addiction

Help Friends And Family Escape Heroin Addiction

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addictionDealing with heroin addiction requires devotion and persistence. The best way to cope with addiction is to surround the addicted friend or family member with positive energy.

The key to unlocking the source of addiction is to understand its nature. Each family member and friend plays a crucial role in the recovery process.  Affection, understanding and spending quality time with the addict aids recovery.

Aiding a loved one through the recovery process from heroin addiction requires a lot of time and effort. As such it’s of vital importance that caregivers care for themselves as well. If parties involved in the healing process neglect themselves they hinder the recovery process. Continue reading →

Fear is a Gift and Here is Why

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fearDanielle Benvenuto – Fear is an inner guidance system, an evolutionary necessity, which warns us when something is wrong. It is our fight or flight response which protects and, if we choose, elevates us. If we choose not to become frozen in time-fleeing from things that are no longer harmful to us and/or fighting battles that no longer need to be fought.

I don’t believe fear is a bad thing. In fact, I think it is a gift — a blank canvas of opportunity that takes on a negative or positive quality in our lives depending on how we choose to navigate it and something we can either reject or be open to receiving.

It has a Jekyll and Hyde energy to it and can manifest as darkness-a gloomy cloud hovering and taking over one’s life sometimes in the form of destruction or as a life force-a frenetic and seemingly chaotic energy which uses its disturbing force to ask us to transform and create our lives anew. We need to integrate the Jekyll and Hyde of fear instead of polarize it so we can do just that-transform and create the lives we want. Continue reading →

Find The Right Key For Unlocking Your Problems

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problemsWe all have things about ourselves we would like to change. Maybe we’ve been working on them for years, or maybe it’s an issue that has only emerged recently. Whatever the case, there are lots of different options we can explore to come to a resolution, but we may find that we don’t solve the problem as quickly as we expect.

In a world where we can do everything instantly, it’s very frustrating to have a problem that we can’t fix with the first thing we try. The more personal the issue, the more troublesome it is when we can’t get to the bottom of it with the first idea.

There are countless factors that go into our ability to solve problems, and if we don’t address them all, we may not succeed. That doesn’t mean that some problems can’t be solved. It just means that you may not solve them on the first try.

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The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered – It’s Not What You Think

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 Johann Hari – It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned, and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong, and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

addictionIf we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.

I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.

I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind — what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can’t stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.

If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: “Drugs. Duh.” It’s not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That’s what addiction means. Continue reading →

Junk Food More Deadly Than War, Famine, Genocide

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JunkFoodDietHealth“Food in the end, in our tradition, is something holy. It’s not about nutrients and calories. It’s about sharing. It’s about honesty. It’s about identity.” ~ Louise Fresco

You may already know that junk food is bad for your health, but you may not realize how bad it can be. A new study from the School of Medical Sciences at Australia’s University of New South Wales points to profound brain changes that junk food causes, making a junk food habit “more deadly than war, famine, and genocide”.

Say what? Yep, the food war is real, and though the UNSW study was conducted on rats, the brain changes observed matter to us humans. As mammals we share similar brain functioning in the orbitofrontal cortex, the part of our gray matter responsible for sensing and evaluating the pleasurable aspects of food.

Makers of junk food know it is highly addictive, but the UNSW study proves unequivocally that junk food alters behavior by causing near-permanent changes in the brain’s reward circuiting, an alteration that can trigger obesity.

The study abstract concluded:

“We observed that rats fed a cafeteria diet for 2 weeks showed impaired sensory-specific satiety following consumption of a high calorie solution. The deficit in expression of sensory-specific satiety was also present 1 week following the withdrawal of cafeteria foods. Thus, exposure to obesogenic diets may impact upon neurocircuitry involved in motivated control of behavior.”

While mammals developed a natural trigger over our evolutionary history which prevents us from over-eating, a phenomenon termed “sensory-specific satiety,” the consumption of junk food overrides this natural ‘kill’ switch that allows us to regulate the calories we consume. Continue reading →