I heard Dan Siegel once say, “Why not try a ‘t’ instead of a ‘c’? Meditation instead of medication.” When I heard this, it got me thinking. . . is there another way? Could we use fewer side-effect laden prescriptions and find a solution that doesn’t involve so many pharmaceuticals? For instance, in some cases, meditation might be just as effective as antidepressants in preventing relapse in people with depression. Zindel V. Segal, PhD and his team from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada conducted a study to determine the effect a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy regimen…

Tuesday night on Jay Leno, President Obama shared that the First Lady has been handing out fruit and raisins for the last couple years on Halloween. He added, “The White House is going to get ‘egged’.” Michelle Obama’s preference for healthy Halloween snacks is not surprising – she has been campaigning for healthy lifestyles with her Let’s Move campaign since February 2010. This morning in our staff meeting we were talking about the potential White House “egging” which led to a discussion on diet. We weren’t just thinking about the impact of food on our health, but how important it…

What if we learned meditation at an early age? Could that possibly help buffer the inevitable stressful events in childhood as well later in life? This morning I was thinking, what if a mindfulness practice came as natural as say, multiplication tables or spelling?  What if it was taught in schools? Is there a chance that if children learned meditation it would be helpful for them in dealing with those “you’re so not-cool” messages from other kids? I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about Mindful Schools – a non-profit organization based in Oakland,CA that teaches mindfulness to children in…

Meditation is in the news a lot, especially with so much exciting research being conducted on the effects of meditation on the brain. I recently read one such interesting study by Virginia Tech’s Read Montague, PhD in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Dr. Montague et al. looked at the differences in decision making between Buddhist meditators and non-meditators, specifically at brain activity during decision making. “There is a lot that we can offer our patients in the way of improved brain functioning…” The researchers took functional MRIs while the 26 Buddhist meditators and 40 control participants played the Ultimatum game. During this…

I’m going to share a not-so-secret secret with you: I love telomeres. If you follow my blogs, you may remember me mentioning telomeres in the past, because, well…they just fascinate me. Telomeres reside at the end of chromosomes in order to protect them from deterioration. When cells replicate, telomeres are cut and become increasingly shorter. If the telomere becomes too short, it dies or at the very least becomes dormant. Many researchers now use telomere length to determine cell age – and with it, brain deterioration. I’ve reported on the recent research findings that exercise has been shown to maintain…

A recent edition of Mindfulness had an interesting application story that I wanted to share with you. A father wrote about his experience using mindfulness to help both himself and his twin sons, who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. As you know, Asperger’s Syndrome has numerous symptoms, including difficulty transitioning between activities, an inability to pick up on social cues, preoccupation with a few favorite subjects, and a preference for a set, familiar schedule. Jack Russell wrote about the challenges and the delights of having special needs children but I was especially struck when he said mindfulness allowed him…