Approaching Significance.

I think everyone should applaud what Brandon Marshall has done here.  For those not interested in sports, Marshall is a star in the NFL.   Revealing a personality disorder is big news.  He will bring more awareness and knowledge to the public about borderline personality disorder (BPD).  By revealing his condition, he is also aiding in the deterioration of stigma attached to mental health disorders, and more specifically, men with mental health disorders.  Males do not reveal their mental health disorders as frequently as their female counterparts, not because they do not have them, but because men are suppose to be tough, strong, and not let their emotions out of control.  Of course this is absolutely ridiculous, but the stigma remains.  To reveal a personality disorder in a profession that prides itself with machismo is a strong move and hopefully will inspire people to seek treatment.

Way to go Brandon Marshall, I hope your journey goes well.  

The Dolphins’ wide receiver [Marshall] says he was diagnosed earlier this year with borderline personality disorder, which has been known to stem from things such as unstable personal relationships, a negative self-image and a fear of failure. He made the decision to go public with the issue to raise awareness, and says he plans to eventually lobby Congress for funding to assist research efforts.

As much as I dislike sharing Psychology Today and all of their GROUNDBREAKING articles, this commentary is right on point.  Do not trivialize addiction.

Addiction doesn’t mean really liking something

For one thing, this attitude trivializes addiction itself - It creates the belief that addiction is incredibly common and is just not that big of a deal. My Bachelor “Addicted” friend isn’t losing her job, her house, or even sleep over her terrible affliction and yet she has no problem putting it right there on the mantle next to a good old heroin habit.

The more we trivialize mental health disorders, which are difficult enough to diagnose, the more of a misunderstanding we create about their true impact. If every one of us is addicted to every thing we find ourselves engaging in, or caring about, a little more than we consider healthy than all those people who keep telling me that “everyone in the world is addicted to something” might just be right.

I am repeating this quote because it is spot on: The more we trivialize mental health disorders, which are difficult enough to diagnose, the more of a misunderstanding we create about their true impact.

Addiction is not about doing something a lot

So stop telling everyone you’re addicted to your Blackberry and take responsibility for the fact that you keep turning to your email messages because you like the satisfaction of seeing a new message or being able to check the latest NFL score. Feel good about and embrace your love for crappy television without having to resort to an explanation that makes it seem like your finger uncontrollably hits the right channel button… You’re lying to us, you’re lying to yourself, and you’re making those with a real problem seem like idiots.

They’re not.

You may or may not know some of these.  I bolded my favorites.  If you are interested in health psychology, get to know your cortisol.  

1. Think about money, work, economic outlook, family, and relationships. Feeling anxious? In a 2010 American Psychological Association survey [pdf], those five factors were the most often cited sources of stress for Americans.
2. Stress is strongly tied to cardiac disease, hypertension, inflammatory diseases, and compromised immune systems, and possibly to cancer.
3. And stress can literally break your heart.Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” occurs when the bottom of the heart balloons into the shape of a pot (a tako-tsubo) used in Japan to trap octopus. It’s caused when grief or another extreme stressor makes stress hormones flood the heart.
4. The hormone cortisol is responsible for a lot of these ill effects. Elevated cortisol gives us a short-term boost but also suppresses the immune system, elevates blood sugar, and impedes bone formation.
5. Even the next generation pays a price: Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, find an association between high cortisol in mothers during late pregnancy and lower IQs in their children at age 7.
6. Stress during pregnancy has also been linked to offspring with autism.
7. But enough stressing! One way to relax: a career of mild obsolescence. Surveying 200 professions, the site CareerCast.comrated bookbinder the least stressful job of 2011. (Most stressful: firefighter and airline pilot.)
8. Or find a new home. The online journal Portfolio.com looked at America’s 50 biggest metro areas, analyzing such criteria as employment, income, circulatory disease, sunshine, and murder rate, and ranked Salt Lake City 
as the least stressful.
9. The tensest? Detroit.
10. Lesson: Landing a 737 at Coleman Young International Airport is not a good way to unwind.
11. Can’t relocate? Perhaps you should take up violent video games. Researchers at Texas A&M International University gave 103 subjects frustrating tasks, then asked them to play [pdf]. Among subjects with a history of violent gaming, the fake mayhem of Hitman: Blood Money and Call of Duty 2 did a great job of easing stress.
12. You might also try eating your veggies. Yale researchers reported in the journal Military Medicine that after survival training, “carbohydrate administration”—eating complex carbs like those in carrots and potatoes—boosted soldiers’ cognitive functioning.
13. No such luck with the simple carbs in cake and cookies, alas.
14. And watch what you don’t eat. Neuro­scientists at the University of Pennsylvania fattened up mice for four weeks, then abruptly cut their caloric intake. When exposed to stress, the animals responded with more depression- and anxiety-like behaviors than did their nondieting peers.
15. One of the mouse stressors that the Penn scientists used: being hung by the tail for six minutes.
16. Over at Louisiana State University, rats were subjected to unpredictable foot shocks and then allowed to self-administer intravenous doses of cocaine. They used more once the stress started. Who could blame them?
17. Addled brain syndrome: Scientists at the University of Minho in Portugal and the U.S. National Institutes of Health found that chronically stressed lab rats respond habitually and ineffectively to stimuli. Trained to press a lever to receive a treat, the rats kept pressing even after they’d been fed.
18. The stressed rats’ brains showed shrunken neurons in the dorsomedial striatum (an area associated with goal-directed behavior) and growth in the dorsolateral striatum (related to habitual behavior).
19. The results suggest that people, too, get locked into rote behavior by stress. Sure enough, other studies show that the primate hippocampus—central to learning and memory—is damaged by long-term exposure to cortisol.
20. Still, do you ever get the feeling that some scientists are just taking out their stress on lab rats?

No. No. No.

Are you a habitual phone checker?

smartphone users have developed what they call “checking habits” — repetitive checks of e-mail and other applications such as Facebook. The checks typically lasted less than 30 seconds and were often done within 10 minutes of each other.

On average, the study subjects checked their phones 34 times a day, not necessarily because they really needed to check them that many times, but because it had become a habit or compulsion.

I used to do this all the time before I started becoming mindful of the act and made conscious efforts to reduce the number of times I check my phone. I mean seriously, the email can wait until I get a chance to look at it.

So why do we do this?

First, his brain liked the feeling when he received an e-mail. It was something new, and it often was something nice: a note from a colleague complimenting his work or a request from a journalist for help with a story.

“Each time you get an e-mail, it’s a small jolt, a positive feedback that you’re an important person,” he says. “It’s a little bit of an addiction in that way.”

Once the brain becomes accustomed to this positive feedback, reaching out for the phone becomes an automatic action you don’t even think about consciously, Frank says. Instead, the urge to check lives in the striatum, a part of the brain that governs habitual actions.

So we learn the behavior due to positive reinforcement. Somewhere along the line it turns into a compulsive, addiction like behavior.

Are you a habitual checker? Here are some signs the author suggests to test if you are in need of some separation from your phone:

1. You check your e-mail more than you need to.
2. You’re annoying other people.
3. The thought of not checking makes you break out in a cold sweat.

Not convinced? Maybe you have a happy medium with the amount of time or the number of instances you check your phone. Or try this: next time you are out with people, try not checking your phone. Unless you are waiting for an email that needs an instant response, you can wait until later. My previous advisor didn’t have a cell phone. He is a younger guy, but refused to get one. Even with the thought of his family being in an emergency situation, he knew they school would be able to get a hold of him while he was there. I’m not ready to give up my phone, but I will definitely still work on leaving it in my pocket for longer periods of time.