Thursday's Therapy - Sleep Loss: Something Else to Worry About! - Lost Sleep Could Mean Lost Neurons

The protein SirT3 might protect us against late nights, but all-nighters may result in neuron loss.

Thursday's Therapy

Sleep Loss: 

Something Else to Worry About!

Lost Sleep Could Mean Lost Neurons

Article from ScienceNews.org: 
Lost Sleep Could Mean Lost Neurons

Repeated all-nighters may result in brain cell loss, mouse study suggests

BY BETHANY BROOKSHIRE 11:26AM, APRIL 2, 2014

Most of us wish we got more sleep. Every night, something — whether it’s children, work or the Internet — seems to keep us up late. Sometimes it keeps us up all night. Often we comfort ourselves with the thought that if all else fails, we can make it up with a few solid nights of sleep on the weekend.

But new research shows that the brain may not be as forgiving as we hoped. While a few extra hours on the Internet may be absolved, all-nighters like those associated with shift work (not to mention parenting) may end up killing off neurons.

There is no question that sleep is important. It cleans our brain cells and helps consolidate our memories. Lack of sleep blunts our ability to focus, makes us dangerous drivers and can make us eat too much. Jing Zhang and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia were interested in the effects of sleep loss on the brain. “Many of us have pulled long nights and/or all-nighters, and we think we’re OK,” says Sigrid Veasey, a neurobiologist at Penn and coauthor on the study. “But what is the effect? Is there a compensatory mechanism? 

Or does the brain pay a price for repeated sleep loss?”

The researchers were particularly interested in the locus ceruleus, an area of neurons deep in the brain stem. The locus ceruleus plays an important role in attention, “fight or flight” and our sleep-wake cycles. But the locus ceruleus is also very sensitive to stress. And late nights can make those cells very frazzled indeed.

To examine how the brain might respond to decreased sleep, Zhang and colleagues put mice in new, interesting environments with other mice to play with and plenty of things to explore. With this mouse playground, the researchers could keep the animals up far past their bedtimes. The scientists looked at mice with normal sleep schedules, mice that stayed up three hours later than normal and mice with a night-shift schedule kept awake during the day for three days straight. In all cases, the mice could get as much sleep as they wanted during the night, their normal active period.

In a paper published March 19 in the Journal of Neuroscience, Zhang and her group showed that three hours of lost sleep in the mouse playground produced an increase in Sirtuin3, or SIRT3, a protein in a cell’s mitochondria. SIRT3 has a lot of functions, and one of them is reducing chemicals called reactive oxygen species. These molecules are capable of binding to and disrupting all sorts of cellular processes. ROS are a natural by-product of a cell’s daily life, but too many accumulating in the cell can get dangerous as the molecules bind to normal proteins, causing damage and eventually cell death.

By increasing SIRT3 protein when mice stay up late, the brain cells in the locus ceruleus are ready to deal with the ROS. But when the mice partied all night long, the situation reversed. SIRT3RNA levels went down, while ROS levels continued to increase. 

With three days of eight-hour sleep deprivation, the neurons in the locus ceruleus actually began to die. Napping didn’t make up for the sleep lost.

SIRT3 appears to be a key protein for protecting neurons from damage from ROS molecules during late nights. In mice lacking the gene for the SIRT3 protein, even three hours of sleep deprivation resulted in neuron injury from ROS.

“We didn’t think the brain got injured from sleep loss,” Veasey says. “Now we know it does.” 

She explains that the next step will be to see if there is similar damage in humans who have done large amounts of shift work, perhaps by examining post-mortem brains. Veasey also plans to see if increasing SIRT3 can protect against the effects of all-nighters.

While it is interesting to see a new role for SIRT3 in sleep, Matthew Hirschey, a cell biologist at Duke University, says that it’s not necessarily surprising. “SIRT3 is a mitochondrial protein, he says, “and mitochondrial function touches so much of biology.” In addition, because every cell in the body has SIRT3 in its mitochondria, increasing SIRT3 might have more effects than protecting your neurons from a late night.  “Generally,” Hirschey says, “it appears to be a good thing, but some cancer cells have high SIRT3 as well.”

It will also be important to see if the locus ceruleus can recover from neuron loss, and if it even matters. Zhang’s group did not run behavioral studies to see if the sleep-deprived mice had deficits in attention or memory, or if these reversed with recovery sleep. They also don’t know if neuron loss continues over long-term shift work, or if the brain can adjust. 

But Veasey says the current findings are scary enough:

“All of us in the lab take sleep a lot more seriously than we used to!”

Picture:  NINJA999/FLICKR (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Article: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/lost-sleep-could-mean-lost-neurons

Thursday's Therapy - Conquering the Physical Damage that Comes with the "New Normal"

Thursday's Therapy

Conquering the Physical Damage

that Comes with

the "New Normal"

As we've mentioned many times, the trauma of losing a child will do damage to your brain. You feel it when you're going to do something you normally do yet find that you are forgetting very basic steps to the routine habits you once knew how to do without thinking about it. If you are a very organized person, at some point within the stressed brain, you find that you may be forgetting to pay some of your bills, or realize that you received a bill (or even a payment) in the mail and forget where you put the bill or even the payment!

The area of the brain that controls our fear response also gets short-circuited, and we end up living in stress such that the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine seem to be controlling our minds rather than the very steady reasoning that we had heretofore in our pre-child-loss days. (Around the end of year 2 of grief, we found ourselves unwittingly living in a state of fight-flight-or-freeze though we had no idea how we had gotten there.)

After several years of the distress of Child-Loss Grief and Trauma, you may think you are still the healthy person you always were only to be shocked when you go to your doctor and find out you have somehow contracted a disease. Stress has been known to compromise the body's immune system such that in your healthier, stress-free days your body was fighting off the beginnings of any disease, but now, in your stress-filled state, those healthy hormones are no longer available to your body, and your immune system begins to succumb.

So, with all these symptomatic disturbances happening in our "New Normal," it can come as a big relief to find that brain damage, and good-hormone damage can be reversible! The following article shows a little bit of how some components of this reversing of the damage can come into play.

For instance, Tommy and I have been exercising regularly now for seven months, (he a little longer than I since his doctor was warning him of his body's succumbing to cancer), and already we feel so much more resilient to stressors. We may still distress over circumstances, but we more quickly get over such distress, and even seem to be able to tackle it before it takes charge.

We both try to do some aerobic exercise at a pretty moderate level every day. What works for us, the methods of exercise that we most enjoy, is Tommy pacing on the elliptical, Angie jogging or jumping on the Rebounder mini-trampoline, working at getting our pulse rate up to 125 - 130 (yes, we use inexpensive heart-rate monitors) and sustaining it for anywhere between 20 to 50 minutes a day). See pictures below. (Note: These are not pictures of us, but pictures of our methods!)

Let us know what kinds of exercise work for you!

*****

How Exercise Fuels the Brain

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, Columnist

February 22, 2012, 12:01 AM

Does exercise keep your brain running?

Moving the body demands a lot from the brain. Exercise activates countless neurons, which generate, receive and interpret repeated, rapid-fire messages from the nervous system, coordinating muscle contractions, vision, balance, organ function and all of the complex interactions of bodily systems that allow you to take one step, then another.

This increase in brain activity naturally increases the brain’s need for nutrients, but until recently, scientists hadn’t fully understood how neurons fuel themselves during exercise. Now a series of animal studies from Japan suggest that the exercising brain has unique methods of keeping itself fueled. What’s more, the finely honed energy balance that occurs in the brain appears to have implications not only for how well the brain functions during exercise, but also for how well our thinking and memory work the rest of the time.

For many years, scientists had believed that the brain, which is a very hungry organ, subsisted only on glucose, or blood sugar, which it absorbed from the passing bloodstream. But about 10 years ago, some neuroscientists found that specialized cells in the brain, known as astrocytes, that act as support cells for neurons actually contained small stores of glycogen, or stored carbohydrates. And glycogen, as it turns out, is critical for the health of cells throughout the brain.

In petri dishes, when neurons, which do not have energy stores of their own, are starved of blood sugar, their neighboring astrocytes undergo a complex physiological process that results in those cells’ stores of glycogen being broken down into a form easily burned by neurons. This substance is released into the space between the cells and the neurons swallow it, maintaining their energy levels.

But while scientists knew that the brain had and could access these energy stores, they had been unable to study when the brain’s stored energy was being used in actual live conditions, outside of petri dishes, because brain glycogen is metabolized or burned away very rapidly after death; it’s gone before it can be measured.

That’s where the Japanese researchers came in. They had developed a new method of using high-powered microwave irradiation to instantly freeze glycogen levels at death, so that the scientists could accurately assess just how much brain glycogen remained in the astrocytes or had recently been used.

In the first of their new experiments, published last year in The Journal of Physiology (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21521757), scientists at the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Neuroscience at the University of Tsukuba gathered two groups of adult male rats and had one group start a treadmill running program, while the other group sat for the same period of time each day on unmoving treadmills. The researchers’ aim was to determine how much the level of brain glycogen changed during and after exercise.

Using their glycogen detection method, they discovered that prolonged exercise significantly lowered the brain’s stores of energy, and that the losses were especially noticeable in certain areas of the brain, like the frontal cortex and the hippocampus, that are involved in thinking and memory, as well as in the mechanics of moving.

The findings of their subsequent follow-up experiment, however, were even more intriguing and consequential. In that study, which appears in this month’s issue of The Journal of Physiology (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22063629), the researchers studied animals after a single bout of exercise and also after four weeks of regular, moderate-intensity running.

After the single session on the treadmill, the animals were allowed to rest and feed, and then their brain glycogen levels were studied. The food, it appeared, had gone directly to their heads; their brain levels of glycogen not only had been restored to what they had been before the workout, but had soared past that point, increasing by as much as a 60 percent in the frontal cortex and hippocampus and slightly less in other parts of the brain. The astrocytes had “overcompensated,” resulting in a kind of brain carbo-loading.

The levels, however, had dropped back to normal within about 24 hours.

That was not the case, though, if the animals continued to exercise. In those rats that ran for four weeks, the “supercompensation” became the new normal, with their baseline levels of glycogen showing substantial increases compared with the sedentary animals. The increases were especially notable in, again, those portions of the brain critical to learning and memory formation — the cortex and the hippocampus.

Which is why the findings are potentially so meaningful – and not just for rats.

While a brain with more fuel reserves is potentially a brain that can sustain and direct movement longer, it also “may be a key mechanism underlying exercise-enhanced cognitive function,” says Hideaki Soya, a professor of exercise biochemistry at the University of Tsukuba and senior author of the studies, since supercompensation occurs most strikingly in the parts of the brain that allow us better to think and to remember. As a result, Dr. Soya says, “it is tempting to suggest that increased storage and utility of brain glycogen in the cortex and hippocampus might be involved in the development” of a better, sharper brain.

Given the limits of current technologies, brain glycogen metabolism cannot be studied in people. But even so, the studies’ findings make D.I.Y. brain-fuel supercompensation efforts seem like an attractive possibility. And, according to unpublished data from Dr. Soya’s lab, the process may even be easy.

He and his colleagues have found that “glycogen supercompensation in some brain loci” is “enhanced in rats receiving carbohydrates immediately after exhaustive exercise.” So for people, that might mean that after a run or other exercise that is prolonged or strenuous enough to leave you tired, a bottle of chocolate milk or a banana might be just the thing your brain is needing.

Track picture, thanks to Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Other pictures, thanks to FotoSearch and from the site:

http://www.how-to-boost-your-immune-system.com/index.html

Article: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/how-exercise-fuels-the-brain/

Thursday's Therapy - 8 Ways for Us Child-Loss Grievers to Restore Our Damaged Brains

Thursday's Therapy

8 Ways for Us Child-Loss Grievers to Restore Our Damaged Brains

It was first at the conference Tommy and I went to in Atlanta, Georgia, training under premier Trauma specialist Dr. Bessel A. van der Kolk, when we learned that brains are often damaged (with evidence of the "hippocampus" actually shrinking) when going through severe trauma such as that of losing our child. That was in February, 2010. At that point in time, Dr. van der Kolk, who works as Medical Director of the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute in Brookline, Massachusetts, was not sure that the damaged hippocampus (which was revealed through the newly available brain imaging for trauma patients) could be repaired or not. (Even the medical world didn't think that the brain could generate new cells; doctors had been taught over the years that the brain had a fixed number of cells, and that was it; a person could only lose cells from that point on, but could never expect to regain any.) Research since that point in time, thankfully, reveals that our brains can indeed go through neurogenesis in which the hippocampus loss that we've apparently experienced can be restored! This new understanding regarding the potential for brain cells to regenerate is called "Neuroplasticity." The following is a list of exciting ways in which the brain can purportedly (via scientific observation) be stimulated into producing such new brain cells, called "Neurogenesis."

7 Scientifically Proven Ways to Stimulate Brain Cell Growth / Neurogenesis

~ found in a blog called, 4mind4life.com

Neurogenesis - “The birth of new neurons in the brain; also referred to as the process in which neurons are created.

The growth of new brain cells occurs in the region of the brain called the "hippocampus." The ‘hippocampus’ is an area involved with memory, learning, and other cognitive functions. In order to live and become part of our brain, new neurons formed in the hippocampus-region need support from surrounding nutrients from blood and glial cells.

Most importantly, they need support from other surrounding neurons – otherwise these new brain cells will die. Though thousands of new brain cells are formed and produced via the hippocampus each and every day, many die quickly after birth. When we can keep them alive for this crucial period after birth, we are able to effectively boost the power of the human brain by adding new brain cells to the bank of existing cells.

Though neurogenesis is most active during prenatal development, there is growing evidence that certain activities also induce the growth of new brain cells [neurons] in the brain. Provided below are 7 researched and proven ways to grow new brain cells and provide a safe haven for effective neurogenesis.

1. An Exercise Regimen

Everybody knows that exercise is good for your overall health and heart, but in recent findings, powerful evidence has proven that exercise is great for your brain. Scientific experiments have discovered that mice consistently using running wheels had around 2 times the amount of hippocampal neurons (brain cells) as the mice that didn’t exercise.

Another study at (Columbia) University found that humans who had a(n) exercise training program were able to grow and maintain new brain cells and nerve cells in the hippocampus region of the brain. The specific area called the “dentate gyrus” is responsible for helping produce neurogenesis. Even more studies have discovered that those who exercised had 2 – 3 times the increases in the birth-rate of new neurons!

2. Eating Blueberries

Eating blueberries can trigger the growth of new brain cells? That’s right! 19-month-old rats that were put on a blueberry enriched diet [equal to about 1 cup per day for humans] were more skilled at navigating through mazes than rats who weren’t fed blueberries. Scientists know for a fact that blueberries promote the growth of new neurons. In order to track the growth of neurons, researchers injected dye into rats.

They saw that in the hippocampus region, new brain cells were generated. Scientists figure that “anthocyanin dye” – the dark bluish-dye found in blueberries caused the neurogenesis. The anthocyanin-dye contains chemicals that can cross the blood-brain barrier and produce the growth of neurons. There is growing evidence that the “anthocyanin dye” has the same effect on the brains of humans!

3. Taking Time for Meditation

Meditation (w)as always thought to have been beneficial for the brain. Recent compelling evidence from scientific researchers at Yale, Harvard, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that meditation can allow us to “grow bigger brains.” Though this isn’t the same thing as neurogenesis, meditation could very well be an activity that boosts the birth rate of neurons.

Researchers also discovered that meditators literally had an altered-physical brain structure compared to non-meditators. Brain scanning technology [i.e. MRIs] showed that meditation boosted thickness of brain structure dealing with attention, sensory input, and memory functions. The thickening was found to be more noticeable in adults than younger individuals. It’s interesting because the same sections of our cortex that meditation thickens, tend to get thinner as we age.

Meditation is known to boost brain activity, coherency of brain waves, strengthen neural connections, and thicken gray matter. Though scientists haven’t confirmed the effects of meditation and its ability to aid neurogenesis [due to complexity issues], there is a likely possibility that it helps.

4. Antidepressant Drugs

Scientific research by the National Institute of Mental Health has proven that antidepressants work by allowing our brains to grow new brain cells (neurons). In a 2003 study, scientists discovered that when they blocked the formation of new neurons in the hippocampus brain region, behavioral effects of the antidepressant Prozac [Fluoxetine] were diminished.

Research has already understood that depression, stress, and anxiety disorders can cause death of neurons in the brain. More studies have demonstrated that most other antidepressants on the market can and will trigger the growth of new neurons. {Actually, our understanding is that, according to J. Douglas Bremner, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry and radiology at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia and author of Does Stress Damage the Brain, in a seminar held in Atlanta, Georgia in September, 2011 that Tommy and I attended, the SSRI anti-depressants are the only antidepressants on the market that trigger the growth of new neurons in the brain.} Even more interesting is the fact that besides humans, adult animals grow new neurons when given antidepressant drugs.

Though there are many other interactions in the brain with antidepressants, their primary beneficial effect from them is derived from their ability to produce neurogenesis. Now if scientists can only figure out a way to induce the amount of neurogenesis that antidepressant medication does without creating a new drug!

5. An Enriched Environment

Science has long known that living in a mentally stimulating environment versus an impoverished environment is far better for brain development. Research has found that exposure to an enriched environment enhances neurogenesis functioning and is able to regulate emotionality.

Scientists have found that memory-based tasks were far improved in the hippocampus region of the brain when human beings are raised in a healthy, enriched environment. One study found that mice put in stimulating environments actually had larger hippocampus regions than did those living in “standard” or “poor” laboratory conditions. They discovered a direct correlation between an enriched environment and the amount of neurons produced in the brains of mice. This had a significant effect on neurogenesis!

6. The Act of “Learning”

Though scientists have long known that new brain cells are able (to) “enhance learning” – they never thought that “learning” could actually cause the birth of new brain cells… that is, until recently. In recent animal studies, researchers have found that there was a direct relationship between “learning” and the survival rate of newly-birthed brain cells.

When researchers taught certain rodents a wide-variety of cognitive tasks which involved a wide-range of brain areas – scientists found that the more the animal “learned” – the more new neurons were able to survive in the hippocampus. Scientists have made it clear that “learning” can increase the presence of new neurons in the brain.

Brain cells that are born in the hippocampus, which normally die off, are literally “rescued” by “learning” experiences. There is still plenty of research being conducted in this area and not all sources agree. However, your best bet is to keep your brain power boosted and your mind sharp. Always try to learn something new!

7. Restricting Caloric Intake

The phenomena of calorie restriction has continued to puzzle researchers. They have found that eating less food can lead to significant increases in longevity. Even when starting calorie restriction in middle age, it is able to produce around a ten to twenty percent increase in life-span. (Calorie restriction) has also been associated with hundreds of biological changes and can harbor our ability to produce new brain cells.

Restricting calorie intake has been associated with increases in neurogenesis and a better overall neuroprotective effect in the brain. Scientists have found that calorie-restricted animals nearly always stay active and healthy up until the end of their lives. This phenomena has also been associated with a significantly lowered likelihood of developing a degenerative brain disease and can even produce new nerve cells!

8. Infrared Light Helmets

Though the use of infrared light helmets is relatively new, researchers believe that they may help patients with Alzheimer's disease by helping them grow new brain cells. Developer of this infrared light helmet, Dr. Gordon Dougal, (also the director of medical research at medical research company Virulite) believes the helmet will hit the market about 1 year from now. It works by aiming low levels of infrared light at the wearer’s brain. Next, it stimulates neurogenesis in the brain, suggests research.

More on how this works according to its inventor [Dr. Gordon Dougal]:

“How we hope it’s going to work is that the infrared light will be facing inside the helmet onto the actual person, onto their skin, onto their brain, and actually goes on the frontal part of the bones, so it goes onto the actual front part of the brain and the side of the brain.

“The side of the head and their skull are relatively thin, so the light will penetrate the skull and treat the underlying brain tissue. And the top of the head is also quite thin, and the light will penetrate the brain tissue at that point.”

————————————————————————————————————————-

For more information, view the sources:

LE Magazine: June 2002 – Calorie Restriction, Exercise, Hormone Replacement, and Phytonutrients Fight Aging – Age Conference – Madison, Wisconsin

Harvard University – Meditation found to increase brain size – Mental calisthenics bulk up some layers By William J. Cromie – Harvard News Office http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2006/01/23-meditation.html

Antidepressants Grow New Brain Cells – About.com; http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/psychopharmacology/a/neurogenesis.htm

Sci STKE. 2003 Aug; (195):318. Antidepressants and Hippocampal Neurogenesis. Santarelli L, Saxe M, Gross A, Surget A, Battaglia F, Dulawa S, Weisstaub N, Lee J, Duman R, Arancio O, Belzung, Hen R.

The Journal of Neuroscience. 2007 Mar; 27(13): 3252-3259. Experience-Specific Functional Modification of the Dentate Gyrus through Adult Neurogenesis: A Critical Period during an Immature Stage. Tashiro A, Makino H, Gage FH.

Stanford University Research In Progress: HD & Lifestyle http://www.stanford.edu/group/hopes/rltdsci/inprogress/ae2.html

Article thanks to, http://4mind4life.com/blog/2008/08/18/7-scientifically-proven-ways-to-stimulate-brain-cell-growth-neurogenesis/

Related: For more information on brain foods, read the article http://4mind4life.com/blog/2008/07/18/brain-foods-list-of-50-good-brain-foods/

Bessel A. van der Kolk's book: Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

Thursday's Therapy - 25 Trauma Bombers for Our Traumatized Systems! ~Tommy and Angie Prince

Thursday's Therapy

25 Trauma Bombers!

~Tommy and Angie Prince

Removing yourself from unnecessary stressors is a start for soothing our grief-torn hearts. For example, if I find myself around people who have a toxic effect on me, I remove myself from that contact since my system is already severely stressed as it is -- it certainly does not need any unnecessary, added distress!

But let's face it, our life amidst years of severe grief IS stressful!

Tommy and I are finding in these past few months, there has been such internal distress, that it seems our own bodies are turning against us!

Animals, when they experience danger, first instinctively do what is called for to survive, but immediately afterwards, they seem to exhibit a physiological tremor that seems to course through their whole body, almost as a way to "shake off" the severe distress they have just undergone.

So too we are discovering we must find ways to release our severe distress.

Some grievers write that they cannot seem to get out of bed they are so depressed and sad over losing their child. And, yes, sleep can be a comfort, but it seems

The body needs forms of movement to unleash the healthy hormones that are, as Tommy's doctor said this week, sitting back just waiting to be released so that they can beat back the pathological symptoms caused by stress and trauma!

For us, it seems stress can start churning up our insides if it is not somehow directed out, to find a pathway of relief. For one thing, we are learning,

"Exercise IS medicine that can start the healing process!"

~Dr. Esther Sternberg

Tommy and I watched "The Science of Healing," a National Geographic documentary this week that held some interesting clues for our healing:

Hans Selye first coined the term "stress" in examining,

"Can our emotions make us sick?"

Neuroimmunologist Esther Sternberg, M.D. narrated the documentary as she examined how stress can affect our immune system. She noted that amidst our extremely stressful environments (stating 1/3 of all Americans live with extreme stress), we need to realize our brains have the ability to help us heal.

Sternberg herself was experiencing rheumatoid arthritis, but the anti-inflammatory medicines she was on were not giving her any relief. About that time her next door neighbors offered her their vacation home in Crete for a writing sabbatical. When she moved to Crete for this wonderful get-away, she became shocked to find herself beginning to heal as she began to absorb the Greek culture which she found to be so different from our own.

She noticed the Greeks seem to pace themselves according to the rhythms of the days and seasons (instead of our typical fighting against the grain, they seemed to work with the grain of their elements and surroundings.) Walking daily to market to get her groceries, eating the healthy Mediterranean diet amidst loving, fun people, dancing together to festive Greek music with laughter and camaraderie, taking daily walks along the picturesque beach and through lovely wooded areas filled with their native flowers, swimming daily in the beautiful Mediterranean, Sternberg began to notice a healing effect on her stressed-out immune system. (She noted, even the olive oil she was enjoying in her meals was in itself an anti-inflammatory!)

This new lifestyle was so healing that she discovered her rheumatoid arthritis was beginning to heal! Esther found new hope that she could change her life back home in America in such a way as to induce more healing and wholeness for herself!

The following activities and experiences seem to be calming stress-busters, or as we call them,

25 "Trauma Bombers" for Our Traumatized Systems:

• Aerobic exercise (movement that increases the heart-rate for a sustained 20 to 30 minutes a day)
• Laughing
• Moving or dancing to music
• Socializing with safe people
• Giving compassion and receiving compassion among safe people (It seems obvious that receiving compassion relieves stress, but did you know giving compassion has been found also to relieve stress?!)
• Partaking in healthy eating (such as Sternberg's Mediterranean diet)
• Gentle walking, as in a labyrinthe (concentric circles) ~ or for me, just mowing our grass!
• Playing a musical instrument
• Painting
• Listening to gospel music (which research has shown effectively bypasses the mind and cuts straight through to minister to the heart and soul).
• Breathing in pleasant aromas such as smelling the flowers flourishing around you (aromas, which Sternberg's brain research demonstrates, go straight through to soothe the emotions!)
• Sculpting
• Writing poetry
• Learning new things (like the myriad challenges throughout navigating the internet, for one)
• Starting a blog
• Doing projects with a safe friend (Tommy enjoys working on our cars with another child-loss father, in which there is much constant movement, and a concentration needed that provides a constructive reprieve from the ever-constant agitation and pain of grief) {Psychological research seems to indicate men seem to prefer working shoulder-to-shoulder with other men, while women seem to prefer communing face-to-face with other women as each, in their own preferred way, walk through their child-loss grief.}
• Gardening, or designing a garden
• Meditating
• Going through guided imagery
• Meditating in scripture and prayer before God (I find much healing by going before God with my authentic emotions, allowing Him to minister to me and reveal His deep comfort and love to me.)
• Showing gratitude
• Counting blessings
• Reading
• Watching edifying movies
• Spending time in nature, absorbed in the rhythms of God's handiwork and graceful, gentle breezes

Pictures, thanks to http://www.hqwalls.com.ua/eng/nature.html