November 30, 2017

The holidays are supposed to be a happy time. But studies show that a lot of people experience acute depression during this season. Here are 15 ways to avoid being one of those statistics.

1. Choose Joy

Happiness is a choice. It’s not about what you don’t have. It’s all about what you do. There are third world countries that score far higher than we as Americans do on happiness indices. And there are a ton of depressed millionaires out there. It’s all about perspective. It’s all about choice.

2. Choose Foods that Honor Yourself

Your gut is filled with trillions of microbes. Eating whole, healthy foods feeds the beneficial parts of your microbiome. Eating terrible food feeds the bad parts. And research over the last decade has shown, time and time again, that your gut plays as much—if not more—of a role than your brain does when it comes to mood. Keep your gut happy and your mood will follow.

3. Give as Many Hugs as You Can

The data is in: People who engage with others in physically-positive ways are happy. And nothing says physically-positive more clearly than a big old bear hug!

4. Spread Happiness

Focusing on the happiness of others is a surefire way to boost your own mood. Isolation, especially during the holidays, is one of the main reasons that depression rates tend rise around this time of year. So, spread your joy… especially to those who seem like they need it the most.

5. Don’t Say Anything Negative for 24 Hours

This exercise is wonderful for boosting your happiness quotient. It also forces you to choose your words carefully and keeps you from spreading negativity to others.

6. Banish All Negative Thoughts for 24 Hours

Negative thoughts are going to happen. They just are. But you don’t have to allow them to linger. So, for 24 hours, when a negative thought pops up in your head, kick it out. Don’t let it put down roots.

7. Understand that Families Can be Stressful

The holidays are a time for family. Which can be wonderful. But, it can also be stressful. So, know that your family gatherings might bring up some tension—spoken or unspoken—in both yourself and others. Just being aware of this fact can go a long way in choosing your joy, no matter the circumstances this holiday season.

8. Search Out the Silver Lining

No matter what happens to you in life, you can find something positive in the situation. If you get into a fender bender, sure it’s annoying. It’s inconvenient. But you can be thankful that no one was hurt. You can use it as a moment to diffuse a stressful situation and be an inspiration to the other driver.

9. Recognize that Other People Find the Holidays Stressful

Again, this is an awareness issue. Even if you don’t get particularly down during the holiday season, others do. So, going into each moment of your day with this knowledge will allow you to show patience and empathy. And maybe brighten someone else’s day!

10. Volunteer

Get out of your routine this holiday season and help others. Soup kitchens, Salvation Army donation kettles, food drives… the opportunities are endless. The key is to be intentional about getting out of your rut and help the less fortunate in your community.

11. Find Your Holiday WHY

What do the holidays mean to you? Because, they aren’t about maxing out your credit cards, stressing over buying gifts for people who are probably going to return them anyway, and eating until your pants no longer fit. Finding your reason for the holiday season will put your mind in a place where happiness isn’t a hard choice.

12. Go to the Mall… But Not to Shop

Go to the mall (or anywhere people are shopping) and be intentional about spreading joy. I’m not suggesting anything radical here. A hello, a smile, a quick compliment… it doesn’t take much to brighten someone’s day. And when you do, that light will shine back on you.

13. Understand What’s Being Marketed at You

Every commercial on TV and the internet this holiday season is a lie. That happy family attempting to shovel that huge pile of food past their fake smiles? Yeah, they don’t exist. We’ve been marketed a vision of the holidays that simply isn’t real. And many people feel like failures when they can’t live up to these false expectations. Understanding that it’s all a mirage designed to sell you cat food or a new vacuum cleaner takes a lot of pressure off your shoulders.

Happiness can happen when you no longer have to live up to an impossible ideal.

14. Focus on Connection

The holidays aren’t about food, gifts, and stress. So, don’t focus on those things. Instead, focus on connecting with the people in your life. Inspire them. Let them inspire you. Be real. Be vulnerable. Be kind.

15. Presence Over Presents

The best gift you can give someone this holiday season is to be present in the moment with them. Put down your phone and have a real conversation. That’s where real joy begins.

Watch more below…

The post Happier Holidays: 15 Ways to Bring Joy to Your Life This Holiday Season appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

October 20, 2017

Sometimes, cognitive issues are difficult to treat, no matter what you do. But now there’s a new technique that showing real promise when it comes to healing difficult imbalances in the brain.

Imagine a time when you felt depressed. The world seems darker, things that once made you happy now fall flat, and the quality of your sleep has fallen off.

And that’s just the beginning of a long list of symptoms. You just feel terrible.

Now imagine that depression just won’t go away. Medications, counseling, even lifestyle changes… Nothing seems to help.

Unfortunately, this is more common than you’d think.

But we now have another powerful tool to deal with these issues.

Neurofeedback training has been proven to be very useful in helping people with these sorts of issues even when nothing else seems to work. It’s helped cognitive issues raining from depression to autism to severe brain injuries. (Watch our videos on neurofeedback here, and here.)

What is Neurofeedback training?

Even as recently as a few decades ago, medical science was pretty convinced that after a certain age your brain cells stopped replacing themselves. The brain you have as a teenager, then, is the brain you’ll have for the rest of your life.

We know now that this isn’t true. Instead, the brain is amazing in its ability to repair itself, to create new inner networks, and divide out responsibilities across the rest of the brain if one portion is damaged. This adaptability is called neuroplasticity, and it’s the basis for neurofeedback training.

Your brain produces electrical waves. But sometimes, those waves can get “stuck” in a pattern. When the pattern gets stuck in a “negative” loop, it can cause depression, along with a broad range of other issues. Just as we can fall into negative habits—eating poorly, absorbing too much stress, or not resolving the roots of our toxic relationships—so too can your brainwaves get “stuck” in self-perpetuating cycles of negativity.

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Neurofeedback training is designed to break those cycles and restore your brainwaves to their normal, healthy levels.

How does it work?

I could get very technical with this explanation, but instead, I’ll tell you a story.

Janet is depressed. She’s been depressed for a long time. She’s tried everything available to break the cycle, but nothing has worked.

So, Janet comes to us, and we begin neurofeedback training. She comes in twice a week, and we hook her up to a machine that first of all measures her brain waves.

Once she’s relaxed—she can watch TV, or close her eyes, or do whatever makes her most comfortable—the machine begins measuring those waves. Again, not to get too far down a rabbit trail, but there are four main types of waves, based on their frequency range: alpha, beta, theta, and delta. When someone is depressed, for example, there tends to be a high level of beta waves coming from the left hemisphere of the brain.

So, the machine provides a reward system. As Janet’s brain lowers those beta waves—this happens on a mostly subconscious level—the machine might (again, this is just one example) make the tv picture clearer. If those waves come back up, the picture on the screen might begin to darken or blur.

By going through this process—we usually do two sessions weekly—the brain starts to develop new, more positive habits. It begins, slowly, to train itself to balance those waves toward healthy levels.

For a lot of our clients in the neurofeedback program, the initial problem has to do with repression. They’ve experienced some trauma, and instead of dealing healthily, the brain has buried it down deep.

Often, it’s down so deep that Janet, and others, don’t even know it’s there. But the effects of that repression are very real, and in many cases, utterly debilitating.

I love that we’ve had to opportunity to begin incorporating this tool into our programs here at the Wellness Training Institute. For one, it’s amazingly useful. But even beyond that, it fits perfectly into what we’re all about.

Our Healthful Evolutions program is all about retraining your body, mind, and soul—step by baby step—to choose life instead of death. To build those healthy habits to the point at which the old, bad habits no longer have a hold. Just like a detox that uses food elimination to reset the body, neurofeedback training does that by focusing first on what causing your brain to be out of balance.

It’s all about living a happy life. And to be happy, you first need to get healthy. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have another, amazing tool to accomplish that for people who can’t seem to find that balance in any other way!

Watch a video on How Neurofeedback training works:

Then check this one out…

Or listen below!

The post Is Neurofeedback Training for You? appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

September 11, 2017

A cutting-edge, scientifically-proven technique that relieves depression, ADHD, migraines and a ton of other cognitive issues is just our latest offering to help you live a better life. Here’s how it works…

As part of our eternal quest to help people live better, happier lives, we recently added Neurofeedback training to our offerings.

What, exactly, is neurofeedback training?

Glad you asked. But before I explain what it does and how it works, let’s first take a look at how your brain works.

Brain Waves

Our brains make four types of electrical impulses: Alpha, Beta, Theta, and Delta.

Here’s what that means…

Alpha waves occur at 8 – 13 Hz. When your brain is producing the right amount at the right frequency, you feel relaxed and calm. Your mind is active, but still at rest (like sitting and watching Netflix.) When you have too little, you feel exhausted. Too much, and you feel hyper-vigilant, anxious.

Beta waves resonate at 14 – 30 Hz. The right amount makes you feel awake, alert and promotes logic and critical reasoning. Think of what your brain is doing when you are reading a book. The waves involved in that process are beta waves. When they’re out of balance, you can feel anxious, stressed, restless, and tense.

Theta waves (4 – 8 Hz) happen in that hazy area between being awake and asleep. When these are resonating at the right level, you’ll experience deep meditation. You’ll feel creative and intuitive. Too much and you’ll feel foggy. Too little and you’ll feel robotic.

Delta waves (0.5 – 4 Hz) happen during very deep sleep.
[Want to watch the video for this blog? Of course you do! Check it out here.]

How it Works

As we live our lives, our brains can fall into destructive, unhealthy patterns, which in turn causes these four brain waves to become imbalanced. This imbalance can lead to everything from insomnia to severe depression.

Neurofeedback training is a scientifically-proven, non-invasive technique designed to teach the brain to get these waves back into balance.

Because it’s such a gentle process, and because we’re essentially dealing with habits your brain has built up over time, it takes several months to complete the process. But as you continue to do the training, your brain eventually learns how to regulate itself.

The actual training sessions look like this. You sit in a chair in a relaxed position. Wires with sensors are attached to your head, and the machine can detect the level and frequency of your brain waves. When your brain produces the right amount of a particular wavelength, the machine rewards it in real time. When they fall out of balance again, the machine produces a (very, very mild) negative effect. For clients who want to watch TV during the training, for example, wave imbalances cause the picture to blur slightly or darken. When they come back into balance, the picture becomes clearer.

So, as you continue to do this weekly for a matter of months—or even over a year—the brain, prompted by the machine, can teach itself to regain balance over the waves it produces.

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It sounds little like science fiction, I know, but here’s the thing.

It works. Really, really well, in fact.

We’ve seen genuine progress in people who’ve struggled with depression for years. It’s also a useful tool for treating anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, migraines, memory loss, and even brains that have suffered serious trauma.

If you’re interested in finding out more about this new, cutting-edge tool—and see if it might be a good solution for you— contact us here.

Or, watch our videos on Neurofeedback here….

And here…

Or listen below!

The post How Neurofeedback Training Works appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.