The Daily Helping

Today our expert guest is Greg Schop. He is a former teenage bodybuilding competitor, a certified personal trainer, an English professor, and a published author.

His latest book, Huge in High School: Fitness for Life, has started a grassroots movement to help parents and students build a framework that establishes the foundation for long-term success.

Greg started weight lifting when he was 12 years old, and (inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger)  he continued to practice bodybuilding throughout high school. This practice created the foundation for Greg’s future goals and lifestyle.

Juggling body building and typical high school life requires a rigid schedule – wake up, go to school, work out, do homework, eat, go to bed, repeat. The discipline stuck with Greg, and it still helps him get things done.

Greg’s experience highlights something important: the things we do in our formative years stick with us, for better or for worse, and they can lead us to our passions. You are building a foundation for your life as you enter adulthood, and laying a structured foundation can help you in the long term.

Do you want to join the #HugeInHighschool movement? If you’re in high school (or you know somebody who is), share something that you do and you are passionate about on social media using the hashtag. It doesn’t have to be related to fitness – It’s all about developing the discipline and courage it takes to live a big life that is right for YOU.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaways

• Live to lift another day. You have a long life ahead of you – take your time, don’t take shortcuts, and be safe.
• While you’re in high school, find your passions… and follow them for your entire life.

--

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Connect with Greg: Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter
• Check out www.TheSchop.com for Greg’s blog posts, poetry, and books
• Huge in High School: Fitness for Life by G. C. Schop

Today our expert guest is Eileen Kennedy-Moore, PhD, an internationally published author, psychologist, and speaker. Her newest book is Growing Friendships: A Kid’s Guide to Making and Keeping Friends.

She is also a professor for The Great Courses, blogger for Psychology Today, an expert contributor to PBS Parents, and the author of two books for parents, Smart Parenting for Smart Kids and The Unwritten Rules of Friendship and What About Me? 12 Ways to Get Your Parents’ Attention Without Hitting Your Sister.

Friendship is Fundamental

“If you want kids to be happier, help them make friends. If you want them to be more engaged in school, help them make friends. If you want them to be less likely to be bullied, friends… it’s kind of the answer to everything.”

As a clinical psychologist, Eileen has seen how important friendship is for kids. Every parent has seen their child struggle with friend relationships, and these can be very painful for children.

The good news is that there’s a lot that parents can do to ease the rough spots and help kids get along with other people.

How do Kids Make Friends?

Before you can help your children get along with other people, it’s good to understand how children think of other people and make friends at the different stages of their life.

These are the stages of friendship established by Robert Selman, which relate to children’s developing awareness of themselves and others:

• Ages 3-6 – The “I want it might way” stage. Kids assume that their friends think the same way that they do. They love the idea of having friends, but they aren’t very good at being friends.
• Ages 7-12 – The “two-way fairweather / by the rules” stage. Kids are very concerned about fairness, and they think about it in a quid pro quo way. They also tend to be very judgemental about themselves and others, and they can be very jealous. This is also the age where kids tend to make secret clubs.
• Ages 8-15 – The “caring is sharing” stage. Kids help each other solve problems, confide thoughts and feelings, and are able to compromise.
• Ages 12+ - The “mature friendship” stage. Kids place a high value on emotional closeness, can accept and appreciate differences between themselves and friends, and start to emphasize trust and support. They also want to stay close over time, even when they’re separated.

Warning Signs?

If you’re a parent, ask yourself these two questions:

• Does your child have at least one relationship in which they like and are liked by another child?
• Do they have someone to hang out with at lunch or recess?

Everybody has bad days, but there are signs that your child might need help navigating their relationships. It’s important to pay attention to the level of distress and how long it lasts. If your child stays stuck feeling down or thinking nobody likes them, then you might want to consider talking to a psychologist.

Non-voluntary isolation is also concerning. If they don’t have someone who likes them back, they are at greater risk for bullying, depression, and negative self thought.

There’s also times where you shouldn’t worry. Some kids are just introverts who need quiet alone time to recharge, and they tend to be loners. If they can interact when they want to, it’s okay.

The Ingredients of Good Friendships

1. Kids have to show an openness to friendship. To do this, they have to greet people that they know or reach out in small ways (e.g. compliments, small kindnesses) to show they like people. Kind children are usually well-liked by their peers.
2. Parents can help children with this by role playing greetings and teaching them to communicate with nonverbal signals.
3. Kids start to believe the “magnet theory” of friendship, where they will attract people to them through being great, but friendships are two-way relationships between equals.
4. Similarity. Kids are more likely to be friends with people are similar to them, particularly in interests and personality.One of the most helpful things parents can do for their kids is arrange one-on-one play dates because that’s what allows friendships to deepen.
5. Shared fun. Kids make friends by doing stuff together.

Dr. Friendtastic

Eileen has a website for children called DrFriendtastic.com that includes friendship questions, quizzes, cute animals, and advice (with a strong dose of silliness). It’s a playful and fun way for children to discover the information they need to learn about getting along.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

Kindness is the key to friendship.

It’s that simple and that complicated. There are a lot of criteria that our kids may or may not meet, but kindness is something that every child (and adult!) can achieve – and they can do it multiple times every day.

--

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Connect with Eileen: Website | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn
• Dr. Friendtastic - a website for kids
• Read Eileen’s blog: Growing Friendships on Psychology Today
• Growing Friendships: A Kid’s Guide to Making and Keeping Friends by Eileen Kennedy-Moore

Today our expert guest is Eileen Kennedy-Moore, PhD, an internationally published author, psychologist, and speaker. Her newest book is Growing Friendships: A Kid’s Guide to Making and Keeping Friends.

She is also a professor for The Great Courses, blogger for Psychology Today, an expert contributor to PBS Parents, and the author of two books for parents, Smart Parenting for Smart Kids and The Unwritten Rules of Friendship and What About Me? 12 Ways to Get Your Parents’ Attention Without Hitting Your Sister.

Friendship is Fundamental

“If you want kids to be happier, help them make friends. If you want them to be more engaged in school, help them make friends. If you want them to be less likely to be bullied, friends… it’s kind of the answer to everything.”

As a clinical psychologist, Eileen has seen how important friendship is for kids. Every parent has seen their child struggle with friend relationships, and these can be very painful for children.

The good news is that there’s a lot that parents can do to ease the rough spots and help kids get along with other people.

How do Kids Make Friends?

Before you can help your children get along with other people, it’s good to understand how children think of other people and make friends at the different stages of their life.

These are the stages of friendship established by Robert Selman, which relate to children’s developing awareness of themselves and others:

• Ages 3-6 – The “I want it might way” stage. Kids assume that their friends think the same way that they do. They love the idea of having friends, but they aren’t very good at being friends.
• Ages 7-12 – The “two-way fairweather / by the rules” stage. Kids are very concerned about fairness, and they think about it in a quid pro quo way. They also tend to be very judgemental about themselves and others, and they can be very jealous. This is also the age where kids tend to make secret clubs.
• Ages 8-15 – The “caring is sharing” stage. Kids help each other solve problems, confide thoughts and feelings, and are able to compromise.
• Ages 12+ - The “mature friendship” stage. Kids place a high value on emotional closeness, can accept and appreciate differences between themselves and friends, and start to emphasize trust and support. They also want to stay close over time, even when they’re separated.

Warning Signs?

If you’re a parent, ask yourself these two questions:

• Does your child have at least one relationship in which they like and are liked by another child?
• Do they have someone to hang out with at lunch or recess?

Everybody has bad days, but there are signs that your child might need help navigating their relationships. It’s important to pay attention to the level of distress and how long it lasts. If your child stays stuck feeling down or thinking nobody likes them, then you might want to consider talking to a psychologist.

Non-voluntary isolation is also concerning. If they don’t have someone who likes them back, they are at greater risk for bullying, depression, and negative self thought.

There’s also times where you shouldn’t worry. Some kids are just introverts who need quiet alone time to recharge, and they tend to be loners. If they can interact when they want to, it’s okay.

The Ingredients of Good Friendships

1. Kids have to show an openness to friendship. To do this, they have to greet people that they know or reach out in small ways (e.g. compliments, small kindnesses) to show they like people. Kind children are usually well-liked by their peers.
2. 1. Parents can help children with this by role playing greetings and teaching them to communicate with nonverbal signals.
   1. Kids start to believe the “magnet theory” of friendship, where they will attract people to them through being great, but friendships are two-way relationships between equals.
3. Similarity. Kids are more likely to be friends with people are similar to them, particularly in interests and personality.
   1. One of the most helpful things parents can do for their kids is arrange one-on-one play dates because that’s what allows friendships to deepen.
4. Shared fun. Kids make friends by doing stuff together.

Dr. Friendtastic

Eileen has a website for children called DrFriendtastic.com that includes friendship questions, quizzes, cute animals, and advice (with a strong dose of silliness). It’s a playful and fun way for children to discover the information they need to learn about getting along.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

Kindness is the key to friendship.

It’s that simple and that complicated. There are a lot of criteria that our kids may or may not meet, but kindness is something that every child (and adult!) can achieve – and they can do it multiple times every day.

--

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Connect with Eileen: Website | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn
• Dr. Friendtastic - a website for kids
• Read Eileen’s blog: Growing Friendships on Psychology Today
• Growing Friendships: A Kid’s Guide to Making and Keeping Friends by Eileen Kennedy-Moore

Today our expert guest is the international bestselling author Debra Oakland, who is an advocate for prioritizing joy and living your most courageous, authentic life. She is the Founder of Living in Courage Online, a spiritual oasis for overcoming life’s biggest challenges.

In Change Your Movie, Change Your Life: 7 Reel Concepts for Courageous Change, Debra goes into the core concepts that have helped guide her through adversity and shares ideas you can use to manifest your best life.

Loss & Love

Over the course of just four years, Debra experienced unimaginable loss: two brothers, two children, and her father all passed away.

Debra asked herself a simple question: What would they want from me?

The people who love us want us to be happy – so Debra decided she would honor the people who have passed by living a happy life, living her joy, and sharing the power of living in courage.

Change Your Movie, Change Your Life: 7 Reel Concepts for Courageous Change

“Everything you need is inside of you. Tap into that... You’ll find the answers.”

Debra’s book introduces readers to the seven concepts that form her belief system:

1. Conscious Choice
2. Wisdom
3. Love
4. Purity
5. Concentrated Illumination
6. Peace
7. Rhythm

After going over each concept, Debra shares a personal storyboard and offers a blank one for the reader to fill out. She also includes a movie treatment telling the same story two different ways, with two different endings, showing how your conscious choices affect the outcome of your life.

You’re the writer, director, editor, and producer of your life’s movie – if you don’t like something, change the script.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s (Two) Most Important Takeaway

1. You are not alone. If you need help, ask for it – and if you love someone, lend a helping hand. We all go through challenges in this life and no one escapes them.
2. Gratitude is the most important thing that you can hold onto. Remind yourself, every day, what you are grateful for.

--

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Connect with Debra: DebraOakland.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
• Change Your Movie, Change Your Life: 7 Reel Concepts for Courageous Change by Debra Oakland

Today our expert guest is the international bestselling author Debra Oakland, who is an advocate for prioritizing joy and living your most courageous, authentic life. She is the Founder of Living in Courage Online, a spiritual oasis for overcoming life’s biggest challenges.

In Change Your Movie, Change Your Life: 7 Reel Concepts for Courageous Change, Debra goes into the core concepts that have helped guide her through adversity and shares ideas you can use to manifest your best life.

Loss & Love

Over the course of just four years, Debra experienced unimaginable loss: two brothers, two children, and her father all passed away.

Debra asked herself a simple question: What would they want from me?

The people who love us want us to be happy – so Debra decided she would honor the people who have passed by living a happy life, living her joy, and sharing the power of living in courage.

Change Your Movie, Change Your Life: 7 Reel Concepts for Courageous Change

“Everything you need is inside of you. Tap into that... You’ll find the answers.”

Debra’s book introduces readers to the seven concepts that form her belief system:

1. Conscious Choice
2. Wisdom
3. Love
4. Purity
5. Concentrated Illumination
6. Peace
7. Rhythm

After going over each concept, Debra shares a personal storyboard and offers a blank one for the reader to fill out. She also includes a movie treatment telling the same story two different ways, with two different endings, showing how your conscious choices affect the outcome of your life.

You’re the writer, director, editor, and producer of your life’s movie – if you don’t like something, change the script.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s (Two) Most Important Takeaway

1. You are not alone. If you need help, ask for it – and if you love someone, lend a helping hand. We all go through challenges in this life and no one escapes them.
2. Gratitude is the most important thing that you can hold onto. Remind yourself, every day, what you are grateful for.

--

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Connect with Debra: DebraOakland.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
• Change Your Movie, Change Your Life: 7 Reel Concepts for Courageous Change by Debra Oakland

Today our expert guest is LaRae Quy, who was an undercover counterintelligence FBI agent for 24 years. As a former U.S. agent, LaRae speaks and consults on no-nonsense FBI practices that help people develop the mental toughness they need to manage their emotions, behavior, and thinking so they can set themselves up for success.

LaRae is also the author of Mental Toughness for Women Leaders and Secrets of a Strong Mind.

Secrets of a Strong Mind

After retiring from the FBI, LaRae started writing Secrets of a Strong Mind.

Using her own life experience as an example – from her first pony Socks to Quantico to her time as a spokesperson – she reveals the six core components needed to move through barriers so we can lead our life from a place of personal strength.

“Every one of us, inside, has a story that will create a strong mind.”

We all have a story from our past, maybe a failure, that we can use to connect our passion to willpower and keep moving through any obstacle.

If you don’t know what that story is, you need to look inward. The most important person you will ever get to know is yourself.

Mental Toughness 

The pillars of mental toughness:

• You can’t have mental toughness without emotional intelligence – understanding yourself and understanding others; the ability to communicate with others – and emotional competency. Do you understand how you present yourself to people and develop relationships?
• If you are resilient and you hit a roadblock, you will be confident that you can keep going. To be confident, you need to know how you will respond when you’re faced with the unknown – you can’t simply react or hope you will respond in the correct way.
• You need the willpower to push past your comfort zone and limits. When times are tough and you’re looking for an answer, are you persistent? Can you set goals that drive you to improve without disheartening you?
• The toughest people have a champion’s mindset: they can think harder about positive information to counter their bias towards negative information. For every negative thought in your brain, it takes five positive thoughts to counteract it.

The biggest obstacles to mental toughness are your own limiting beliefs. Although these beliefs are often seeded by other people, only you can make the beliefs true. 

Overcoming those beliefs, again, comes back to confidence. Too many people are afraid to revisit their own failures or negative experiences, but that’s how we learn more about ourselves; that’s how we mine the significance of our own stories.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“Mental toughness is believing that you will prevail in your circumstances, rather than believing that your circumstances will change. You have what it takes in order to prevail in your circumstances.”

--

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Connect with LaRae Quy: LaRaeQuy.com | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
• Mental Toughness for Women Leaders: 52 Tips To Recognize and Utilize Your Greatest Strengths by LaRae Quy
• Secrets of a Strong Mind: What My Years As An FBI Counterintelligence Agent Taught Me About Leadership and Empowerment—And How To Make It Work For You by LaRae Quy

Today our expert guest is LaRae Quy, who was an undercover counterintelligence FBI agent for 24 years. As a former U.S. agent, LaRae speaks and consults on no-nonsense FBI practices that help people develop the mental toughness they need to manage their emotions, behavior, and thinking so they can set themselves up for success.

LaRae is also the author of Mental Toughness for Women Leaders and Secrets of a Strong Mind.

Secrets of a Strong Mind

After retiring from the FBI, LaRae started writing Secrets of a Strong Mind.

Using her own life experience as an example – from her first pony Socks to Quantico to her time as a spokesperson – she reveals the six core components needed to move through barriers so we can lead our life from a place of personal strength.

“Every one of us, inside, has a story that will create a strong mind.”

We all have a story from our past, maybe a failure, that we can use to connect our passion to willpower and keep moving through any obstacle.

If you don’t know what that story is, you need to look inward. The most important person you will ever get to know is yourself.

Mental Toughness 

The pillars of mental toughness:

• You can’t have mental toughness without emotional intelligence – understanding yourself and understanding others; the ability to communicate with others – and emotional competency. Do you understand how you present yourself to people and develop relationships?
• If you are resilient and you hit a roadblock, you will be confident that you can keep going. To be confident, you need to know how you will respond when you’re faced with the unknown – you can’t simply react or hope you will respond in the correct way.
• You need the willpower to push past your comfort zone and limits. When times are tough and you’re looking for an answer, are you persistent? Can you set goals that drive you to improve without disheartening you?
• The toughest people have a champion’s mindset: they can think harder about positive information to counter their bias towards negative information. For every negative thought in your brain, it takes five positive thoughts to counteract it.

The biggest obstacles to mental toughness are your own limiting beliefs. Although these beliefs are often seeded by other people, only you can make the beliefs true. 

Overcoming those beliefs, again, comes back to confidence. Too many people are afraid to revisit their own failures or negative experiences, but that’s how we learn more about ourselves; that’s how we mine the significance of our own stories.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“Mental toughness is believing that you will prevail in your circumstances, rather than believing that your circumstances will change. You have what it takes in order to prevail in your circumstances.”

--

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Connect with LaRae Quy: LaRaeQuy.com | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
• Mental Toughness for Women Leaders: 52 Tips To Recognize and Utilize Your Greatest Strengths by LaRae Quy
• Secrets of a Strong Mind: What My Years As An FBI Counterintelligence Agent Taught Me About Leadership and Empowerment—And How To Make It Work For You by LaRae Quy

Today our guest expert is Dr. Melanie Greenberg, who specializes in managing stress, love, and relationships using proven techniques from neuroscience, mindfulness, and positive psychology. She uses these techniques to educate, support, heal, and inspire people so that they can overcome emotional barriers to fulfilling their potential.

In Dr. Greenberg’s bestselling book, The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity, she examines health through the lens of the biopsychosocial model. Basically, she looks at mental health and health as the combined effects of your mind, body, and spirit.

How does the biopsychosocial approach work in practice?

For example, someone may comes into Dr. Greenberg’s practice with chronic pain. This pain makes them feel helpless and depressed, and this puts a strain on their social relationships. All of that can make the objective experience of the pain worse.

In treating this person, Dr. Greenberg would try to move them away from strictly using medicine to cure their pain, explain how stress can worsen physical pain, help them see how their thoughts and feelings affect the pain (so that they might feel less helpless), and coach them to interact with social relationships in a way that would empower the theoretical patient.

Everything interacts.

Exploring The Stress-Proof Brain

Dr. Greenberg describes stress as an automatic response that can trigger you into a state of flight or fight, in which you fall into an automatic response pattern. In the book, she offers readers tools they can use to manage that response and, instead, leverage its positive aspects.

By taking advantage of neuroplasticity, or your brain’s ability to change through experience, you can rewire your brain to shift from responses that promote stress to healthier responses. This is important on many levels.

On a biological level, stress can literally be a killer – it creates inflammation, changes blood pressure, depress the immune system, and more. In the short-term, this isn’t terribly harmful.

In the long term, continued stress can erode your immune system, develop into significant inflammation in the pathways going to your heart, and affect your glucose production. The negative results of stress can also compound other health problems, or other symptoms of stress.

On a social level, stress can make people angry, argumentative, and more likely to saying things they regret. It can get in the way of relationships and drive people away. 

On top of all that, we often have unhealthy responses to stress. Sometimes we drink to excess, over eat, stop exercising, and generally stop taking care of ourselves. Those unhealthy cycles just add to the feedback loop.

One powerful tool for lessening or relieving stress is mindfulness. Mindfulness is meditation, but it’s also much more – it’s an attitude.

“Mindfulness is an open, compassionate attitude towards your own inner experience.”

–Dr. Melanie Greenberg

Mindfulness will teach you to see your judging thoughts, negativity, reactivity, and fear, and then create some distance between you and those responses so that you understand that those thoughts don’t define you.

If make that a regular practice then, over time, you can learn the difference between your direct experience in the body and the judging thoughts that you cling to. As a result, you will be able to decrease the power of negative thoughts over your life.

As you develop familiarity with mindfulness, you can employ it to change your life at work, online, and in relationships.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

Stress is a natural part of life. It doesn’t have to own you – it doesn’t have to get in the way of your health and happiness. If you learn to manage your brain’s automatic fight or flight response then you can put an end to unhealthy responses to stress, become more mindful, and develop greater compassion.

You can start the rewiring process by beginning a mindfulness practice today, even if it’s just five minutes a day. The most important part of the practice is consistency.

You can begin to learn mindfulness through a specific type of meditation:

• Focus on your breath as an anchor and watch it go in and out
• During this process, your breath will naturally slow down
• As you’re trying to watch your breath, your mind will likely wander to a judging thought (e.g. this isn’t working, I’m not doing this properly)
• In the moment that you can catch that thought, notice that you’re having it and bring your attention back to the breath
• You now have a little bit more power over how you focus your attention and a little bit more self-awareness

-- 

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity by Melanie Greenberg, PhD
• Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) by Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn

Today our guest expert is Dr. Melanie Greenberg, who specializes in managing stress, love, and relationships using proven techniques from neuroscience, mindfulness, and positive psychology. She uses these techniques to educate, support, heal, and inspire people so that they can overcome emotional barriers to fulfilling their potential.

In Dr. Greenberg’s bestselling book, The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity, she examines health through the lens of the biopsychosocial model. Basically, she looks at mental health and health as the combined effects of your mind, body, and spirit.

How does the biopsychosocial approach work in practice?

For example, someone may comes into Dr. Greenberg’s practice with chronic pain. This pain makes them feel helpless and depressed, and this puts a strain on their social relationships. All of that can make the objective experience of the pain worse.

In treating this person, Dr. Greenberg would try to move them away from strictly using medicine to cure their pain, explain how stress can worsen physical pain, help them see how their thoughts and feelings affect the pain (so that they might feel less helpless), and coach them to interact with social relationships in a way that would empower the theoretical patient.

Everything interacts.

Exploring The Stress-Proof Brain

Dr. Greenberg describes stress as an automatic response that can trigger you into a state of flight or fight, in which you fall into an automatic response pattern. In the book, she offers readers tools they can use to manage that response and, instead, leverage its positive aspects.

By taking advantage of neuroplasticity, or your brain’s ability to change through experience, you can rewire your brain to shift from responses that promote stress to healthier responses. This is important on many levels.

On a biological level, stress can literally be a killer – it creates inflammation, changes blood pressure, depress the immune system, and more. In the short-term, this isn’t terribly harmful.

In the long term, continued stress can erode your immune system, develop into significant inflammation in the pathways going to your heart, and affect your glucose production. The negative results of stress can also compound other health problems, or other symptoms of stress.

On a social level, stress can make people angry, argumentative, and more likely to saying things they regret. It can get in the way of relationships and drive people away.  

On top of all that, we often have unhealthy responses to stress. Sometimes we drink to excess, over eat, stop exercising, and generally stop taking care of ourselves. Those unhealthy cycles just add to the feedback loop.

One powerful tool for lessening or relieving stress is mindfulness. Mindfulness is meditation, but it’s also much more – it’s an attitude.

“Mindfulness is an open, compassionate attitude towards your own inner experience.”

–Dr. Melanie Greenberg

Mindfulness will teach you to see your judging thoughts, negativity, reactivity, and fear, and then create some distance between you and those responses so that you understand that those thoughts don’t define you.

If make that a regular practice then, over time, you can learn the difference between your direct experience in the body and the judging thoughts that you cling to. As a result, you will be able to decrease the power of negative thoughts over your life.

As you develop familiarity with mindfulness, you can employ it to change your life at work, online, and in relationships.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

Stress is a natural part of life. It doesn’t have to own you – it doesn’t have to get in the way of your health and happiness. If you learn to manage your brain’s automatic fight or flight response then you can put an end to unhealthy responses to stress, become more mindful, and develop greater compassion.

You can start the rewiring process by beginning a mindfulness practice today, even if it’s just five minutes a day. The most important part of the practice is consistency.

You can begin to learn mindfulness through a specific type of meditation:

• Focus on your breath as an anchor and watch it go in and out
• During this process, your breath will naturally slow down
• As you’re trying to watch your breath, your mind will likely wander to a judging thought (e.g. this isn’t working, I’m not doing this properly)
• In the moment that you can catch that thought, notice that you’re having it and bring your attention back to the breath
• You now have a little bit more power over how you focus your attention and a little bit more self-awareness

-- 

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity by Melanie Greenberg, PhD
• Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) by Chade-Meng Tan, Daniel Goleman, Jon Kabat-Zinn

Today our expert guest is Dr. Nicholas Opie. He is a biomedical engineer with experience in neural prosthesis, co-head of the Vascular Bionics Laboratory, and Founder of pioneering endovascular bionics company Synchron, Inc.

Vascular bionics combine biology and medical electronics in the bloodstream. Devices like stents and pacemakers are currently using blood vessels, and Dr. Opie sees these as an opportunity to access the brain without open brain surgery.

These bionics have potential applications for individuals who suffer from paralysis, traumatic brain injuries, and degenerative diseases.

Making Technology Applicable 

Too often, engineers and researchers create something fantastic that never reaches clinical use. Synchron is devoted to making these technological breakthroughs medically applicable.

They’re currently developing STENTRODE™, the world’s first endovascular electrode array. It is a minimally invasive implantable device designed to interpret signals from the brain, and Synchron is currently preparing for a pilot clinical trial of the device. 

They plan to evaluate the safety and feasibility of the device to enable patient-directed brain control over mobility assist devices. He’s confident people will be able to control wheel chairs and computers using the device, and his ambitious goal is that the technology will also allow people to control prosthetic limbs.

In just the United States, there are about 6.9 million people who are paralyzed. “If we can help even a small fraction of those, then everything we’re doing is worthwhile.”

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway 

If you enjoy what you do, then it’s not working. 

“That’s what I like to live by. Everything I do is because it’s something I enjoy and it’s something I want to do. I think if everyone can take that bit of advice and do what they are passionate about, then their lives will be a lot happier and they’ll have a great time doing it.”

--

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn More: Vascular Bionics Laboratory | Synchron, Inc.
• Read through Dr. Opie’s Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) on brain-controlled devices and neural implants