MENS-WELLBEING.COM

Why Looking After Your Feelings is Looking After Your Health.

A character in a Woody Allan movie once said that he doesn’t get angry, he just grows tumours!  Instinctively we all know that there is an intimate link between our emotional wellbeing and our physical health … but is there any evidence to link the two realms?

In fact the evidence that connects the health of the mind with the health of the body is overwhelming.  If you have a bought of stress, for example, you are more likely to experience a cough or a cold.  If you suffer from chronic (long term) stress, you are more likely to develop cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, motor neurone disease … and in fact a whole range of other diseases.  In other words, if you don’t find a way of dealing with your emotional problems, your body will find a way of expressing them for you.

The science that explores the mind body link is called psychoneuroimmunology.  I know it’s a mouthful.  It basically looks at how the emotional system, immunune system, nervous system and endocrine system work as a unified whole.  The basic finding is that psychological stress suppresses the immune system.  If the immune system is suppressed, disease cannot be controlled by the body, and is therefore expressed as symptoms.

The implications of this research is that if you want to live a healthy life, or you want to have the best chance of curing a physical illness, you need to consider ways of processing your emotional pain.  Denial and suppression, quite simply, is lethal. 

In one study, a cohort of cancer patients was randomly divided into two groups.  One received treatment as usual; the other was given six sessions of group support and psychotherapy.  The death rate of the group offered a chance to emotionally heal was one third of the death rate of those who received treatment as usual.

If such a simple intervention can save lives, why is emotional healing given such a low priority in conventional medicine? 

Well one reason is the very idea of the mind body split itself.  It is a peculiarly western phenomenon, which other systems of healing, such as Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine, refuse to follow.  Yet it is anti-scientific.  You cannot, from a scientific point of view, hold that the mind and the body are separate entities.  The physician Dr Gabor Mate, in his book “When the Body says No:  Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection” suggested that mind-body research in medicine disappears into a ‘Bermuda Triangle’.  That is to say, it is consistently produced, but rarely taken up by the medical profession itself.

This, of course, is unsurprising.  The myth of medicine is that there are discreet disease entities with physical causes that can be reliably diagnosed and treated with discreet surgical or pharmacological interventions.  The model makes available a vast medical industrial complex for financial exploitation by business.  The subtle, time consuming and messy business of emotional processing of childhood trauma and working through the implications for acceptance and autonomy in adult life is less easily commercially standardised and exploitable. 

Yet it’s what we need to do if we don’t want our emotions to kill us.

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Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK.  He offers:

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and Skype counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK

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Book Review: Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius.

If you are like me, you will be pretty suspicious of anything that sounds a bit cranky. Primal scream therapy, rebirthing and neuro linguistic programming all fall into that camp for me. But what about meditation?

Over the last decade what is interesting has been the way evidence-based therapies have taken meditation on board. It is as if no self-respecting new treatment approach can afford to ignore it. There is good reason for this; the evidence shows meditation is really helpful in conditions as diverse as borderline personality disorder to depression, and anxiety to chronic pain.

What most of these treatment approaches do, of course, is separate meditation from its Buddhist cultural heritage. It is as if by dropping the ‘religion’, it makes meditation more palatable to the Western practitioner/client. Although this is understandable, in a way it's a shame. Buddhism's raison d'être is the alleviation of human suffering, and has developed sophisticated psychological models of how to do just that.

What is great about this book is that Hanson and Mendius don't drop the Buddhist heritage of meditation. Neither do they drop the scientific method. In fact Hanson and Mendius are deeply immersed in brain science, Rick Hanson as a neuropsychologist, and Richard Mendius as a neurologist. They draw on their scientific understanding of the brain to integrate Western science with Buddhist psychology.

This book isn't a hard read though. The authors skilfully explain the intricate workings of the brain in straightforward language. If you are interested in the relationship between brain science and Buddhism and meditation, but don't want something too taxing, this is the primer for you.

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Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK.  He offers:

• Cognitive behavioural therapy (cbt) for men in Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and online counselling for men wherever you live
• Supervision and consultative support for therapists in Manchester
• Mediation for employment disputes in Manchester and the UK

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About This Blog

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Pumping Iron Makes You Live Longer.

I once asked a gym manager what brought his customers through the door.  His answer, “sex”, surprised me.  I had expected a more conservative response, like “to lose weight”, “train for a sport” or “recover from illness”.  He went on to say that in his experience of the industry what people want is to look good so they can attract, or keep, a good looking partner.  I suppose this sort of makes sense.  After all one of the first things many guys do when they split from their partner is head off down the gym to “get back in shape” (hear look more sexually desirable!).

The sex thing might explain why men and women often pursue different exercise regimens.  Women, on the whole, dominate aerobics classes.  These classes’ burn fat and tone muscle.  Women tend to be concerned about their weight and hip size as cues to sexual attraction.  Men, on the other hand, can usually be found pumping iron.  Because of the male hormone testosterone, which is needed to build muscle mass, men can build and shape their body more flexibly than women.  Men, often mistakenly, assume muscle size is a cue to sexual attraction (most women don't like guys with huge muscles).

Sculpting the body beautiful may make us believe we are more desirable in the bedroom, but are there any health benefits from doing so?  Until recently, there was a disparagingly small amount of compelling evidence to suggest it did.  However, in the past few years there have been a number of studies that seem to have answered in the affirmative.

In one longitudinal study published in the BMJ (2008, vol. 337, p. 439) the researchers measured the muscle strength of 9000 American men and checked up on their health over 20 years.  The weakest 30% of the men had a death rate 30% higher than the other guys.

This doesn’t mean to say that you should avoid aerobic activity on the back of this.  One of the studies authors, Steve Blair, quoted in the New Scientist (9/1/10 p37) said “The bottom line is that both strength and aerobic fitness make independent contributions to health”.

So the message is clear:  sculpting your beautiful body will make you live longer too, but don’t forget to look after your heart and lungs ... even if nobody can see them.

 

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Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK.  He offers:

• Group therapy weekends for men in London and Manchester
• Beginners meditation weekend retreats for men in London and Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Cognitive behavioural therapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and online counselling for men wherever you live
• Mediation for conflict resolution at work in London
• Mediation for conflict resolution at work in Manchester and the North West
• Supervision and consulative support for therapists in Manchester

Dr Tyson is also regularly quoted in the printed media and as a guest on local and national broadcast media.

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The Indignity of Producing a Sperm Sample – is Home Testing the Way Forward?

The venue was an antiquated general hospital on the northern shores of the Welsh coastline.  The building looked like a prefabricated relic from the post war era from the early days of the NHS.  I was ushered by a matronly looking, stern but caring type of middle aged nurse, into a side room.  Her uniform, and the authority it represented, may have excited some men … but not me.

The room itself was painted in two shades of clinical green.  It contained a desk, an examination table, and various medical paraphernalia, including a stethoscope, a wound trolley, and x-ray viewing cabinet.

“Lie on there”, said Sister in a matter of fact sort of way, “and use this to collect the sample”, handing me a small jar on which had been written my name and hospital number. 

With her instructions ringing in my ears, the ‘privacy curtain’ was pulled around me.  Sister apologised for not having any porn, and she was gone.

Like a ‘good patient’, I tried to ‘produce’ my sample.  Although a little embarrassed, I tried to be ‘grown up’ about the procedure.  These were professionals after all, and had asked many men to perform the same manoeuvre.

‘The sample’, of course, was of sperm … and it necessitated, as a precondition of its production, an erection. 

I tried, as best conditions would allow, to make myself comfortable.  I took off my shoes, dropped my jeans to my ankles, and lay on my back with a heavy sense of duty. 

I closed my eyes and withdrew into the deep recesses of my mind, you know, where the ‘really dirty’ fantasies reside … the ones that only come out when the need to cum outweighs the need masturbate in a morally responsible way.

Nothing happened … in fact the longer it took … the more difficult it became. 

I wondered what NHS porn, should it have been available, would have looked like.  I came to the conclusion it probably wouldn’t have been of any help.  Any porn, so I reasoned, pre-screened and approved by Sister, wasn’t going to hit the spot.

I reflected that a more male friendly ‘masturbatory suite’ should have been pre-planned by managers for just these eventualities, and wondered what such a suite might contain.  A comfortable ‘bed’ was a must, as was subdued lighting, a DVD player of course, and perhaps solicitous décor. 

Such thoughts, though pleasant, only served to impede my progress through my usual routine, and frustrated my ability to meet Sisters’ request. 

As time moved on, I imagined the nurses talking amongst themselves, wondering why I was taking so long.  Perhaps it was the end of their shift, and they were waiting for me before going home.  The pressure was intense.

It was only when I was at the point of giving up that ‘things’ managed to stir in the right direction. Seizing my opportunity, I indulged with vigour - finally able to let inhibition retreat sufficiently to let necessity in.  I produced ‘my sample’.

Somewhat embarrassed by the three quarters of an hour I had been cocooned in this medico-sexual nightmare, I handed my sample to Sister with a sense of pride tapered with relief.  The ordeal was over.

“No” she said to my horror “you don’t give it to me, you have to take it to the lab”.

“The lab!” I exclaimed. 

And so it was I was despatched to hand deliver the sample “as quickly as possible” to the counting facility for their attention.

I left the hospital feeling bruised and battered.  In producing ‘on command’, the very thing that defined me as a man, I had been emasculated by the process.

Perhaps because my memory of that day is etched indelibly into my consciousness, I read with considerable interest of the efforts of Loes Segerink and colleagues at the MESA and the Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.  They have produced a 10 centimetre long ‘lab on a chip’ that, in principle, means that sperm counting could be done at home.

What a great idea!

In fact the technology is so ‘portable’, it may be possible to deliver it as an ‘off the shelf’ test similar to women’s pregnancy testing kits.

Of course there are ‘ethical’ issues about making such tests available to men without a medical consultation.  Given my experience, if any medical ethicists are reading this, you need to seriously consider the ethical benefits of the home test, against the reality of its alternative.  Trust me, it’s not pretty!

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Dr Phil Tyson is a Men's Psychotherapist based in Manchester in the UK.  He offers:

• Group therapy weekends for men in London and Manchester
• Beginners meditation weekend retreats for men in London and Manchester
• Counselling for men in Manchester
• Psychotherapy for men in Manchester
• Cognitive behavioural therapy for men in Manchester
• Telephone and online counselling for men wherever you live
• Mediation for conflict resolution at work in London
• Mediation for conflict resolution at work in Manchester and the North West
• Supervision and consulative support for therapists in Manchester

Dr Tyson is also regularly quoted in the printed media and as a guest on local and national broadcast media.

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