This month, an American Psychological Association (APA) task force released a report highlighting these and other psychological barriers standing in the way of action. But don’t despair. The report also points to strategies that could be used to convince us to play our part. Sourced from psychological experiments, we review tricks that could be deployed by companies or organisations to encourage climate-friendly behaviour. Also, on page 40 of this issue, psychologist Mark van Vugt of the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands describes the elements of human nature that push us to act altruistically.

As advertisers of consumer products well know, different groups of people may have quite distinct interests and motivations, and messages that seek to change behaviour need to be tailored to take these into account. “You have to target the marketing to the demographic,” says Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, another of the report’s authors.

Messages that seek to change behaviour need to be tailored to the interests of individual groups
The affluent young, for instance, tend to be diet conscious, and this could be used to steer them away from foods like cheeseburgers – one of the most climate-unfriendly meals around because of the energy it takes to raise cattle. So when trying to convince them to forgo that carbon-intensive beef pattie, better to stress health benefits than harp on about the global climate.

Though conservative pundits have been known to attack such efforts, characterising them as psychological manipulation or “mind control”, experiments indicate that people are willing to be persuaded. “From participants in our experiments, we’ve never heard a negative backlash,” says Wesley Schultz of California State University in San Marcos. In fact, according to John Petersen of Oberlin College, Ohio, we are used to far worse. “Compared to the barrage of advertising, it seems milder than anything I experience in my daily life,” he says.

Good neighbours

DEEP down, most of us want to fit in with the crowd, and psychologists are exploiting this urge to conform to encourage environmentally friendly behaviour.

Researchers led by Wesley Schultz at California State University in San Marcos and Jessica Nolan, now at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, have found that people will cut their electricity usage if told that their neighbours use less than they do.

In one experiment, the researchers left information with households in San Marcos asking them to use fans rather than air conditioners at night, turn off lights and take shorter showers. Some messages simply stressed energy conservation, some talked about future generations, while others emphasised the financial savings. But it was the flyers that implored residents to join with their neighbours in saving energy that were most effective in cutting electricity consumption (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 913).

In another study, the researchers told households what others in their neighbourhood used on average. High users cut their consumption in response, but low users increased theirs. The problem disappeared if the messages were reinforced with sad or smiley faces. The smileys received by the residents who were already saving energy provided sufficient encouragement for them to keep doing so (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 429).

Information economy

MOST people seem to conserve energy if provided with real-time feedback on how much they are using. But feedback can be too immediate.

For instance, Janet Swim has a General Motors car that shows her mileage per gallon plummeting each time she accelerates. It’s just not very useful, she argues, because it’s hard to place that momentary piece of feedback in the context of her overall driving behaviour and fuel efficiency.

In contrast, the Toyota Prius display shows mileage per gallon over 5-minute intervals for the previous half-hour. With that contextual information, people can experiment with different driving styles to see how they affect mileage, and even compete with themselves to improve over time. The 2010 Honda Insight goes one better, flashing up an image of a trophy to reward thrifty driving.

The benefits of feedback are not restricted to car gadgets. Studies show that devices that display domestic energy usage produce savings of between 5 and 12 per cent.

Competitive instincts

EVERY spring, selected student dormitories at Oberlin College in Ohio compete to discover which one can cut energy use by the most. Computer screens give the students detailed feedback on electricity consumption, and in one study dorms cut their electricity use by 55 per cent (International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, vol 8, p 16).

The researchers running the study have not yet crunched their numbers to separate out the effects of competition from the feedback on electricity consumption, but the large savings compared to other studies that lack a competitive element suggest a strong effect. “The competition, at least in this environment, is critical,” says John Petersen, Oberlin’s head of environmental studies.

Petersen concedes that Oberlin may attract students with green sensibilities atypical of society at large. The project is about to extend into the real world. Equipment to provide detailed feedback on electricity use will be fitted into 53 apartments and six business units in a development now under construction in the city of Oberlin. “We hope to create volunteer groups that will compete with one another,” says psychologist Cindy Frantz.

Here and now

PEOPLE have to be persuaded to act on climate change even though the benefit won’t be felt for decades. Research by David Hardisty and Elke Weber of Columbia University in New York suggests ways to achieve this.

Hardisty and Weber have found that people respond in exactly the same way to decisions involving future environmental gains and losses as they do when making financial decisions (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol 138, p 329). This allows psychologists’ knowledge of how to manipulate financial decision-making to be brought into play.

For instance, schemes that give people an upfront cash payment for insulating their home will work better than those promising long-term savings, even if the people receiving cash end up paying a little more in the long run.

And because we are generally more worried about future losses than we are impressed by future gains, messages are more effective if framed to warn people that they will lose $500 over 10 years if they don’t follow a particular course of action to limit climate change than if they are told they’ll be $500 better off if they do take action.

Social networks

AS SOCIAL animals, we like to interact with others and take inspiration from their actions. Psychologists are working out how to exploit this to spread behaviours that will help limit climate change. “My sense is that social networks are going to be important,” says Swim.

Allowing people to document successes in saving energy on their Facebook pages could drive change among their friends, and the Oberlin team is considering integrating this into its urban residence experiment.

Tawanna Dillahunt and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, think such opportunities presented by Facebook can be combined with our liking for furry animals. Inspired by the attachment that people can develop towards Tamagotchi virtual pets, the team is testing the persuasive power of a “virtual polar bear” standing on an ice floe that grows bigger as people adopt environmentally friendly behaviours such as taking shorter showers. Initial results suggest the polar bear has pull.

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No matter what tasks I have before me, who I am with, or where I happen to be, joy is within my soul. It springs up from the very depths of my being, from the presence of the indwelling Christ. This joy is peaceful, loving, and fulfilling.

As an inner quality that is part of my nature, joy is waiting to be expressed by me at any time, in any situation. All that is required is my participation. So I activate my inner joy by loving and by living with anticipation, wonder, and appreciation. I am joyous, radiant, and fulfilled.

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When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere, in all sorts of marginally related or even unrelated contexts, it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft. “Green” (or, even worse, “going green”) falls squarely into the first category. But “sustainable,” which at first conjures up a similarly vague sense of environmental virtue, actually belongs in the second. True, you hear it applied to everything from cars to agriculture to economics. But that’s because the concept of sustainability is at its heart so simple that it legitimately applies to all these areas and more.
Despite its simplicity, however, sustainability is a concept people have a hard time wrapping their minds around. To help, Scientific American Earth 3.0 has consulted with several experts on the topic to find out what kinds of misconceptions they most often encounter. The result is this take on the top 10 myths about sustainability. And after this introduction, it’s clear which myth has to come first….

Myth 1: Nobody knows what sustainability really means.
That’s not even close to being true. By all accounts, the modern sense of the word entered the lexicon in 1987 with the publication of Our Common Future, by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland commission after its chair, Norwegian diplomat Gro Harlem Brundtland). That report defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Or, in the words of countless kindergarten teachers, “Don’t take more than your share.”
Note that the definition says nothing about protecting the environment, even though the words “sustainable” and “sustainability” issue mostly from the mouths of environmentalists. That point leads to the second myth….

Myth 2: Sustainability is all about the environment.
The sustainability movement itself—not just the word—also dates to the Brundtland commission report. Originally, its focus was on finding ways to let poor nations catch up to richer ones in terms of standard of living. That goal meant giving disadvantaged countries better access to natural resources, including water, energy and food—all of which come, one way or another, from the environment. “The economy,” says Anthony Cortese, founder and president of the sustainability education organization Second Nature, “is a wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere. The biosphere provides everything that makes life possible, assimilates our waste or converts it back into something we can use.”

If too many of us use resources inefficiently or generate waste too quickly for the environment to absorb and process, future generations obviously won’t be able to meet their needs. Says Paul Hawken, the author (his latest book is Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, and Why No One Saw it Coming) and entrepreneur (he’s a co-founder of the Smith & Hawken garden tools company) who helped to found the sustainability movement: “We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP [gross domestic product].” If people continue to pour carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air, for example, we won’t necessarily exhaust resources (there’s plenty of coal still in the ground), but we will change the climate in ways that could very likely impose huge burdens on future generations. The same, of course, goes for the poisonous by-products other than CO2 from all kinds of human activity, from manufacturing to mining to energy generation to agriculture, that get dumped onto the land and into streams, oceans and the atmosphere. The nonenvironmental rationales for sustainability get a little squishier when we talk about intangibles, such as the beauty of nature or the value of wilderness. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Henry David Thoreau; the national parks movement that began in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century and has since spread internationally springs from that idea. In modern terms, because humans evolved in a nontechnological world, we seem to need some connection to nature to be content. That concept is tough to prove scientifically. Nevertheless, says Nancy Gabriel, program director at the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vt., “If you look at Western society, you have huge rates of depression, isolation, [and] people who are disenfranchised. I think that reconnecting to the land is an important way of reestablishing a basic level of happiness.” That kind of intangible connection has led towns, cities and states all over the U.S., but especially in built-up areas, to preserve land for open space. A related but separate myth is….

Myth 3: “Sustainable” is a synonym for “green.”
Although there’s a fair amount of overlap between the terms, “green” usually suggests a preference for the natural over the artificial. With some six billion people on the planet today, and another three billion expected by the middle of the century, society cannot hope to give them a comfortable standard of living without a heavy dependence on technology. Electric cars, wind turbines and solar cells are the antithesis of natural—but they allow people to get around, warm their houses and cook their food with renewable resources (or at least, a much smaller input of nonrenewables) while emitting fewer noxious chemicals. It’s probably more difficult to see nuclear power as sustainable. Unlike the other alternative energy sources, it has long been anathema to environmentalists, largely because of the problem of storing radioactive waste. But nuclear reactors are also a highly efficient source of power, emit no pollutant gases and—with some types, anyway—can be designed to generate minimal waste and to be essentially meltdown-proof. That’s why Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, has become a nuclear booster and why many other environmentalists are beginning—sometimes grudgingly—to entertain the idea of embracing nuclear. Calling it green would be a stretch. Calling it sustainable is much less of one.

Myth 4: It’s all about recycling.
“I get that a lot,” says Shana Weber, the manager of sustainability at Princeton University. “For some reason, recycling was the enduring message that came out of the environmental movement in the early 1970s.” And of course, recycling is important: reusing metals, paper, wood and plastics rather than tossing them reduces the need to extract raw materials from the ground, forests and fossil-fuel deposits. More efficient use of pretty much anything is a step in the direction of sustainability. But it is just a piece of the puzzle. “I deal with the people who run the recycling program here,” Weber notes, “but also with purchasing, dining services, the people who clean the buildings. The most important areas by far in terms of sustainability are energy and transportation.” If you think you are living sustainably because you recycle, she says, you need to think again.

Myth 5: Sustainability is too expensive.
If there is an 800-pound gorilla in the room of sustainability, this myth is it. That’s because, as Gabriel observes, “there’s a grain of truth to it.” But only a grain. “It’s only true in the short term in certain circumstances,” Cortese says, “but certainly not in the long term.” The truth lies in the fact that if you already have an unsustainable system in place—a factory or a transportation system, for example, or a furnace in your house, an incandescent lightbulb in your lamp or a Hummer in your driveway—you have to spend some money up front to switch to a more sustainable technology.
In general, governments and companies can take that step more easily than individuals can. “Over the past seven years,” Cortese explains, “DuPont has made investments that have reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 72 percent over 1990 levels. They’ve saved $2 billion.” The Pentagon is determined to cut its energy use by a third, both to save money and to reduce its dependence on risky foreign oil supplies.

Myth 6: Sustainability means lowering our standard of living.
Not at all true. It does mean that we have to do more with less, but as Hawken argues, “Once we start to organize ourselves and innovate within that mind-set, the breakthroughs are extraordinary. They will allow us to achieve greatly superior rates of resource productivity, which in turn allow us to be prosperous, fed, clad, secure.” Moreover, he and others maintain that the innovation at the heart of sustainable living will be a powerful economic engine. “Addressing climate change,” he says, “is the biggest job creation program there is.”

Myth 7: Consumer choices and grassroots activism, not government intervention, offer the fastest, most efficient routes to sustainability.
Popular grassroots actions are helpful and ultimately necessary. But progress on some reforms, such as curbing CO2 emissions, can only happen quickly if central authorities commit to making it happen. That is why tax credits, mandatory fuel-efficiency standards and the like are pretty much inevitable. That conclusion drives free-market evangelists crazy, but they operate on the assumption that wasteful use of resources and the destruction of the environment is without cost, which is demonstrably untrue.

To cite just one example, economic devastation is very likely under even the mildest plausible climate change scenarios, in the form of disruptions to agriculture from shifts in rainfall patterns and growing zones; densely populated coastal areas will be rendered unlivable as sea level rises, and so on. Yet the price currently being charged to people who add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is zero. Putting a per-ton tax on carbon emissions would be wildly unpopular, but it would for the first time account for the real costs of unsustainable energy use. Free-market purists also argue that with respect to the depletion of natural resources, rising prices will automatically push people into more efficient behavior. True enough—but the transition can be painful and disruptive. The primary reason U.S. automakers are in such trouble is that they have been depending for years on high-profit, gas-guzzling SUVs. When the price of oil shot up last year, the market for big cars plummeted (gas prices have only come down since then in the face of a worldwide recession, which hasn’t helped the auto industry). So car buyers may have changed their behavior, but only at the cost of potential disaster for some of America’s biggest companies and their employees.

Still, rising energy prices have had the effect of again galvanizing research into wind, solar and other alternatives—and if you leave economic disruption aside, we can at least count on car companies to make more efficient vehicles and on utilities to find more sustainable sources of energy. But that outcome may reflect another myth….

Myth 8: New technology is always the answer.
Not necessarily. During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama made the tactical mistake of pointing out that proper tire inflation could save Americans millions of gallons of gasoline through better fuel economy. The Republicans ridiculed him, just as they did President Jimmy Carter for appearing on TV in a sweater during the energy crisis of the late 1970s. Both Carter and Obama were right, however (California’s Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has called for proper tire inflation as well).

In other words, sometimes existing technology can make a huge difference. Sometimes it takes a creative business model. Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi, for example, wants to electrify the world’s car fleet—widely acknowledged as a big step toward cutting down carbon emissions—not by inventing a battery that gets 200 miles on a charge but by inventing a better system for letting drivers go as far as they want without recharging. His proposal, which has been adopted on a pilot basis by Israel and Denmark, would create battery exchange stations along highways, analogous to the gas canister exchanges that people now use for barbecue grills. What do you do if you are out on the road and your battery is running low? You pull into a station, your dead battery is swapped for a fully charged one and you’re on the road again in a few minutes. “He’s delivering distance, not better batteries,” says Mark Lee, CEO of the London consulting firm SustainAbility. “There’s an Italian utility that’s selling its customers hot water, not energy to heat water. It’s a different way of measuring, and it gives the company an incentive to be more efficient so it can be more profitable.”

Myth 9: Sustainability is ultimately a population problem.
This is not a myth, but it represents a false solution. Every environmental problem is ultimately a population problem. If the world’s population were only 100 million people, we would be hard-pressed to generate enough waste to overwhelm nature’s cleanup systems. We could dump all our trash in a landfill in some remote area, and nobody would notice. Population experts agree that the best way to limit population is to educate women and raise the standard of living generally in developing countries. But that strategy cannot possibly happen quickly enough to put a dent in the population on any useful timescale. The U.N. projects that the planet will have to sustain another 2.6 billion people by 2050. But even at the current population level of 6.5 billion, we’re using up resources at an unsustainable rate. There is no way to reduce the population significantly without trampling egregiously on individual rights (as China has done with its one-child policy), encouraging mass suicide or worse. None of those proposals seems preferable to focusing directly on less wasteful use of resources.

Myth 10: Once you understand the concept, living sustainably is a breeze to figure out.
All too often, a choice that seems sustainable turns out on closer examination to be problematic. Probably the best current example is the rush to produce ethanol for fuel from corn. Corn is a renewable resource—you can harvest it and grow more, roughly indefinitely. So replacing gasoline with corn ethanol seems like a great idea. Until you do a thorough analysis, that is, and see how energy-intensive the cultivation and harvesting of corn and its conversion into ethanol really are.

One might get a bit more energy out of the ethanol than was sunk into making it, which could still make ethanol more sustainable than gasoline in principle, but that’s not the end of the problem. Diverting corn to make ethanol means less corn is left to feed livestock and people, which drives up the cost of food. That consequence leads to turning formerly fallow land—including, in some cases, rain forest in places such as Brazil—into farmland, which in turn releases lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Eventually, over many decades, the energy benefit from burning ethanol would make up for that forest loss. But by then, climate change would have progressed so far that it might not help.

You cannot really declare any practice “sustainable” until you have done a complete life-cycle analysis of its environmental costs. Even then, technology and public policy keep evolving, and that evolution can lead to unforeseen and unintended consequences. The admirable goal of living sustainably requires plenty of thought on an ongoing basis.

Copyright 2009, Scientific American

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I’m not sure if it’s because we’re strung out on “Lost” episodes, or if it’s because we’re still suffering from a post-9/11 stress disorder that makes us crave “breaking news” alerts, or if it’s because the economy has turned us into distraction junkies. But one thing is painfully obvious after Michael Phelps’ marijuana “scandal” erupted last week: Our society is addicted to fake outrage — and to break our dependence, we’re going to need far more potent medicine than the herb Phelps was smoking.

If you haven’t heard (and I’m guessing you have), the Olympic gold medalist was recently photographed taking a toke of weed. The moment the picture hit the Internet, the media blew the story up, pumping out at least 1,200 dispatches about the “controversy,” according to my LexisNexis search. Phelps’ sponsors subsequently threatened to pull their endorsement deals, and USA Swimming suspended him for “disappointing so many people.”

America is a place where you can destroy millions of lives as a Wall Street executive and still get invited for photo ops at the White House; a land where the Everyman icon — Joe Six-pack — is named for his love of shotgunning two quarts of beer at holiday gatherings; a “shining city on a hill” where presidential candidates’ previous abuse of alcohol and cocaine is portrayed as positive proof of grittiness and character. And yet, somehow, Phelps is the evildoer of the hour because he went to a party and took a hit off someone’s bong.

As with most explosions of fake outrage, the Phelps affair asks us to feign anger at something we know is commonplace. A nation of tabloid readers is apoplectic that Brad and Jen divorced, even though one out of every two American marriages ends the same way. A country fetishizing “family values” goes ballistic over the immorality of Paris Hilton’s sex tape … and then keeps spending billions on pornography. And now we’re expected to be indignant about a 23-year-old kid smoking weed, even though studies show that roughly half of us have done the same thing; most of us think pot should be legal in some form; and many of us regularly devour far more toxic substances than marijuana (nicotine, alcohol, reality TV, etc.).
So, in the interest of a little taboo candor, I’m just going to throw editorial caution to the wind and write what lots of us thought — but were afraid to say — when we heard about Phelps. Ready? Here goes:

America’s drug policy is idiotic.

Doctors can hand out morphine to anyone for anything beyond a headache, but they can’t prescribe marijuana to terminal cancer patients. Madison Avenue encourages a population plagued by heart disease to choke down as many artery-clogging Big Macs and Dunkin’ Donuts as it can, but it’s illegal to consume cannabis, “a weed that has been known to kill approximately no one,” as even the archconservative Colorado Springs Gazette admitted in its editorial slamming Phelps. Indeed, it would be perfectly acceptable — even artistically admirable in some quarters — if I told you that I drank myself into a blind stupor while writing this column, but it would be considered “outrageous” if I told you I was instead smoking a joint (FYI — I wasn’t doing either).

That said, what’s even more inane than our irrational reefer madness is our addiction to the same high that every pothead craves: the high of escapism. Nerves fried from orange terror warnings, Drudge Report sirens and disaster capitalism’s roller-coaster economics, our narcotic of choice is fake outrage — and it packs a punch. It gets us to turn on the television, tune in to the latest manufactured drama, and drop out of the real battle for the republic’s future.

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–- Paulo Coelho

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– Paulo Coelho

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But with a little help from you, your employees can be prepared for the holidays and have a healthy and happy season.

The key to staying healthy during the holiday season is getting plenty of exercise, eating right, and minimizing stress. As an employer, you can help your employees do this by:

Promoting the Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Many times, employees are feeling pressure and stress from work and home, but aren’t aware of the services available to them through the EAP. The free and confidential services through the EAP may be just what your employees need to lower stress during the holiday season.

Offering an onsite diet support group. Whether it’s Weight Watchers®, Jenny Craig®, or some other local program, diet support groups provide motivation for dieters to stay on plan – even during the difficult holiday season. However, during this busy season, many employees don’t have time to attend meetings outside of work. So, an onsite meeting during lunch may be just the answer.

Providing healthy alternatives. If you are planning a holiday party, be sure to include a variety of healthy alternatives to the typical high-calorie, high-fat holiday foods. Also consider filling your vending machines with healthy snacks such as nuts, whole wheat crackers, trail mix, and granola bars.

Being flexible. During the holidays, the factor that leads to the most stress is time – and not having enough of it. When possible, offer employees flexible alternatives for getting their work done – whether it’s flex time, telecommuting, or allowing them to use their personal time in smaller increments than normal (i.e., in 1-hour increments, rather than 1-day increments).

Implementing a walking program. Organize walks around the office (or outside, if weather permits) during lunch breaks. Not only does this provide much needed physical activity, it will also help give your employees a mental break that can help reduce stress.

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Crunch expected as President-elect Barack Obama is committed to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq within 16 months (Reuters).

According to a report from a Congressional hearing on mental health problems confronting soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, about 20% of the 1.5 million soldiers deployed to those war fronts will return from battle suffering from mental health problems.

The reports projects that about 20% or 300,000 (the size of a large city) will return suffering with clinical anxiety, depression, sleeplessness or post-traumatic stress disorder. A more recent survey found that in fact half of the National Guard troops returning from battle report mental health problems.

These illnesses not only affect the returning soldiers, but they have a cascading effect on the families including the approximately 700,000 children in the United States with at least one parent returning from battle. The expected hundreds of thousands of cases will overflow from the VA and the Department of Defense into and burden the civilian health care system. Bettina Rasmussen, CEO of BachFlower.com says that Bach Flower has a remedy for that.

Ms. Rasmussen (BFRP) is a Bach Centre licensed practitioner and an author on natural remedies. She recently sent a letter to the Department of Defense asking them to explore the cost-effective benefits of all-natural remedies for reducing the symptoms associated with PTSD as part of the recovery regime.

The first wave of 15,000 returning soldiers landed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky; and military health officials at the Department of Defense are bracing for the surge in mental health cases wondering if there are sufficient resources to handle it. The next large wave is expected to arrive in February. Col. Richard Thomas, the Fort Campbell director of health services, has roughly doubled his staff of psychologists and behavioral specialists and is searching for more.
A report by the Army’s Mental Health Advisory Team released in 2007 found that 28 percent of soldiers who had been in high-intensity combat were experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, or acute stress.

It also found that the percentage of soldiers with severe stress, emotional, alcohol or family problems had risen more than 85 percent since the invasion of Iraq five years ago.
General Peter Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the Army is monitoring how Fort Campbell handles their caseload in order to develop a plan on how other bases around the nation will handle the surge in PTSD cases.

Not all will be rosy when the soldiers come home. Soldiers are faced with adjustment to new realities, some of them quite unpleasant. Many are greeted by marital problems, financial difficulties, disintegrating relationships and family unity.

According to Fort Campbell military health officials, more than 3,000 of the initial 15,000 troops returning home will experience headaches, sleep disorders, irritability, memory loss, bouts of violence, sense of hopelessness, relationship strains or other symptoms linked to stress disorder.
The base officials say that about 85 percent of those soldiers with stress disorder symptoms will recover with the help of treatment or medication; but the other 15 percent will require more intensive help.

A year later has not seen any improvements. According to an Army study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in July of 2007, one in 8 soldiers returning from war suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Symptoms of PTSD include having flashbacks, nightmares, feeling detached, irritable, resorting to violence, having trouble concentrating or sleeping.

Some veterans suffering from stress are finding their own solution, suicide
Over 120 vets are committing suicide every week, a rate double the general population.

On the war theater, suicide inching up to 1/3 of all deaths
Meanwhile, on the war zone, over 2000 active soldiers have taken their own life this year a number that has been increasing steadily; the highest in 25 years. The number in 2002 was 500. In an article published in the U.S. Army.mil News it states that in the early part of 2007 suicide was the third largest cause of death of active soldiers accounting for almost 30%.
One age group among active soldiers stands out, the 20 to 24 year olds; their rate of suicide is four times that of the general population. In those cases reported in 2007 about 70% of suicides were related to relationship problems back home. In today’s military 2/3 of the soldiers are married.

Coming home involves letting go of the battlefield adaptation and reintegration to civilian life. Couples and families must reset their expectations and renegotiate their roles. Open communications is very important at this stage. Returning soldiers decompressing from combat stress are often irritable, guarded and want to be alone. Attempts are claiming old roles and hierarchy of authority may result in relationship or marital arguments.

Adding to the stress, at the end of duty, the soldier and his family may be move to a new station upon returning from deployment. Back to back deployment can be stressful for the whole family. Some soldiers may turn to alcohol or drugs to numb the emotional pain they experience, but chose cover up.

There is mounting evidence that the Army is not prepared for the return of soldiers with mental health issues. A National Public Radio (NPR) investigative report exposed how supervisors at Fort Carson, Colorado were punishing soldiers who returned from war with serious mental health problems. The soldiers were prevented from getting needed attention. NPR spoke with a half-dozen sergeants who expressed contempt for soldiers with PTSD. They said such soldiers were “weak,” called them “s-bags,” and said they didn’t belong in the Army. The story sparked a Senate investigation.

Early this year, commanders at Fort Carson responded by launching a program requiring every leader, from sergeants up to generals, to attend a training course on how to spot and help soldiers who potentially have post-traumatic stress disorder. More than 2,200 leaders have taken the course so far.

To see the impact the PTSD training had, NPR made a follow-up visit to Fort Carson’s base commander Gen. Robert Mixon. Gen. Mixon stated that he would take disciplinary action against leaders who fail to follow the training guidelines. News of any disciplinary actions was denied by Gen. Mixon’s right hand man, who stated that there had been a few verbal warnings and no more. Down the command line, Command Sgt. Maj. Terrance McWilliams insisted that he will punish soldiers who “misbehave” with PTSD symptoms even if the Army doctors have diagnosed the soldiers with PTSD. PTSD remains controversial at Fort Carson and perhaps is simply indicative of what our returning soldiers can expect no matter where their tour of duty ends.
The United States Department of Veteran Affairs has setup the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. Soldiers and their families are advice to check the website as well as websites from a number of other government and civilian organizations dedicated to giving our veterans the help they need. The families should be prepared to apply public relations and political pressure as needed, as resources for the expected volume of cases is not likely going to be sufficient.

Prolonged emotional imbalances whether they are those associated with PTSD or a range of others symptoms such as fear, panic, jealousy, separation anxiety, clinical anxiety, excessive worry, uncontrollable anger; and so on, depress the immune system and lead to decease or delayed healing.

It is evident that the fundamental philosophy behind keeping a standing army ready full time and in full force is incompatible with recognizing that emotional and psychological imbalances can render some soldiers temporarily incapable.

Healthcare professionals, social workers and caring individuals look at the problem from a different perspective. Bach Flower Remedies practitioners, such as Bettina Rasmussen (BFRP), are among those who understand the impact of emotions on our health and quality of life.
Ms. Rasmussen points out that a body of research, especially over the last 20 years, has produced innumerable tomes relative to the interrelationship between psychology, sociology and the immune and endocrine systems. For example, “Human Psychoneuroimmunology”, “Understanding the Interaction between Psychosocial stress and Immune-related Deceases”, “The Effects of Acute Psychological Stress on Circulating Inflammatory Factors in Human” and a host of others.

The University of Illinois hosts the Integrative Immunology and Behavior Program which spearheads research in immunophysiology.

75 years ahead of this time, Dr. Edward Bach discovered a series of flower herbal remedies that have since been used and recommended around the world. The Bach Flower Remedies treat emotional states which Dr. Bach believed, and volumes of studies support, greatly impact on our health, healing and quality of life.

Dr Edward Bach studied medicine at the University College Hospital, London, and was a House Surgeon there. Dr. Bach was a bacteriologist and later a pathologist. He worked for a number of years on vaccines and a set of homoeopathic nosodes still known as the seven Bach nosodes.
Dr. Bach won international acclaim for his work on vaccines at the University College Hospital during the First World War when his responsibilities, ironically enough, included a huge war casualty ward. 40 million Europeans died in WWI between 1914 and 1918 and millions more were injured physically and emotionally.

Dr. Bach earned further distinctions by developing experimental vaccines that saved thousands of lives during the Influenza epidemic of 1918, caused by a devastating virus that killed 18 million Europeans.

Soon following WWI and the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 he read the germinal work of the German, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, “The Organon of the Healing Art”. Dr. Hahnemann is the founder of homeopathy. It was Dr. Hahnemann’s influence that caused him to re-think the treatment of decease. From that time forward he would treat the person, including his emotions, and not just the decease.

So, despite the success of his work with orthodox medicine Dr. Bach felt dissatisfied with the way doctors were expected to concentrate on diseases and ignore the people who were suffering them. In 1930 he gave up his lucrative Harley Street practice and left London, determined to devote the rest of his life to the new system of medicine that he was sure could be found in nature.

Dr. Bach discovered 38 individual Bach Flower Remedies and made one blend that he called Rescue Remedy. The Remedies are all-natural, non-habit forming, have no known side effects or counter-indications in 75 years of use. The remedies, based on a homeopathy heritage, are gentle and safe for children and expectant mothers. Each remedy, which come in drops, spray, cream and pastilles run between $10-15 each. In the case of drops, only 2 to 4 drops will do and a bottle will lasts a long time. Cost is not a barrier to its use.

A good place to start for PTSD is the Rescue Remedy. Rescue Remedy contains five of the Bach Flower Remedies which are especially beneficial when we find ourselves in traumatic and stressful situations. The Remedies quickly get us back to our normal emotional balance so that we can calmly deal with the situation at hand.

The five remedies in Rescue Remedy are:

- Impatiens: For those who act and think quickly, and have no patience for what they see as the slowness of others. For those who often prefer to work alone. It gives empathy and understanding and enable us to be patient with others. It is fast-acting in alleviating an impatient attitude and lowering stress.

- Star of Bethlehem: For trauma and shock, whether experienced recently or in the past. Gives the ability to recover from traumas and to integrate their adaptation into the present life.

- Cherry Plum: For those who fear losing control of their thoughts and actions and doing things they know are bad for them or which they consider wrong. Gives trust in one’s spontaneous wisdom and the courage to follow one’s path.

- Rock Rose: For situations in which one experiences panic or terror.

- Clematis: For those who find their lives unhappy and withdraw into fantasy worlds. They are ungrounded and indifferent to the details of everyday life. Helps to establish a bridge between the physical world and the world of ideas; may foster great creativity. Is also used to bring clarity and alertness to the present moment.

The Remedies are easy for anyone to understand, obtain and use. Optionally, there are licensed Bach Flower practitioners (BFRP) who will be able to help find the correct combination for your emotional situation. More information can be found at www.BachFlower.com.

“Men find it hard to talk about their health concerns, and resist seeking help”, says Ms. Rasmussen. It is for this reason that she recommends the works of Stefan Ball, Bach Flower for Men. “This book can make the first step to recovery easier – seeking help”.

Soldiers suffering from PTSD often complain about not being able to sleep. The bulk of sleep disorder studies discourage dependency on sleep pharmaceutical medications; they make matters worse. Sleeping medications, including sedative/hypnotic medications, like Ambien, are recommended for short-term use, but lots of people take them frequently and become dependent upon them to fall asleep. Sleep-inducing medications, especially when taken over long periods of time, stay in the bloodstream, giving a hangover the next day and beyond. Studies charge pharmaceutical sleep medication with impairing memory and performance on the job and at home.

All medications interact with other medications to one degree or another, sometimes with harmful effects. Finding a natural product or modifying our patterns of behavior to get a good night sleep is a good first approach with little or no harmful consequences.

There are questions about the effectiveness of sleeping pills. A study by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School found that a change in sleep habits and attitudes was more effective in treating chronic insomnia, over the short- and long-term, than sleeping pills (specifically Ambien). Ambien is the most prescribed pharmaceutical product to induce sleep, chemically. Earlier this month, it was reported that some Ambien users are susceptible to amnesia and walking in their sleep. Some even ate in the middle of the night without realizing it.

If the soldier or family member has trouble sleeping, the all-natural Rescue Sleep blend would be the recommended remedy. It contains the same five remedies as Rescue Remedy plus White Chestnut, which is effective against restless mind and unwanted thoughts.

Rescue Remedy clinical trial
On July 2, 2007, the Medical News Today reported the results of a study on the effectiveness of the best selling Bach Flower preparation called Rescue Remedy. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Miami School of Nursing. Using a sample of 111 individuals aged 18 to 49, the study was a double-blind clinical trial comparing a standard dose of Rescue Remedy against a placebo of identical appearance. A standard test to evaluate anxiety was administered before and after the dosage.

The result was that Rescue Remedy was found to be “an effective over-the-counter stress reliever with a comparable effect to traditional pharmaceutical drugs yet without any of the known adverse side effects, including addiction.”

Technorati Tags: Healing well, Mental Health, Soldiers, US military

Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbours, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.

The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person’s husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbour.

“You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience,” said Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who helped conduct the study published online today by BMJ, a British medical journal. “But it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious.”

One person’s happiness can affect another’s for as much as a year, the researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the “infectiousness” of that emotion appears to be far weaker.

Previous studies have documented the common experience that one person’s emotions can influence another’s — laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one’s spirits. But the new study is the first to find that happiness can spread across groups for an extended period.

When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbour would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.

The research follows previous work by Christakis and co-author James H. Fowler that found that obesity also appears to spread from person to person, as does the likelihood of quitting smoking. The researchers have been using detailed records originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running project that has explored a host of health issues, to construct and analyze detailed maps of social networks.

The findings, Christakis and others said, provide striking new evidence of the power of social networks, which could have implications for public policy. Happy people tend to be better off in myriad ways, being more creative, productive and healthier.

“For a long time, we measured the health of a country by looking at its gross domestic product,” said Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego who co-authored the study. “But our work shows that whether a friend’s friend is happy has more influence than a $5,000 raise. So at a time when we’re facing such economic difficulties, the message could be, ‘Hang in there. You still have your friends and family, and these are the people to rely on to be happy.’ “

Other experts praised the study as a landmark in the growing body of evidence documenting the influence of personal connections and the importance of positive emotions.

“It’s a path finding article,” said Martin E.P. Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. “It’s totally original, and the findings are striking.”

Stanley Wasserman, who studies social networks at Indiana University, said: “We’ve known that one’s network ties are important, but we’ve never looked at anything on this scale. The implications are you can’t look at individuals as little entities devoid of their social context.”

Others, however, questioned the findings, noting that it is difficult to account for every variable that might affect the outcomes of such studies.

“Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends in social network effects,” wrote Ethan Cohen-Cole of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and Jason M. Fletcher of Yale University in an accompanying study. Their research used data from a large federal survey to show that acne, headaches and even height could appear to spread through social networks if not analyzed properly. “The methods of detecting ’social network effects’ of health outcomes commonly found in the recent medical literature might produce effects where none exists.”

But Christakis said his analysis took other possible explanations into consideration.

Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the findings could explain why people in some countries tend to be happier than others. “This is an extremely exciting study — interesting, provocative and important,” Diener said.

While obesity appeared to spread even among people who lived far apart, happiness appears to be transmitted only among people who live within a mile of one another. The influence was also greatest among people who considered themselves mutual friends.

Because the researchers did not find the effect for people living on the same block beyond a next-door neighbour, they were confident that the positive mood was not the result of living in the same good neighbourhood. Because people tended to get happier if someone they knew became happy, the researchers could rule out the alternative explanation that happy people tend to be drawn to each other.

“We know it’s not a ‘birds of a feather flock together’ effect,” Christakis said.

Surprisingly, happiness had no such effect at work. The researchers speculated that work relationships may have different dynamics. One worker might become happy because he or she got a raise or a promotion at the expense of another, for example.

Unhappiness also appeared to be catching, but not as strongly: An unhappy connection increased the chances of being unhappy by about 7 percent on average, while a happy connection increased the chances of being happy by about 9 percent. While having more friends is important for a person’s happiness, the benefit of having more friends appears to be cancelled out if they are unhappy, the researchers found.

The researchers and others speculated that the emotion may be important on an evolutionary level by helping people cooperate. Seligman likened happiness to an orchestra tuning up.

“Laughter and singing and smiling tune the group emotionally,” Seligman said. “They get them on the same wavelength so they can work together more effectively as group.”

TIME FOR A GOOD HEALTH : RELAXATION CLINIC : LUNCH, PLAY, RELAX, FEEL GOOD

Technorati Tags: community, Green HR, Happiness, Human capital, Sustainable HR

‘Most people would rather die than think’
Bertrand Russell once said that ‘most people would rather die than think’, which sounds crass until you think about it. It is incredible what we can accept, as long as we can blame someone else. Witness the mass witch-hunt over ‘who is to blame’ for the current economic situation. The truth is we’ve all done rather well, and now we have to pay. The truth is we are all to blame, so let’s stop the forensic examination and start looking forward.

Wasted energy
Energy spent in creating excuses and reasons why is energy not spent creating a better future. It is wasted. So how do we get ourselves and those around us looking forward not back?
How do we get out of the negative energies around blame, and into the positive energies of creativity?

Practical leadership
Well, we all need to start taking personal responsibility for solving problems. Taking personal responsibility is really tough, and almost impossible to do on our own. It’s like trying to give up smoking without telling anyone. We need leadership, but not of the sort that stands up and exhorts us to take responsibility, since that will not work, particularly if the exhortation is coming from those whom we are still conveniently blaming for our situation. We need the practical, on-the-ground leadership of consistent and dedicated facilitators.

Taking responsibility
Something magic happens when you make someone think – they start to take responsibility. They have to. Try it out – pick any problem in your company and ask someone about it, and you will no doubt hear a strident critique of the situation, combined with a laser like analysis of who is to blame. Then ask that person what they would do if they were in charge. Notice how easy it is for them to answer the question, but only in vague and general terms. There will be little specificity in their answer. Follow up by asking ‘but specifically what would you do?’ and notice their confidence start to evaporate in front of your very eyes, since asking for specifics is really asking them to take real responsibility for what they think, and that is risky for them.

Keep on asking
So much easier to stay in a place of criticism and blame. Notice in fact how they do not actually answer your request for specifics, but resort instead to a continuation of what is wrong and who is to blame. Keep asking what they would do, and keep noticing how the question is avoided. If you persist, they will eventually have to think. And so starts the journey of personal responsibility. Soon you will be able to deliver the only really important question which is ‘what can you do to help solve the problem?’

“They went quiet and their eyes glazed over.”

This means that we have to stop having nice  conversations, and start having structured discussions that really get people thinking.

How do we know when someone is thinking?
Well, they go quiet and they drop their eye contact. They go quiet because they are really have to consider their answer before starting to speak, and they drop their eye contact because they are searching for the answer somewhere in their brain. Of course managers feeling very pressured tend to interpret this behaviour as both inconvenient and resistant, and so they jump in with the answer to their own question, thus letting the person off the hook.

So how do you get everyone in the organization to think?
The answer is basic coaching – frame the right question; ask it clearly; stay quiet while they are thinking; keep asking the question until it is answered; don’t accept “I don’t know” as an answer. As well as framing great questions, and insisting they are answered, we need to work on our behaviours as leaders – accepting people’s answers without necessarily agreeing with them; being patient; sitting with someone else’s discomfort; deferring judgement until we are ready to make a decision. The reality is that all the answers to all the problems lie within our own workforce. Our job as leaders is to have the strength and the patience to bring this out, harness it and martial the energy and creativity.

Collective positive energy
There has never been a greater need for collective positive energy and creativity in our businesses. It is ‘time to think’, and to bring this out we must lead people by giving them time to think.

Technorati Tags: change board, Collective positive energy, financial crisis, leadership, Sustainable HR