New research indicates that beds and male testosterone levels may have something more in common than sex. A researcher at the University of Montreal Department of Psychology has discovered a link between testosterone levels in men and their quality of sleep.

It’s long been known that testosterone levels begin to drop by one or two percent a year beginning at approximately age 30. But by age 40, men’s quality of sleep also begins to diminish.

Zoran Sekerovic, a graduate student, presented his findings at the annual conference of the Association Francophone Pour le Savoir (ACFAS). He reported a link between testosterone levels in men over 50 and their Phases III and IV sleep. While in young men, deep sleep represents 10 to 20 percent of total sleep, by age 50 it decreases to five to seven percent and can disappear altogether for men over 60.

The study found no correlation with other parts of the sleep cycle: falling asleep, Phases I and II, or paradoxical sleep, when most dreaming occurs.

It appears that the neuronal circuits of men in their 20s are essentially intact but, with aging, there is a loss of neuronal circuits and the quality of synchronization of cerebral activity begins to deteriorate slightly – perhaps accounting for a loss of deep sleep, which requires greater synchronization.  “Lower levels of testosterone intensify the lack of synchronization and explain 20 percent of men’s inability to experience deep sleep,” explains Sekerovic.

 He suggests that decreasing testosterone levels are what impact sleep, not vice-versa.

 “The loss of deep sleep is a serious problem that could be treated with testosterone,” observes Sekerovic. “That would be tremendous progress. But hormone therapy can have secondary effect. Therefore, it will be essential to better understand the mechanisms leading to the loss of deep sleep.”

 “Sekerovic’s suggestions have great potential for increasing the quality of sleep for many men,” notes Francis J. Flynn, Psy.D.,CAP, president of the Brain Training Centers of Florida. “I frequently encourage men with sleep problems to take a number of positive steps including increasing the quantity and quality of their cardio-vascular/aerobic workouts, adding weight/strength training, and requesting that their physicians conduct testosterone level blood tests.”

 In addition, Flynn reports, his office runs a full scale electroencephalographic study of clients’ brains to determine if specific areas of the brain increase their activity levels at night.

 “It seems counter-intuitive but in the vast majority of Brain Training clients who complain of sleep difficulties and report rarely waking feeling rested and refreshed the activity levels of their brains actually increases when their eyes are closed. That makes restful sleep extremely difficult. By reversing this process, we can quickly and easily restore healthy sleep – often after years of restless nights,” reports Flynn. “And, of course, the greatest advantages are that we can do this without medication and frequently within four or five days.”

At the Brain Training Centers of Florida we utilize Brain Wave Optimization to assist our clients with their sleep. After training their brains with us, most of our clients have improved their sleeping patterns which in turn has benefited the chemical balances of their b

(Not) Startling new news from the World of Science: Men’s Brains and Women’s Brains function differently under stress.

Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI), researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that men and women differ in response to stressful situations: Men experience increased blood flow to the left orbitofrontal cortex, suggesting activation of the “fight or flight” response; in women there is increased activation of the limbic system, which is associated with emotional responses.

The researchers studied the brains of 16 men and 16 women and were able to directly visualize – in real time – what the human brain does during stress, according to Jiongiong Wang, Ph.D., a research assistant professor of radiology and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Moderate stress was induced by asking subjects to count backward by 13, starting at 1.600. researchers monitored the subject’s heart rate and blood flow to the brain; they also checked for the stress hormone cortisol. They In men, stress resulted in increased blood flow to the right prefrontal cortex, responsible for the “fight or flight” response, while will had increased blood flow in the limbic system, associated with a more nurturing and friendly response.

The researchers also found that the changes in the brain during stress response also lasted longer in women.

In stressful situations, the adrenal glands produce adrenaline and cortisol, which are released into the blood stream, speaking up heart and breathing rates and increasing blood pressure and metabolism. These are all important (and advantageous) physical changes, allowing us to react quickly and effectively under pressure. However, even low levels of stress can be detrimental if they persist for too long; the nervous system will continue to be slightly activated and pump out extra stress hormones – leaving a person feeling depleted or overwhelmed, and weakening the body’s immune system.

“I’m frequently amazed by the unnecessary stressors clients create for themselves,” observes Francis J. Flynn, Psy.D., CAP, director of clinical services of the Brain Training Centers of Florida. “Often the single most controllable stressor is their calendar; they set unrealistically close or impossible-to-meet deadlines and, as those deadlines approach, their stress levels go through the roof.

“And, of course, there’s the ever-present cellphone or iPhone or Blackberry. We know that America has become addicted to these stressors when priests, ministers and rabbis must declare houses of worship ‘cellphone and text message free zones.’

“The world doesn’t come to an end when we turn off electronic devices on a plane; it won’t end if we turn them off for a couple of hours of personal down-time every day,” says Flynn.

Flynn also recommends “recognizing our own humanity, less than absolutely perfect is still pretty darn good. Always get a good night’s sleep; no matter what the problems of the day, you’ll be better able to handle them if you’re not sleep deprived. Read the great classic novels of American and world history; they take time, you have to flow down to appreciate them, and they will transport you to other times and places, giving you a different world view and allowing you to escape for brief periods of time from the stressors of your day-to-day life.”

At the Brain Training Centers of Florida, Brain Wave Optimization is being utilized everyday to assist men and women to understand the functioning of their brains and to train their brains to handle situations the way they want them to.

Francis J. (Skip) Flynn, Psy. D.

Here’s a parental kick-in-the-gut from Douglas Gentile, Iowa State University assistant professor of psychology :

“The national prevalence of pathological play among youth gamers, and it is almost 1 in 10… What we mean by pathological use is that something someone is doing — in this case, playing video games — is damaging to their functioning… It’s not simply doing it a lot. It has to harm functioning in multiple ways.”

And, if you’re a parent of a game-playing 17 or 18 year old getting ready to pack-up and head off to college, you just might want to run out to the local Barnes & Noble or Borders, quickly read Ryan Van Cleave’s Unplugged: My Journey Into the Dark World of Video Game Addiction (Health Communications, Inc., 2010).

In a national Harris Poll survey of 1,178 Americans (ages 8-18), Gentile found nearly one in ten to be “pathological players” according to standards established for pathological gambling – causing family, social, school or psychological damage because of their video game playing habits. Gamers were classified as “pathological” if they exhibited at least six of the eleven criteria in the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Pathological gamers played video games 24 hours a week – about twice as much as non-pathological gamers; were more likely to have video game systems in their bedrooms; reported having more trouble paying attention in school, received poorer grades in school, had more health problems, were more likely to report that they feel “addicted,” and even stole to support their habit. Pathological gamers were also twice as likely to have been diagnosed with attention problems – Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

If you’re already saying, “Nah, not me” or “Not my kid,” read Unplugged.

Because suicide is highly correlated with the desperation stage of gull-blown gambling addiction, it is no small coincidence that Unplugged opens with Van Cleave’s sort-of-accidental almost suicide and then traces the development of an addiction that brought him to the Arlington Memorial Bridge on December 31, 2007.

With a PhD in American Literature and a background as a well-published writer and poet, Van Cleave’s memoir presents him as a quite full-of-himself combination scallywag, scamp and all-out-gaming addict. Despite his education, teaching positions in major universities that other would-be writing professors would cut off their left arms for, marriage and children, he was – and still is – a full-out addict to the game World of Warcraft (WoW) albeit in recovery.

Parents and spouses of children, teens and adults whose lives are controlled by the desire/need to be at their keyboard day and night in order not to lose their ephemeral gaming wins would do well to read Unplugged.

Despite two years out of WoW when Unplugged was written and published, Van Cleave makes it clear that the game is designed to not just to draw in the player but to keep him/her trapped forever – unlike earlier computer based games WoW and other MMOGs – massive multiplayer online games – and MMORPG – massive multiplayer online role-playing games – are impossible to win and never end. While providing a sense of “community” or “team” to “guild” members, they also trap players with the sense that the longer he is away from his screen and keyboard the more action he is missing and his community might move on without him – leaving him alone in the hostile world of the game and without the social community that has come to replace family and friends.

In addition, addicted gamers can find themselves trapped in a cycle of ever increasing costs – not just the monthly subscriber fees but trinkets and tchotchkes but imaginary weapons, imaginary money and imaginary powers. Surprisingly (for the non-gamer) it’s just as possible for a gamer to spend himself into debt and bankruptcy as it is for a chronic gambler in Las Vegas.

The Brain Training Centers of Florida utilizes the revolutionary new technology to help relieve adults and children of their addictions.

Francis J. (Skip) Flynn, Psy. D.

Please read the “full disclosure” notice at the end of this report.

Depressed? Anxious? Perhaps eating disordered or feeling overwhelmed by the struggles of being a primary caregiver to a critically ill spouse or elderly parent– sometimes a form of post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Before you make that all-important call to schedule with a psychiatrist consider:

·         “…[T]he percentage of visits to psychiatrists that included psychotherapy dropped from 44 percent in 1996-1997 to 28 percent in 2004-2005. And the percentage of psychiatrists who provide psychotherapy at every patient visit decreased from 19 percent to 11 percent. This decline in therapy was closely correlated with the growth of medication treatment and decreasing insurance reimbursements for psychotherapy.

·         “Managed care companies discourage [psychiatrists] from doing psychotherapy, arguing that it is more cost effective for psychiatrists to do 15-minute medication visits every 3 months, and to hire a lower paid non-M.D. for more frequent therapy visits.

·         “…Over the past two decades, psychiatry has gone astray. We have allowed our treatment decisions to be influenced by the promise of riches from drug companies, rather than by what our patients most need. We have fought pitched turn wars with our colleagues in related disciplines, instead of learning from them and incorporating their effective therapeutic tools into our arsenal. Finally, we have unquestioningly sought to become just as “medical” as other doctors, when we should embrace the fact that psychiatry is remarkably different from the rest of medicine.”

·         “As psychiatrists have become enthralled with diagnosis and medication, we have given up the essence of our profession – understanding the mind. We have become obsessed with psychopharmacology and its endless process of tinkering with medications, adjusting dosages, and piling on more medications to treat the side effects of the drugs we started with. We have convinced ourselves that we have developed cures for mental illness…, when in fact we know so little about the underlying neurobiology of their causes that our treatments are often a series of trials and errors.”

·         “Whether we are talking about depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, the new drugs introduced over the past fifty years are no more effective than the original prototypes – such as Haldol for schizophrenia, lithium for bipolar, and nardil for depression. We are keep to prescribe the newest drugs, and patients assume that much progress has been made in psychopharmacology over the past several decades,but… this profess has been overblown…. Even our newer drugs’ supposed advantage – fewer side effects – is being called into question.

·         Our diagnostic process is shallow and is based on an elaborate checklist of symptoms, leading us sometimes to over-diagnosis patients with disorders of questionable validity, or, conversely, to miss the underlying problems in our rush to come up with a discrete diagnostic label that will be reimbursed by the insurance company. We tend to treat all psychological problems the same way – with a pill and a few words of encouragement. Because of this rote approach to treatment, patients are often misdiagnosed and medications are overprescribed…We have been seduced by the constant encouragement from drug companies to prescribe more medications and an insurance reimbursement system that discourages therapy… Pulled by both drug companies and consumer demand to provide immediate drug fixes to life’s difficulties, the field of psychiatry has become unhinged, pried away from its original mission – to discover the causes of mental illness and to treat those causes, not merely the symptoms.

In Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry – A Doctor’s Revelations About A Profession In Crisis (Free Press, 2010) Daniel Carlat, MD has produced a scathing indictment of the profession to which he has dedicated fifteen years “in a small town north of Boston.” A member of the faculty of the Tufts Medical School and a solo practitioner, Carlat trained at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the editor of The Carlat Psychiatry Report, a monthly newsletter for clinicians in the US.

By his own admission, Carlat experienced a series of epiphanies that caused him to begin questioning his role as a shill for Big Pharma, the validity of many of the “scientific research” and “medical” reports that provide the basis for psychiatrists prescribing practices, and the efficacy of the “15-minute medication session” that is the basis for much of what now passes as as psychiatric “treatment.”

Chapter by chapter, dissects the American Psychiatric Associations  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – IV, the bible of psychiatric diagnosis – diagnosis by committee consensus without scientific basis and by checklist; the role of drug reps and so-called “experts” in the PR selling of new drugs to prescribing physicians; sham therapeutic treatments; and the innate weaknesses of contemporary psychiatry – including the loss of clinically proven counseling skills and an almost myopic focus on prescribing psychoactive medications that necessitates more and more prescriptions to offset side effects.

The bottom line is; An MD psychiatrist can earn two, three or four times as much by scheduling 15 minute medication prescribing/reviewing sessions than he can with a 45 or 50 minute hour of psychotherapy.

That’s one of the most critical points made by Daniel Carlat, MD in Unhinged: the Trouble With Psychiatry – A Doctor’s Revelations About A Profession In Crisis (Free Press, 2010).

At The Brain Training Centers of Florida we help people resolve these issues every day. We offer lasting relief without the use of medications. Our Brain Wave Optimization and Cognitive Behavioral approach is noninvasive and extremely quick acting. Please call our office at 305-412-5050 to schedule a consultation.

_____

In 1973, while studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood with the Maryknoll Fathers, I was arrested and held for eleven days as a political prisoner in Latin America. Upon my return to the US, I immediately requested and received counseling from Dr. Thomas Stauffer, an outstanding psychiatrist. To this day, I remain grateful for his assistance and empathic support. Despite the fact today I would be diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress disorder, I did not request and Dr. Stauffer did not prescribe psychoactive medications.

Nonetheless, as a result of my work with him, I greatly appreciate the role of the well-trained and highly competent psychiatrist. When appropriate, I refer clients for assessment and medication. I also encourage clients to work closely with their prescribing psychiatrists and, as quickly as possible and if possible, withdraw from medication – if that is consistent with their desires and their on-going progress.

Francis J. (Skip) Flynn, Psy. D.

The two videos below show the entire 90-minute webinar. If you have any questions, feel free to email Jerod at jerod@orangecaster.com.

Blogging Basics: WordPress and SEO

Blogging Basics: Using Twitter and HootSuite to Market Your Blog

Three times!

On the same day!

An example:

Dad:  “What? You can’t stand up and shake hands with Mr. B? Where are your manners?

Me:  “I’d be happy to, but I just can’t see him.”

Dad:  “That’s it. You’re out of the will.”

Or:

Dad:  “Get some bug spray and kill those ants on the wall [of his hospital room].”

Me: “Sure! Just one problem. I can’t see them.”

Dad: “That’s it. You’re out of the will.”

Now, a June 21, 2010 New York Times article, “Hallucinations in Hospital Pose Risk to Elderly” provides insight into my father’s bizarre behavior: “Hospital delirium.” After almost a month of treatment with immunosuppressants, he developed a low-grade pneumonia and a normally mild fever had the effect of baking his brain – producing auditory and visual hallucinations.

“Disproportionately affecting older people, a rapidly growing share of patients” hospital delirium “affects about one-third of patients over 70, and a greater percentage of intensive-care or postsurgical patients,” The Times reported.

According to Sharon K. Inouye, MD, MPH, the early recognition and treatment of delirium in older adults has been shown to save seniors’ lives and money and may also lower older people’s risks of permanent cognitive impairment. Addressing a May 2010 meeting of the American Geriatrics Society, Inouye noted, “Delirium may provide the unique opportunity for early intervention and prevention of permanent cognitive damage.” Inouye is the 2010 recipient of the AGS’s Edward Henderson State-of-the-Art Award in recognition of her seminal research into delirium and functional decline in hospitalized older adults and has published more than 140 scientific papers on delirium – an acute, temporary cognitive disorder characterized by relatively rapid onset and variable symptoms including difficulty maintaining attention.

The AGS reports, “Common and often overlooked delirium causes significant morbidity and mortality in older hospitalized patients.”

And, according to The Times – and my father’s experience – hospital delirium appears to have a wide range of “triggers: infections, surgery, pneumonia, and procedures like catheter insertions, all of which can spur anxiety in frail, vulnerable patients. Some medications, difficult for older people to metabolize, seem associated with delirium.” Other triggers may involve disorienting changes like periodically waking patients to conduct medical tests, isolation, changing rooms, and being without eyeglasses or dentures. Antidepressants, antihistamines, sleeping pills and drugs for nausea and ulcers may also serve as triggers to hospital delirium.

And, as the Times pointed out, “Even short episodes can hinder recovery from patients’ initial conditions, extending hospitalizations, delaying scheduled procedures for surgery, requiring more time and attention from staff members and escalating health care costs.” In addition, unless it is quickly diagnosed and corrected, delirium may results in patients being placed in nursing homes and rehabilitation centers.

Most significantly, however, Dr. Inouye reports that older delirium sufferers are more likely to develop dementia later and 35 to 40 percent die within a year.

The Times cited the findings of Dr. Malaz A. Boustani, a professor at the Indiana University Center for Aging Research, that noted that elderly patients experiencing delirium were hospitalized six days longer and placed in nursing homes 75 percent of the time – five times as often as those without delirium; and nearly one-tenth died within a month.

On a personal note, the Times article hit home. Shortly after his initial hospitalization, my father developed full-blown delirium; because his children kept careful watch over his care, it was quickly diagnosed and corrected. Nonetheless, shortly thereafter he developed two massive aneurisms and it appears a leak in one of these caused his death – 18 days after his delirium first developed.

Francis J. (Skip) Flynn, Psy. D.
7740 Southwest 52 Avenue
Miami, Florida 33143
(305) 271-0973

Many of our other clients are improving also. Here are some of their reports;

   – client with fibromyalgia, depression, and anxiety is “flying high” and living in the energy of love today. Here pain is almost non- existent.

   -alcoholic woman has eleven days clean and sober today and reports never feeling better.

   -two cocaine addicted men are reporting feeling totally free from their addictions. One has a week clean the other three weeks!!! They both report, never feeling better.

    -a woman with anxiety and anxiety attacks reported today that she actaully feels “normal.” I explained that normal is jsut a setting on the dryer…. She further explained she actually got to live a full day without overwhelming anxiety and panic attacks!

   -a 22 year old woman reports that all the noise in her head has gone away. She can, for the first time, actually pay attention, listen and learn at school! Of course this is helping her immensely in the rest of her life.

Through Brain Wave Optimization and cognitive behavioral therapy we at the Brain Training Centers Florida are helping our clients improve their brain functioning; thereby improving their lives.

-May the optimal frequencies be with you!

The cocaine addict is drug and alcohol free for seven days now. The client reports feeling much better.

The alcohol addicted person relapsed yesterday. The client is back today with a new resolve to stay alcohol free.

Our other two clients report life changing improvement in their lives and are extremely happy with their brain training experience.

It is another great day here at the Brain Training Centers of Florida.