This is the second in a series of articles on emotional intelligence for personal growth. The first part is here.

Mindfulness is a non-judgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises is acknowledged and accepted as it is. It is a skill that is learned by committed practice. The object is to focus one's attention on thoughts, feelings and events in the present moment while remaining curious, open, and accepting whatever occurs.

The idea is to take on the role of an observer of your own mind. Notice everything that happens without holding onto anything, having a "Teflon Mind". An important part of observing is putting words to the experience. The effect of naming the experience effectively separates you from it. Thoughts are just thoughts, feelings just feelings, all transient experiences that are not necessarily a part of or define who we are.

True mindfulness involves immersing yourself in your experiences so that you actually forget yourself. The idea here is to stop the conversation you have with yourself, or as Eastern traditions put it, letting go of ego. This internal dialogue, while an important skill in the right circumstances, can become a major distraction. Imagine yourself walking through a beautiful park muttering to yourself. Would you remember what you saw in the park? You'd probably remember more about what you were muttering to yourself!

One way to do this is to focus on what is at hand. "See the job, do the job." The idea is NOT to always stay busy, ut to invest all of yourself in everything you do. "Smell the roses." Another thing to watch while doing things judging if this should have happened or whether it's fair, just, or right or wrong. It IS, the only value in questioning why is avoiding a problem in the future. Anything more than that is a waste time and emotional energy. See what you are doing, but don't evaluate it. Focus on the facts without evaluating it. Count on your intuitive self to react appropriately, changing the harmful situation or changing your harmful reaction to the situation.

Another distraction to your experiences is multi-tasking. Doing more than one thing at a time spreads your skills thin so that your product becomes sub-optimal, perhaps even mediocre. If you multi-task regularly, you actually train yourself to be easily distracted. There is some research that suggests that this subtle distraction training contributes significantly to attention deficits that impair your concentration. Research also suggests that training persons with Attention Deficit Disorder with mindfulness techniques can be an effective treatment!

The idea is to keep your mind's eye on the objectives until the task is done having faith that you will do the best job your can and react appropriately should something go wrong. Think about it, if you are preoccupied with what might go wrong while doing something, will your focus be on the job or the fear of what might happen? If you are distracted by fear, how good a job can you do?

Most of us, when not structured and focused on a task at hand, are thinking about past and future events. We either review previous experiences looking for new learnings we might have missed or planning our reactions to anticipated events. We focus on the moment only when there is something immediately presenting that requires a response. Our focus is often divided between what is happening in the moment and the thoughts on which we are focused.

For those of us that have more than our share of regrets and/or worries, being focused on the past or the future becomes a nearly full time job! This is not good. Without your full participation in the moment you are in, you are distracted, your reactions are primed with the emotions of the worry or regret. That means your judgment and decision making ability is impaired by emotionally distorted judgments! Have you ever been startled by someone while preoccupied with regrets or worries? Did you react with an emotion not meant for the other person? Most people have had that experience. It is likely we have all experienced spilling our internal emotion on an unintended other. And if that person was paying attention, he or she probably noticed your emotion and wondered if you were upset with them!

Few of us have the ability to be focused on the moment at will. It is a skill that takes a lot practice and a commitment to follow through. The eventual reward is an incredible feeling of peacefulness, acceptance, and centeredness combined with heightened concentration. You see, a mind uncluttered by regrets or worries has only the moment to focus on. Self-consciousness dissolves into the experience of the moment. Instead our focus is on our senses, our perceptions, punctuated by the thoughts and feelings flowing through our minds. The ultimate state of mindfulness is what is called flow.

Flow is the state in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing with a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and an expectation of success. Flow could be conceived of as being completely focused and motivated in a single-minded immersion. Emotions and thoughts are synchronized in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. While in flow, we feel a clear sense of direction, confidence, intense concentration, and personal control. We feel a natural and continuous intrinsic reward. Time seems altered, slowed or moving quickly. Feedback for one's actions and focused redirection come easily and painlessly so that action and awareness seem to merge.

One does not have to reach the ultimate form of mindfulness to benefit. With each strengthening of the skill comes with incredible benefits in quality of life. There are many tools available to us that will help us learn. Check out the resources here.

Continued here.

ADD was originally conceived as rare brain abnormality with an unknown cause. However, the emphasis on symptom based diagnosis since DSM came to be seems to have contributed to a ballooning incidence of diagnosis of ADD, ADHD, and Bipolar Disorder discussed in the previous article.

This article describes the results of two studies. The first study reassessed data from six large child-development studies performed since 1970. Each of these studies tracked hundreds of children from an early age through elementary school. The second study documents resolution of brain dysfunction as reflected brain images of children.

New York Times

...[K]indergartners who are identified as troubled do as well academically as their peers in elementary school. The other found that children with attention deficit disorders suffer primarily from a delay in brain development, not from a deficit or flaw.

Experts say the findings of the two studies, being published today in separate journals, could change the way scientists, teachers and parents understand and manage children who are disruptive or emotionally withdrawn in the early years of school. The studies might even prompt a reassessment of the possible causes of disruptive behavior in some children.

[..]In one study, an international team of researchers analyzed measures of social and intellectual development from over 16,000 children and found that disruptive or antisocial behaviors in kindergarten did not correlate with academic results at the end of elementary school.

Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions and even picked fights were performing as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of the same abilities when they both reached fifth grade, the study found.

Other researchers cautioned that the findings, being reported in the journal Developmental Psychology, did not imply that emotional problems were trivial or could not derail academic success in the years before or after elementary school.

In the other study, researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health and McGill University, using imaging techniques, found that the brains of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder developed normally but more slowly in some areas than the brains of children without the disorder.

The disorder, also known as A.D.H.D., is by far the most common psychiatric diagnosis given to disruptive young children; 3 percent to 5 percent of school-age children are thought to be affected. Researchers have long debated whether it was due to a brain deficit or to a delay in development.

Doctors said that the report, being published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps to explain why so many children grow out of the diagnosis in middle school or later, often after taking stimulant medications to improve concentration in earlier grades.

Diagnosis is a complex and continuous assessment of symptoms and measures of bodily conditions. Interpretation of the measures must be based on sound theoretical understanding of etiology and systems function. Diagnosis was never well represented by a set of concrete criteria of symptoms only. DSM is a flawed tool, useful, but not a representation of reality. Continuous reassessment based on complete knowledge of the condition is necessary to prevent a misapplication of symptom criteria as the sole basis of diagnosis and treatment decisions. Clinical judgment is still an art.

Wisely, schools have always based eligibility for special education on academic performance. There are childhood issues that are not reflected in academic performance. Social, emotion and relationship skills are also in critical developmental phases during elementary years. We have been neglecting this part of development by counting on the family to teach these skills when parents are on average no more skilled than their parents, and hardly qualified to teach a critical developmental skill. As I've said many times before, we need to be teaching children about emotions and social skills.

Medicating young children has always been controversial. For awhile, it appeared as if that suspicion of medication would subside. More and more kids everyday were taking stimulants and others were taking anti-depresants.

Then the controversy about the association of suicide with anti-depressant medication. The whole logic of that argument has always seemed faulty given that kids who are depressed and suicidal are the one's offered anti-depressants. The medication can't be causing behavior that was possible even likely before taking it. However, the evidence suggests something more complex is going on than simple logic can explain.

Now there are more recent studies suggest anti-depressant medication may have unexpected effects on the developing brains of children.

Similarly, researchers are calling to question the long term effects of stimulants used in the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. As with depression, cognitive-behavior therapy is showing initial research results suggesting that it is sometimes as effective or even more effective than medication.

To medicate or not?

Long-term studies increasingly link attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder with poor educational outcomes, even when children are medicated. ADHD kids drop out of high school more frequently, and their academic achievement scores average 8 to 10 percent lower than their non-ADHD peers, despite equivalent IQs. Additional support for these fi ndings will be published by William Pelham of the University at Buffalo and Brooke Molina of the University of Pittsburgh, whose research also hints that stimulant medication may increase the risk of substance abuse later in life.

Millions of parents must decide when their child is diagnosed with attention-defi cit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—a decision made tougher by controversy. Studies increasingly show that while medication may calm a child’s behavior, it does not improve grades, peer relationships or defiant behavior over the long term. Consequently, researchers have focused attention on the disorder’s neurobiology. Recent studies support the notion that many children with ADHD have cognitive deficits, specifically in working memory—theability to hold in mind information that guides behavior. The cognitive problem manifests behaviorally as inattention and contributes to poor academic performance. Such research not only questions the value of medicating ADHD children, it also is redefining the disorder and leading to more meaningful treatment that includes cognitive training.

“This is really a shift in our understanding of this disorder from behavioral to biological,” states Rosemary Tannock, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Tannock has shown that although stimulant medication improves working memory, the effect is small, she says, “suggesting that medication isn’t going to be sufficient.” So she and others, such as Susan Gathercole of the University of Durham in England, now work with schools to introduce teaching methods that train working memory. In fact, working-memory deficits may underlie several disabilities, not just ADHD, highlighting the heterogeneity of the disorder.

“Working memory is a bottleneck for everyday functioning independent of what category you fit into,” comments Torkel Klingberg, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Based on Klingberg’s research, Karolinska founded Cogmed—a biotech company that has developed a software program to train working memory. In a recent paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Klingberg reported that 60 percent of 20 unmedicated ADHD children no longer met the clinical criteria for ADHD after five weeks of training. The company has already rolled out its training service in Sweden and Germany, and Karolinska is collaborating with New York University to launch a clinical trial with ADHD kids later this year. “It’s intriguing data,” Tannock remarks.

A recent study has found medication combined with behavior therapy works best for children with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD). When behavior therapy is combined with a new patch administering the active ingredient in Ritalin and Concerta, "the study showed that the amount of medication required to achieve the same results as use of medication alone can be reduced by two-thirds."

This is tremendous news for children and parents dealing with ADHD. A lower dose very likely means fewer and less serious side effects.

And this study continues to affirm my contention of many years, medication and therapy together work best in treating any mental health difficulty and that therapy may have the effecting of lowering the required medication dose.

Many years ago I started to see a pattern in people who were treated for schizophrenia with neuroleptics would show greater adjustment to live over years of learning skills of stress management and independent living skills. Even without therapy, people mature and become wiser with age. Therapy and skills training seems to allow people to adjust to life's challenges with a mental illness much more quickly. Since then, I've seen the same effect with those people who take anti-depressants.

Many were encouraged by their psychiatrist to lower their dose over time. A few even were able to stop their medication at least for significant periods of time once they understood what their illness did to them, and how they could cope without medication. These folks often chose to restart a low dose during extreme stress.

As always, never adjust your medication without consulting your physician. If you are taking multiple psychotropic or other medications, it's best to consult a psychiatrist or qualified nurse clinician.