John Castleford Blogs

Obesity is growing. Do excuse the phrasing! But the most overweight children in Europe are to be found in the UK, and obesity rates are approaching those in the USA. The latest research confirms what we already know: diets don't work. Well, they do, for a while. But many dieters not only can't maintain weight loss, they often gain weight.  Today, 25 April 2018, I saw celebrity TV chef Jamie Oliver on TV expressing concerns. Our kids are eating too much of the wrong food. More can found here found on his Ted talk  . The problem began in the 1970s: we all blithely accepted the idea that the way to stop getting fat was to stop eating fat. The intuitive appeal of that remains widely accepted today. Even though it's wrong. The problem that has stayed with us for 50 or so years is that much of the flavour of food comes from fat. So when the fat was taken out, the food industry knew we weren't happy with bland food, so they replaced the fat with sugar. Want proof? L...

What to Do When You’re Depressed   John Castleford     6 April 2017     1 Comment     activities ,  depression ,  sadness We’ve all been there: in a state of sadness. Sometimes it’s despair. Next day we might get over it, particularly if the sun is shining. But sometimes it doesn’t just go away. And when it persists, low mood can become deeply depressing. Perhaps the most debilitating effect of pathological worry, deep anxiety and the pit of cerebral despair itself – depression – is that soulless, cheerless feeling of anger without enthusiasm, leading the mind to stay firmly focused on “what’s wrong”. This cognitive version of tunnel-vision literally loses sight of “what’s right”. But not only is it an imbalance; it’s highly resistant to any remotely positive perspectives. When challenged by any optimistic attempts to diminish the insidious feeling of mental angst and gloom, the mind can be downright bigoted. Persistent...

Are some countries happier places than others? " All the top countries tend to have high values for all six of the key variables that have been found to support well-being: income, healthy life expectancy, s ocial support, freedom, trust and generosity."  An annual ssessment of how happy the world is published every year, and 20 March 2018 is the United Nations World Happiness Day, and the day that the World Happiness Report for 2018 was published. The last few years have seen a consistently high ranking for Scandinavian countries. The report makes fascinating reading.  Four different countries are consistently the happiest countries in recent years. And they all have something in common. They're all Scandinavian. Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Norway.  Their individual rankings may change from year to year but they're all consistently top performers. Seems like the Nordic countries have worked out what the rest of us haven't.  Interestingly the biggest climb...

Q: Besides temperature and the fuel level in the car, what else fluctuates? A: Our self esteem! Sometimes it's up and sometimes it drops. When it's low it can be harder to get motivated; when it's high we can be unstoppable. Self-esteem is simply a measure of how we rate ourselves. It is not fixed and it's not "real" — it’s just a feeling about how we feel about ourselves. It varies from day to day, sometimes hourly. If we don't value ourselves we deny ourselves so much of what life has to offer. Just as training is necessary for sporting performance, and diet and exercise underpin physical health, effort is needed to bring about desirable outcomes. And that effort WILL pay off in helping to feel better IF you believe the effort needed will pay off. Too many people refuse to believe they deserve to feel better about themselves. So they don't try. To raise self-esteem we have two options: lower our expectations of ourselves or increase our ach...

We often read or hear that our brain is wired for negativity. To what extent are negative emotions stronger than positive emotions?  WHY has evolution selected for stronger negative emotions, rather than positivity.? Wouldn't life be so much better if happiness was more pronounced than uncertainty and anxiety? How we deal with life is largely influenced by how we feel. So if negativity is a more prominent feature of our lives, then that outlook is a major influence: there is a very good reason why negative reactions are FAR stronger. So when we understand why they’re so powerful, and why it’s not our fault, we are in a much better place to reassess our outlooks and perspectives! Let’s dump the idea that positive and negative are just opposite ends on the same scale. They’re not. Negative feelings are so strong because that is part of our evolutionary heritage. In the prehistoric past, well before Facebook and The Simpsons, we were strongly programmed to survive threats and dan...

Our modern existence and angst seem to reside side-by-side. And a whole industry of self-help experts and personal development gurus are only too willing to sell you their services, books and subscriptions to a continuous series of solutions. Everyone touts ‘positive’ thinking. Get rid of your negativity! Embrace the power within. Sound familiar? Which, of course we’ve tried. And it’s not as though lessons haven’t been learned in the process. Not the least of which is that it often doesn’t work. What we learn is how quickly we can lose confidence in ourselves. We’ve experienced just how rapidly self-esteem can diminish, and, sometimes we even become experts at how to become firmly stuck and helpless in a confusing and challenging world. There is an irony here. We’ve learned to become less, not more, resilient, More pessimistic and less optimistic. Less confident. We’ve learned the “lessons of life”! We’ve learned to be far more “realistic”. As we don't lie to ourselves, we...

Lots of news items on mental health recently. While it’s good that the stigma of mental health is diminishing, and that key issues are increasingly being debated openly and prominently, many individuals still fear the thought that they may have mental health issues. And yet that fear parallels the incontrovertible growth of those seeking help from doctors and therapists. The wider world seems beset with declining mental health. We all know that a major proportion of the population of all western countries are, or will be, seeking help for conditions such as depression and anxiety. In 2015, the “top five” countries ‘on’ antidepressants are USA, Iceland, Australia, Canada and Denmark. Which is interesting as the last three also share a high ranking of happiest populations in the world, with Denmark topping the happiness league table, according to a global study of 156 nations ( http://worldhappiness.report ). Happiness, with or without antidepressants, does seem a Nordic/Sc...

If pressed, most mental health professionals will admit they really have no idea what causes depression. And many admit to increasing suspicions that neither medication or therapy seem very effective in dealing with depression, long term. But there is increasing evidence that depression is a consequence, not a cause, of negative thinking. More and more credence is being given to the idea that the body can only deal with so much negative thinking. Just as we can only cope with a limited amount of stress. So a prolonged period of negative thinking -- often, but not always, following a traumatic event -- leads us to feel increasingly numb.  To absolutely everything. Depression is now being seen not as a mental disorder, but rather as a body defence mechanism against stress and things we find it hard to handle. Research now shows that negative thinking can occur hundreds of times a day, often subconsciously. So, faced with too much stress, the body pulls down protecti...

None of us are anywhere near as smart as we like to think. So just how clever are we? How many inspirational insights do we “tick” as being relevant, without really internalising them by absorbing them fully.  One of my favourites is ‘ do what you have always done, and you’ll get what you’ve always got .’ If you want a different outcome in life, you can’t keep doing the same things and expect a different result; I think Einstein defined this as insanity. But most of us keep doing what we’ve always done and wonder why we always get the same results. An equally wise thinker, Aristotle, recognised that we are what we habitually do. And, of course, our thinking patterns are nothing if not habituated. We may think we are supremely intelligent, whether we attended the university of life, or other of hallowed halls of learning. But when it comes to thinking about our lives, what the hell happened to all those lofty dreams we had for ourselves when we were young? The sad realit...

It's so understandable. You look up at yet another overcast day: wherever you look the grey leaden skies stretch all the way to the horizon. Just like yesterday, and the day before. It's cold. It's damp. Winter just keeps hanging on and on and on. Will the sun ever appear?? Does this sound familiar? Do you feel depressed in the winter? Have you been “diagnosed” with the medical condition “seasonal affective disorder?” If you ask your friends and family if ‘anyone else feels down when the weather was poor?’ would you be surprised is a common response is “massively"? Family doctors expect to see people with low mood in the winter. I totally understand the temptation to label winter-induced gloom as a medical condition. Just like when they put " Taloia " on sick notes — which UK doctors allegedly did when they couldn’t be bothered to precisely ascertain the nature of widespread sniffles (TALOIA='There's a lot of it about!').  We all agree we ...