Mindfulness can help beat addiction…and perhaps bipolar disorder too!

I’m sure we've all noticed mindfulness, meditation and yoga becoming trendier and trendier. It feels like celebrities have been lauding these “eastern” practices as the new cure-alls for health and happiness since I was in high school, yet here I stand, a college senior, with the Huffington Post telling me “Why 2014 Will Be the Year of Mindful Living.” But lately it seems the endorsements are getting more and more legit.

Earlier this semester we heard from Tom Lyons about how mindfulness and mediation are being used to help with drug and alcohol addiction and relapse. Mindfulness is hard to define broadly, with Lyons calling it “a mental state that varies from moment to moment in an individual.” Basically, it’s living in the moment. For our purposes, mindfulness can be more specifically broken down to dispositional mindfulness, which occurs when mindfulness comes more naturally to an individual and helps them function more adaptively. This adaptive functioning can be characterized by lower levels of anxiety and depression, or simply by taking better care of oneself. In the case of drug and alcohol abuse, levels of mindfulness are inversely related to an individual’s level of dependence, that is to say, the more addicted you are the less mindfully you are living your life.  Thus, it follows that mindfulness therapy would be a good idea in the treatment of addictions. With mindfulness treatment targeting change in the cortex, among other brain structures, it may help addicts improve control as well as objective awareness. If maintained, these qualities of mindfulness may also help recovering addicts avoid relapse. Although it is not a substitute for traditional treatment, and still lacks evidence for effectiveness, it appears to be emerging as a viable option for drug addiction.

A new mindfulness trial has also recently been announced at the University Of Cincinnati College Of Medicine to test the effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on children and adolescents with mood disorders, specifically those with at least one bipolar parent. The hope for the treatment, that fuses meditation techniques with cognitive behavioral therapy, is that it will teach “children to pay attention to anxiety-related thoughts, emotions and physical sensations with openness and non-judgment, helping them to consciously choose the most appropriate behaviors for the situation.” The study is funded by a grant from the Depression and Bipolar Disorder Alternative Treatment Foundation, in the face of findings that the usage of antidepressants by youth can often worsen or accelerate the mania and hypomania that are characteristic of bipolar mood disorders. If researchers at UC succeed in finding a non-pharmaceutical approach, and increasing control and agency in these youth, as hoped, it could be another step on mindfulness’s journey from trend to therapy.

Even if it takes a while for mindfulness to move from the celebrity gossip mill onto the pages of scientific journals, these new findings are certainly telling us something. Maybe mindfulness isn’t just among the trendy, pseudo-scientific fodder usually peddled by Huffington Post. It seems to have the power to positively affect drug and alcohol addicts and the anxiety and mood disordered among others, probably even your average stressed out college student. Move aside celebs, we’re here to make your mindfulness and meditation a little less (or more?) cool.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-trial-mindfulness-based-cognitive-therapy-effect.html

Girls Toys, Boy Toys: Gendered Preference for Childhood Playthings

In her book “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” Lise Eliot discusses the differences in behavior and aptitude between boys and girls, and how these differences have been explained, both correctly and incorrectly, by neuroscience. In a section entitled “Toddlers and Their Toys” Eliot brings up “boy toys,” “girl toys,” and the early gender bias in choosing playthings, which she cites as one of the largest and most obvious early psychological differences. By the age of 12 months there is said to be a significant difference in toy choices between boys and girls. However, the effect weakens with age, especially for girls, and it is doubtful how important these choices are to development over time despite the early strength of the bias.

A commonly studied toy dichotomy is the difference in preference for either dolls or toy trucks. Most studies show a similar pattern: at six-months children tend to favor the two toys at least equally, with the dolls usually winning out, especially for girls. By the age of 12 months, girls favor dolls and boys favor trucks. By the age of 5 boys spend drastically favor trucks, but girls once again divide their attention almost equally between the gendered toys. Many attribute this tendency to our society’s more rigid demands for men to fit into traditional gender roles and the growing acceptability for women to take on more traditionally masculine roles. In short, they say that we give girls more freedom to choose, to split their attention equally.  In any case, this view suggests that toy choices are not innate, nor are they predictive of a child’s disposition and choices later in life.

Others suggest that toy choice is indeed innate. Evidence for this viewpoint comes in the form of monkey research. In studies using vervet and rhesus monkeys it was shown that female monkeys spent more time playing with rag dolls and red cooking pots, males spend more time with balls and toy cars, and that both sexes spent equal time with gender neutral toys such as a stuffed dog or a book. Because monkeys are not human, and thus have not been socially conditioned to recognize toys, much less if a certain toy is for boys or girls, the results suggest that toy preferences may have an innate factor. According to this school of thought girls are innately drawn to babies (the red pot preferred by female vervets was the same color as a baby vervet’s face) and boys are drawn to action and motion, such as that of a ball or a car. After discussing both possibilities, Eliot proceeds with the understanding that toy preference across genders is probably a result of both innate and social factors, a wise and highly probable conclusion.

Given these findings, one might ask “How should we go about gendering and marketing toys?” A New York Times article by Peggy Orenstein does just that. In “Should the World of Toys be Gender-Free?” Orenstein discusses the differences in gendered toy choices and recent moves by toymakers and sellers in both more and less-gendered directions. On one side we have F.A.O. Schwartz, a London based department store that rearranged its entire toy sales floor to be gender neutral. It donned red and white décor, instead of the traditional blue and pink, and arranged toys by interest instead of gender categories. On the other end of the spectrum in Lego, who unveiled a new collection of Lego products aimed at girls, featuring pastel colored blocks and more girlish figurines. The article explores both sides of the issue, citing some of the same research used by Eliot. Both sides argue for gender-fairness which they see manifesting itself in different ways. To some it is brought about by reaping the benefits that come with a variety of gender-neutral play styles, to others it means access to gendered toys that a male or female child is more disposed to desire.

This leaves us asking, which way is the right way? I think the better question is “Is there really a right way at all?” The fact remains that kids will choose the toys that they choose. Most girls will choose dolls and most boys will choose trucks, others will go against the grain. While childhood is a very important period of development, toy choice has not been shown to be highly predictive of future behavior or performance. As long as a child is developing healthily and happily, gendered toy choices are very interesting but do not appear to be highly influential. I would sooner devote more research to WHY gender preferences exist than whether they SHOULD exist. 

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/does-stripping-gender-from-toys-really-make-sense.html?action=click&module=Search&region=searchResults%230&version=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DSectionFront%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3Dscience%26t%3Dqry187%23%2Fgender+differences