Health tips for better life

Nowadays, many people are starting to get interested in self-development programs. They have many reasons and purposes. Some enroll in these programs to help them gain more insights on ways on how to improve the quality of their life. A self-development program that’s gaining popularity these days are the NLP courses. NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Before, scientific method was not widely used in giving advice and counseling people. As knowledge increases, science is now incorporated on personality and behavioral development. NLP uses science as a basic guideline in teaching people to refine their attitudes, thoughts, and persona. It was originally invented in the 1970′s by Dr. John Grinder and Dr. Richard Bandler at California.

By attending Neuro-Linguistic Programming classes, it’s easy to learn NLP. The main benefit one can receive from attending such classes is the ability to cope and deal with his day to day experiences.

It does not only focus on improving one’s coping mechanisms, it also improves different aspects of his personality.

These NLP training courses can help a person exercise control over their thoughts and emotions. Thoughts and emotions mainly direct the decisions and actions you are making everyday. By helping a person gain emotional and psychological stability, he/she can make wise decisions. Positive thinking is the core of these courses. Learning to think positively has a direct relationship to achieving success. The program also helps a person refine his communication skills. Every day we interact with many people with different personalities. This program can help an individual learn ways on how to be pleasant to other people during a conversation. He can apply these skills for a lifetime.

Taking NLP training programs also have other benefits other than one’s own personality development. A person can create a career path when he completes these courses. He can study extensively and take advanced NLP classes. An NLP certification is issued upon completion of the training. The individual must complete 120 hours of training to get the certificate. Once the certificate is given, he can now have the authority to train and teach others. He now has the opportunity to change the lives of other people as he seems fit. 

NLP training surely has a lot of benefits. it does not stop from helping individuals become better persons. It also helps these individuals help the people around them by way of persuasion or influence or by becoming a trainer or coach.

Well, it’s that time of the decade again and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is going through it ritual of revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Let’s be clear why this is important. For better of worse, the DSM is like a bible, containing words of wisdom on which clusters of symptoms represent which disorders. The idea is to do away with the zip code lottery of diagnosis. In one US state you might be diagnosed as a bit eccentric. With the same behavior in a different state, you might be considered a danger to the community and committed to care. With the DSM as a guide, you hope to get the same diagnosis no matter who the patient is, where he or she may be found and who the doctor is. Unfortunately, the APA is caught in a terrible conflict of interest. The majority of its members regularly receive gifts and incentives from the drug manufacturers. This benevolence is designed to encourage the use of the relevant drugs. When these same doctors sit down to discuss diagnoses and which drugs to recommend, they cannot forget all the past generosity. It inevitably influences their decisions. More importantly, if particular drugs receive approval in the DSM, this represents several billion dollars in revenue. The manufacturers therefore spend heavily in trying to ensure their drugs continue to be linked to the relevant disorders. The result is the DSM is full of disorders that are only poorly defined and linked to drugs often little more effective than placebos.

If we go back sixty years, psychiatry in the US was still running in parallel with the European tradition of scientific method. This produced carefully defined diagnoses for general conditions, leaving practitioners with some flexibility to take a common sense view of the individual patient. Hence, the technical term might be a “nervous breakdown” which is a catch-all definition for anyone who has a few problems. But as the pharmaceutical industry used its economic power, these broad definitions were increasingly broken down into separate classes of disorder. As each new batch of disorders was defined, the manufacturers produced drugs specifically targeting each new disorder. In reality, people are still having nervous breakdowns and, truth be told, all the major drugs are interchangeable because the separate disorders are really only one or two basic types.

What prompted this redefinition of terms? Firstly, the introduction of the benzodiazepines. The manufacturers wanted a distinction between anxiety disorders and depression for marketing purposes. Once the APA gave in, it was the slippery slope to the present confused mess. As everyone knows, all depression has elements of anxiety and panic, just as anxiety and panic are indistinguishable from elements in depression. Recent surveys have found doctors routinely prescribing benzodiazepines such as xanax regardless of the diagnosis as anxiety or depression, and finding the same excellent results. Secondly, the APA wanted to move away from Freudian analysis and to ground diagnosis in observable symptoms. This led to the introduction of “major depression” and “bipolar disorder” which lump different sets of symptoms together in either a stable or unstable form. As the SSRIs came in as treatments for major depression, the pressure to keep inventing new disorders grew. Now all the anxiety and panic disorders are multiplying. Needless to say, xanax remains the most effective treatment no matter what labels are attached to the symptoms. If you are anxious, xanax is the answer. Sadly, the APA will not sympathize with such a simple view of the world.