1. Tell yourself a positive story. Life is a story. The story we tell ourselves and the role we play in that story determines the quality and direction of our life. Successful people are able to overcome adversity by telling themselves a more positive story than the rest. Instead of a drama or a horror movie, they define their life as an inspirational tale. Instead of being the victim, they see themselves as a fighter and over-comer. You may not be able to control the economy, but you can influence the outcome of your story.
2. Model yourself after success. Are there people in your industry succeeding today? Of course there are. Seek out those people in your industry and ask to meet with them. Learn from their advice and model their attitudes and actions. If they can succeed, so can you.
3. Focus on the important stuff. Tune out the negative voices and start making positive choices. What are you doing on a daily basis to grow yourself, your team, and your business? Don’t focus on the negative things other people and the media are saying. Instead, focus on marketing your business, taking care of clients, and building loyal relationships. Every morning ask yourself this question: "What are the three most important things I need to do today that will help me create the success I desire?" Then take action on those items.
4. Replace "have to" with "get to." This simple word swap can change your mind-set and your approach to work and life. It turns a complaining voice to an appreciative voice, and acknowledges that life is a gift—not an obligation. So often we grudgingly say things like "I have to go to this meeting," "I have to meet with this client," or "I have to make a bunch of phone calls." In reality, it’s not about what we have to do. It’s about what we get to do. Research shows that when we practice gratitude, we get a measurable boost in happiness that energizes us and enhances our health. It’s also physiologically impossible to be stressed and thankful at the same time.
5. Refuse to participate in the recession. Professionals who’ve thrived during past recessions continued to go about business as usual regardless of market conditions. They worked hard and focused on taking actions to grow their business. As others are paralyzed by fear, take the opportunity to charge forward.
6. Boost your marketing and advertising. It may seem counterintuitive to spend more money on advertising and marketing right now. But with so many of your competitors cutting back in these areas, this is a great opportunity to build your brand and gain market share. People are still buying and selling, and they will buy from those whom they trust and see in the marketplace.
7. Create a positive vision. Instead of being disappointed about where you are, make the decision to be optimistic about where you are going. Create a positive vision for your future and the future of your team. Vision helps you see the road ahead and it gives you something meaningful and valuable to strive towards.
8. Invite others on your bus. Invite colleagues and customers to board your bus for a positive ride. Send them an e-bus ticket at www.TheEnergyBus.com. Share your vision with team members and ask them to join you in making this vision a reality. Be a positive influence.
9. No more complaining. Abide by the "no complaining" rule. When you realize you’re about to complain, replace your thoughts and words with positive actions. Let your complaints help you identify what you don’t want so that you can focus on what you do want. The key is to turn complaints into solutions.
JON GORDON
http://www.jongordon.com
Energy ADDICT
Monday, August 30, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
BREATH CONTROL
The correct method of breathing is an essential part of the shooter's system of control. Most pistol shooters know less about the proper method of breath control than of any of the other fundamentals. The object of proper breath control is to enable the pistol shooter to hold his breath with a comfortable
feeling long enough to fire one shot slow fire; five shots in twenty seconds timed fire; or five shots in ten seconds rapid fire without loss of the ability to hold still or concentrate on sight alignment.
1. To be Effective, Breath Control Must Be Employed Systematically and Uniformly: The ability to concentrate and maintain rhythm is aided.
a. Promote a steady hold: It is generally known that one must not breathe during aiming. Breathing is accompanied by the rhythmical movement of the chest, abdomen, and the shoulders. This causes the pistol to move about excessively, making it almost impossible to produce an accurate shot. Therefore, one must not simultaneously breathe and try to fire a shot, but must endeavor to hold the breath for a short period of time.
b. The physiological processes involved in breathing: The shooter however, must not view the breathing process solely from the movement of the chest and the gun. He must not forget that the process of breathing, which consists of a combination of processes which occur constantly in the human body, determine in general the condition of the human being. Therefore, proper breathing is of great importance during shooting exercises which last several hours. Incorrect breathing technique has an adverse effect upon shooting, especially if the concentration is disturbed by sensing of the need to breathe.
(1) During the process of breathing, there is an alternating increase and decrease in the volume of the chest, as a result the person inhales and exhales. A person inhales when the dimensions of the chest increase. Once inside the lungs, the air provides oxygen to the blood and in turn it absorbs carbon dioxide and aqueous vapors. Exhalation occurs when all the muscles relax, the diaphragm presses upward, and, under the action of the weight of the chest and the elasticity of the lungs, air is forced out of the body. Exhaling does not require muscular effort; it occurs as the result of the resiliency of the ribs and the muscular tissues and the elasticity of the lungs.
(2) When breathing calmly a person produces an average of 12 - 13 respiratory cycles a minute. Consequently, one respiratory cycle lasts 4 - 5 seconds. If one traces the
respiratory cycle, it is not difficult to note that the strained position of inhalation is replaced very quickly by exhalation. The very next inhalation begins after a respiratory pause of 2 to 3 seconds, during which time the carbon dioxide
accumulates in the lungs. The duration off the respiratory pause is determined by the
ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air remaining in the lungs.
(3) The respiratory pause and the problems of the ventilation of the lungs are of great importance to the shooter. It is obvious that during aiming and applying pressure on the trigger, the breath must be held only after the shooter has exhaled, timing it so that the breath is held at the moment of the natural respiratory pause. During that time the muscles are not strained and are in a relaxed state.
c. A person can prolong by several seconds this respiratory pause, that is, hold his breath comfortably for 15 - 20 seconds, without any special labor and without experiencing unpleasant sensations. This time is more than adequate to produce a shot or shots. Experienced shooters usually take a deep breath before firing and then, exhaling slowly, hold their breath gradually, relax and concentrate their entire attention upon sight alignment and the smooth application of pressure on the trigger.
2. Recommended method
a. Prior to fire commands:
(1) When expelling the air from the lungs before aiming, no effort whatever must be
exerted. The exhaling must be natural and free, as in ordinary breathing. The air
must not be held in the lungs; incomplete exhaling before aiming leads to straining
and to stimulation of the nerve centers regulating the breathing, and the shooters
concentration on aiming is distracted.
(2) In order to make sure that during prolonged firing the interruption of the rhythm of breathing does not have an influence upon the shooter, the breath must not be held for an excessive period when trying to fire a slow fire shot. If the shooter does not produce a shot in 8 - 10 seconds, he must stop aiming and take another breath.
(3) Before holding his breath for the next shot he must empty his lungs well, taking
several deep breaths. The same should be done between shots and strings of shots
throughout the firing. This facilitates the lengthening of the respiratory pause before aiming and provides for regular rest between shots and strings. The oxygen level in the blood is slightly increased. As a result the shooter is relaxed and comfortable during all shooting without excessive and premature fatigue.
b. During the fire commands: Take a deeper than normal breath at the command, "READY
ON THE RIGHT", take another at "READY ON THE LEFT", extend your pistol and take
the final breath and exhale to the point of comfort at "READY ON THE FIRING LINE".
As the shooter gains experience in proper breath control, he will find that he will hold his breath, or extend his normal respiratory pause, without being too conscious of the action and allow intense concentration on sight alignment and trigger pressure.
c. During actual firing: The shooter should not be conscious of the need to breathe. If during practice a shooter finds that he cannot hold his breath the twenty seconds necessary to fIre a timed fire string, he should make a practice of firing his timed fire strings in less than twenty seconds. However, if during a timed or rapid fire string, the shooter feels compelled to breathe, he should take a short breath quickly and continue to fire. This causes a lapse of concentration on sight alignment and should not be the normal
technique used.
feeling long enough to fire one shot slow fire; five shots in twenty seconds timed fire; or five shots in ten seconds rapid fire without loss of the ability to hold still or concentrate on sight alignment.
1. To be Effective, Breath Control Must Be Employed Systematically and Uniformly: The ability to concentrate and maintain rhythm is aided.
a. Promote a steady hold: It is generally known that one must not breathe during aiming. Breathing is accompanied by the rhythmical movement of the chest, abdomen, and the shoulders. This causes the pistol to move about excessively, making it almost impossible to produce an accurate shot. Therefore, one must not simultaneously breathe and try to fire a shot, but must endeavor to hold the breath for a short period of time.
b. The physiological processes involved in breathing: The shooter however, must not view the breathing process solely from the movement of the chest and the gun. He must not forget that the process of breathing, which consists of a combination of processes which occur constantly in the human body, determine in general the condition of the human being. Therefore, proper breathing is of great importance during shooting exercises which last several hours. Incorrect breathing technique has an adverse effect upon shooting, especially if the concentration is disturbed by sensing of the need to breathe.
(1) During the process of breathing, there is an alternating increase and decrease in the volume of the chest, as a result the person inhales and exhales. A person inhales when the dimensions of the chest increase. Once inside the lungs, the air provides oxygen to the blood and in turn it absorbs carbon dioxide and aqueous vapors. Exhalation occurs when all the muscles relax, the diaphragm presses upward, and, under the action of the weight of the chest and the elasticity of the lungs, air is forced out of the body. Exhaling does not require muscular effort; it occurs as the result of the resiliency of the ribs and the muscular tissues and the elasticity of the lungs.
(2) When breathing calmly a person produces an average of 12 - 13 respiratory cycles a minute. Consequently, one respiratory cycle lasts 4 - 5 seconds. If one traces the
respiratory cycle, it is not difficult to note that the strained position of inhalation is replaced very quickly by exhalation. The very next inhalation begins after a respiratory pause of 2 to 3 seconds, during which time the carbon dioxide
accumulates in the lungs. The duration off the respiratory pause is determined by the
ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air remaining in the lungs.
(3) The respiratory pause and the problems of the ventilation of the lungs are of great importance to the shooter. It is obvious that during aiming and applying pressure on the trigger, the breath must be held only after the shooter has exhaled, timing it so that the breath is held at the moment of the natural respiratory pause. During that time the muscles are not strained and are in a relaxed state.
c. A person can prolong by several seconds this respiratory pause, that is, hold his breath comfortably for 15 - 20 seconds, without any special labor and without experiencing unpleasant sensations. This time is more than adequate to produce a shot or shots. Experienced shooters usually take a deep breath before firing and then, exhaling slowly, hold their breath gradually, relax and concentrate their entire attention upon sight alignment and the smooth application of pressure on the trigger.
2. Recommended method
a. Prior to fire commands:
(1) When expelling the air from the lungs before aiming, no effort whatever must be
exerted. The exhaling must be natural and free, as in ordinary breathing. The air
must not be held in the lungs; incomplete exhaling before aiming leads to straining
and to stimulation of the nerve centers regulating the breathing, and the shooters
concentration on aiming is distracted.
(2) In order to make sure that during prolonged firing the interruption of the rhythm of breathing does not have an influence upon the shooter, the breath must not be held for an excessive period when trying to fire a slow fire shot. If the shooter does not produce a shot in 8 - 10 seconds, he must stop aiming and take another breath.
(3) Before holding his breath for the next shot he must empty his lungs well, taking
several deep breaths. The same should be done between shots and strings of shots
throughout the firing. This facilitates the lengthening of the respiratory pause before aiming and provides for regular rest between shots and strings. The oxygen level in the blood is slightly increased. As a result the shooter is relaxed and comfortable during all shooting without excessive and premature fatigue.
b. During the fire commands: Take a deeper than normal breath at the command, "READY
ON THE RIGHT", take another at "READY ON THE LEFT", extend your pistol and take
the final breath and exhale to the point of comfort at "READY ON THE FIRING LINE".
As the shooter gains experience in proper breath control, he will find that he will hold his breath, or extend his normal respiratory pause, without being too conscious of the action and allow intense concentration on sight alignment and trigger pressure.
c. During actual firing: The shooter should not be conscious of the need to breathe. If during practice a shooter finds that he cannot hold his breath the twenty seconds necessary to fIre a timed fire string, he should make a practice of firing his timed fire strings in less than twenty seconds. However, if during a timed or rapid fire string, the shooter feels compelled to breathe, he should take a short breath quickly and continue to fire. This causes a lapse of concentration on sight alignment and should not be the normal
technique used.
Monday, July 19, 2010
US fitness guru urges yoga for fat soldiers
July 17, 2010 by Virginie Montet
Asked by the US military for tips to help combat the growing problem of obesity in the ranks, a popular television fitness guru came up with an unusual answer: mind-soothing and body-bending yoga.
"I know inclusion of yoga in military training sounds a tad alien," Tony Horton, 52, acknowledged as he presented his techniques to a group of 200 people, many clad in gymwear, at the National Press Club in Washington.
"The days of push ups, sit ups and long runs in the military are over," said Horton, whose functional fitness concept combines equipment-free, body weight-based exercises with push-ups, sit-ups and yoga postures.
"Yoga magnifies the positive effects of strength and cardiovascular exercises," he said. "It's lubricating all the major joints and reduces the potential for injury."
The fitness trainer best known for his trendy "P90X" workout regime has trained celebrities like Usher, Bruce Springsteen and Sean Connery, as well as soldiers at military bases, including Andrews Air Force Base and Fort Bragg.
As Horton demonstrated, men and women of all sizes struck yoga poses, arms and feet outstretched.
"Obesity is a national security issue," Horton said, repeating a warning issued earlier this year by two senior retired generals, John Shalikashvili and Hugh Shelton, both former chairs of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"People are too fat to fight," the fitness trainer added.
Pentagon studies say the military's obesity rate has nearly doubled since 2003. According to Horton, the military saw its obesity rate nearly triple from 1995 to 2008 alone, while the overall number of obese troops has grown from 1.6 percent in 1998 to 4.4 percent in 2008.
In the United States as a whole, more than two thirds of states now have an adult obesity rate above 25 percent, Horton said. In contrast, not a single state had a rate above 20 percent in 1991.
The US military also faces a problem with troops already serving who are overweight, Horton said.
"The failure to meet fitness standards has meant each year thousands have had to deal with canceled promotions, loss of education opportunities," he added.
"The statistics are profoundly disturbing."
(c) 2010 AFP
Asked by the US military for tips to help combat the growing problem of obesity in the ranks, a popular television fitness guru came up with an unusual answer: mind-soothing and body-bending yoga.
"I know inclusion of yoga in military training sounds a tad alien," Tony Horton, 52, acknowledged as he presented his techniques to a group of 200 people, many clad in gymwear, at the National Press Club in Washington.
"The days of push ups, sit ups and long runs in the military are over," said Horton, whose functional fitness concept combines equipment-free, body weight-based exercises with push-ups, sit-ups and yoga postures.
"Yoga magnifies the positive effects of strength and cardiovascular exercises," he said. "It's lubricating all the major joints and reduces the potential for injury."
The fitness trainer best known for his trendy "P90X" workout regime has trained celebrities like Usher, Bruce Springsteen and Sean Connery, as well as soldiers at military bases, including Andrews Air Force Base and Fort Bragg.
As Horton demonstrated, men and women of all sizes struck yoga poses, arms and feet outstretched.
"Obesity is a national security issue," Horton said, repeating a warning issued earlier this year by two senior retired generals, John Shalikashvili and Hugh Shelton, both former chairs of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"People are too fat to fight," the fitness trainer added.
Pentagon studies say the military's obesity rate has nearly doubled since 2003. According to Horton, the military saw its obesity rate nearly triple from 1995 to 2008 alone, while the overall number of obese troops has grown from 1.6 percent in 1998 to 4.4 percent in 2008.
In the United States as a whole, more than two thirds of states now have an adult obesity rate above 25 percent, Horton said. In contrast, not a single state had a rate above 20 percent in 1991.
The US military also faces a problem with troops already serving who are overweight, Horton said.
"The failure to meet fitness standards has meant each year thousands have had to deal with canceled promotions, loss of education opportunities," he added.
"The statistics are profoundly disturbing."
(c) 2010 AFP
TO FAT TO FIGHT
A group of retired military officials recently expressed concern that school lunches are a threat to national security. According to them, the food being fed to children at public schools is making them "too fat to fight", leaving a potentially considerable gap in military recruitment.
"Mission: Readiness", the non-profit group of over 130 retired military leaders that is calling for healthier federal food for children, is expressing support for new legislation that would outlaw junk food from schools so that more children will qualify to enroll in the military.
The group believes that "national security" is America's top priority, so it is doing everything it can to increase military enrollment, even if that means supporting and passing federal food restriction legislation.
According to the group's report, roughly 75 percent of all young Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 do not qualify for military service because they do not finish high school, have criminal records, or they are not physically fit enough to serve.
According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics, the number of states with 40 percent or more of the young adult population being overweight or obese has jumped from one to 39 in just ten years. Currently in three states, more than half of the young adult population is overweight.
Mission: Readiness is calling on Congress to amend the Child Nutrition Act to include three new policies:
- Permit the USDA to adopt updated nutrition standards that would eliminate high-calorie, low-nutrition junk foods from public schools.
- Provide additional funding to improve the quality of food at public schools and increase the number of children who have access to it.
- Administer school-based programs to teach parents how to teach their children to adopt better eating and lifestyle habits.
Sadly, the motivation for such legislation does not seem to be for the actual benefit of the children themselves, but rather to fuel the endeavors of the military-industrial complex.
Sources for this story include:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellne...
http://cdn.missionreadiness.org/MR_...
"Mission: Readiness", the non-profit group of over 130 retired military leaders that is calling for healthier federal food for children, is expressing support for new legislation that would outlaw junk food from schools so that more children will qualify to enroll in the military.
The group believes that "national security" is America's top priority, so it is doing everything it can to increase military enrollment, even if that means supporting and passing federal food restriction legislation.
According to the group's report, roughly 75 percent of all young Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 do not qualify for military service because they do not finish high school, have criminal records, or they are not physically fit enough to serve.
According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics, the number of states with 40 percent or more of the young adult population being overweight or obese has jumped from one to 39 in just ten years. Currently in three states, more than half of the young adult population is overweight.
Mission: Readiness is calling on Congress to amend the Child Nutrition Act to include three new policies:
- Permit the USDA to adopt updated nutrition standards that would eliminate high-calorie, low-nutrition junk foods from public schools.
- Provide additional funding to improve the quality of food at public schools and increase the number of children who have access to it.
- Administer school-based programs to teach parents how to teach their children to adopt better eating and lifestyle habits.
Sadly, the motivation for such legislation does not seem to be for the actual benefit of the children themselves, but rather to fuel the endeavors of the military-industrial complex.
Sources for this story include:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellne...
http://cdn.missionreadiness.org/MR_...
"The Battle Over Battle Fatigue" Soldiers can now claim trauma from events they didn't actually experience. Is the diagnosilosing meaning?
Military history is rich with tales of warriors who return from battle with the horrors of war still raging in their heads. One of the earliest known observations was made by the Greek historian Herodotus, who described an Athenian warrior struck blind "without blow of sword or dart" when a soldier standing next to him was killed. The classic term—"shell shock"—dates to World War I; "battle fatigue," "combat exhaustion" and "war stress" were used in Word War II.
Modern psychiatry calls these invisible wounds post-traumatic stress disorder. And along with this diagnosis, which became widely known in the wake of the Vietnam War, has come a new sensitivity to the causes and consequences of being afflicted with it.
Veterans with unrelenting PTSD can receive disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. As retired Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, secretary of Veterans Affairs, said last week, the mental injuries of war "can be as debilitating as any physical battlefield trauma." The occasion for his remark was a new VA rule allowing veterans to receive disability benefits for PTSD if, as non-combatants, they had good reason to fear hostile activity, such as firefights or explosions. In other words, veterans can now file a benefits claim for being traumatized by events they did not actually experience.
The very notion that one can sustain an enduring mental disorder based on anxious anticipation of a traumatic event that never materializes is a radical departure from the clinical—and common-sense—understanding that disabling stress disorders are caused by traumatic events that actually do happen to people. This is not the first time that controversy has swirled around the diagnosis of PTSD.
In brief, the symptoms of PTSD fall into three categories: re-experiencing (e.g., relentless nightmares; unbidden waking images; flashbacks); hyper-arousal (e.g., enhanced startle, anxiety, sleeplessness); and phobias (e.g., fear of driving after having been in a crash). Symptoms must last at least one month and impair the normal functioning to some degree. Overwhelming calamity, not only combat exposure, can lead to PTSD, including natural disasters, rape, accidents and assault.
Not everyone who confronts horrific circumstances develops PTSD. Among the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, 34% developed PTSD, according to a study by psychiatric epidemiologist Carol North. After a car accident or natural disaster, fewer than 10% of victims are affected, while among rape victims, well over half are affected. The reassuring news is that, as with grief and other emotional reactions to painful events, most sufferers get better with time, though periodic nightmares and easy startling may linger for additional months or even years.
Large-scale data on veterans are harder to come by. According to the major study of Vietnam veterans, the 1988 National Vietnam Veterans' Readjustment Study, 50% of those whose stress reactions were diagnosed as PTSD recovered fully over time. A re-analysis of the data, published in Science in 2006, found that 18.7% of Vietnam veterans suffered PTSD at some point after returning from war, but half had recovered by the time the study was conducted in the mid-1980s.
A 2010 article in the Journal of Traumatic Stress summarized over two dozen studies and found that among servicemen and women previously deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, between 5% and 20% have been diagnosed with PTSD.
The story of PTSD starts with the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, a band of self-described antiwar psychiatrists—led by Chaim Shatan and Robert Jay Lifton, who was well known for his work on the psychological damage wrought by Hiroshima—formulated a new diagnostic concept to describe the psychological wounds that the veterans sustained in the war. They called it "Post-Vietnam Syndrome," a disorder marked by "growing apathy, cynicism, alienation, depression, mistrust, and expectation of betrayal as well as an inability to concentrate, insomnia, nightmares, restlessness, uprootedness, and impatience with almost any job or course of study." Not uncommonly, Messrs. Shatan and Lifton said, the symptoms did not emerge until months or years after the veterans returned home.
This vision inspired portrayals of the Vietnam veteran as the kind of "walking time bomb" as immortalized in films such as "Taxi Driver" and "Rambo." In the summer of 1972, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Post-Vietnam Syndrome. It reported that 50% of all Vietnam veterans—not just combat veterans—needed professional help to readjust, and contained phrases such as "psychiatric casualty," "emotionally disturbed" and "men with damaged brains." By contrast, veterans of World War II were heralded as heroes. They fought in a popular war, a vital distinction in understanding how veterans and the public give meaning to their wartime hardships and sacrifice.
Psychological casualties are as old as war itself, but historians and sociologists note that the high-profile involvement of civilian psychiatrists in the wake of the Vietnam War set those returning soldiers apart. "The suggestion or outright assertion was that Vietnam veterans have been unique in American history for their psychiatric problems," writes the historian Eric T. Dean Jr. in "Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War." As the image of the psychologically injured veteran took root in the national conscience, the psychiatric profession debated the wisdom of giving him his own diagnosis.
During the Civil War, some soldiers were said to suffer "irritable heart" or "Da Costa's Syndrome"—a condition marked by shortness of breath, chest discomfort and pounding palpitations that doctors could not attribute to a medical cause. In World War I, the condition became known as "shell shock" and was characterized as a mental problem. The inability to cope was believed to reflect personal weakness—an underlying genetic or psychological vulnerability; combat itself, no matter how intense, was deemed little more than a precipitating factor. Otherwise well-adjusted individuals were believed to be at small risk of suffering more than a transient stress reaction once they were removed from the front.
In 1917, the British neuroanatomist Grafton Elliot Smith and the psychologist Tom Pear challenged this view, attributing the cause more to the experiences and less on those who suffered them. "Psychoneurosis may be produced in almost anyone if only his environment be made 'difficult' enough for him," they wrote in their book "Shell Shock and Its Lessons." This triggered a feisty debate within British military psychiatry, and eventually the two sides came to agree that both the soldier's predisposition to stress and his exposure to hostilities contributed to breakdown. By World War II, then, military psychiatrists believed that even the bravest and fittest soldier could endure only so much. "Every man has his breaking point," as the saying went.
In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association adopted post-traumatic stress disorder (rather than the narrower Post-Vietnam Syndrome) as an official diagnosis in the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
A patient could be diagnosed with PTSD if he experienced a trauma or "stressor" that, as DSM described it, would "evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone." Rape, combat, torture and fires were those deemed to fall, as the DSM III required, "generally outside the range of usual human experience." Thus, while the stress was unusual, the development of PTSD in its wake was not.
No longer were prolonged traumatic reactions viewed as a reflection of constitutional vulnerability. They became instead a natural process of adaptation to extreme stress. The influence of individual differences shaping response to crisis gave way to the profound impact of the trauma, with its leveling effect on all human response.
If the pendulum swung too far, obliterating the role of an individual's own characteristics in the development of the condition, it served a political purpose. As British psychiatrist Derek Summerfield put it, the newly minted diagnosis of PTSD "was meant to shift the focus of attention from the details of a soldier's background and psyche to the fundamentally traumatic nature of war."
Messrs. Shatan and Lifton clearly saw PTSD as a normal response. "The placement of post-traumatic stress disorder in [the DSM] allows us to see the policies of diagnosis and disease in an especially clear light," writes combat veteran and sociologist Wilbur Scott in his detailed 1993 account "The Politics of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans Since the War." PTSD is in DSM, Mr. Scott writes, "because a core of psychiatrists and Vietnam veterans worked conscientiously and deliberately for years to put it there…at issue was the question of what constitutes a normal reaction or experience of soldiers to combat." Thus, by the time PTSD was incorporated into the official psychiatric lexicon, it bore a hybrid legacy—part political artifact of the antiwar movement, part legitimate diagnosis.
While the major symptoms of PTSD are fairly straightforward—re-experiencing, anxiety and avoidance—what counted as a traumatic experience turned out to be a moving target in subsequent editions of the DSM.
In 1987, the DSM III was revised to expand the definition of a traumatic experience. The concept of stressor now included a secondhand experience. In the fourth edition in 1994, the range of "traumatic" events was expanded to include hearing about the unexpected death of a loved one or receiving a fatal diagnosis such as terminal cancer. No longer did one need to experience a life-threatening situation directly or be a close witness to a ghastly accident or atrocity. Experiencing "intense fear, helplessness, or horror" after watching the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on television, for example, could qualify an individual for PTSD.
There is pitched debate among trauma experts as to whether a stressor should be defined as whatever traumatizes a person. True, a person might feel "traumatized" by, say, a minor car accident—but to say that a fender-bender counts as trauma alongside such horrors as concentration camps, rape or the Bataan Death March is to dilute the concept. "A great deal rides on how we define the concept of traumatic stressor, says Harvard psychologist Richard J. McNally, author of "Remembering Trauma." In the civilian realm, Mr. McNally says, "the more we broaden the category of traumatic stressors, the less credibly we can assign causal significance to a given stressor itself and the more weight we must place on personal vulnerability."
Americans are deeply moved by the men and women who fight our wars. We have an incalculable moral debt, as Abraham Lincoln said, "to care for him who shall have borne the battle." Yet rather than broaden the definition of PTSD, it would do our veterans better to ensure they first receive quality treatment and rehabilitation before applying for disability status. Otherwise, how can we assess their prospects for meaningful recovery no matter their diagnosis?
The new regulations announced by Mr. Shinseki take the definition of PTSD further than any of his predecessors surely imagined.
Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
Modern psychiatry calls these invisible wounds post-traumatic stress disorder. And along with this diagnosis, which became widely known in the wake of the Vietnam War, has come a new sensitivity to the causes and consequences of being afflicted with it.
Veterans with unrelenting PTSD can receive disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. As retired Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, secretary of Veterans Affairs, said last week, the mental injuries of war "can be as debilitating as any physical battlefield trauma." The occasion for his remark was a new VA rule allowing veterans to receive disability benefits for PTSD if, as non-combatants, they had good reason to fear hostile activity, such as firefights or explosions. In other words, veterans can now file a benefits claim for being traumatized by events they did not actually experience.
The very notion that one can sustain an enduring mental disorder based on anxious anticipation of a traumatic event that never materializes is a radical departure from the clinical—and common-sense—understanding that disabling stress disorders are caused by traumatic events that actually do happen to people. This is not the first time that controversy has swirled around the diagnosis of PTSD.
In brief, the symptoms of PTSD fall into three categories: re-experiencing (e.g., relentless nightmares; unbidden waking images; flashbacks); hyper-arousal (e.g., enhanced startle, anxiety, sleeplessness); and phobias (e.g., fear of driving after having been in a crash). Symptoms must last at least one month and impair the normal functioning to some degree. Overwhelming calamity, not only combat exposure, can lead to PTSD, including natural disasters, rape, accidents and assault.
Not everyone who confronts horrific circumstances develops PTSD. Among the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, 34% developed PTSD, according to a study by psychiatric epidemiologist Carol North. After a car accident or natural disaster, fewer than 10% of victims are affected, while among rape victims, well over half are affected. The reassuring news is that, as with grief and other emotional reactions to painful events, most sufferers get better with time, though periodic nightmares and easy startling may linger for additional months or even years.
Large-scale data on veterans are harder to come by. According to the major study of Vietnam veterans, the 1988 National Vietnam Veterans' Readjustment Study, 50% of those whose stress reactions were diagnosed as PTSD recovered fully over time. A re-analysis of the data, published in Science in 2006, found that 18.7% of Vietnam veterans suffered PTSD at some point after returning from war, but half had recovered by the time the study was conducted in the mid-1980s.
A 2010 article in the Journal of Traumatic Stress summarized over two dozen studies and found that among servicemen and women previously deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, between 5% and 20% have been diagnosed with PTSD.
The story of PTSD starts with the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, a band of self-described antiwar psychiatrists—led by Chaim Shatan and Robert Jay Lifton, who was well known for his work on the psychological damage wrought by Hiroshima—formulated a new diagnostic concept to describe the psychological wounds that the veterans sustained in the war. They called it "Post-Vietnam Syndrome," a disorder marked by "growing apathy, cynicism, alienation, depression, mistrust, and expectation of betrayal as well as an inability to concentrate, insomnia, nightmares, restlessness, uprootedness, and impatience with almost any job or course of study." Not uncommonly, Messrs. Shatan and Lifton said, the symptoms did not emerge until months or years after the veterans returned home.
This vision inspired portrayals of the Vietnam veteran as the kind of "walking time bomb" as immortalized in films such as "Taxi Driver" and "Rambo." In the summer of 1972, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Post-Vietnam Syndrome. It reported that 50% of all Vietnam veterans—not just combat veterans—needed professional help to readjust, and contained phrases such as "psychiatric casualty," "emotionally disturbed" and "men with damaged brains." By contrast, veterans of World War II were heralded as heroes. They fought in a popular war, a vital distinction in understanding how veterans and the public give meaning to their wartime hardships and sacrifice.
Psychological casualties are as old as war itself, but historians and sociologists note that the high-profile involvement of civilian psychiatrists in the wake of the Vietnam War set those returning soldiers apart. "The suggestion or outright assertion was that Vietnam veterans have been unique in American history for their psychiatric problems," writes the historian Eric T. Dean Jr. in "Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War." As the image of the psychologically injured veteran took root in the national conscience, the psychiatric profession debated the wisdom of giving him his own diagnosis.
During the Civil War, some soldiers were said to suffer "irritable heart" or "Da Costa's Syndrome"—a condition marked by shortness of breath, chest discomfort and pounding palpitations that doctors could not attribute to a medical cause. In World War I, the condition became known as "shell shock" and was characterized as a mental problem. The inability to cope was believed to reflect personal weakness—an underlying genetic or psychological vulnerability; combat itself, no matter how intense, was deemed little more than a precipitating factor. Otherwise well-adjusted individuals were believed to be at small risk of suffering more than a transient stress reaction once they were removed from the front.
In 1917, the British neuroanatomist Grafton Elliot Smith and the psychologist Tom Pear challenged this view, attributing the cause more to the experiences and less on those who suffered them. "Psychoneurosis may be produced in almost anyone if only his environment be made 'difficult' enough for him," they wrote in their book "Shell Shock and Its Lessons." This triggered a feisty debate within British military psychiatry, and eventually the two sides came to agree that both the soldier's predisposition to stress and his exposure to hostilities contributed to breakdown. By World War II, then, military psychiatrists believed that even the bravest and fittest soldier could endure only so much. "Every man has his breaking point," as the saying went.
In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association adopted post-traumatic stress disorder (rather than the narrower Post-Vietnam Syndrome) as an official diagnosis in the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
A patient could be diagnosed with PTSD if he experienced a trauma or "stressor" that, as DSM described it, would "evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone." Rape, combat, torture and fires were those deemed to fall, as the DSM III required, "generally outside the range of usual human experience." Thus, while the stress was unusual, the development of PTSD in its wake was not.
No longer were prolonged traumatic reactions viewed as a reflection of constitutional vulnerability. They became instead a natural process of adaptation to extreme stress. The influence of individual differences shaping response to crisis gave way to the profound impact of the trauma, with its leveling effect on all human response.
If the pendulum swung too far, obliterating the role of an individual's own characteristics in the development of the condition, it served a political purpose. As British psychiatrist Derek Summerfield put it, the newly minted diagnosis of PTSD "was meant to shift the focus of attention from the details of a soldier's background and psyche to the fundamentally traumatic nature of war."
Messrs. Shatan and Lifton clearly saw PTSD as a normal response. "The placement of post-traumatic stress disorder in [the DSM] allows us to see the policies of diagnosis and disease in an especially clear light," writes combat veteran and sociologist Wilbur Scott in his detailed 1993 account "The Politics of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans Since the War." PTSD is in DSM, Mr. Scott writes, "because a core of psychiatrists and Vietnam veterans worked conscientiously and deliberately for years to put it there…at issue was the question of what constitutes a normal reaction or experience of soldiers to combat." Thus, by the time PTSD was incorporated into the official psychiatric lexicon, it bore a hybrid legacy—part political artifact of the antiwar movement, part legitimate diagnosis.
While the major symptoms of PTSD are fairly straightforward—re-experiencing, anxiety and avoidance—what counted as a traumatic experience turned out to be a moving target in subsequent editions of the DSM.
In 1987, the DSM III was revised to expand the definition of a traumatic experience. The concept of stressor now included a secondhand experience. In the fourth edition in 1994, the range of "traumatic" events was expanded to include hearing about the unexpected death of a loved one or receiving a fatal diagnosis such as terminal cancer. No longer did one need to experience a life-threatening situation directly or be a close witness to a ghastly accident or atrocity. Experiencing "intense fear, helplessness, or horror" after watching the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on television, for example, could qualify an individual for PTSD.
There is pitched debate among trauma experts as to whether a stressor should be defined as whatever traumatizes a person. True, a person might feel "traumatized" by, say, a minor car accident—but to say that a fender-bender counts as trauma alongside such horrors as concentration camps, rape or the Bataan Death March is to dilute the concept. "A great deal rides on how we define the concept of traumatic stressor, says Harvard psychologist Richard J. McNally, author of "Remembering Trauma." In the civilian realm, Mr. McNally says, "the more we broaden the category of traumatic stressors, the less credibly we can assign causal significance to a given stressor itself and the more weight we must place on personal vulnerability."
Americans are deeply moved by the men and women who fight our wars. We have an incalculable moral debt, as Abraham Lincoln said, "to care for him who shall have borne the battle." Yet rather than broaden the definition of PTSD, it would do our veterans better to ensure they first receive quality treatment and rehabilitation before applying for disability status. Otherwise, how can we assess their prospects for meaningful recovery no matter their diagnosis?
The new regulations announced by Mr. Shinseki take the definition of PTSD further than any of his predecessors surely imagined.
Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
Thursday, July 8, 2010
"Marines are warriors.
Comprised of smart, highly adaptable men and women, the Marine Corps serves as the aggressive tip of the U.S. military spear. Ours is a smaller, more dynamic force than any other in the American arsenal, and the only forward-deployed force designed for expeditionary operations by air, land, or sea. It is our size and expertise that allow us to move faster. Working to overcome disadvantage and turn conflict into victory, we accomplish great things, and we do so together. In the Marine Corps, there is a motto that describes our commitment to each other, our organization, and our country. It is Semper Fidelis or 'Semper Fi.' Translated from Latin, it means 'Always Faithful.
'Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem.'- President Ronald Reagan, 1985"
Comprised of smart, highly adaptable men and women, the Marine Corps serves as the aggressive tip of the U.S. military spear. Ours is a smaller, more dynamic force than any other in the American arsenal, and the only forward-deployed force designed for expeditionary operations by air, land, or sea. It is our size and expertise that allow us to move faster. Working to overcome disadvantage and turn conflict into victory, we accomplish great things, and we do so together. In the Marine Corps, there is a motto that describes our commitment to each other, our organization, and our country. It is Semper Fidelis or 'Semper Fi.' Translated from Latin, it means 'Always Faithful.
'Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem.'- President Ronald Reagan, 1985"
Sunday, July 4, 2010
BREATH CONTROL for the WARRIOR ATHLETE
4 second breathing is recommended by many stress physicians, and this deliberate breathing is practiced by many athletes. It assists in controlling your parasympathetic nervous system. When a stressful moment occurs, when you feel the urge to fight or flee, slow down for a moment. Now consciously inhale, one gentle and deliberate intake through the nose-to the full count of four seconds. The belly expands first, the rib cage second, the chest and back fill third and fourth the collar bones rise. The slow exhale is the hardest part of the process, requiring the most concentration. At the minimum repeat this breathing pattern holding your body still at least 5 times. The US Olympic Biathlon Team uses this technique to gear down from high speed to steady concentration. Their event requires them to ski at top speed then halt and aim and fire their weapon accurately. They use four second breathing to slow and steady their heart rate and their trigger finger. It is also scientifically proven to control stress during periods of physical and mental exertion such as combat. It will allow you to restore yourself moment to moment and steady your weapon.
http://www.warriorathlete.org/
http://www.warriorathlete.org/
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