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Psychological Association Warns Against Blaming Mental Illness For Mass Shootings

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Mass shootings

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) issued a statement warning against blaming mental illness for all mass shootings. Following two major shootings this weekend, politicians, including the President of the United States, made statements about gun control and violence. Trump called the shooters “mentally ill monsters,” but the APA believes people with mental illness are being stigmatized.

Mass Shootings Doesn’t Equate Mental Illness

On Monday, Trump called for heavier mental health screenings. He stated that mental illness and hatred pull the trigger and even played with the idea of involuntary mental health treatment for some individuals.

“We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence,” he said, “and make sure those people, not only get treatment but when necessary, involuntary confinement.”

Many other members of the Republican party agreed with the president. Senator Chris Murphy, however, took to Twitter correcting POTUS.

The APA stated that “the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent and far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of violence.” Anything saying otherwise, according to the association, can discourage people from getting the help they need. It can also embolden individuals with mental health issues to act violently.

Is There An Answer To Ending Gun Violence?

“The rates of mental illness are roughly the same around the world, yet other countries are not experiencing these traumatic events as often as we face them. One critical factor is access to, and the lethality of, the weapons that are being used in these crimes. Adding racism, intolerance and bigotry to the mix is a recipe for disaster,” Rosie Phillips David, president of the APA said.

So, while increasing mental health screenings for individuals purchasing guns may be a good idea, it won’t necessarily cut down on the number of mass shootings we see in a year. It is also unlikely to help cut down on other types of gun violence occurring in the country.

The only possible “fix” to the problem is reforming our laws surrounding firearms. All in all, further regulation is needed instead of placing blame where it simply does not belong.

Readers, what do you think about the APA’s warning against blaming mental illness for mass shootings? Is it accurate?

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Why Intermittent Fasting May Not Be Great For Your Health

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Intermittent fasting

The weight loss industry makes billions of dollars a year from Americans attempting to lose a few pounds. Some individuals have combated this billion-dollar industry with trying things like intermittent fasting. Of course, you’ll spend less money on food when you simply don’t eat for a certain period of time, but at what cost?

What is Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting is something people do to increase their metabolism, lose weight, and possibly even reduce inflammation. To perform this type of fasting, you go without food for a set period of time every day. During this time, you can only drink water.

Many people fast for 16 hours and eat within an 8-hour window. So, if you start eating at 8 a.m., you’d only eat until 4 p.m. Then you’d fast again until 8 a.m. the next day.

Others use something called the 5:2 method. This means fives days out of the week you eat a normal number of calories. The other two days you have a restricted caloric intake (usually between 500 and 600 calories).

Dangers of Fasting

Billions of people worldwide fast for various reasons, including weight loss. However, many extreme diets or going without eating altogether can have some positive (and negative) impacts on your physical and mental health. More recently, the negative impacts of intermittent fasting have come to light.

Cons of Fasting

“Intermittent fasting is a gateway to an eating disorder,” Evelyn Tribole, registered dietitian and co-author of Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works stated. Oftentimes, when you get used to not eating, you just stop eating. Some individuals may fall into habits that lead to developing an eating disorder.

At the same time, those who don’t fall into anorexia may find themselves binge eating when they come off their fast. They may do really well for a few weeks, then when they stop their fasting period, they binge and gain the weight back, which can be just as harmful. Most importantly, you lose touch with your body’s ability to know when you need food and when you don’t.

On top of how intermittent fasting can change your relationship with food, it can also impact your social life. Many people who have done this type of fasting note that the social side effects were what almost broke them in the beginning. It is more difficult to go out with friends for a bite to eat when you don’t eat most of the day. Also, not all your friends and family will agree with you just not eating.

Pros of Fasting

That being said, there are plenty of benefits to intermittent fasting. Some individuals find that during periods of fasting they are able to think more clearly and feel happier. Additionally, most people who perform any type of fasting see some weight loss results, though they vary from person to person.

As with any extreme change in your lifestyle, be sure to consult with your physician before fasting or adopting any new diet.

Readers, have you tried intermittent fasting or any other kind of fasting? How did it impact you? 

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More Kids Are Being Placed in Foster Care Because of Drug Use

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Foster care

The opioid crisis could cost the United States more than $500 million over the next three years. Not to mention, it has already cost billions of dollars, plus lives. Now, more children are being placed in foster care because of this drug use.

Drug Use and Foster Care

The number of children being placed in foster care due to parental drug use has more than doubled in the last 20 years, a 147 percent increase, to be exact. A new study, which took a look at 5 million foster care cases, analyzed how many cases were due to parental drug use.

“A lot of the work out there [on the opioid epidemic] has focused on mortality and overdoses and how it affects adults,” said Angelica Meinhofer, lead author of the study. “[It’s] less known how the epidemic might spill over to children. And that’s something I’m trying to shed light on.”

Between 2000 and 2017, the rate of kids being removed from the home for abuse, neglect, or any other reason declined. However, the instances of children being removed from the home because of drug use increased from 15 percent to 36 percent during that period. Additionally, the children impacted by removal due to drug use are younger than kids removed for other reasons. Those removed for parental drug use were typically under the age of five.

Does This Have Anything to Do With The Opioid Epidemic?

Parental drug use was responsible for more than 1 million entries in the foster care system. That is 23 percent of all the children admitted to foster care during that period of time.

It is easy to tie the opioid epidemic into the increase. Meinhofer believes there may be other contributing factors that may help explain the upward trend. Drug use overall has increased during that period of time. Because of this, policies that increase child removal have changed and child social workers are asked to pay more attention to drug use. This, as well as other altered data collection, may have an impact on the findings.

“We hope our findings will provoke researchers to ask … what’s causing this growth, what are the implications of this growth and whether or not our system has to absorb the capacity of increasing foster care loads,” Meinhofer stated.

Is There a Solution?

For more than a decade, children in the foster care system were on the decline. Between 2012 and 2017, it began on this upward trend. During that period, the number of foster care children in the system increase by 8 percent and opioid use was on the rise. But, separating children from their parents long-term through the foster care system is never optimal.

If social workers have a child removed from the home, one of the best things they could do is seek help for the drug-using parent(s). Certain special programs within the family drug court system help provide supervised treatment for substance abuse. They can help the parent(s) get clean and regain custody.

For now, Meinhofer and her colleagues are calling for follow-up studies which would take a better look at the cause of the increased drug use. This way, policymakers can better address the needs of the children.

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Change Your Mind to Change Your Money: Earning “Enough” Is a Matter of Perspective

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financially enough

The average North American never feels like they have quite enough money. There are always more bills to pay, more things to buy, or even more savings to set aside for later. The funny thing is, we always think that if we get just a certain amount more, then we’ll have “enough.”

But it never happens. If we reach the imaginary goal, the goal changes, an ever-shifting line in the sands of our financial perception. Is it possible to ever feel like we have enough? Yes. But the answer isn’t in a number. It’s all in our own perspective.

We Compare Ourselves Unfavorably to Others

There are many complex psychological and social reasons why we never feel like we have “enough.” According to a recent CBC Business News report, the leading factor causing us to feel inadequate about our money is the human brain’s tendency to compare ourselves to others. Our minds do this naturally when it comes to many different factors in life. We can’t help it. But when it comes to money, we are particularly vulnerable.

The problem is that we tend to only compare ourselves to those who have more than us. We don’t look at people who earn less than us and think, “oh, wow, I earn so much more than that person.” Instead, we look at those who earn more than us and long to have what they have. It’s a trick of the brain that leaves all of us vulnerable to constant feelings of financial inadequacy.

Comparing Ourselves to the Super Rich

Several things in modern times have made this problem worse. One of the biggest is the increasingly large gap between rich and poor. More specifically, there are people in the world who earn grotesquely large amounts of money. If you compare yourself to someone who has billions, then you’re always going to feel like you don’t have enough.

There is a persistent idea in our society than anyone can become super-rich. You can win a reality TV show and instantly get one million dollars. Or you can win the lottery. Or while still in your twenties, you can launch the next amazing start-up company. If you haven’t succeeded at attaining millions, or preferably billions, by mid-life, then society can make you feel like you’re failing.

The Problem of (Social) Media

The persistence of rich life imagery today exacerbates the problem. There are countless reality television shows devoted to showcasing the lives of the rich. Social media makes everyone lives look so much better than our own. Somewhere in our minds, we know that most people aren’t celebrities. We realize that people post their best days on social media and manipulate their images accordingly.

Nevertheless, our brains compare. We begin to believe that those people have amazing lives that are so much better than our own. Furthermore, we believe that if we got just a little bit more, then we would be happy as well.

Our Own Peer Group Doesn’t Help

Of course, the people we spend the most time with are usually our peers. They are our coworkers who earn salaries comparable to ours. They are the people who attend the same events as us, live in the neighborhoods that we do, send their children to the same schools. Clearly, we more or less must make the same amount of money as them. So why does it still feel like we need more?

The first reason is the age-old concept of feeling like we have to “keep up with the Joneses.” We see our neighbors spend more to upgrade their homes, so we do the same. Our friends post stunning vacation destination photos on their Instagram, and we pull out the credit card to book a similar trip. We don’t compare ourselves to our peers by what we each earn. In contrast, we make comparisons about what we perceive each other as spending. This leads to overspending, which ends up making us feel like we don’t have enough.

Humans Easily Adapt to New Circumstances

Comparisons to others aren’t the only problem. We face a lot of mental challenges to ever feeling like we truly have enough. For example, we’re prone to a phenomenon called Hedonic Adaptation. It’s a fancy term that basically means we quickly adjust to whatever we have. If you earn $50,000 per year, and that doesn’t feel like enough, then suddenly changing to a job where you earn $100,000 per year should feel abundant. It will – for a moment. But thanks to our brain’s ability to adapt, we’ll quickly go back to feeling the same way that we did before. We’ll adjust to a $100,000 income, and it won’t feel like enough. Likewise, if that doubles to $200,000 annually, it still won’t feel like enough. The initial surge will be awesome. Then it’ll fade. The same old feelings will come right back. We adapt, for better or worse.

The Only Answer is to Change Your Perception

If we can adapt to earning more, then couldn’t we also adapt to earning less? Yes. We see a variation on this when people have children. If you’re earning $50,000 per year as a single person, and someone asks you how you would afford kids, you might have no clue. But if you have a child, you make the money work. You may feel an initial financial strain, but ultimately, you basically mentally balance out where you were before. You have to spend more, you’re not earning any more, and yet you feel the same as you did before about your money.

How to Change Your Money Perception

This sounds terrible. How can we ever feel like we’re earning enough if no external circumstance can change our feelings? The answer is that we have to change our feelings from within. We have to alter our perspective in order to feel like we already have enough. Recognizing that there is no magic number that will suddenly feel satisfactory, we have to find ways to feel satisfied with exactly what amount of money we have right now. We must embrace an abundance mindset.

Here are some tips:

  • Get realistic about your finances. Figure out exactly what you earn and what you spend. Calculate what you need to save for emergencies and retirement. Then set about creating a plan to make that happen. This isn’t a “dream income” plan. It’s a plan for how to limit yourself to just what you actually need and then make a way to make your income suit that.
  • Stop comparing yourself to others. This is easier said than done. Opportunities to compare ourselves to others financially are all around us. It takes effort. But it’s the single best endeavor you can undertake if you want to start feeling like you have enough. Delete social media that makes you feel financially bad. Focus spending on your true needs, not what you “need” to match what others have. Stop watching the lives of others who seem to have more.
  • Embrace abundance. Use affirmations to remind yourself that what you have is already enough. Focus your time and energy on the non-financial things that give you joy. Change your language from “I need” to “I have.”
  • Try therapy. Money is one of the biggest issues in individual’s lives. It is also a primary cause for fights in relationships. We all have struggles with money. Work through those challenges at a deeper level to truly move past them. When you learn to feel like you are enough, you will also start to feel like you have enough.

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If You Want to Lose Weight, Cut 300 Calories a Day

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300 calories

People spend $60 billion every year trying to lose weight or alleviate medical issues cause by being overweight. New research has shown that cutting 300 calories a day can not only help you lose weight but also improve your heart health.

The Diet Industry

About 50 percent of Americans say they’re trying to lose weight right now. As mentioned above, billions of dollars are spent every year just to shed those extra pounds. Most of the time, the most expensive diet plans and foods don’t produce lasting results.

According to a new study, you may be wasting money on those diet books and foods. Save your money and just cut 300 calories a day from your regular diet.

Just 300 Calories a Day Can Make a Difference

Even if you’re at a healthy weight now, cutting those calories can also benefit your cardiovascular health too. Over the span of two years, individuals who lowered their overall caloric intake had lower blood pressure and bad cholesterol. They also saw a 24 percent decrease in triglycerides.

Additionally, participants lost an average of 16 pounds over the span of the study. Seventy-one percent of the weight loss was fat. Study authors say this shows that even the smallest changes can make a huge impact on your health.

Dr. William Kraus, the senior author of the study, stated, “Exercise and diet are the two most profound and easily implemented interventions we have in our environment that can reduce our cardiovascular risks. There aren’t five drugs on the market when combined that could approach what we saw in this study from moderate calorie restriction.”

Cutting 300 calories a day is extremely doable. You don’t have to make a huge change to your diet to make this happen. Three hundred calories could be cut by doing intermittent fasting or skipping dessert. With more than 610,000 people dying of heart disease every year, that’s a small price to pay.

Readers, have you tried a fad diet that turned out to be a flop? 

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How Mindfulness at Work Helps Your Health … and Maybe Even Your Bank Account

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mindful working

Mindful working encompasses a variety of different practices. It includes ways to practice mindfulness throughout your work day. This allows you to stay present, centered, and calm regardless of what’s going on around you. Mindful working also means that you approach your career path with intention even as you stay grounded in the moment.

Mindfulness at work has a variety of health benefits. We see those benefits when practicing mindful working. Moreover, you might think that slowing down at work would negatively impact your career. However, mindful working can actually lead to a better work life and possibly even more money in your bank account.

What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a really trendy term. In fact, it’s become quite controversial. Mindfulness is one form of meditation practice. There is certainly a whole art to meditation. Therefore, if you want to dig deep into mindfulness, then you may wish to take courses and learn more.

That said, the concept of mindfulness is really a very simple one. It’s the practice of staying aware of all things happening inside of you and outside of you in the present moment. It’s awareness without judgment.

In other words, you may never stop having random thoughts, but with mindfulness, you become aware of those thoughts. Over time, the thoughts hold less power. You can watch them occur without reacting.

What Is Mindfulness at Work?

Mindful working simply means taking the concept of mindfulness and apply it to your work life. There are two key aspects to this:

  1. Practicing mindfulness in your day-to-day work life
  2. Taking a mindful, intentional approach to career planning

Daily Practices in Mindful Working

If this is something that interests you, then the majority of your effort will be in the first aspect: practicing mindful awareness every day at work. Additionally, you’ll practice mindfulness when you’re outside of work but find thoughts of work intruding on your mind.

When You’re At The Office

Examples of this at work mean that you:

  • Set a daily intention upon arrival to remain as present as possible throughout the day.
  • Single task instead of trying (and failing) to multitask.
  • Take breaks to breathe, focus on what’s around you, and clear your mind.
  • Practice gratitude throughout the workday.
  • Tune in to your body to check for stress and reactivity, pausing to ground yourself accordingly.

You also implement a variety of different techniques to limit distractions. You turn off all of the notifications on your devices so that they aren’t constantly pinging at you. Perhaps you have a “closed-door” time each day at the office when coworkers aren’t to interrupt you. As much as possible, you create a schedule and setting that enhances your ability to do one thing at a time with complete focus.

When You’re At Home

These days, work doesn’t take place from 9-5. Maybe you work from home. Or perhaps you work from an office, but your job calls upon you to answer emails at all hours. Mindful working means that you find a way to delineate “work time” and “rest time” even though that’s a challenge.

If you never turn off, then you’re stressing your body and mind. This isn’t healthy, and it isn’t productive. People need downtime to replenish their internal resources. Without that time, you end up running on empty. You’re not giving your best self to the job or the other things in your life.

Therefore, you find ways to be completely present at home or with friends when that’s where you are. You limit contact with work during out-of-office hours. If you work for yourself, you still create “out of office” hours when you can wind down. You practice meditative and centering exercises to train your brain that it doesn’t constantly have to think about what’s going on at work.

Planning Your Career Intentionally

Mindfulness is about staying in the present moment. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t apply it to planning out your career. In fact, approaching your career trajectory with mindfulness can greatly improve your job satisfaction as well as your overall quality of life.

This simply means that you actively schedule times to think about your work plans. For example, you might do a monthly review of your goals for the year and an annual review of your long-term goals. During those times, you focus intensively and intentionally on planning out your next steps.

Outside of those times, you practice just being in the moment, knowing that you’ve got a plan in place, so you don’t have to worry. People worry about their jobs constantly. They worry about what’s next, how the economy will affect their job security, whether or not they’re moving up in their work, how to get more business … This distracted mind isn’t healthy, and it isn’t productive.

Benefits of Mindful Working

Mindful working offers a vast array of benefits. More than anything else, you should see a better state of mind, which in turn leads to some terrific physical health benefits. But you may also find that working more mindfully improves your career, too, which allows you to earn more money over time.

Mental and Physical Health Benefits

Research has shown that mindfulness offers benefits that include:

  • Better concentration and working memory
  • Better sleep
  • Faster, more effective task completion
  • Fewer headaches, GI problems, and physical aches
  • Increased self-awareness
  • Less preoccupation with regrets or worries
  • Less reactivity
  • Lower blood pressure
  • More capacity for joy in daily life
  • Reduced conflict with others
  • Reduced stress
  • Symptom relief for depression and anxiety

Career and Financial Benefits

Benefits of mindful working may include:

  • Better work-life balance
  • Decreased likelihood of burnout
  • Doing your job better because you’re more focused
  • Improve co-worker relations
  • More job satisfaction
  • New, fresh ideas for problem-solving
  • Renewed sense of appreciation for your work
  • You run your job; your job doesn’t run you

Mindful working means that you’ll make choices that are right for you. This improves your relationship with your career. In turn, this can mean better career advancement, which could mean earning more money.

Moreover, it also means that you are happier with what you have. Therefore, even if you don’t technically earn more, you may be happier with your earnings. If you’re happy at work, then you’re less likely to engage in spending to “make up for” not enjoying your job.

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