Dreams

During certain stage of sleep having dream is common.  Mostly dream occur during sleep state named REM (Rapid Eye Movement), although it can occur in other stages also.   Purpose of the dream is not well understood.  Study of dream is called oneirology.



Dream can be vivid or memorable.  Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind.  A dream could be a reflection of an event in the past or unresolved intent.  Duration of the dream could be from few seconds to minutes.  Mostly, recent memory firm up during the dream.

In order to dream it is important the person reaches REM sleep, rapid eye movement indicates the event in the mind. Dream is an unconscious mind activity.  This means, person's experience is played to either firm or form.  People are more likely to remember the dream if they are awakened during the REM phase. The average person has three to five dreams per night, but some may have up to seven dreams in one night.

Dream interpretation is practiced in religion, and medically.  Without getting into the significance of dream by interpreting, it is an important activity of the mind to imbibe learning, formation of thoughts, view points and strengthen self esteem.

Themes of dream include but not limited to visuals, emotions, sexual themes, relationships, life events, etc.

Do you dream?

Need for Psychological support during pregnancy

Pregnancy, beautiful gift of nature, brings about varied physiological (somatic) and psychological changes to a woman.  Men also undergo some changes, but we will deal with this later.  Pregnancy is a complex phenomenon which also includes social changes.  First pregnancy represents a powerful psychological event.  Lets understand the psychological changes in the course of pregnancy.

Likely changes during pregnancy

Pregnancy is always associated with changes in psychological functioning of pregnant women. It is usually associated with ambivalence, frequent mood changes, varying from anxiety, fatigue, exhaustion, sleepiness, depressive reactions to excitement.

During pregnancy, changes include body appearance, affectionate and sexuality, whereas the position and role of women attains a new quality. Even thoughts of pregnancy can bring about numerous worries about its course and outcome, and especially of the delivery itself, which may be so intense that they acquire a features of phobia (which may be the reason for avoiding pregnancy).

Motherhood, resulting from pregnancy, brings about several positive psychological changes as well, like emotional bonding with the child, affection, feel of family, joy.   Socially, in some countries, motherhood provides special status to women.

Relationship change is another aspect, a social change, affects not only the expecting mother, but also others closely associated with her.

Postpartum depression is another aspect of pregnancy usually requires psychological help.

Conclusion

Pregnancy is an event that involves numerous somatic and psychological changes. However, pregnancy can also be a potent stressor. Existence of prenatal maternal stress may lead to different perinatal complications that may have long-term consequences on the newborn. In prevention of maternal stress emphasis has to be put on partner's emotional support, as well as empathy of the social environment. However, in certain cases, professional psychotherapeutic support is necessary, in form of short supportive treatment. Preventive measures should include adequate psychological support during pregnancy, especially the first one, provided for all pregnant women, but also for those women that plan to get pregnant in the near future.

Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet of Things (IoT) is the new buzz word!! This is an attempt to have the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.   IoT has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and the Internet.

Network of computers, aka Internet, are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code.   Such manual mega effort is unstructured, mostly wasted.  This resulted in social area like facebook, resulted in structured data.  In order to use such massive data, aka big data, brought in analytics, pattern matching.  Hadoop, similar technologies helped analyse such information.

What to expect?

Recently wearable flood the market, smart watch, iWatch etc are getting popularity.  Such gears identify location, temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and similar information about individual.  Imagine, a cardiac patient requires constant monitoring of pulse, analysis of pulse help determine the condition of the heart.  Based on the threshold setup, such information can be transmitted to the doctor automatically along with several other parameters like body temperature, environment, blood pressure, exact location of the individual.  Even, device can receive instruction to handle the emergency, alert ambulance.... essentially save a life in this emergency situation.

Second example, imagine a smart home having smart devices like fans or air conditioner based on sensors operate to to regulate temperature.  Similarly, washing machine can fitted with sensors to connect to internet, take care of creating service requests and report exact fault.  Even better, get automatic upgrade of its intelligence!!  Your water filter can order cartridge refill automatically! Television is already hooked to internet, so it is more evolved of the device so far.

Diabetic patients know their the pain of taking insulin every day.  How fixing a device in the digestive system to release insulin based on the setting of the doctor?  Health psychology deals with a challenge of patient consuming the medication as prescribed by the doctor.  Internet of Things can help increase the compliance!

Many other usages can be listed!!  The list is huge.

My view

Internet of Things are expanding the networking of devices, according to one study, 2 billion devices are expected to be interacting by 2016.  This humongous blast of information generates several petabytes of information. Life style of human being is set to change towards greater automation.  Such a change also has social challenges, relationship challenges, basic human challenges.  You need to decide to what extent this is useful or barging in to your privacy!!!  Only time will tell!!

Internet of Things are here to challenge human smartness for sure!  In this battle of smartness and intelligence, lets see who wins.

Depression

Depression is a common mental disorder, characterized by sadness, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, feelings of tiredness, and poor concentration.

Depression can be long-lasting or recurrent, substantially impairing an individual’s ability to function at work or school or cope with daily life. At its most severe, depression can lead to suicide. When mild, people can be treated without medicines but when depression is moderate or severe they may need medication and professional talking treatments.

Depression is a disorder that can be reliably diagnosed and treated by non-specialists as part of primary health care. Specialist care is needed for a small proportion of individuals with complicated depression or those who do not respond to first-line treatments.

Levels of depression

Mild or no depression indicates that you are not suffering from depression or that what you are feeling are signs of depression within the normal range of human experience. 

Mild to Moderate Depression All of us are apt to experience at least mild to moderate levels of depression due to environmental or situation factors that are less than favorable. Feelings of depression from time to time are normal. What's most important is our ability to cope with that depression, resolve it's contributing factors and elevate our mood and thinking to a more positive state. Failure to resolve moderate depression can result in stress-related illness and interfere with sleep, work, family, and social functions.

It's best to get help or do whatever it takes to resolve feelings of depression as soon as possible, as left untended depression will build on itself and become deeper and harder to deal with.

Moderately Severe to Severe Depression should be treated as an illness and professional attention should be sought. Severe depression is a debilitating disorder that interferes with sleep, work, family, and social functions, leading to great impairment and isolation. Severe depression is treatable and treatment can help people lead productive and fulfilling lives.

Visit your mental health care professional to seek care.

Are you hypnotised?

Every life event is stored as an experience in our conscious mind, while sleeping this is prioritized and stored in subconscious or unconscious mind.  Unless required recall of subconscious experience is restricted.  There is managed by a filter/layer.  Hypnosis is one such tool manages to breach this layer.

During a session with hypnotherapist, you could experience accessing your subconscious mind to understand or resolve conflicts/issues.  But, certain emotions also enable you to similar experiences.

Imagine you are at grief, have you wondered why do you recollect all the events, which otherwise not accessible?  Similarly the case in anger, we recollect all the points against a person whom we are fighting?  Meet someone after long time, all nostalgic moments pop.

You are basically breaching this barrier in such emotional states.  Try and place your feedback!! 

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by unreasonable thoughts and fears (obsessions) that lead you to do repetitive behaviors (compulsions). It's also possible to have only obsessions or only compulsions and still have OCD.

OCD is a common disorder among individuals, may or may not realize that your obsessions aren't reasonable, and you may try to ignore them or stop them. But that only increases your distress and anxiety. Ultimately, you feel driven to perform compulsive acts in an effort to ease your stressful feelings.

Examples are obsession:

• Fear of being contaminated by shaking hands or by touching objects others have touched
• Doubts that you've locked the door or turned off the stove
• Intense stress when objects aren't orderly or facing a certain way
• Images of hurting yourself or someone else
• Thoughts about shouting obscenities or acting inappropriately
• Avoidance of situations that can trigger obsessions, such as shaking hands
• Distress about unpleasant sexual images repeating in your mind

Examples of Compulsion:

• Hand-washing until your skin becomes raw
• Checking doors repeatedly to make sure they're locked
• Checking the stove repeatedly to make sure it's off
• Counting in certain patterns
• Silently repeating a prayer, word or phrase
• Arranging your canned goods to face the same way

This leads to more ritualistic behavior — and a vicious cycle that's characteristic of OCD.

Checking emails, SMS, social media updates are also kind of OCD symptoms.

There's a difference between being a perfectionist and having OCD. OCD thoughts aren't simply excessive worries about real problems in your life. Perhaps you keep the floors in your house so clean that you could eat off them. Or you like your knickknacks arranged just so. That doesn't necessarily mean that you have OCD.

If your obsessions and compulsions are affecting your quality of life, see your doctor or mental health provider. People with OCD may be ashamed and embarrassed about the condition, but treatment can help.

A type of therapy called exposure and response prevention (ERP) is the most effective treatment. This therapy involves gradually exposing you to a feared object or obsession, such as dirt, and having you learn healthy ways to cope with your anxiety. Exposure therapy takes effort and practice, but you may enjoy a better quality of life once you learn to manage your obsessions and compulsions.

Therapy may take place in individual, family or group sessions.

See earlier article on Emotions

Emotions

Emotions seem to rule our daily lives. We make decisions based on whether we are happy, angry, sad, bored, or frustrated. We choose activities and hobbies based on the emotions they incite.

As per Hockenbury & Hockenbury, "An emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response.".  This is a resultant action of human nervous system using some of the chemicals.

Emotions can be highly subjective, may not be pure in form.  your own unique experience of these emotions is probably much more multi-dimensional. Consider anger. Is all anger the same? Your own experience might range from mild annoyance to blinding rage.

Responses

As defined earlier, emotion exhibits physiological and behavioral responses.

Physiological 

Many of the physical reactions you experience during an emotion such as sweating palms, racing heartbeat, or rapid breathing are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, a branch of the autonomic nervous system.

Brain scans have shown that the amygdala, part of the limbic system, plays an important role in emotion and fear in particular. The amygdala itself is a tiny, almond-shaped structure that has been linked to motivational states such as hunger and thirst as well as memory and emotion.

Behavioral

Actual expression of emotion is behavioral.  Our ability to accurately understand these expressions is tied to what psychologists call emotional intelligence and these expressions play a major part in our overall body language.  A smile indicate your degree of happiness.

An emotion is normally quite short-lived, but intense. Emotions are also likely to have a definite and identifiable cause.  A mood on the other hand is usually much milder than an emotion, but longer-lasting. In many cases, it can be difficult to identify the specific cause of a mood.

Some Emotions

Uneasy

Nervous, tense, anxious, flustered, insecure, angry, cross, confused, bored, flat, apathetic, weak

Angry

frustrated, cross, irritated, annoyed, furious, livid, enraged, hurt, inadequate, trapped, tired, scared

Frightened

uneasy, weak, insecure, inadequate, tense, anxious, nervous, anxious, scared, petrified, threatened, trapped, horrified

Happy

pleased, glad, wonderful, elated, excited, content, surprised, proud, relieved, satisfied, confident

Negative

distress, suspicious, scornful, disdain, bitter, stupid, shame, worthless

Positive

determined, forgiving, hopeful, motivated, inspired, daring, energetic, loving, eager, excited, receptive, happy

Unhappy

 hurt, upset, lonely, guilty, miserable, bereft, despairing, devastated, lost, down

Upset

angry, frustrated, sad, tearful, hurt, miserable, weepy

Confused

hurt, upset, lonely, inadequate, cross, miserable, shocked, mixed-up, nervous, scared, discontent, stupid, foolish

You would have experienced at least three of the listed emotions.