The New Compounds That Could Treat Depression in 24-Hours

 
Current antidepressants take around 3 to 8 weeks to kick in and only help around 50% of people who are depressed.

Professor Scott Thompson, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine who led the research, said:A new type of antidepressant holds the promise of treating depression quickly, without too many side-effects.

“Our results open up a whole new class of potential antidepressant medications.

We have evidence that these compounds can relieve the devastating symptoms of depression in less than one day, and can do so in a way that limits some of the key disadvantages of current approaches.”

Currently used antidepressants, such as Prozac and Lexapro, target levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Unfortunately they are only effective in around half of people with depression.

Even amongst people they do help, it can take three to eight weeks for the effects can be felt.

For patients who are suicidal, this period can be excruciating.

Also, many now believe that targeting serotonin is not effective.

The new compounds focus on another neurotransmitter with the acronym GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), instead of serotonin.

GABA mainly reduces brain activity in certain key areas related to mood.

The new class of compounds dampen down these inhibitory signals.

Theoretically, the result should be to lift mood.

Professor Thompson explained that preliminary tests on animals have been encouraging:

“These compounds produced the most dramatic effects in animal studies that we could have hoped for.

It will now be tremendously exciting to find out whether they produce similar effects in depressed patients.

If these compounds can quickly provide relief of the symptoms of human depression, such as suicidal thinking, it could revolutionize the way patients are treated.”

The study found that the compounds only affected the brains of stressed rats and left unstressed rats unchanged.

This may mean that the side-effects of the treatment will be less severe than those seen for current antidepressants.

The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology(Fischell et al., 2015).

The Good Habit Which Boosts Self-Control

This good habit can boost attention, decision-making and the ability to resist impulses.

Good sleep habits include going to bed at the same time every night, avoiding caffeine late in the day and allowing time to mentally wind-down before bedtime.Good sleep habits can boost attention, decision-making and the ability to resist impulses, a new review of the evidence finds.

Professor June Pilcher, who led the study, said:

“Self-control is part of daily decision-making.

When presented with conflicting desires and opportunities, self-control allows one to maintain control.

Our study explored how sleep habits and self-control are interwoven and how sleep habits and self-control may work together to affect a person’s daily functioning.”

Professor Pilcher explained the review’s conclusions:

“Poor sleep habits, which include inconsistent sleep times and not enough hours of sleep, can also lead to health problems, including weight gain, hypertension and illness, according to prior research.

Studies have also found that sleep deprivation decreases self-control but increases hostility in people, which can create problems in the workplace and at home.”

Since sleep and self-control are so intimately connected, improving sleep can help in many ways, Professor Pilcher said:

“Many aspects of our daily lives can be affected by better-managed sleep and self-control capacity.

Improved health and worker performance are two potential benefits, but societal issues such as addictions, excessive gambling and over spending could also be more controllable when sleep deficiencies aren’t interfering with one’s decision making.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience(Pilcher et al., 2015).

Here’s Why People Are Getting Smarter (And Taller)

 
Data from 350,000 people in over 100 different studies shows people are getting smarter — and this is why…

People whose parents are genetically dissimilar are also more likely to be taller.The more genetically diverse your parents are, the more likely you are to think quickly, a new study finds.

The data comes from 350,000 people in over 100 different studies.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh looked at similarities in the genetic code of people’s parents.

When parents share the same genetic code, this is a clue that they are (distantly) related.

Greater genetic differences, though, indicate that people’s parents are more likely to be unrelated.

Over time genetic diversity seems to be favouring people who are taller and think faster.

Dr Peter Joshi, of the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute, said:

“Our research answers questions first posed by Darwin as to the benefits of genetic diversity.

Our next step will be to hone in on the specific parts of the genome that most benefit from diversity.”

Dr Jim Wilson, at the same intitution, said: http://www.hotels-scanner.us

“This study highlights the power of large-scale genetic analyses to uncover fundamental information about our evolutionary history.”

The study is published in the journal Nature (Joshi et al., 2015).

How To Get Rid of Negative Thoughts

Repressing thoughts doesn’t work so here are 8 ways to get rid of negative thoughts.

It’s one of the irritations of having a mind that sometimes it’s hard to get rid of negative thoughts.

The most intuitive method to get rid of negative thoughts is trying to suppress them by pushing it out of our minds.It could be a mistake at work, money worries or perhaps a nameless fear. Whatever the anxiety, fear or worry, it can prove very difficult to control.

Unfortunately, as many studies have shown, thought suppression doesn’t work. Ironically, trying to push thoughts out of mind only makes them come back stronger. It’s a very frustrating finding, but one that’s been replicated experimentally again and again.

So, what alternatives exist to get rid of negative thoughts we’d rather not have going around in our heads?

In an article for American Psychologist, the expert on thought suppression, Daniel Wegner, explains some potential methods to get rid of negative thoughts (Wegner, 2011). Here are my favourite:

1. Focused distraction

The natural tendency when trying to get your mind off, say, a social gaff you made, is to try and think about something else: to distract yourself. The mind wanders around looking for new things to focus on, hopefully leaving you in peace.

Distraction does work but, oddly enough, studies suggest it is better to distract yourself with one thing, rather than letting the mind wander.

That’s because aimless mind wandering is associated with unhappiness; it’s better to concentrate on, say, a specific piece of music, a TV programme or a task.

2. Avoid stress

Another intuitive method for avoiding persistent thoughts is to put ourselves under stress. The thinking here is that the rush will leave little mental energy for the thoughts that are troubling us.

When tested scientifically, this turns out to be a bad approach. In fact, rather than being a distraction, stress makes the unwanted thoughts come back stronger, so it certainly should not be used as a way of avoiding unpleasant thoughts.

3. Postpone the thought until later

While continuously trying to suppress a thought makes it come back stronger, postponing it until later can work. Researchers have tried asking those with persistent anxious thoughts to postpone their worrying until a designated 30-minute ‘worry period’. Some studies suggest that people find this works as a way of side-stepping thought suppression.So save up all your worrying for a designated period and this may ease your mind the rest of the time.

4. Paradoxical therapy

What if, instead of trying to suppress a worrying repetitive thought about, say, death, you head straight for it and concentrate on it?

It seems paradoxical that focusing in on a thought might help it go away, but some research suggests this can work. It’s based on the long-established principle of ‘exposure therapy': this is where, for example, arachnophobes are slowly but surely exposed to spiders, until the fear begins to fade.

This approach is not for the faint-hearted, but research suggests it can be useful to get rid of negative thoughts when used by those tackling obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviour.

5. Acceptance

Along similar lines, but not so direct, there’s some evidence that trying to accept unwanted thoughts rather than doing battle with them can be beneficial. Here are the instructions from one study which found it decreased participants’ distress:

“Struggling with your target thought is like struggling in quicksand. I want you to watch your thoughts. Imagine that they are coming out of your ears on little signs held by marching soldiers. I want you to allow the soldiers to march by in front of you, like a little parade. Do not argue with the signs, or avoid them, or make them go away. Just watch them march by.” (Marcks & Woods, 2005, p. 440)

6. Meditate

Similar to acceptance, Buddhist mindfulness meditation promotes an attitude of compassion and non-judgement towards the thoughts that flit through the mind. This may also be a helpful approach to get rid of negative thoughts.

There is a basic guide to mindfulness meditation in this article on how meditation improves attention.

7. Self-affirmation

Self-affirmation is the latest psychological cure-all. It involves thinking about your positive traits and beliefs and has been found to increase social confidence and self-control, amongst other benefits.

It may also be helpful to get rid of negative thoughts, although it has only been tested experimentally a few times.

8. Write about it

In contrast to self-affirmation, expressive writing—writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings—has been tested extensively and it does have various health and psychological benefits (although generally only with a small effect).

Writing emotionally about yourself, then, may help to get rid of negative thoughts.

The disclaimer

A note on how to get rid of negative thoughts from Daniel Wegner:

“The techniques and therapies explored here vary from the well established to the experimental, but it should be remembered that, on balance, they lean toward the experimental…these assembled solutions for unwanted thoughts should be taken as hypotheses and possibilities rather than as trusty remedies or recommendations.”

That said, none of these techniques are likely to do any harm and all of them are probably an improvement on thought suppression.

Anxiety: The Reason It Can Socially Isolate You

 
Anxiety has a strange effect on this critical social ability, study finds.

Anxiety makes people focus more on themselves and reduces their empathy for others, psychologists have found.Anxiety interferes with the ability to take other people’s perspective, new research reveals.

The study’s results may help explain why anxiety can be such an isolating emotion.

The conclusions come from a series of experiments published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Todd et al., 2015).

For the research, people were made anxious by recounting a nervous moment from their past.

Then they were given a series of tests.

In one they were shown a picture of a person with a book next to them.

They were asked to say which side it was on.

Although the book was on the man in the picture’s left-hand-side, it was on the viewer’s right-hand side.

In other words: whether you see the book on the right or the left depends on whose perspective you are taking.

Over half of non-anxious people said the book was on the left, indicating they’d taken the other person’s perspective.

But, of the anxious people, only about one-quarter took the other person’s perspective.

The study’s authors concluded:

“…anxious participants displayed greater egocentrism in their mental-state reasoning: They were more likely to describe an object using their own spatial perspective, had more difficulty resisting egocentric interference when identifying an object from others’ spatial perspectives, and relied more heavily on privileged knowledge when inferring others’ beliefs.”

And they don’t think these results are explained by anxiety being a negative emotion.

The restricted empathy seems to be a unique effect of anxiety:

“…the egocentric effect of anxiety cannot be explained by the combination of negative valence and high arousal alone; rather, it seems that feeling anxious uniquely led to an increased reliance on one’s own egocentric perspective, to the detriment of understanding others’ viewpoints.”