boredom, she suggests picking an activity that requires little or no concentration — like walking a familiar route, swimming laps or even just sitting with your eyes closed — and simply letting your mind wander, without music or stimulation to guide it.

It’s also crucial to unplug during this time, Mann says. Our cultural attachment to our phones, she says, is paradoxically both destroying our ability to be bored, and preventing us from ever being truly entertained.

“We’re trying to swipe and scroll the boredom away, but in doing that, we’re actually making ourselves more prone to boredom, because every time we get our phone out we’re not allowing our mind to wander and to solve our own boredom problems,” Mann says, adding that people can become addicted to the constant dopamine hit of new and novel content that phones provide. “Our tolerance for boredom just changes completely, and we need more and more to stop being bored.”

Next time you find yourself in line at the grocery store, in a tedious meeting or killing time in a waiting room, resist the urge to scroll. You’re bound to get bored — and your brain, mood and work performance just might improve.

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Men: Marijuana Could Impact Sperm Cells & Unborn Children

From Science News Daily: New research from Duke Health suggests men in their child-bearing years should also consider how THC could impact their sperm and possibly the children they conceive during periods when they’ve been using the drug.

As legal access to marijuana continues expanding across the U.S., more scientists are studying the effects of its active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), in teens, adults and pregnant women.

Much like previous research that has shown tobacco smoke, pesticides, flame retardants and even obesity can alter sperm, the Duke research shows THC also affects epigenetics, triggering structural and regulatory changes in the DNA of users’ sperm.

Experiments in rats and a study with 24 men found that THC appears to target genes in two major cellular pathways and alters DNA methylation, a process essential to normal development.

The researchers do not yet know whether DNA changes triggered by THC are passed to users’ children and what effects that could have. Their findings will be published online Dec. 19 in the journal Epigenetics.

“What we have found is that the effects of cannabis use on males and their reproductive health are not completely null, in that there’s something about cannabis use that affects the genetic profile in sperm,” said Scott Kollins, Ph.D., professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke and senior author of the study.

“We don’t yet know what that means, but the fact that more and more young males of child-bearing age have legal access to cannabis is something we should be thinking about,” Kollins said.

National research has shown a steady decline in the perceived risk of regular marijuana use. This, combined with the demand and wide availability of marijuana bred specifically to yield higher THC content, make this research especially timely, Kollins said.

The study defined regular users as those who smoked marijuana at least weekly for the previous six months. Their sperm were compared to those who had not used marijuana in the past six months and not more than 10 times in their lifetimes.

The higher the concentration of THC in the men’s urine, the more pronounced the genetic changes to their sperm were, the authors found.

THC appeared to impact hundreds of different genes in rats and humans, but many of the genes did have something in common — they were associated with two of the same major cellular pathways, said lead author Susan K. Murphy, Ph.D., associate professor and chief of the Division of Reproductive Sciences in obstetrics and gynecology at Duke.

One of the pathways is involved in helping bodily organs reach their full size; the other involves a large number of genes that regulate growth during development. Both pathways can become dysregulated in some cancers.

“In terms of what it means for the developing child, we just don’t know,” Murphy said. It’s unknown whether sperm affected by THC could be healthy enough to even fertilize an egg and continue its development into an embryo, she said.

The study was a starting point on the epigenetic effects of THC on sperm and is limited by the relatively small number of men involved in the trial, Murphy said. The findings in men also could be confounded by other factors affecting their health, such as their nutrition, sleep, alcohol use and other lifestyle habits.

The Duke team plans to continue its research with larger groups. They intend to study whether changes in sperm are reversed when men stop using marijuana. They also hope to test the umbilical cord blood of babies born to fathers with THC-altered sperm to determine what, if any epigenetic changes, are carried forward to the child.

“We know that there are effects of cannabis use on the regulatory mechanisms in sperm DNA, but we don’t know whether they can be transmitted to the next generation,” Murphy said.

“In the absence of a larger, definitive study, the best advice would be to assume these changes are going to be there,” Murphy said. “We don’t know whether they are going to be permanent. I would say, as a precaution, stop using cannabis for at least six months before trying to conceive.”

In addition to Kollins and Murphy, study authors include Nilda Itchon-Ramos, Zachary Visco, Zhiqing Huang, Carole Grenier, Rose Schrott, Kelly Acharya, Marie-Helene Boudreau, Thomas M. Price, Douglas J. Raburn, David L. Corcoran, Joseph E. Lucas, John T. Mitchell, F. Joseph McClernon, Marty Cauley, Brandon J. Hall, and Edward D. Levin.

The research was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Duke University Medical Center. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Hey Girl, Your Limit For Safety May Be None

Did you know when it comes to alcohol math girls may not be safe at any level of drinking?  It’s biology. Girls are impaired after one drink and drunk after two. Alcohol affects the behavior of your boys, of course, but not to the same degree or with the same adverse consequences. For boys, drinking is just a rite of passage and all too often a way to get laid without getting in trouble. For girls the adverse consequences are lasting. Do you know the alcohol math?

Alcohol Math At College

More kids die on college campuses as a result of alcohol or substances every year than in the military.
One in four college students is sexually assaulted as the result of drinking.
If fun in high school or college is drinking, your daughter is not going to tell you about the adverse consequences.
If your daughter, sister, friend has been assaulted in high school or college as the result of drinking, she is not likely to tell you, or the faculty, or seek help.
For girls, drinking and adverse alcohol experiences are not a just a rite of passage as they are experienced by boys.
If your daughter dares to talk, she will be blamed.
If she keeps the secret, the trauma and shame of adverse alcohol experiences in high school and college are lasting and life-changing.

What Girls Don’t Know

Girls, especially in high school, know that their parents don’t want them drinking. They know bad things can happen, but they want to have fun and be grown up. Young adults in college are encouraged to drink not just one, but to drink heavily. Girls and young women know they get drunk and feel sick. They know they act stupid and reckless. When they get assaulted, they blame themselves. Girls are taught that they can have fun and drink with the boys. They are taught to blame themselves for the adverse alcohol experiences that lead to assault.

Girls don’t know that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for them.

It isn’t just pregnant women who can’t drink without consequences.

Why Girls Can’t Drink Safely

Girls get drunk quicker and stay drunk longer. The simple reason for this is biology. Males have more water and enzymes in their bodies that allow them absorb alcohol more efficiently than women. A few drinks for a male will make them reckless and aggressive; even one drink for a girl renders her incapable of protecting herself.

Let’s Do The Alcohol Math

If you’ve ever seen a BAC (Blood Alcohol Content) card, you will know that girls’ blood alcohol content rises at a faster rate than boys. But BAC cards have not caught on in the seven years we’re been writing about alcohol. What do the numbers on the BAC cards really mean? When girls have just one drink, brain function is impaired. Reflexes are impaired. Judgement is impaired. They are no longer able to say no. Is this new information for you?

One Drink For a Boy Equals Two For A Girl

You may have to see the math to understand how extreme the imbalance is between males and females and how little alcohol it takes to incapacitate girls.

1 drink for a boy = 2 drinks for a girl

2 drinks for a boy = 4 drinks for a girl

3 drinks for a boy = 6 drinks for a girl

The simple fact is your daughters, sisters, friends are at risk for sexual exploitation after just one drink. But how many girls know that? How many girls and women are taught to think that the fun has to stop after one drink. Girls are taught to play the drinking games and to keep up with the boys.

Now You Know The Alcohol Math

Now you know that when your daughter, sister, friends, have two drinks it’s the same as a male having four. And when they have three drinks, it’s the same as a boy having six. It’s time for a change. #notmetoo, #knowyourlimit

References:

From Celeste Robb-Nicholson, M.D., Editor in Chief, @ Harvard Women’s Health Watch: Why Does Alcohol Affect Women Differently?
From The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism: Women And Alcohol

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The Unbearable Heaviness of Clutter

From Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi @ The New York Times: Do you have a clutter problem?

If you have to move things around in order to accomplish a task in your home or at your office or you feel overwhelmed by all your “things,” it’s a strong signal that clutter has prevailed. And it might be stressing you out more than you realize.

“Clutter is an overabundance of possessions that collectively create chaotic and disorderly living spaces,” said Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago who studies the causes of clutter and its impact on emotional well-being. And a cluttered home, researchers are learning, can be a stressful home.

Dr. Ferrari was part of a research team that questioned three groups of adults about clutter and life satisfaction: college students; young adults in their 20s and 30s; and older adults, most in their 50s.

The authors assessed volunteers’ tendency to procrastinate, asking them to respond to statements like “I pay bills on time” using a five-point scale, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Procrastination is closely tied to clutter, because sorting through and tossing items is a task that many people find unpleasant and avoid. It takes time to file away important papers or sort through a dining room table buried under books.

The researchers also measured participants’ general well-being in relation to how clutter might be affecting their lives, asking them to answer questions such as “the clutter in my home upsets me” and “I have to move things in order to accomplish tasks in my home.”

The study, published in Current Psychology, found a substantial link between procrastination and clutter problems in all the age groups. Frustration with clutter tended to increase with age. Among older adults, clutter problems were also associated with life dissatisfaction.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that clutter can negatively impact mental well-being, particularly among women. Clutter can also induce a physiological response, including increased levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.

A 2010 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looked at dual-income married couples living in the Los Angeles area who had at least one school-aged child at home. The wives in the study who perceived themselves as having a cluttered home or a home that needed work tended to have increased levels of cortisol throughout the day. Those who weren’t feeling cluttered, which included most of the men in the study, had cortisol levels that tended to drop during the day.

Darby Saxbe, an assistant psychology professor at University of Southern California and the study’s lead author, said that the women in the study who described their home as being cluttered or needing work began their day stressed and remained stressed. Some of the added stress, she suspects, was tied to women’s tendency to take on housework and extra chores after the workday. In terms of cortisol levels, men who did more housework in the evening were as likely to have raised cortisol levels at the end of the day as women. It’s just that not as many men spent as much time on housework as their wives, she said.

In a follow-up study, Dr. Saxbe studied the cortisol level in the afternoon and evening, a time when stress should be dropping in “an adaptive recovery.” Not everyone in the study was bothered by shoes left on the staircase or mail piled on the coffee table. But again, women were more likely than men to complain about clutter or having too many unfinished projects, and did not show a cortisol reduction.

“Clutter is in the eye of the beholder,” Dr. Saxbe said. “The people who talked about it were the ones who had the cortisol response.”

Experts are beginning to explore why clutter can elicit such a strong emotional response.

Dr. Saxbe said there has long been a standard representation on how a middle-class home should look and function. A disorderly home fails to live up to such an expectation.

“If you think of the 1950s ideals of the single family home,” Dr. Saxbe said. “The man comes home, kicks up his feet and has a cocktail. The home is a place to come home and unwind. But not if the home is filled with a to-do list and never-ending drudgery.”

Gaining control over the drudgery of decluttering is a task that many inhabitants of cluttered residences struggle to master.

Dr. Ferrari noted that clutter is also often the result of an “over-attachment” to our personal items, which makes it difficult to part with them. For overwhelmed individuals who want to declutter, he recommends a hands-off approach.

“If you’re going to declutter, don’t touch the item. Don’t pick it up,” he said. “Have somebody else hold the pair of black pants and say, ‘Do you need this?’ Once you touch the item, you are less likely to get rid of it.”

Another option is to make a conscious effort to acquire less. Dr. Ferrari argued that most of what we accumulate we do not need. “We have taken our wants and been told they are needs,” he said.

Dr. Saxbe agreed that a good way to declutter is to keep items out of the house in the first place. She urged shoppers to consider whether they truly need an item or if it will add to their home’s sense of dysfunction. “Once it’s in the house, it’s really hard to deal with. You get attached to the things you own,” she said.

The post The Unbearable Heaviness of Clutter appeared first on Reach Out Recovery.

Giving Up Alcohol For Just 1 Month Has Lasting Benefits

From Medical News Today:

A new study shows that going alcohol-free for as little as 1 month or even less brings both immediate and long-lasting health benefits.

Many of us will have enjoyed numerous glasses of wine, beer, champagne, or other alcoholic beverages over the winter holidays. Thus, in January, we may feel the need to take a break from alcohol. An alcohol-free month is the best choice we could possibly make for our health, British researchers conclude.

Dry January is an initiative of the charity organization Alcohol Change United Kingdom, which encourages people to try giving up alcohol for 1 month at the start of the year.

Although the charity that promotes this effort is UK-based, thousands of people around the world pledge to take part in this campaign each year.

It is fairly logical to assume that giving up alcohol for 31 days can only benefit health, since drinking regularly is a major risk factor for cancer, liver disease, and cardiovascular diseases, among other issues.

Now, a study by researchers from the University of Sussex in Falmer, UK, shows just how much skipping alcohol for 1 month can improve your life and concludes that these benefits are long-lasting.

The research, which Dr. Richard de Visser from the University of Sussex led, found that people who took part in Dry January in 2018 reported higher energy levels and healthier body weight. They also felt less need to drink alcohol, even several months after participating in this initiative.

1 alcohol-free month boosts long-term health

Dr. de Visser and team analyzed data that they collected from Dry January participants in three online surveys. A total of 2,821 people filled in a survey upon registering for the campaign at the beginning of January. In the first week of February, 1,715 participants completed a survey, and 816 participants submitted additional data in August 2018.

The researchers found that giving up alcohol for a month helped the participants reduce their number of drinking days later in the year. The number decreased from an average of 4.3 days per week before taking part in Dry January to an average of 3.3 days per week afterward.

Moreover, people who went teetotal for a month also got drunk a lot less frequently later on in the year. Rates of excessive drinking fell from an average of 3.4 times per month at baseline to 2.1 times per month on average.

In fact, Dry January participants also learned to drink less. They went from consuming an average of 8.6 units of alcohol per drinking day at baseline to 7.1 units of alcohol per drinking day later on.

“The simple act of taking a month off alcohol helps people drink less in the long term; by August, people are reporting one extra dry day per week,” notes Dr. de Visser.

“There are also considerable immediate benefits: nine in 10 people save money, seven in 10 sleep better, and three in five lose weight,” he adds.

Important benefits, however, are also available to those who give up alcohol for shorter periods. An alcohol-free month would be better, but even less than that can still boost a person’s health, Dr. de Visser says.

“Interestingly, these changes in alcohol consumption have also been seen in the participants who didn’t manage to stay alcohol-free for the whole month — although they are a bit smaller. This shows that there are real benefits to just trying to complete Dry January,” the researcher emphasizes.

A long list of benefits

The people who took part in Dry January last year noted numerous mental and physical health benefits as well as a “healthier” bank account. More specifically:

93 percent of participants reported experiencing a sense of achievement at the end of the alcohol-free month
88 percent had saved the money that they would otherwise have spent on drinks
82 percent of participants reported an enhanced awareness of their relationship with alcohol
80 percent felt more in control of their drinking habits
76 percent understood when they felt more tempted to drink and why
71 percent of participants learned that they did not need alcohol to have fun
71 percent said that they enjoyed a better quality of sleep
70 percent reported better overall health
67 percent had higher energy levels
58 percent of participants lost weight
57 percent reported improved concentration
54 percent said that they noticed better skin health

“The brilliant thing about Dry January is that it’s not really about January. Being alcohol-free for 31 days shows us that we don’t need alcohol to have fun, to relax, to socialize,” says Dr. Richard Piper, the CEO of Alcohol Change UK.

“That means that for the rest of the year, we are better able to make decisions about our drinking and to avoid slipping into drinking more than we really want to,” Dr. Piper notes.

“Many of us know about the health risks of alcohol — even forms of cancer, liver disease, mental health problems — but we are often unaware that drinking less has more immediate benefits too. Sleeping better, feeling more energetic, saving money, better skin, losing weight… The list goes on.”

Dr. Richard Piper

So, be it this January or later in the year, you may want to try swapping alcohol for tea, juice, or water for a month or even a few weeks. It could make you happier and healthier, and your bank account will thank you too.

The post Giving Up Alcohol For Just 1 Month Has Lasting Benefits appeared first on Reach Out Recovery.