Which room would you prefer… I imagine that many of you have children or grandchildren. Perhaps nieces or nephews? If you had to picture the nursery that you would want for them, would it look more like this: Or this: Did you cringe at the thought of putting a child in the sterile room at the top? There’s nothing to interest or excite them in such a sterile environment. Every child rearing book will tell you that babies need increasing levels of visual and mental stimulation so that they can grow and develop. Why then do we not expect that…

What color do you think of when you think of depression? It’s probably a dark color, like blue, black or gray. There is a reason for that. Research from the University of Freiburg shows that depressed patients cannot view black and white contrasts accurately. A new study in Biological Psychiatry showed a dramatically lower retinal contrast gain in patients with depression than in healthy subjects. For the study, Seeing Gray When Feeling Blue? Depression Can Be Measured in the Eye of the Diseased, Dr. Emanual Bubl and his team evaluated 40 patients suffering from depression (20 who were taking antidepressant…

Most of us know that what we eat is so very important (for energy, healthy metabolism and all around vibrant health). Actually, much of what we’ve talked about in our teleseminar series so far really starts with what we put in our mouths each day. Yet preparing healthful meals is often a challenge. Besides being a physician, a consultant to the White House and a volunteer in the relief effort in Haiti, Mark Hyman MD, our next teleseminar speaker, is also a three-time New York Time’s bestselling author. Just for fun we asked him to allow us to share one…

Many psychotherapists think first of psychological causes for sleep disorders, yet increasingly, we are seeing the combination of medical and psychological factors causing various sleep problems.

Most of us believe that sleep is essential for function and focus. Recent findings suggest that even afternoon naps can improve the quality of brain function throughout the day. Robert Stickgold, PhD conducted a study through the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His experiment required 99 college students to inspect and memorize a maze presented to them on a computer screen. Next, the students were asked to navigate a 3-D version of the maze on the computer. At this point, half of the participants took an hour and a half nap, while…

While conducting research on Adrenal Fatigue, we ran across lots of studies documenting the effects of stress on the body. There were so many new studies that we had a hard time trying to choose one to blog on. So rather than try to narrow our options, we thought that we would share some of the more interesting results below: • Chronic stress reduces the number of neurons in the dentate gyrus (the part of the brain associated with the formation of new memories), and also contributes to cognitive problems. • In the hippocampus (which play a role in long-term…