How to Turn Your Dreams Into Reality

By Denise Foley for Completely You

Americans are so optimistic and rah-rah that it should come as no surprise that cheerleading was invented here.

We’re also the country of origin for The Power of Positive Thinking, the ‘50s book by minister Dr. Norman Vincent Peale; the positive psychology movement, founded by psychologist Martin Seligman; and Oprah Winfrey, an outspoken proponent of the philosophy that if you dream it, it will happen.
We tend not to tolerate pessimism. In our culture, being realistic is, well, a downer.

So it should come as no surprise that when we fantasize about what we want out of life -- a new job, a vacation in faraway places, even just to look like Sarah Jessica Parker in Manolo high heels -- we tend to forget that nothing’s perfect. In fact, say researchers at New York University, nurturing our idealized fantasies makes us forget that there could be some negatives embedded in our heart’s desires.

In other words, our pros-and-cons lists tend to be light on the cons. (You can read the full study here.)

“There’s been a lot written about the benefits of positive thinking,” says researcher Heather Kappes, who conducted the study in which she and her colleagues induced positive fantasies in a group of college student volunteers about wearing high heels, investing in the stock market and exotic vacations. But she says no one ever considers the negative aspects of such optimism.

The Negatives of Being Positive
The dark side of fantasizing is that it may take some of the steam out of action. “If you imagine everything positively and put yourself mentally where you want to be, you can trick your brain into thinking that you’re already there, so you don’t think about the work you have to put in and don’t muster up the energy to get there,” says Kappes.

You also may overlook some vital information that can help you make the right decision: That new job could have you in the office 24/7; high heels hurt and while Australian beaches are beautiful, they’re also home to the largest number of poisonous creatures in the world. Bummer.

But that doesn’t mean you should abandon fantasizing altogether.  “Daydreams give us a lot of joy and hope in life,” says Kappes. “Positive thinking can be useful when you’re talking yourself into setting a goal, such as deciding what to do in the future or to lose weight. If you didn’t think you could achieve those things, you’d have no reason to strive for anything.”

How Fantasies Can Lead to Fulfillment
Positive fantasies also keep your dreams alive until you can fulfill them. For instance, you may want to go to Fiji, but your salary will only cover a staycation. Or you’d like to work at Woods Holes Oceanographic Institute, but your only marine biology experience is with a tank full of guppies in your dorm room. A little more time at the job, a few salary hikes and a tad more education can get you within striking distance of your fantasy life.

At that point, if you’re still serious about making your dreams come true, take the blinders off, says Kappes. “If the con side of your pro-and-con list is so much shorter, it could be because you want it so much. Pause to ask yourself if there are downsides you haven’t considered.”

For more great health and lifestyle content, check out the rest of Completely You
Denise Foley   is Completely You’s “News You Can Use” blogger. She is a veteran health writer, the former deputy editor and editor at large of Prevention, and co-author of four books on women’s health and parenting.

Could Exercise Be Bad for You?

By Denise Foley for Completely You

It’s the news that couch potatoes have been waiting for: A new study has found that in about 10 percent of people who exercise, at least one standard measure of heart health (levels of insulin, HDL cholesterol and triglycerides, as well as blood pressure) got worse. And in 7 percent who exercise, at least two of those measures got worse.

That’s right -- exercise is actually bad for them.

But don’t hang up your sneakers just yet. Dr. William Kraus, a cardiologist who is  the paper’s co-author and a member of the committee behind the government’s national exercise recommendation that Americans get 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week, points out that an equal number of people in the six exercises studies the researchers reviewed got better – much better.

In fact, “10 percent of people were super-responders, and did way better than predicted,” says Kraus, who is also a professor of medicine at Duke University. So the take-home message of the study isn’t that exercise is dangerous to your health. “If people use this as an excuse [not to exercise], they’re just looking for excuses,” says Kraus. And that’s a very bad idea for most of us. Read the full study here.

Should you exercise or not?
The truth is, it’s impossible to know in advance where you fall on the spectrum when it comes to benefiting from exercise, any more than you can predict whether a statin drug will lower your cholesterol.

Comparing exercise to a drug is a good analogy, says Kraus. “A certain percentage of people respond unfavorably to drugs. In some people, statins raise levels of HDL (good cholesterol). In a small percentage of people, they lower them. This is why we have a panoply of treatment options.”

But what this means, says Kraus, is that doctors aren’t going to be able to assure patients that if they exercise more they’re going to reduce their risks of heart disease -- at least, not until they see how an individual patient reacts. The link between physical activity and heart health comes mainly from studies of large groups of people. “What this paper had uncovered is the individual variation,” says Kraus.

In other words, you’re going to have to become a study of one. What if exercise doesn’t work for you? “If your HDL drops, maybe exercise isn’t the answer for you,” says Kraus. “For some people, changing their body composition [by losing weight] helps and for others, there are drugs, like niacin, which is very good for raising HDL.”

And who knows -- maybe you’ll be one of the super-responders whose HDL shoots into the stratosphere after a few weeks of daily walks. In any case, the numbers don’t lie: Only 10 percent of people can’t seem to exercise their way to better health. That means the other 90 percent have no excuse.

For more great health & lifestyle content, visit Completely You
Denise Foley   is Completely You’s “News You Can Use” blogger. She is a veteran health writer, the former deputy editor and editor at large of Prevention, and co-author of four books on women’s health and parenting.

Fight Food Addiction

Ever wonder why, when it comes to your favorite foods, one bite always leads to another? Why single-serving packages don’t stop you from eating the equivalent of one entire sleeve of chocolate chip cookies or a whole bag of potato chips?

Come on, you know why. Because it tastes so good.

But science has come up with yet another reason. When you eat because it’s pleasurable and not because you’re hungry, your body activates chemicals that are linked to your brain’s reward system. Yes, that’s right -- just like drugs. Even worse, when your reward system is activated, it overrides the chemical signals that tell your body that you’re full. (Like we need that.)

Italian researchers found this out when they tested eight adults who had already eaten and were full. They fed each of them their own personal favorite foods and then fed them a less palatable food of equal calories. Then, they measured levels of 2-AG, a chemical released by the brain’s reward system, and the appetite-boosting hormone ghrelin. Both were elevated when the study participants were chowing down on their favorite foods, but not when they were eating the other meal. (Read a synopsis of the study here.)

That led scientists to raise the possibility that food can be an addiction in the same way drugs are. In fact, there are ongoing studies looking at whether naltrexone, the medication that diminishes the appetite for certain recreational drugs, may have the same effect on the appetite for food. (Learn more about how your brain chemistry can make you binge here.)

Until those studies are completed, we may be left with 100-year-old advice from humorist Mark Twain, who wrote, “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.”

It’s not pleasant, but there you have it.

For more great health and lifestyle content, check out the rest of Completely You
Denise Foley   is Completely You’s “News You Can Use” blogger. She is a veteran health writer, the former deputy editor and editor at large of Prevention, and co-author of four books on women’s health and parenting.

Stop the Ringing in Your Ears

By Denise Foley for Completely You

I blame the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia may be gone, but the buzzing in my ears that first materialized during a Dead concert in the 1980s lives on. Well, some of the time.

I have tinnitus, which is a ringing, hissing, roaring, clicking, whistling and chirping in the ears that can range from subtle to mind-blowing. It’s estimated that 250 million people worldwide hear a sound no one else hears. That’s because it comes from somewhere in their heads -- not the environment around them.

It’s not a disease, says the American Tinnitus Association, but a signal that something is wrong inside you. No one really knows exactly where. But research does suggest why tinnitus can be so emotionally upsetting: It involves the limbic system -- your brain’s emotional center, which interprets any constant loud noise as something dangerous.

Although the damage to my ears may have started at the Dead concert, my tinnitus was mild until I had a bout of Lyme disease a few years ago. Then, the sound in my left ear became disconcertingly louder, possibly as the result of the huge dose of antibiotics I was taking. (A very long list of drugs can cause tinnitus.) It also became a source of anxiety. This kind of constant buzzing can keep you up, make you avoid quiet rooms (ambient noise masks it), and make you about as able to concentrate as a mom with a colicky infant. It can drive you crazy. Some people commit suicide because of it.

A New Way to Silence the Noise
If you have tinnitus, your mind may not only be telling you that you’re in danger, but also mobilizing its resources -- raising your heart rate and your blood pressure, flooding your body with energizing stress hormones, tensing your muscles to fight or flee. That’s the traditional stress response to, say, coming home early to find a burglar ransacking your bedroom or being in the pedestrian crosswalk when a truck careens around the corner at breakneck speed. When those things happen, that reaction is a good thing: It gives you the oomph to get out -- or get out of the way. Phantom noise in your head? Not so much.

And that’s why a new study from the Netherlands gave me new hope. Scientists at Maastricht University introduced almost 500 tinnitus patients to cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy is based on one fundamental principle: External things, such as people and situations, don’t cause our feelings and behaviors; it’s how we think about those external things that can make us happy or miserable.
With cognitive therapy, you learn to replace old thoughts (“Buzzing noise -- scary!”) with new thoughts (“It’s just a noise”), which takes fear and anxiety out of the equation. If the noise stops bothering you, sometimes -- as I’ve learned -- you just don’t notice it anymore because you no longer pay attention to it. Then your stress response shuts down, and all is well.

The Dutch researchers combined this valuable psychological tool with the other tricks in the tinnitus playbook, including something called tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT), which I used when tinnitus was the soundtrack of my life. TRT uses counseling and an external masking sound that induces habituation, desensitizing you to the noise in your head.

The Dutch researchers went innovative with TRT too, using the actual noise of the tinnitus as the external masking sound to desensitize sufferers. Says researcher Rilana Cima of Maastricht University: “The more people expose themselves instead of avoiding the tinnitus sound, the faster they get used to it.”

They also introduced the tinnitus sufferers to relaxation techniques and some mindfulness skills -- that is, learning to be in the moment, every moment, in a relaxed state, so that you’re no longer anxious about a noisy future.

I suspect, because of my own experience, that this new tinnitus treatment will be highly effective. I finally found a solution when I took a six-week class in mindfulness meditation as part my research for a magazine article I was writing. Meditation, which can be rough for many tinnitus sufferers because the silence makes the sound seem louder, helped me turn off the fear, and I learned to ignore the ringing. When people ask me how I cope with tinnitus, I always tell them what I learned: “When you stop listening, you stop hearing.”

For more great health and lifestyle content, visit Completely You
Denise Foley   is Completely You’s “News You Can Use” blogger. She is a veteran health writer, the former deputy editor and editor at large of Prevention, and co-author of four books on women’s health and parenting.

Misplaced Something? Talk to Yourself to Find It!

By Denise Foley for Completely You

I’m a Baby Boomer. That means that I can pretty much remember the theme song to every ’60s TV show and have no trouble identifying photos of skate keys, wringer washers and that little thing you put in 45s to play them on your turntable that are popping up on Facebook daily. But I lose my keys at least twice a day, forget where I stashed the peanut butter, and can’t find my glasses (even when I’m wearing them on top of my head).

I need help. You probably do too. Very little is more aggravating than not being able to find something you want. Now, new research suggests there might be something that will make it a little easier: Act crazy and talk to yourself out loud.

In a recent study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Pennsylvania found that people who repeated the name of the object they were trying to find located it faster than those who just searched quietly. (Read more about the study here.)

They chose to test that particular technique because “people really do sometimes talk to themselves when searching for something,” says researcher Daniel Swingley, associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Is this just to help them remember what they’re doing? Or might it actually help?”

It helps. Why? Explains Swingley: “It brings more mental resources to bear, focusing them on the object they’re searching for.” In other words, when searching for my glasses, I’ll be more focused on finding my glasses if I say the word “glasses” over and over until I find them. And probably be less distracted by other things while looking for them.

For more great health and lifestyle content, visit me here at Completely You

Denise Foley   is Completely You’s “News You Can Use” blogger. She is a veteran health writer, the former deputy editor and editor at large of Prevention, and co-author of four books on women’s health and parenting.