Top fibromyalgia recommendations from fifteen experienced patients. Great advice for the newly diagnosed and those who have struggled for decades!
Top Fibromyalgia Recommendations From Fifteen Experienced Patients — The Disabled Diva’s Blog
Apr 22, 2021 / Wendy M. Troxel PhD
There are many ways that sleep problems can set you on a path toward a rocky relationship.
Making sound decisions, being in a good mood most of the time, reining in some of your bad moods or irritability, problem solving, communicating effectively, tolerating frustration, practicing empathy — these are all important skills for cultivating and maintaining a healthy relationship. And these are also all the things that go south when you’re low on sleep.
When these are in short supply, whom do you take it out on? Usually your partner. Chronic sleep loss or otherwise disturbed sleep can trigger a host of emotions that can send you on a spiral of relationship-damaging behaviors.
Sleep plays a powerful role in how we experience and regulate our emotions. When we miss out on sleep, we become more irritable, we have more negative moods, our frustration tolerance is lowered, and we become more emotionally labile, meaning that we are more prone to mood swings, because our capacity to regulate our emotions is impaired.
Studies have shown that when sleep was restricted to five hours per night for a week, participants showed a progressive increase in negative emotions (e.g., anger, sadness, frustration, irritability), with each successive night of sleep restriction. Research has further shown that sleep loss led not only to increases in negative emotion but also decreases in positive emotion.
To the partner of the person deprived of sleep, this activation of negative emotions in concert with the blunting of positive emotions can feel like a double whammy of contempt and criticism. The partner feels lonely, vulnerable, and attacked, which, of course, can then lead to defensiveness or counterattack. Not a great recipe for relationship bliss.
On nights when couples slept worse, they reported more conflict the next day.
Decades of relationship research has confirmed that conflict itself is not necessarily a sign of relationship doom or distress — it is perfectly normal and in fact healthy to have some level of conflict in relationships. It’s about how you engage in conflict with your partner that matters.
Social psychologists Drs. Amie Gordon and Serena Chen have studied couples’ nightly sleep patterns and their daily relationship behaviors. They found that on nights when couples slept worse, they reported more conflict the next day. But it’s not just that sleep loss increases the likelihood of conflict. It’s that once a couple is in conflict, sleep loss triggers the very relationship behaviors and communication styles that we know are most toxic to relationships. As Dr. Gordon explains it, “When one or both partners are not well-rested, minor squabbles can turn into major rifts.”
Researchers at the Ohio State University brought 43 couples into the lab and asked them to engage in a typical relationship conflict. (It turns out that couples are very good at diving right into conflict when instructed to do so, even under the conspicuous conditions of a scientific laboratory, replete with a video camera to record the event.) Couples also reported on their nightly sleep patterns.
After each conflict, the researchers painstakingly coded the conversation using a well-developed relationship coding system that identifies positive versus negative communication styles, including the degree of hostility or constructive responses.
While all couples engaged in conflict, the researchers saw a clear distinction in how they engaged: Couples who reported sleeping less than seven hours per night were more likely to engage in hostile conflict. It’s the difference between saying to your partner “It really makes me mad that you didn’t unload the dishwasher” vs. “Shocker — yet again, you couldn’t do the one thing I asked you to do.”
Couples who reported sleeping less than seven hours per night were more likely to engage in hostile conflict.
A sure-fire way to ratchet up the intensity of a relationship tiff is when one or both partners feel their words and, more importantly, their feelings are not being heard. In many ways, empathy is the glue that binds a relationship together. Being able to gauge your partner’s emotional temperature during a hot-topic discussion is a critically important skill for relationship well-being. Unfortunately, empathic accuracy also takes a hit when relationship partners are sleep-deprived.
Drs. Gordon and Chen found not only that couples were more likely to engage in conflict after sleeping poorly but also that poorly slept people had lower empathic accuracy. Their research showed that the negative effects of one partner’s sleep loss on empathic accuracy spread to the other partner. On nights when one partner slept worse, the other partner also showed reductions in empathic accuracy. This likely reflects a relationship dynamic in which one partner feels dismissed or that their feelings aren’t being heard, leading to increased defensiveness and emotional walls being built up on both sides.
Other research shows that even the words we use to communicate and the sounds of our voices are colored by our sleep or lack thereof. Psychologist Eleanor McGlinchey used computerized text analysis, including analysis of acoustic properties of speech, as well as observer ratings of the emotional expression of speech, before and after sleep deprivation in the laboratory. She wanted to determine the extent to which sleep deprivation affected word choice, including positive and negative emotion words, like “happy” or “excited” or “sad” or “anxious,” as well as the tone, including positive and negative emotion expression.
She found that under sleep-deprived conditions, participants showed a decrease in the use of positive emotion words. Observers rated their speech as being lower in positive emotional expression (less happy or calm) and higher in negative emotional expression (more sad, anxious, or fatigued). Using sophisticated computerized text analysis of the acoustic properties of speech, she also found that sleep-deprived participants’ speech was, as McGlinchey put it, “softer, sharper, and lower energy … and the lower acoustic energy can make it sound like the person is disengaged.”
Sleep-induced loneliness is contagious. Within couples, this can lead to greater emotional distancing and a lack of connection with your partner.
Beyond the sleep-induced relationship blowups and communication shifts, lack of sleep can lead to broader social consequences, including the more existential state of loneliness. Science is showing us that lack of sleep hurts our social brains and can make us feel alone in the world.
In a series of elegant studies published in 2018, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that poor sleep predicted greater feelings of loneliness, as well as greater social withdrawal and anxiety, the next day. At the brain level, the researchers demonstrated that sleep-deprived people showed deactivation in the parts of the brain that are responsible for helping understand other people’s actions and behaviors, and amplification in the parts of the brain that signal threat or fear responses in social contexts.
In other words, sleep-deprived subjects’ brains were less active in the parts of the brain that make you more social and more active in the parts of the brain that make you want to stand in the corner away from people. Researchers also looked at how other people reacted to the sleep-deprived subjects. They found that the observers perceived the sleep-deprived people to be lonelier and less attractive than well-slept people. But the real kicker is that after observing the people who were sleep-deprived, the observers themselves reported feeling lonelier and more socially withdrawn, despite being well-rested. Sleep-induced loneliness, therefore, is contagious. Within couples, this can lead to greater emotional distancing and a lack of connection with your partner.
As you read this, you may be entering a state of increasing anxiety, verging on panic for some, as I describe the relationship harms that could be caused by sleep loss. And frankly, the last thing any of us needs is yet another reason to keep us up at night.
But rather than sweating the consequences of sleep loss, it’s time to start prioritizing sleep as a mutual goal within your relationship.
Excerpted from the new book Sharing the Covers: Every Couple’s Guide to Better Sleep by Wendy M. Troxel PhD. Copyright © 2021. Available from Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Watch the TEDxManhattanBeach Talk from Dr. Wendy Troxel now:
Wendy M. Troxel PhD Wendy Troxel PhD is a senior behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation and an adjunct faculty member in psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist. Dr. Troxel is internationally recognized for her work on sleep in couples, how sleep affects health and the global economy, and how social environments and public policy impact sleep.
It’s Wednesday, we’re alive and we’re here today! Thank you.
What do you think? Can a red daisy feel blue?
Melinda
Apr 27, 2020 / Patrick Lencioni
Glenn Harvey
This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.
We’re currently living in an era of teamwork.
Today, we take for granted the fact that we can be on the same team as somebody who lives on the other side of the country — or the world — and that’s largely because of technology. As a result of technology, people are developing in-organization solutions that are amazing and complex and that are solving problems in business, medicine and communication, in every kind of field. Those complex solutions demand that people collaborate and work together as teams.
But even though teamwork is everywhere, we continue to train people — whether in education or in the workforce — for primarily individual and technical skills. As someone who’s worked with teams for the past 25 years in the corporate world and written two books about teamwork, I think that needs to change. And that’s why I’m going to share with you the three simple virtues that make for a good team player.
The first and by far the most important is humility. If you want to be an ideal team player and if you want to be successful in life, you really need to be humble. Most of us know what humility is — it means not being arrogant or self-centered but putting others ahead of ourselves. It’s such an attractive and powerful thing.
When somebody lacks confidence and makes themselves small, that’s not humility. To deny our talents is actually a violation of humility, just like it is to exaggerate them. The writer C.S. Lewis said it best when he wrote, “Humility isn’t thinking less of ourselves, it’s thinking about ourselves less.” (Editor’s note: That quote has long been misattributed to Lewis.)
The second is equally simple: You have to be hungry. This simply means having a strong work ethic. People who have an innate hunger about getting work done are typically much more successful on teams and in life. This quality is the one that you probably have to develop earliest in life; when I work with people later in life who never developed it, it can be harder for them to build it. Being hungry is not about workaholism, though. Workaholics are people who get their entire identity from their work. People who are hungry just want to go above and beyond what’s expected; they have a high standard for what they do, and they never do just the minimum.
The third attribute is what I call being smart. But it’s not about intellectual smarts; this is about emotional intelligence and having common sense around how we understand people and how we use our words and actions to bring out the best in others. This is so important in the world, and being smart is one of those things that people can work on and get better at.
You need to have all three qualities to be a great team player. So it’s really important that you learn how to identify in yourself and in others when one of them is lacking. I’ve come up with some labels that you can use to refer to people (including yourself) who are missing one of these traits.
A person may be humble and hungry but they lack smarts — I call them the accidental mess maker. As a manager, I have a lot of time for accidental mess makers. They’re good people, they have really good intentions, but they create problems that they’re not aware of. They’re like a puppy; they knock things over a lot but they mean well. The problem with this type is you have to clean up after them and over time, you can get tired of having to say things like, “He’s a really good guy; he didn’t mean it that way.”
Then there’s someone who’s humble and smart but they lack hunger — I call them the lovable slacker. The problem is while they’re lovable and really fun to be around, they do just the bare minimum. They don’t go above and beyond. You have to constantly remind them to do more, and you have to pick up their slack in an organization.
The most difficult type is the team member who is hungry and smart but they’re not humble — I call them the skillful politician. They know how to portray themselves as being humble, which is a very dangerous thing. They’re able to interview well, and they say the right things at meetings. The problem is, deep down inside them, work is about them, and not about others. By the time managers figure it out, there’s usually a trail of dead bodies hidden in closets around the organization.
So, what do you do with this information?
Don’t misuse these labels. Don’t say to your boss or colleague, “Hey, I think that you’re an accidental mess maker.”
Next, apply these categories to yourself and the people around you. Sit down with your work team, your family, or the soccer team you coach. Explain the qualities, and have everybody rank themselves in those three areas — which one they’re best at, second best and third. Even if they’re good at all of them, they’re still going to be better in some and weaker in another.
Then, go around the group and ask people to explain their third and why it’s theirs. Talk together about how they can strengthen this trait. Give each other advice; turn your colleagues, your team members and your family members into each other’s coaches.
For the person who needs help being humble, you might say something like, “Maybe you shouldn’t talk about yourself so much and instead, ask questions about others and take an interest in their lives.” For the person who needs to be hungry, suggest that when they’re about to sign out for the day, they should check in and see if there’s work that still needs to be done. And for the person who needs to be emotionally smarter, ask them to double-check at the end of meetings whether they’ve treated everyone with kindness and respect.
It’s time that we changed the way we think about success as a society and how we prepare people for success in life. By developing these three qualities in ourselves, we could start to change ourselves and improve our organizations, our schools, our families — and our world.
This piece was adapted from a TEDxUniversityofNevada Talk. Watch it here:
Patrick Lencioni is one of the founders of organizational health consultancy The Table Group and the author of 11 books, including The Ideal Team Player.
Perfect timing for Immunization Awareness Week.
Melinda
Another great Ted Talk video.
Enjoy
Melinda
Watching an elderly relative suffer due to decreasing independence can be so hard to bear, but luckily you needn’t simply sit on the sidelines for much longer. There are several tips and tricks that you can utilize to help them gain back some of the independence they have lost, and it couldn’t be easier to get started today. So, if you would like to find out more, then read on!
One of the easiest ways to help an elderly relative gain back some of their independence is by adapting their home. Leaving their home means leaving behind most of their treasured possessions along with the memories attached to the property, so avoiding such a scenario can be extremely beneficial for their mental health. Start by tackling the issue of mobility, as getting around safely may be the biggest struggle for your elderly relative. Install grab bars in frequently-traveled areas such as the hallway, as well as around the toilet and shower to ensure they can stand up without the risk of falling. Investing in a fold-up seat to go inside their shower can help to reduce the risk of slips and falls dramatically. Seeking out more ergonomic furniture may also be of benefit for your elderly relative, as getting into and out of bed may be difficult for them. Luckily you can source both beds and chairs that slowly rise up to lift the user onto their feet without any struggle, so this may be an option you wish to explore.
Sometimes the sole reason for an elderly individual moving into sheltered accommodation is a lack of access to support, so making sure your relative can seek help should they need it is absolutely vital. Take some time to identify their weaknesses, and aim to assist them in working around these issues productively rather than simply passing the burden onto someone else. If you find that your elderly relative struggles to make their own meals, don’t let them go hungry or risk their safety using cooking equipment; sign them up for a ‘meals on wheels’ service that provides fresh dishes delivered straight to their door to ensure their nutritional needs are met. If they live alone and need some company, they may benefit from the services of a live-in-care provider. They can move into your elderly relative’s home or work out a visiting schedule that allows them to provide care and attention, performing tasks such as laundry, cleaning, and cooking, as well as assisting with medication and socialization.
It might even be worth looking into places like benchmark at rye for example. These are places that allow your elderly relatives to retain a large amount of their independence while also offering the support that is needed. It’s a meet-in-the-middle kind of solution while ensuring that your relatives are taken care of.
Helping your elderly relatives to stay independent has never been so simple when you can take the time to make the most of the brilliant ideas described above. Providing your family with the help they need to thrive in such a rewarding project, and they’ll no doubt appreciate your hard work and dedication. There’s no time like the present to adapt your elderly relative’s home and improve their access to essential support.
This is a collaborative post.
Melinda
I’ll work hard not to get on my bandstand! The COVID vaccine is more effective than your early Flu shot and the flu won’t kill you most, with few exceptions with prior health conditions. I know there are naysayers that go way back, that is your right. BUT, in order to eradicate the COVID 19 Virus, we must have 70-80% of the population vaccinated. Can you imagine the struggle that causes poor countries?
It angers me to read day after day that roughly 30% of COVID vaccine appointments are no shows, no reschedule. They are too convenient in our area right now not to reschedule. I received no special treatment, went in with an appointment, and was out within 30 minutes.
I understand so people got jumpy when the J&J vaccine was paused, that right there tells you the government is doing the right thing. Only 15 out of 18 million got blood clots, a nano number but out of an abundance of caution, and for the public to see how stringent the process is they paused the vaccine. It started distribution yesterday, will someone else get sick, maybe, you can get sick from what you buy over the counter at the drug store and end up in the hospital.
Thousands of people have to volunteer to take the vaccine under strict supervision, all side effects are documented. The stand is high in order to reach Phase 2 trails. Even more strenuous testing is done and again all side effects are noted and researched. Before a vaccine can be approved it has to go thru a Phase 3 and final phase before it can be recommended to the FDA.
You may ask why does it normally takes 7-10 years to get a vaccine to market and these vaccines took less than two years. Very simple, a Presidential Act. Extra resources, money, extra scientist. governments collaborating together, all the things take extra time from the front end, finding the vaccine itself, had thousands of scientists working night and day to find the right mix. The Clinical Trail process wasn’t speeded up the research and finding the right vaccine was. One reason is also they had the DNA code from the virus to work from.
Please, just take the time to educate yourself on the process and weigh the side effects, which for 99% of people are minimal against getting or giving COVID. How are you going to feel if you give your children for mother or grandmother COVID and they die?
Another fork for those who don’t like to take vaccines is I feel strongly all children should be required to have the vaccine to enter public school. If you don’t want to vaccinate your children once they become available that is your right, it’s not your right to have the minority make the majority sick. you need to go to private or home school. YES, I would fight hard for that if given chance.
I feel that passionate about the vaccine. I also feel that if we are throwing away vaccines in America we need to start shipping them to India right away and Americans can go back to long lines and shortages.
Get vaccinated.
Melinda
Let’s lighten this up a bit!
My little man Jet, no quite a year old yet, loves his toys. He also loves to chew on his toys. It’s like a mission when he gets a new toy, how do I chew an appendage off as fast as possible. After throwing away several toys it was time to get a small sewing kit to try to repair the ones I could. Last week he presented me with a challenge, the new Squirrell has a major hole right by his tail. Now I could cut the tail off and make the job easier but that would be no fun for him. So I ordered upholstery thread, needles, and leather thimbles for the delicate surgery.
This photo is of Jet with his orange toy after a double leg and arm amputation. He doesn’t mind it’s still one of his favorite toys and usually goes to sleep with him at night.
Apr 5, 2021 / Guy Katz PhD
Angus Greig
This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.
Emails are just as fundamental these days as food and water in our lives, and they form a large part of our daily communications.
Roughly 300 billion are sent around the world every day, according to Statista. On average, each of us who works in an office gets 121 emails per working day on average! Yet we send them and read them without thinking about them for a second.
But emails are essential. In some situations, they can’t be replaced with a short meeting or a phone call. We send them because of traceability or a time difference, or we need to have many people reading the same thing.
A study of around 1 million emails that was done with Microsoft shows the average employee spends 28 percent of his or her day working on emails.
But given how essential emails are, did anyone ever teach you how to write one?
I have dedicated the last 25 years to learning and teaching. I have trained in the Scouts and the Israeli Army, and I teach business at a German university today. Just like anyone else, I send and receive emails and texts. Loads of them. I use them to stay in touch with customers, collaborators and students around the world.
My students and I decided to optimize our emails and test what worked — and what didn’t. We found by tweaking just five little things, you’ll make it more likely that your email gets read, you’ll spend less time working on it, and writing an email might even become fun. Here they are:
A subject line is your chance to make a positive first impression on your recipient. According to existing research, three things make an effective subject line: It should be short, call for action and indicate familiarity with the recipient.
I showed 300 people the following email subject lines and asked them which they’d open first. Can you guess which they chose?
A. Statement 10.31.2020
B. Welcome Message
C. Meeting tomorrow, please respond!
D. Hey! 🙂
E. Missed you, how’s Friday?
If you picked C, you’re right! That was the overwhelming favorite, with 47 percent choosing it. The runner-up was D, with 20 percent of the vote.
Our emails are written in black and white, so they automatically look kind of boring. Sending your thoughts in email is a bit like speaking without being able to use your body, voice, or face. So how can we put some color and — more importantly — feeling into them?
By using different kinds of punctuation and, yes, emojis.
For example, here’s the same sentence but written three different ways. Which do you find the most engaging?
Dear Guy, thank you for visiting.
Guy, thanks for visiting!
Hey Guy, awesome that you dropped by 🙂
I like to call punctuation and emojis “digital body language,” which we desperately need to show who we are, even if we’re just writing an email.
And if you want to go all in, try adding a GIF.
Here’s one of me!
Should you always add an emoji or a GIF to your work emails? Of course not. Think of digital body language as the spices and seasoning in your email recipe — depending on the culture, setting and background, you may want more or less of that curry or hot sauce. Or none at all.
Research from NYU, MIT, and Boston University shows that many emails aren’t read but just skimmed or simply deleted. And it seems that with every additional word you write beyond your first 40, you directly reduce the chances of getting an answer.
So be as brief as you can. Keep it the length of a tweet, or 280 characters.
Now you may be telling yourself: “No way — my meeting notes [or whatever you’re writing about] can’t be that short.”
And you’re right.
But the one part of that email in which you ask for something or get something done can be kept brief. You can include those meeting notes as an attachment.
Imagine if you knew a magic word that you could include in your email, a word that could instantaneously grab the attention of every single person in the world.
Well, it turns out you already know it: It’s the name of the person you’re emailing.
Dale Carnegie once wrote, “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” He wrote this almost 100 years ago, but I believe his words still apply today.
We all have a narcissist in us, and if you use a person’s name at critical moments, you will increase your likelihood of getting an answer. For example, when you’re making a crucial request in your email, start with the recipient’s name. What’s more, research shows that mentioning the name of another person whom the recipient knows will also significantly raise the chances your email will be answered.
Just remember: There is one way in which a person’s name can completely ruin your email — if you misspell their name, all the thought you put into your message will go down the drain.
Now I’m sure that some people reading this will say there is no “perfect” email, and they’re right. Every email is different, yet most emails have two things in common: one, you want something from someone, and two, that someone is a human. Because of these two things, my suggested ingredients can surely help.
What matters is the proportion. Now that you have the list of recommended ingredients for an email make sure you use them in the right quantities. From now on, try and break away from writing any important emails on autopilot. Instead, picture the person you’re writing to and season your email to their taste using your ingredients.
Here’s one final point. Remember how Steve Jobs always waited until the end of his presentations to show off the coolest of the products he was introducing? He used to say “one more thing”, and boom, there came a new iPhone out of his pocket.
Why not use that tactic too? If you have one important thing to say or one crucial thing you need from your recipient, or one uncomfortable thing to say, try putting it in the P.S. line. This is the last impression, which isn’t as well known as the first impression. But it can be just as powerful as it’s the one thing that sticks with your reader even after the rest is forgotten.
This post was adapted from Guy Katz‘s TEDxZurich Talk. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/PjW94dolmRo?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
Guy Katz PhD first served as an officer for the Israeli Defense Forces and then worked for governments, startups, non-profits, consulting firms and giant corporations. Constantly on the lookout for the right bit of science mixed with practical tips, he now spends his days optimizing the magical recipe for being a father of two amazing boys, a business professor at FOM University in Germany, the owner of a consulting and training company that operates worldwide, and teaching people how to fly airplanes.
lookingforthelight.blog 