“Self-criticism ... can lead to ruminative thoughts that interfere with our productivity, and it can impact our bodies by stimulating inflammatory mechanisms that lead to chronic illness and accelerate aging”
This assertion may sit outside conventional medical science and mainstream accepted wisdom, but it aligns with my own experience.
After trying unsuccessfully for years to overcome depression/anxiety, chronic fatigue and other mysterious illnesses (asthma, skin problems, headaches, back tension/pain) using conventional/material remedies (antidepressants, exercise, diets), I added emotion-based treatments to my regimen about 6 years ago, and have had much greater success.
In particular, I've undertaken practices that identify negative beliefs, traumas and sabotaging behavioural patterns that are held in the subconscious, then allow these issues to be understood and resolved. Self-criticism has been big part of what I've been able to work through.
It's been no quick fix (it seems I've had a lot of baggage to work through), but bit by bit, as my emotional health has improved, my physiological health has steadily improved, as have all the outer-world indicators like relationships, productivity and career.
I'm now comfortable suggesting that this approach is overlooked by mainstream medicine to the great detriment of many people suffering chronic illness, and given the link with inflammation that has been suggested in this article and elsewhere, and that I seem to have experienced myself, far more progress could be made in addressing inflammatory and autoimmune illnesses if this approach were to be taken seriously.
>This assertion may sit outside conventional medical science and mainstream accepted wisdom, but it aligns with my own experience.
Conventional medical science is still at the level chemistry was in the alchemy days. Heck, it was just a few decades ago that they thought lobotomy was a cure -- and tons of other BS non-scientific convictions held in the last and this century.
It should itself better align with individual experiences and physiological responses...
I wish that global anecdotal database for health issues that people keep talking about existed so we could pool data and come up with some correlation for things.
I was fortunate enough to have started directly with an emotion-based treatment and the changes from last year to now have been huge. Very incremental and I have no idea when they happened, but I feel so much better now.
> I'm now comfortable suggesting that this approach is overlooked by mainstream medicine to the great detriment of many people suffering chronic illness
You're welcome to email me directly for more info - address in profile.
The techniques that have been most successful for me are those that involve kinesiology muscle-testing, which identify where emotional triggers lead to neurological/physiological responses. There are several versions of it around. There's a book about a do-it-yourself version called Self Clearing [1]. I've used that approach a lot, but it's worth having a good practitioner to see from time to time. Good practitioners are hard to find, but persistence pays handsomely in the end.
To my knowledge the closest thing that mainstream psychiatry offers is CBT as another commenter suggested; I can't attest to its effectiveness as I'd already sought and found other approaches before having a chance to try it.
I'm happy to share more details via email. I've found that discussions about this stuff on forums like this very quickly get stuck in the weeds.
The Amazon reviews of that book look dodgy in the extreme. 24 five star reviews, one one star review. All the five star reviews follow the same brief format. Ten of them were written on the same day, three days after the book was added to the Kindle store. All but one of those ten reviewers have not reviewed any other books on Amazon.
Yeah fair enough, I haven't read that book myself as I'd already learned the technique from other practitioners before the book came out. That author is just a practitioner (and self-promoter) himself and not an accomplished author.
It's a nascent area, so solid references are scant. I hope to remedy that myself some day.
A better known author on the topic is Bruce Lipton, whose 2006 book The Biology of Belief [1] introduced these concepts to a broad audience.
I've found the book insightful and helpful, but whilst he's a credentialed scientist himself (former cell biology researcher at Stanford School of Medicine), he gets hand-wavy about concepts like epigenetics and quantum entanglement and leaves himself vulnerable to attack from mainstream skeptics.
Still, I recommend the book for anyone who is able to overlook that. The science may be unclear but the core principles and healing techniques are solid, in my experience of applying them over the past 6+ years.
Yep, for the uninitiated, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a standard and empirically-proven set of techniques used by many therapists to treat negative feedback loops (destructive self-criticism). It's basically a set of exercises to reframe one's thoughts.
There's a workbook (Mind over Mood 2e, Greenberger & Padesky, $18 on Amazon) that is often recommended.
I don't suffer from any kind of mental illness but even so have found CBT useful for managing my day-to-day emotions.
To be fair, you're not expected to know random abbreviations from random fields of study.
That said, if you're interested in emotion-based therapy you can check out http://istdpinstitute.com or http://www.iseft.org/ (they have global lists with therapauts).
This assertion may sit outside conventional medical science and mainstream accepted wisdom, but it aligns with my own experience.
After trying unsuccessfully for years to overcome depression/anxiety, chronic fatigue and other mysterious illnesses (asthma, skin problems, headaches, back tension/pain) using conventional/material remedies (antidepressants, exercise, diets), I added emotion-based treatments to my regimen about 6 years ago, and have had much greater success.
In particular, I've undertaken practices that identify negative beliefs, traumas and sabotaging behavioural patterns that are held in the subconscious, then allow these issues to be understood and resolved. Self-criticism has been big part of what I've been able to work through.
It's been no quick fix (it seems I've had a lot of baggage to work through), but bit by bit, as my emotional health has improved, my physiological health has steadily improved, as have all the outer-world indicators like relationships, productivity and career.
I'm now comfortable suggesting that this approach is overlooked by mainstream medicine to the great detriment of many people suffering chronic illness, and given the link with inflammation that has been suggested in this article and elsewhere, and that I seem to have experienced myself, far more progress could be made in addressing inflammatory and autoimmune illnesses if this approach were to be taken seriously.