Search Results

After looking at some great topics in reason weeks, I wanted a bit of a platter-cleanser-style episode where we look at a really fun topic and something that all of us can relate too. Therefore, in this fascinating episode, we look at the 12 reasons why couples break up and the different outcomes this can have on people’s mental health. Today’s episode has been sponsored by Psychology of Relationships: The Social Psychology of Friendships, Romantic Relationships and More Fourth Edition. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Why Do We Need To Look At Why Couples Break Up? The main reason why I want to look at this is because the main audience for the podcast is psychology students and professionals and anyone interested in psychology. And just because we love psychology, it doesn’t make us immune to break-ups and other relationship-related behaviours. Therefore, I want to look at it for all of us so you listeners can get a better understanding. However, if we look towards our clients, then relationship breakdown can seriously impact their mental health, so by looking at this topic, it helps us to gain insight how they’re feeling as well. For example, Rhoades et al. (2011) showed that break-ups can increase a person’s psychological distress as well as reduce their life satisfaction, and it’s interesting to note that break-ups can impact a person’s mental health for months, and even years, after it happened. In addition, after a relationship ends, it’s important for people to take notice and think about what went wrong. This can be done by themselves or friends or with the help of a therapist. This can be a good thing to do as it helps the person to make sure they don’t enter a similarly vulnerable situation again in the future. Additionally, this is exactly why it’s a good idea to be at least aware of the common things that lead to break-ups, so you can help to manage your own relationship and maybe even steer yourself in a better direction in the future. And I just want to say here that if you listen to today’s episode and you realise that you might want to change a few things in your relationship. One, I think that’s a healthy attitude to have because it shows you care about the relationship, and two, I seriously doubt you’ll be alone. Building upon that last point further, break-ups really are just part of life because Rhoades et al. (2011) also showed that a third of unmarried people between the ages of 18 to 35 have had a breakup in the past two years. Why Do Couples Break Up? Personally, I always find it interesting to read these sort of research articles because it is an area I would never personally research, because I can imagine this sort of thing gets depressing after a while. But I do really admire the researchers that want to investigate this area. Therefore, according to Gravningen et al. (2017), here are the 12 most common reasons why couples in the UK breakup: · They Grew Apart · Arguments · Unfaithfulness · Lack of Respect · Different Interests · Moved (presumably one partner wanted to move away for some reason and the other didn’t follow) · Money Issues · Not Sharing Housework I can really imagine a bunch of people nodding their heads now, because I think that will be a seriously annoying thing I find in the future. · Difficulties with sex · Domestic Violence · Not Wanting Children (Presumably when the other partner does) · Drugs, gambling or drinking Personally, before I explore the results in any great depth, I just want to mention my thoughts on them, because they are interesting. Since the first five or so aren’t surprising in the slightest, and I can fully understand why not sharing housework is a factor in breaking up. Yet different interests I find interesting, because I personally believe it’s healthy to have your own things in relationships so you effectively have you time or your space. But this finding raises the point that you always need to strike a balance, as with everything in life, so you still have your time and interests but you have shared interests too, and effectively bond over. Overall, another interesting thing about the findings were that these factors were relatively consistent for both men and women. Since both genders said “arguments” and “growing apart” were the top-two reasons for breaking up. Yet there were some gender differences as well, because women were more likely than men to say “lack of respect” was a more important factor for breaking up, along with “money issues”, “domestic violence” and “not sharing household responsibilities”. Furthermore, another reason this is important to look at is because Williamson et al. (2016) found many problems that led to a divorce were present at the beginning of the relationship. Therefore, it is very possible that if couples sort out of their issues sooner rather than later in a relationship, and do eventually get married, then they might save themselves the trouble of a divorce. On the other hand, we have to realise that people do heal from breakups and the damage, hurt and pain they cause aren’t permanent. As well as Gardner and Oswald (2005) found some vital findings showing divorcing couples do reap a lot of great psychological gains from the breaking up of their marriage and men and women tend to benefit equally in this regard. This can be supported with the following quote: “Divorce works. The evidence suggests that marital dissolution eventually produces a rise in psychological well-being. For those couples who take it, the leap into the dark seems to improve their lives.” Social Psychology Conclusion At the end of this episode, I am not denying that breakups are emotionally devastating, but, it is important to learn from it. We need to take time to reflect on what happened, what went wrong and what could we do in the future to protect ourselves from another let-down. I hope the 12 reasons we briefly looked at in this episode might help to give you a place to start. However, I will make this point very clear, you must not shelter away from the world after a breakup. You must at some point get back up and get back out on the dating scene, because sheltering yourself away out of fear will do you no good whatsoever. I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Psychology of Relationships: The Social Psychology of Friendships, Romantic Relationship and More Fourth Edition. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Social and Clinical Psychology References Gardner, J., & Oswald, A. J. (2006). Do divorcing couples become happier by breaking up?. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), 169(2), 319-336. Gravningen, K., Mitchell, K. R., Wellings, K., Johnson, A. M., Geary, R., Jones, K. G., ... & Mercer, C. H. (2017). Reported reasons for breakdown of marriage and cohabitation in Britain: Findings from the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3). Plos one, 12(3), e0174129. Rhoades, G. K., Kamp Dush, C. M., Atkins, D. C., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2011). Breaking up is hard to do: the impact of unmarried relationship dissolution on mental health and life satisfaction. Journal of family psychology : JFP : journal of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association (Division 43), 25(3), 366–374. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023627 Williamson, H. C., Nguyen, T. P., Bradbury, T. N., & Karney, B. R. (2016). Are problems that contribute to divorce present at the start of marriage, or do they emerge over time?. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 33(8), 1120-1134. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

Surprisingly enough, given how common autism is and how it is a major area in clinical psychology, I am surprised that we have never really looked at the condition on the podcast before. That is all about to change as we focus on how to prevent burnout in autistic people by looking at the Spoons Theory and how it can help them. If you’re interested in clinical psychology and autism then this is a great episode for you. Today’s episode of the podcast is sponsored by Developmental Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Introduction To Autism Burnout and Spoons Theory As you probably know from your own life, everyone only has so much energy to use on work, socialising and their everyday life, but autistic people have a lot less energy for these sort of things than neurotypical people. As well as it is also extremely important to note that autistic people might have a lot more energy for certain things. For example, any of their special or restricted interests. However, it tends to be the things that people call the “daily grind” things that has the potential to overload our senses and it is this that autistic people find the most draining. Leading writer and speaker Christine Miserandino to come up with her Spoon Theory and this is most commonly used to explain what it feels like to have a limited amount of energy, and because of this a person has to make choices so they can hopefully avoid (or minimise) fatigue as well as burnout. Whilst she originally used this theory to explain her own chronic illness, it has been adopted by the autistic community to explain the similar energy limitations that autistic people constantly face. What Is Spoon Theory? The theory all starts with the idea that people who face a chronic illness or another condition, which in this case is autism, start their day with a set amount of energy, or in this case, spoons. As well as this is in direct contrast with other people without the condition who could have unlimited spoons and amounts of energy. Following this after a person does something, they will use up one of their spoons and once you’re used up a spoon, it’s gone and there aren’t any more spoons to replace it. Additionally, by doing certain tasks there is a chance a person might end up using more than one spoon for that task. For example, a person might have to load the dishwasher and uses up one spoon, but if a person has to write a psychology essay then that might use up two spoons. And I think this entire podcast audience can agree with me how painful some essays can be and we have all been drained after writing at least one essay. The entire point of this theory is that a person only starts off with so many spoons and once they’re gone, they are gone. It’s important to note that even when autistic people do something they enjoy they will still use spoons. A Possible Practical Implication and Swapping Spoons For Pebbles Yet some clinical psychologists, mental health professionals and researchers like Claire Jack, Ph.D have decided to take this idea into the real world and replace spoons with something else. Instead some clients prefer to think about spoons as pebbles because the great thing about this idea is that you can literally have a jar full of pebbles in the therapy room with you. Then if you’re doing some psychoeducation with the client, you can literally show them how this theory works using the practical example of taking pebbles out of the jar. Of course absolutely nothing on this podcast is ever official advice, but it is an interesting idea. Additionally, it has the added self-care benefit of helping to remind us all not to push ourselves beyond what our bodies can cope with so we can hopefully avoid burnout. What Happens When A Person Has No Pebbles Left? When a person has used up all of their pebbles then a person is more likely to have meltdowns, feel overwhelmed and reach a stage when they’re too fatigued to do much of anything. One of the reasons for this, and a bad habit that people do when they’re burnout, is to keep doing things that require a lot of energy and people basically pretend that they have an endless supply of pebbles. This only leads to greater exhaustion, fatigue and burnout. As well as the real risk here is that this fatigue might last longer and take the person greater effort to recover from compared to if they simply faced up to the fact that should have had a break earlier due to their lack of pebbles. Personally, I do understand this section because there have been so many times when I have just pushed on doing things because I wanted to be productive. Then later on, I found myself even more fatigued and exhausted and this lasted into some of the next day. Therefore, I really have learnt the hard way that you need to listen to your body and when you’re exhausted, you need to stop or face the consequences. Also, for people without these conditions like myself, we have unlimited (more or less) supplies of peddles or spoons, and it’s good to acknowledge that people with these conditions get frustrated that they have a limited supply. They don’t believe it’s fair, right or good that they have to consider conversing their energy. So when we meet people with their conditions, we need to be mindful of what they can do, of course only after they tell us what they can’t do. We must never ever assume they cannot do something because of a condition without finding out if they can’t do it. Yet we also need to be mindful and help them accept that it’s okay that they only have so much energy and it isn’t something to be ashamed of. Preparation Is Key And How To Replenish Pebbles I truly believe that this goes for everyone listening or reading this podcast episode, but to prevent burnout, we need to prevent ourselves from using up our allocated amount of pebbles. Of course this will be very hard to do but it’s important. Nonetheless, if we have already used up our pebbles and we are completely fatigued then we need to realise what do you need to do to replenish your energy. This will be different for everyone. You might want to read a good book, take a walk, be complete silence or do something else entirely. And we all have things that we can’t avoid, like university, parenting or work, so in this case we probably should ditch the things we don’t need to do and stop these things from draining us even more. Clinical Psychology Conclusion I have to admit that this was a rather different episode from normal, but this was needed. I really wanted to do this episode because we needed to look at autism, how autistic people’s lack of energy for the everyday grind impacts them and most importantly how to help them. I’m sure there are listeners of the podcast with autistic family members, and if that’s you then I hope this helped. If not, then I hope you found it interesting, and you never know you might be able to apply this idea of spoons and pebbles and energy levels to your own life to prevent burnout. I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Developmental Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Clinical Psychology References https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/women-autism-spectrum-disorder/202211/what-is-the-spoons-theory-autism I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

Continuing on from the mini-theme of last week, I want us to continue to look at great and fascinating new therapies for a wide range of mental health conditions. It turns out that ketamine and other similar drugs can actually be combined with psychotherapy to treat a wide range of mental conditions, so in this clinical psychology podcast episode, we’ll going to examine this in more depth so we understand how this works, and what the future could bring. If you’re into clinical and biological psychology then you will love today’s episode. Today’s episode has been sponsored by Biological Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. How Can Psychotherapy Be Combined With Ketamine? I just want to say upfront like last week, I am not for or against this new approach at this moment in time and of course I am far from recommending it. we are all just learning about it and I’ll share my thoughts, feelings and opinions on the approach throughout the episode. Therefore, whilst the research isn’t conclusive on the effectiveness of ketamine combined with psychotherapy to treat mental health conditions, there is a growing body of literature showing that ketamine can be a good tool for treating a lot of psychological conditions (Borenstein, 2021). As well as esketamine, a derivate of ketamine, is what’s most commonly used and even the USA’s Food and Drug Administration has signed it off as a treatment for different conditions. In addition, research shows that ketamine treatments are most effective when therapists combine them with courses of psychotherapy and draw on the psychological approaches. And personally, I already prefer this line of treatment compared to neuromodulation from last week, because this feels a lot more holistic as it effectively combined the biological and psychological approaches to treatment. But it does raise the question of why is psychotherapy reported to be effective with ketamine? In order to answer these questions, we need to look at the benefits of ketamine and what it does to the human body to fully understand how ketamine can optimise treatment outcomes for the client. 3 Benefits of Ketamine For Psychotherapy Firstly, ketamine engages the neurotransmitters glutamate and GABA. Due to N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) is a glutamate receptor and ketamine effectively blocks NMDA receptors from action so this allows more glutamate to be present in the synapses of a client (Furikawa et al., 2005). Therefore, with glutamate being an excitatory neurotransmitter and GABA being an inhibitory neurotransmitter, the client’s other neurotransmitters can reach an optimal homoeostasis. Then this leads to a reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms as it decreases hyperarousal as well as rumination. As a result from a psychotherapist’s perspective, this allows them to focus on the underlying events that are causing the client’s affective and cognitive dysfunction with a client that is calmer and more able to focus constructively on finding better ways to effectively manage their condition. Personally, I think this is a very interesting idea and concept because whilst this isn’t right for everyone, and to be honest I do sort of question the idea of giving clients drugs to make them calmer, but some people will need this. For example, I was in a lecture this week and the clinical psychologist said, sometimes there’s no point in giving someone therapy if they aren’t going to be able to focus. Therefore, yes if we need to give drugs to the client to help them focus on the psychotherapy then this is something we need to do. Ketamine Causes An Ephemeral Dissociative State: Secondly, we need to look at how ketamine causes an Ephemeral dissociative state and why this is potentially useful in psychotherapy. Since in many traumatic conditions, dissociation can be a deliberating chronic problem that prevents clients from being able to even acknowledge that they have a condition in the first place in some cases, and as we know if a person doesn’t acknowledge they have a condition first of all then they have next to no hope of resolving the associated difficulties. Nonetheless, with ketamine, this causes the dissociative state that it induces to be temporary and ideally this should (or will) occur in a controlled setting with the psychotherapeutic staff actively engaged in the process. The reasoning behind this is that the dissociative state can give the client a brief break from the underlying emotional dysfunction and this allows the therapist with the client to address the originating difficulties. Overall, leading to potential long term relief. Afterwards, when the dissociative state is over, the psychotherapist then helps the client to cognitively realign with a greater understanding of the formative difficulties that have led to the mental health condition. In other words, the ketamine allows the client to take a break from their emotional and other difficulties and this allows them to really focus on the psychotherapy without having to deal with or be potentially overwhelmed with their difficulties at the same time. Then when the state is over the therapist helps the client with their new found knowledge to deal with the “returned” difficulties that they didn’t feel during their dissociative state. Ketamine Starts Neural Pathway Formation Finally, this rather new finding about ketamine is very exciting for psychologists, because it differentiates ketamine from a lot of other monoamine-based psychotropic medications. For example, ketamine is different from SSRIs with these showing disappointing results (Rush & These, 2018). Also with Ketamine blocking NMDA receptors, glutamate presence is increased which mediates synaptic plasticity (Furukawa et al., 2005). And that basically just means the adaptability of the synapses in the nervous system. Therefore, by taking advantage of the new neural pathways created by this synaptic plasticity, psychologists can work with clients to create positive thought processes as well as memories to mitigate the effects of the previous negative feedback loops and rumination. Meaning this can literally give the clients a new opportunity to find relief and a more positive overlook on the whole, and as future or current psychologists that is exactly what we want. Also, it is very much worth noting that if a psychologist isn’t used or at least present to help the client create a more positive overlook during this increased synaptic plasticity process, this does lead to even worst outcomes for the client. It is the positivity that is absolutely key here. Clinical Psychology Conclusion At the end of today’s episode, we can conclude that there is good research that by taking advantage of the benefits provided to us by ketamine, psychologists can work with clients to achieve three main benefits as we’ve learnt about today. Resulting, in the client being helped to deal with their psychological distress and trauma through short-lived and removed (also known as dissociated) states. Additionally, we know that depression and anxiety can be calmed and its symptoms decreased by ketamine’s effects on both GABA and glutamate, enabling a more logical examination of the causes of the mental health condition without the client’s difficulties overshadowing and making it difficult to constructively engage with the therapy. As well as ketamine helps for new neural pathways to be formed and hopefully break the previous negative cycles as well as rumination. Furthermore, these three benefits of ketamine all thankfully reduce the client’s sympathetic stress response mechanisms, including the presence of cytokine and the inflammation it causes, which further improves their physiological and psychological wellbeing (Comer, 2022). However, we have to take note that this is a relatively new treatment and we seriously need more longitudinal studies before we can even begin to understand the long-term effects of ketamine and psychological treatment. Since like any medication, ketamine does have side effects, which we aren’t going to look at in today’s post but it still has some. Yet the current research and even the practitioner reports do provide a promising glimpse of hope for the use of ketamine and psychotherapy in the future and how they can potentially benefit the treatment of people with treatment-resistant forms of depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, alcohol abuse and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Personally, I am very interested in this new approach to treatment, because it is great that we are still finding ways to combine biological and psychological aspects in treating mental health conditions. Because a condition never has a single cause so neither can its treatment. Of course, a lot of clients will not need ketamine in the slightest but I can understand why ketamine will definitely be useful for clients that are resistant to treatment and have severe symptoms that can make psychotherapy difficult to engage in. This is an area I will certainly be interested in in the future, but until then we will have to keep researching, learning and enjoying all the amazing possibilities possibly heading our way. I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Biological Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Clinical Psychology References Furukawa, H., Singh, S., Mancusso, R., and Gouaux, E. (2005). "Subunit arrangement and function in NMDA receptors". Nature, 438 (7065), 185–192. doi:10.1038/nature04089. Borenstein, F. (2021). "Ketamine and chronic PTSD symptoms: Repeated ketamine infusions reduces symptoms." Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-and-behavior/202101/ketam… Psychology Today. (2022). "Ketamine basics." https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/ketamine Rush, A. and Thase, M. (2018). "Improving depression outcome by patient-centered medical management." American Journal of Psychiatry, 175, 118-1198. Comer, J. (2022). "Beyond stress and burnout: What Is psychoneuroimmunology? Taking the stress out of stress." Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/node/1171851/preview I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

When it comes to treatments for mental health conditions, I always like to be pushing the boundaries of what we look at on the podcast and making us, as psychology students and professionals, think deeper about our amazing profession. This episode is no different as today we examine a very interesting new treatment for conditions that could represent a fundamental shift in how we treat mental conditions. If you’re interested in clinical psychology at all, then this is certainly the podcast episode for you. Today’s episode has been sponsored by Abnormal Psychology: The Causes and Treatments For Depression, Anxiety and More. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Introduction To Neuromodulation: I will define this term in a moment but the really interesting thing about Neuromodulation is that this is a fast-growing area of medicine over the last decade. As well as it is commonly seen as a way to treat chronic illness, neurological conditions and even mental health conditions. Yet this still represents a fundamental shift for a lot of us psychologists that use drug therapy, psychotherapy and lifestyle changes to treat mental health conditions. And let me just say right now, I am not for or against Neuromodulation at this moment in time. I am just researching it and learning about it and I will make a judgement about it at the end. But I will say that if Neuromodulation hopes to replace psychotherapy then I seriously doubt I’ll be too impressed by it. Anyway, there is some discussion that whilst drug and psychological therapy are the most common treatments at this moment in time, advances in Neuromodulation devices could replace all this in the future. Or at least add to this range of treatments as it could provide relief to clients who suffer from intolerable side effects or limited benefits from therapy, lifestyle changes and drugs. Personally, I flat out know it will never replace psychotherapy because this sounds very much like the biomedical model to me first of all. Which I’ll explain more about Neuromodulation now. What Is Neuromodulation? Neuromodulation uses electrical, electromagnetic or mechanical stimulation to modify how our central, autonomic or peripheral nervous systems function. Sometimes these procedures require clinical expertise or implants, but in many cases the treatment can be conducted with a handheld device that our clients can use in the comfort of their own home. Additionally, whilst this all sounds very experimental or like an alternative treatment, its actual theoretical framework is the same as underpins conventional drug treatments. Since all of our brain activity is a combination of electrical and chemical communications throughout our nervous systems, and it’s the job of psychopharmacology to investigate this chemical communication system, by affecting the chemical signalling in the central nervous system. Yet Neuromodulation works the other way because it regulates the electrical signalling within the central nervous system and as a result this causes neurochemical changes. This is actually getting researchers so excited that some of them, like Nolan Williams of Stanford University, are proposing that psychiatry could be entering a brand new era that focuses on neural circuity to treat clients. However, I will admit I have massive problems with how psychiatrists are defining these waves and eras. Since they propose that Psychiatry 1.0 was psychotherapy, then 2.0 was psychopharmacology and this 3.0 is Psychiatrist. But that implies two things that I don’t like, it implies that we all need to be moving away from psychotherapy because that is so old-hat that drug treatments are so much better. As well as it implies that psychotherapy became popular before drug treatments but anyone who knows their “big institution” and psychiatry history knows that’s flat out wrong. This is definitely why I don’t personally like psychiatry because they really do focus too much on the biomedical model and the biological causes and treatments of mental conditions without even giving the psychological and social causes and treatments an ounce of thought. How Is Neuromodulation Used? Anyway, despite the massive public problems with electroconvulsive therapy and my own personal problems with the so-called therapy as a gay person. Electroconvulsive therapy continues to be used today because it is very effective in treating catatonia and people with very severe depressive episodes that are associated with bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder. As well as it can also be used to treat treatment-resistant psychotic disorders (Edemann-Callesen et al., 2021). Moreover, electroconvulsive therapy isn’t the only treatment these days that relies on neuromodulation since there are a number of others. For example, transcranial magnetic stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation and cranial electrotherapy stimulation (Brunye et al., 2021). All of these are minimally invasive and transcranial techniques. There are other techniques that are a little more invasive too. For instance, Vagus nerve stimulation and deep brain stimulation that does involve putting wires into the brain to grossly oversimplify the process. And these techniques are effective in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Gouveia et al., 2020), Generalised Anxiety Disorder (Sagliano et al., 2019), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Neuropathic pain (Yu et al., 2020) amongst other neurological disorders. Also I just want to add hear that all of these treatments you do regularly hear about in psychology and I have mentioned basically all of these in psychology books before, so actually these are rather interesting treatment options for the future. How Could Neuromodulation Be Used In The Future? Looking out into the future, we have to admit that a lot of these techniques are still very new and largely not well-established. I have mentioned in my books before that they are very hopeful and interesting and exciting, but neuromodulation still has a long way to go before it will ever be considered a first-line treatment in everyday care. And this is before we mention the significant side effects of many of these more intensive procedures, because even if these techniques don’t require implants, they still carry their own set of considerations and difficulties. And there is evidence that many of the least intensive means of neuromodulation like Transcranial Direct- Current Stimulation may not be very effective at all. Of course, this will be likely change as these devices become more popular, are researched more and there’s more investment in the area. Yet there are still structural obstacles to overcome before these devices are widely adopted. For example, the considerable knowledge gap between researchers, therapists and the general public so information about current research at academic centres needs to be shared with others a lot better before therapists and the clients become more interested. Then there are problems with how neuromodulation trials are done in the first place, because in normal psychopharmacological trials you can do placebo groups, double-blind trials and randomised controlled trials to demonstrate the effectiveness of treatments. But the randomised control trials for these devices require a very different model altogether requires a so-called “sham/placebo treatment”. Therefore, it’s a lot more difficult to do placebo-controlled trials for these devices, and the available data suggests we lack the validity and replicability to know the true effectiveness of neuromodulation. So new and standardised experimental methods are needed more than anything. Lastly, we need to know the longer term effects that neuromodulation has on the brain, since research suggests that these techniques do enhance neuroplasticity, how the brain changes in response to the environment, but we don’t yet fully understand the full therapeutic effects of these techniques, nor how it affects the brain later on. Clinical Psychology Conclusion Whilst I want to finish up this podcast episode by mentioning that none of these obstacles are impossible and I truly hope that researchers do overcome them. I still very much consider myself a child of the biopsychosocial model and I have my concerns. To me this still sounds like the medical model too much and like people and psychiatry are trying to create yet another treatment that only focuses on the biological and neurological causes of mental health conditions. Of course, our brains and what happens to us on a biological level plays a role in these conditions, but it isn’t the only cause and these neuromodulation techniques will not help to solve negative cognitive styles, negative cognitive triads or even the negative influence of a poor social support network. I truly hope that neuromodulation proves successful as it would actually be another valuable tool in our collective arsenal that us as psychologists could choose from. But I am extremely weary of people wanting to use this to replace psychotherapy and even return us to the biomedical model completely. Because this is something that mainstream psychology cannot allow in the slightest. I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Abnormal Psychology: The Causes and Treatments For Depression, Anxiety and More. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Clinical Psychology References Brunyé, T. T., Patterson, J. E., Wooten, T., & Hussey, E. K. (2021). A critical review of cranial electrotherapy stimulation for neuromodulation in clinical and non-clinical samples. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 15, 625321. Edemann-Callesen, H., Winter, C., & Hadar, R. (2021). Using cortical non-invasive neuromodulation as a potential preventive treatment in schizophrenia-A review. Brain Stimulation, 14(3), 643-651. Gouveia, F. V., Davidson, B., Meng, Y., Gidyk, D. C., Rabin, J. S., Ng, E., ... & Hamani, C. (2020). Treating post-traumatic stress disorder with neuromodulation therapies: transcranial magnetic stimulation, transcranial direct current stimulation, and deep brain stimulation. Neurotherapeutics, 17(4), 1747-1756. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/balanced/202209/neuromodulation-and-psychiatry-30 Sagliano, L., Atripaldi, D., De Vita, D., D'Olimpio, F., & Trojano, L. (2019). Non-invasive brain stimulation in generalized anxiety disorder: A systematic review. Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry, 93, 31–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnpbp.2019.03.002 Yu, K., Niu, X., & He, B. (2020). Neuromodulation management of chronic neuropathic pain in the central nervous system. Advanced functional materials, 30(37), 1908999. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

Whenever we think about teenagers with body image and body positivity problems, we always think that girls are the main people that suffer with these problems. We believe that girls are always the people with body negativity, and that boys are very safe from this problem. But a lot of recent research suggests that the majority of boys have massive body image problems, so why do we still focus on girls when there is clearly a much larger problem? That’s what we’ll explore in today’s podcast episode. This episode had been sponsored by Abnormal Psychology: The Causes and Treatments For Depression, Anxiety and More. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Body Negativity In Boys One of the miniature themes of this podcast is that I always like to investigate underexplored areas and help to bring them to the attention of all of us. For example, that’s why I investigate suicide on the podcast, how mental health conditions could in fact be adaptions and not disorders amongst other topics. Therefore, I really want to highlight how boys can be very badly affected by body image issues, and how this is not a problem limited to girls. In addition, the author of the book Being You: The Body Image Book for Boys mentioned that young men and boys are often at a complete loss when it comes to talking about their body image concerns, even if these concerns start early in life. And before I start talking about studies and the research side of this argument, I want to give you a little bit of my own personal interest in the topic area. Since as a child I was obese and as you imagine I was an easy target for bullies so I was really bullied for it for years and years. As well as even though I was basically change between being underweight and having a normal weight depending on the week and my body attitude, I still think I will always see myself as fat. Wow, even writing that’s difficult because during my first year of university, several people did suspect I had developed an eating disorder because I was barely eating maybe a thousand calories a day and I was doing extreme amounts of exercise. Looking back I know that wasn’t healthy and I was had that I didn’t hospitalise myself, but it just does to show how powerful bullying can be, and whilst there are other factors that are more or less influential for other people. That’s my story in short. In addition, McLean et al. (2018) found that even boys that are as young as 6 years old believe that muscles make boys look better, and one of the real dangers about this particular belief is that before puberty, boys aren’t apt to build anything looking like the bulky muscles of bodybuilders. Resulting in a lot of young boys being disappointed in their bodies from an early age. Personally, I think that’s heart-breaking and a massive shame that somewhere in our society, we have created an atmosphere where pre-teenagers feel the need to get muscles to look good. And possibly connecting to my own personal story, this concern about body image isn’t just a superficial concern as it can and does have very serious consequences. Like eating disorders because one-fourth to one-third of eating disorder patients are male, as well as eating disorders are among the deadliest mental health conditions. If you want to see the source for that fact see the reference list below for the website. So yes, it is very, very fair to say that body image issues can kill people. Finally for this section, a very concerning finding is that this problem isn’t going away since a growing number of boys, as much as an 11% growth (Glazer et al., 2021), are using steroids or supplements to increase their muscle mass. As well as TikTok seems to only encourage these maladaptive body image behaviours by increasing the popularity of trends like “dry scooping” protein powder. This is where you take a pre-workout consumption of chalky powders without dissolving them in water first. That is actually very dangerous. Why Don’t We Talk About Body Image Issues in Boys? Now this is one of my favourite areas to explore because I really am interested in why certain mental health conditions are steered or limited towards only affecting certain populations or genders, or at least that’s what the mainstream wants us to believe. Thankfully, unlike other areas of mental health, like telling female rape survivors in the last century that what they experienced didn’t matter, the body image conversation around boys isn’t quite as dark, but it is still outrageous. Since the reason why body image and negativity surrounds girls and women so much is because out of concerns over the decades’ long marketing and objectifying and basically society telling women they had to be thin, attractive and feminine if they wanted to have any hope of succeeding in society. Well that’s the gist. Therefore, to combat the damage this marketing and other societal-level factors had done over the decades, the focus on was protecting the mental health of women and young girls. However, this has caused men and boys to have a lot of trouble speaking out about their own mental health in general but especially surrounding their body image. Furthermore, in the book, Being You: The Body Image Book for Boys, a lot of boys emphasised how they were embarrassed about taking off their t-shirt at the swimming pool and generally just showing off their body. This is something I certainly understand because again, I truly believe I will always see myself as fat and even now, I don’t take off my t-shirt on holiday, in front of my parents if they want me to try on clothes they’re bought me and I am seriously concerned for my future relationships to be honest. Moreover, as I’ve repeatedly mentioned on the podcast before, boys and men are far less likely than women and girls to seek out help for their mental and physical health concerns. Due to a number of stupid societal and personal factors, like the outrageous belief about talking about feelings makes you weak, real men don’t cry and all that other rubbish that I hate beyond words. Because it is those dumb myths that are causing so much damage to the mental health and wellbeing of our men and women in our society. Anyway, the problem with this brand of masculinity, the type were men are only allowed to be seen as strong, stoic and independent, is that it stops them from coming forward. As well as Lynch et al. (2016) shows that recognising and having an awareness of the body image issue is the first step in obtaining treatment for it. therefore, if boys are scared of being ridiculed or stigmatised by coming forward then they will continue to try to manage their body image distress alone and I know that doesn’t work. Also I want to mention that before we move on to the last section of the podcast episode, I now know after researching this, how lucky I was and I suppose I really do need to try to be more careful about body image and try to remain positive. I think in the future, dating would help with that because that way hopefully people would tell me I’m beautiful and they like me and my body, but that is a long way off for personal and situational reasons. And again, this is just my experience, a lot of other people would have other experiences too. Overall, this will only intensify and worsen the current mental health crisis in the teenage population, and to be honest this will kill people too. How Do We Improve Boys’ Body Image? Now that we know how serious body image issues are and their serious consequences, we need to look at how can we solve this and start to help these boys. Firstly, we need boys to acknowledge that they have these concerns, and this is very typical to be something that they’re ashamed of. Thankfully not everyone will be ashamed of their bodies but it is okay if they are. As psychologists and therapists, we cannot do anything unless a person admits they’re experiencing psychological distress and they want to change this. Additionally, we can help these boys further to understand that body dissatisfaction is a natural reaction to have in our appearance-based culture that really does bombard us all with messages about the importance of how we look, not who we are. For example, I’m not I can actually say name of the social media site by a very famous picture-based social media site that I use loves to show my pictures of muscular men for literally no reason. I don’t actually want to see these pictures but it is an example of how these pictures of “ideal” beauty and attraction are bombarded on us. Also, we have to admit that there is a lot, a lot of money for people to make if they increase the insecurities we have about our appearance. Since these pictures could make people buy make-up, steroids, gym memberships and so many more tools we could use to achieve this ridiculously unhealthy version of “ideal” beauty. And another point to raise is why would any industry, let alone the wellness and beauty industry, stop at catering for women and girls when they could double their profits by targeting young boys and men? It's a numbers game for sure. Clinical Psychology Conclusion To wrap up this podcast episode, I don’t want to focus on the content this time, instead I want to focus on the message of you really are perfect the way you are. In society, we don’t need to be beautiful, perfect or some messed up version of Adonis (the Greek God of beauty) and if you meet people who think that that is the only way to be then leave them. They are not going to be a healthy influence in your life, and it seriously is about time that for the sake of our mental health, the wellbeing of our young people and society as a whole that we start moving about from the appearance-based focus of our society. We need to start understanding that everyone is perfect in their own way and that we don’t all need to look like models and muscle gods or whatever the kids are called it these days. I seriously don’t know what they are. Because I can promise you this, if you don’t accept yourself and if you allow body image issues to eat away inside of you then you really are playing a dangerous game. After this episode I now know I was lucky I was a few years ago but a lot of other people aren’t so lucky. So please be careful, accept yourself and have the body that you want. Not what something else wants you to have. I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Abnormal Psychology: The Causes and Treatments For Depression, Anxiety and More. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Clinical Psychology References Glazer, K. B., Ziobrowski, H. N., Horton, N. J., Calzo, J. P., & Field, A. E. (2021). The course of weight/shape concerns and disordered eating symptoms among adolescent and young adult males. Journal of Adolescent Health, 69(4), 615-621. https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/busting-myths-about-eating-disorders Lynch, L., Long, M., & Moorhead, A. (2018). Young Men, Help-Seeking, and Mental Health Services: Exploring Barriers and Solutions. American journal of men's health, 12(1), 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557988315619469 Markey, C., Hart, D., & Zacher, D. (2022). Being You: The Body Image Book for Boys. Cambridge University Press. McLean, S. A., Wertheim, E. H., & Paxton, S. J. (2018). Preferences for being muscular and thin in 6-year-old boys. Body image, 26, 98-102. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

As I’ve mentioned in other social psychology episodes and in my Social Psychology and Psychology of Human Relationships books, humans are a very social species and our bonds are very important to all of us. Therefore, when these relationships break we all tend to be upset, confused and just flat out devastated when these people who we have spent time in bonding and maintaining our relationships with, are no longer our friends. But what causes this to happen? That’s the focus of today’s great episode. Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Psychology of Relationships: The Social Psychology of Romantic Relationships, Friendships and More Fourth Edition (Brand New Edition!). Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Apostolou and Keramari (2021) In order to answer that question we need to look at a great new study that investigates both the evolutionary psychology and social psychology behind friendships, but first we need to emphasise the importance of the topic a little more. Because this does truly affect everyone, no matter their age, socioeconomic status or where they live, we all prefer to keep bonds than break them. This is even more important when we consider how much of a role friendships play in all our lives. Since it is our friends that provide us with companionship, emotional support and they are sources of a lot of pleasure and joy. Therefore, when our friendships do decay and break down, we do lose an awful lot of great things. That’s why it is critical to know why friendships break down in the first place. To investigate this, Apostolou and Keramari (2021) conducted a recent study using 577 over 18-year-olds and this study ended up concluding 4 factors that lead to why friendships end. And for the sake of research methodology and to stretch out this episode a little longer, it’s important to note that both men and women were used in this study, so the results can be applied to both sexes, and there was no difference between opposite- and same-sex friendships, so these results are fairly generalisable. As well as another good thing about this study is that you really can apply the results to your own life to different extents so you can possibly understand why you’ve lost friends in the past, and these results could help all of us to be better friends moving forward. Apostolou and Keramari (2021)’s 4 Factors To Why Friendships End Now let’s look at these 4 factors. Romantic Involvement The researchers found that women were more likely to end friendships if they perceived that their friend was interested in them or their partner romantically. Which I can understand because it certainly does bring a little more awkwardness to the friendship. Then again I’ve been in friendships when I’ve liked them and they actually didn’t impact the friendship at all and it ended for completely different reasons that were more to do with other people then me and my friend. Lack of Frequent Interaction This is definitely an important factor and I will have to admit, I am extremely guilty of this, and I would have to say this is probably how most of my friendships have ended in the past. But Apostolou and Keramari (2021) found that losing touch and having a decreased amount of communication fell under this reason for why friendships ended. As well as men, not women, were more likely to say this was a reason for ending a friendship. Selfishness This reason isn’t strictly limited to selfishness per se, because a lack of reciprocity and trust in a friendship fell under this section too. As well as if friendships were or became unsupportive, unkind or manipulative then these traits also fell under this reason, among others. And I really do recommend checking out the study itself for more details for this category, some of it’s really interesting. In addition, women were more likely than men to end friendships because of selfishness. Perceptions Of Friends and Family This is a reason I have wholeheartedly support and this is just an awful reason because I really can and does ruin friendships. Therefore, Apostolou and Keramari (2021) found that both men and women were just as likely as each other to end their friendships if their other friends and family members disapproved of them. And one example of this could be our other friends pointing out the negative effects these friends have on us. Personally, I completely get that example and I have done it too. I have openly said to friends before that I didn’t think they were a good influence on them, and to be honest they weren’t. Because we all want to protect our friends so they don’t make a decision they’re going to regret or do something stupid, if not a little criminal. And even that example has probably given you an insight into one of my friendships and their other friends. But equally, something friends and family members can overreact for no reason and ruin a very healthy and great friendship. So it is a tough one and one that I have a lot of experience with. Lastly, Apostolou and Keramari (2021) did find that older people were more likely to end friendships than younger people, with the researchers suggesting this is because older people tend to already have a well-formed group of friends so they’re in a better position to sort through and eliminate friendships that aren’t serving them well. Limitations of Apostolou and Keramari (2021) Of course, no study is ever perfect and I do sort of like to look at this methodology side of life on the podcast from time to time. For example, Apostolou and Keramari (2021) didn’t look at the difference in dynamics involved in ending opposite versus same-sex friendships, so that’s something for future studies to explore. Additionally, it would have been good to know the quality (strength) of the friendships before it was ended. This would allow us to understand if a newer friendship is easier or harder to end than an older one, and if the reasons are different. Finally, and this is a mini-theme on The Psychology World Podcast, but this study was conducted in Greece. As a result, it would be interesting to see if this study replicated well in other cultures in other countries on other continents. Social Psychology Conclusion Personally, I know today’s episode was very different from what we normally look at on the podcast but it is important to do. It is important for all of us to break out of our niches from time to time and explore other areas of our amazing, wonderful and to be honest, breath-taking profession. And this is even better when we explore a topic that does directly impact our lives and maybe even improves it. Since now we know as real people, not psychologists, four things not to do, or we do truly risk ruining and breaking our friendships with those we treasure. This is something I think we can all agree is something that we really, really want to avoid. Because we are a social species, and absolutely none of us want to experience the pain of losing our precious social bonds. I really hope you enjoyed today’s biological psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Psychology of Relationships: The Social Psychology of Romantic Relationships, Friendships and More Fourth Edition (Brand New Edition!). Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Social Psychology Reference Apostolou, M., & Keramari, D.(2021). Why friendships end: An evolutionary examination. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Advance publication. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

Personally, I always love episodes that rail against social norms and speaking ill of the dead definitely does. However, this social norm is understandable but in today’s episode we’re going to look at the inherent problems this causes trauma survivors and how speaking ill of the dead might help them in their recovery. If you’re even remotely interested in clinical psychology and therapy, you seriously need to read on! Today’s episode has been sponsored by Abnormal Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Mini-Introduction to Benefits of Speaking Ill of The Dead As I mentioned in the introduction of the post, there actually might be benefits of speaking ill of the dead for people, and this could be especially true for trauma survivors. Since when offenders of trauma die, survivors often face a wide range of very complex emotions and this sets them off on an emotional journey where they will need others to help them understand, support and accept themselves and their own emotions. As well as in this case the social norm of do not speak ill of the dead under any circumstances is very damaging, because it could make the social support network of the trauma survivor get uncomfortable listening to them speak ill of the dead and they may be ill-equipped to support the trauma survivor. Resulting in them even being tempted to challenge, silence or minimise what the survivor experienced all because of some social norm. Personally I flat out do not blame anyone for feeling uncomfortable about speaking ill of the dead, because I too experience it. For example, if someone speaks ill about my Grandmother on my dad’s side, then yes, I get uncomfortable and to be honest I do not want to hear it. But there are problems with this, and I will fully admit if my Grandmother was abusive or wronged other people then I might be tempted to silence a survivor on the matter. But the point of this podcast episode is to help raise awareness of this, and learn how to improve myself at the same time in case I do actually have a loved one or know someone who was good to me, but abusive to others. Supporting The Survivor’s Grieving Process Whenever an offender dies, trauma survivors can experience a wide range of disturbing and conflicting emotions throughout their grieving process. They might be angry and devastated about the death, they might be happy and relieved or they might be overwhelmed. And like always everyone is completely entitled to feel how they want to feel, like I know when certain people pass in my family none of my immediate family will be upset. It doesn’t make us bad people, it is just the response we will have because of what certain people have done. Therefore, to aid in the grieving process, survivors might benefit from sharing their feelings, thoughts and experiences about the dead offender or offenders. So some survivors might speak ill of the dead as part of the grieving process, whilst other people might not. At the end of the day, there is no right or wrong way to grieve, and the worst thing any of us can do, me included, is to try to force someone to grieve a certain way. Additionally, trauma survivors do need to be selective or at least intentional about who they allow to support them during this difficult time, even more so if they do end up speaking ill of the dead. For example, it is unofficially best to talk to a non-judgemental best friend compared to a family member who thought the offender of the trauma could do no wrong. In addition, there are a lot of reasons why people won’t be able to support trauma survivors and they might even be intolerant towards the survivor. Some of these reasons include they might be grieving themselves for the offender, and they might perceive them differently to the survivor. Therefore, as an unofficial tip here, it could be best to seek out a friend or family member who either didn’t know the deceased offender or someone who is capable of distancing themselves from their own personal thoughts, feelings and experiences of the offender to help support the grieving process of the survivor. Connecting This To Intergenerational Trauma When it comes to trauma, there are many different types including intergenerational trauma. This is a type of trauma that consists of a response that has been passed down from one or more person to another. Normally this is done within the same family or a shared community. Intergenerational trauma can begin with an event that impacts one person in a family, or a number of events impacting multiple different people in the same family, or traumatic experiences that impact a particular community. Be it a cultural, sexual, national, ethnic, racial, religious or another type of group entirely. Therefore, survivors of this intergenerational trauma, be it different generations of a family starting and continuing a cycle of physical abuse or another type of trauma, may need to speak ill of the dead so they can acknowledge what happened to them and process the impact of this intergenerational trauma. And connecting this to a wider point about death, we all talk about the dead so we can tell their stories as well as gain and learn enough to form our own understanding about them. As a result, survivors could need to speak ill of the dead to gain a similar understanding and accept the impact and most importantly help themselves heal. Also it is this understanding and accepting of the trauma that could be critical to avoid them passing on the trauma to future generations. Speaking Ill of The Dead and Breaking Cycles: Whilst cycles of abuse isn’t something we’ve ever covered on the podcast (something I actually find rather surprising), we do really need to talk about it here. Due to trauma survivors are vulnerable to unknowingly repeating their experiences and trauma, so they may victimise others just like how they were victimised themselves. This, as a result, creates a cycle of abuse, and sometimes survivors engage in self-sabotaging behaviours. Such as if a father was abused as a child repeatedly for years then he might abuse his children, or he may avoid having a child altogether. And like I have mentioned on previous podcast episodes, this can happen to anyone, and mothers can be abusive too. As a result, in order to break this cycle of abuse, the survivors of the trauma may very well need to talk ill of the dead. They might need to say something along the lines of “He was a terrible father and I will never ever harm my children like he did,” or “I will never turn into my abuser,”. These sort of verbalisations can help people foster not only an awareness of their own personal thoughts and feelings, but they help give the survivor a sense of accountability to help them break or avoid the cycles of trauma and abuse. Clinical Psychology Conclusion: I know today’s mental health themed podcast episode was very different and to be honest, I will be rather surprised if it didn’t “trigger” anyone because the social norm of not speaking ill of the dead is so ingrained in our society. However, as psychology students and psychology professionals, we know the damage that other social norms, societal beliefs and other societal constructs can have on people’s mental health and healing processes. Therefore, it is very possible that this social norm about the dead needs to be added to that list. Because as I have mentioned time and time again and I always will, as current or future psychologists, it is our unofficially mandate to help people decrease their psychological distress and improve their lives. And if speaking ill of the dead helps them to do that then it is something we absolutely have to consider. I really hope you enjoyed today’s biological psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Abnormal Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Clinical Psychology References Krebet, Isabella. Is it OK to Speak Ill of the Dead? It Can Be. ABC Everyday. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/everyday/is-it-ok-to-speak-ill-of-the-dead/11906… https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/simplifying-complex-trauma/202209/i-m-glad-they-died-the-benefits-speaking-ill-the-dead I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

When it comes to this unfortunate side of human relationships and social psychology, we all like to believe that we are amazing at detecting deception, lies and any manipulations our loved ones could ever use against us. But it turns out in reality, all of us have been fooled once, twice or a lot more because we haven’t picked up on the signs that our partners and loved ones have been cheating on us. Therefore, this raises of the question of what are the signs of infidelity and most importantly, what are the strategies cheating people use to deceive their partners? If you’re interested in social psychology and relationships you really need to read on! Today’s episode has been sponsored by Psychology of Relationships: The Social Psychology of Friendships, Romantic Relationships and More Fourth Edition. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Strategies of Deception By Apostolou et al. (2022) A new study aims to examine these strategies and the results of Apostolou et al. (2022) are very interesting from a social psychological standpoint. Yet I will definitely admit that was a human viewpoint, these are a little sad but let’s stay on the positive notes. Therefore, Apostolou et al. (2022) found 53 acts that people engage in to hide their cheating from their partners as well as 11 infidelity-hiding strategies that both men and women use. Then out of these 11 strategies used by both sexes the findings show over 70% of participants were inclined to use at least seven of these. With the researchers noting that a combination of them is often needed to hide their cheating behaviour and counter their partner’s detection strategies. In addition, in terms of detection strategies, Apostolou and Ioannidou (2021) found that people use 47 different acts to detect if their partner is cheating on them, with Apostolou et al. (2022) noting that several of these infidelity-hiding strategies are designed to counter the strategies their own partners use to detect their cheating behaviour. And the really interesting thing about that is that in theory this sounds perfectly logical, because of course if you’re doing something wrong then you want to go out of your way to hide it. But in reality, this could actually make the cheating a lot easier to detect. What Are The Signs of Infidelity? Therefore, here are the top four “groups” of strategies that cheating partners use to hide their infidelity. Firstly, the most common secret strategy to hide cheating behaviour in Apostolou et al. (2022) was the idea of “less is more” or “being discreet”. As you can imagine, this often involved meeting people in private, secluded areas and making sure that their current partner couldn’t get a hold of them. As well as Apostolou noted that using this discretion results in people wanting to avoid leaving physical evidence of the infidelity so it makes the real partners who want to spy on their cheating partner more difficult for them to do that. Secondly, and leading on from the first group of strategies is the concept of “show me the evidence” because with the cheating partner getting rid of physical evidence, this can itself create a lot of questions. For example, I don’t know about you but I haven’t wiped my search history in years nor do I ever delete texts, so if I had a partner and they looked at my search history and all of they find I have an empty search history and I’ve deleted a lot of texts. Then I will all of a sudden look very suspicious because why has my behaviour and habits changed all of a sudden? Or another example could be that I’ve sure that your phone is filled with photos and emails and everything else that we get constantly. Like on my phone there are massive groups of pictures in my gallery, so again, if there are suddenly large gaps in my gallery or something. Then this would look suspicious because I’m breaking my behavioural habits for seemingly no reason. Furthermore, the next group of strategies that were third popular were termed “Stability Suppresses Suspicious” and this I think is an interesting group. Due to Apostolou noted that people use strategies to hide their cheating by “keeping the same routines” and “keeping the same behaviour”. These methods involve cheaters making an effort to avoid changing their habits, routines and attitudes towards their partners along with their appearance. And it turns out that these strategies could be very effective in real life because normally it is the changing of a person’s look or behaviour within an already established relationship that causes the other partner to become suspicious. Finally, the fourth “group” of strategies people use to hide cheating behaviour (and this is a very dumb strategy in my opinion) is the cheater becomes suddenly smitten with their partner, and I mean seriously, that will only end up arousing suspicious but yea, it’s your relationship. The idea behind this strategy is that cheaters try to camouflage their cheating by expressing a lot more love and interest in their partners. But as Apostolou noted, however, this strategy is very vulnerable to what we mentioned above with the “observed changes in their behaviour” because by trying to hide their cheating behaviour, the cheater might be giving us signs of their unfaithfulness. Nonetheless, to give some credit to cheaters (and because this strategy is so flawed) Apostolou did note that this is rarely used at only 46% of people using it. Due to some partners will take this increased romantic interest as an increase in how much their partner loves them. Which is a massive shame. Signs of Infidelity and Machiavellianism Personally, I always love to dip into personality psychology whenever I can so for the last section of the podcast episode, I wanted to mention a little finding from Apostolou et al. (2022) concerning personality. Since the researchers found Machiavellianism, which as a reminder to everyone is described as being manipulative, exploitative and deceitful towards others is a significant predictor of infidelity. With a deceptive strategy includes directly lying to the non-cheating partner, and one manipulation strategy includes expressing love towards the non-cheating partner to assure their partner of their devotion to them, despite them cheating on the partner. Social Psychology Conclusion Personally I’ve rather surprised that there is a rather useful takeaway from today’s episode. Of course it’s an unofficial piece of advice but I still rather like it. Therefore, in terms of dating, it is probably best to take things slow and make sure you get to know them carefully at the beginning of a relationship, so you’re able to separate sheer attraction (because believe me I know some people are very attractive) from character (because that actually is the most important thing) so you can see the sort of people they are. And if they’re the sort of person to give you authentic adoration rather than manipulations and the other red flags that follow a lot sooner rather than later. Because I truly don’t want that for any of you. I really hope you enjoyed today’s biological psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Psychology of Relationships: The Social Psychology of Friendships, Romantic Relationships and More Fourth Edition. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Social Psychology References Apostolou, M. (2022). Catch me if you can: Strategies for hiding infidelity. Personality and Individual Differences, 189, 111494. Apostolou, M., & Ioannidou, M. (2021). Strategies for Detecting Infidelity: An Explorative Analysis. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 7(4), 380-389. I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

Returning to the idea of looking past the “dysfunctional” and “disorder” aspects of mental health conditions, like we did in Why Dyslexia Is A Cognitive Strength, Not A Disorder? In this great podcast episode I want to look at the evidence and arguments for borderline personality disorder in fact not being a mental disorder but instead being an adaption that has helped humanity to survive. If you’re interested in personality psychology and clinical psychology then this is a brilliant podcast episode for you! Today’s episode has been sponsored by Personality Psychology and Individual Differences. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. How Has Borderline Personality Disorder Traditionally Been Seen? Whenever Borderline Personality Disorder is spoken about it is often seen as a brain dysfunction with Borderline Personality Disorder being described as a disorder related to interpersonal relationships. Due to people with Borderline Personality Disorder traits often have chaotic as well as unstable relationships, causing the sufferer to rapidly switch from valuing a person to devaluing them completely without much notice, if any. In addition, Borderline Personality Disorder is associated with the sufferer being hypersensitive to rejection, having difficulty in controlling their emotions and they’re mistrustful of others. As well as Borderline Personality Disorder tends to have a positive outcome in the end because the symptoms of the condition tend to gradual decrease around a person’s mid-life and there are plenty of psychological treatments designed to help people with Borderline Personality Disorder. However, the reason why I’m writing this introductory section is because mainstream research into the condition often sees the condition as something that is caused by a brain dysfunction, with one leading theory proposing that Borderline Personality Disorder is caused by a frontal lobe deficit, this impacts a person’s impulse control. Nonetheless, there is a new argument forming in the literature of Borderline Personality Disorder because there is increasing evidence and argument that the condition is not caused by a dysfunction but instead caused by an adaption that has helped the person to survive. So what is this new argument and most importantly what does it mean for Borderline Personality Disorder? Why Is Borderline Personality Disorder Seen As An Adaption? The main supporter and author working on the argument for Borderline Personality Disorder as an adaption comes from Martin Brune who is a professor of psychiatry at Ruhr University Bochum and a psychiatrist at LWL University Hospital. The professor has previously written a lot on evolutionary psychiatry, and this is a field that proposes we need to think about mental health and mental health conditions in terms of the big evolution picture as conditions and adaptions that have allowed our species to survive. Therefore, where other professionals see mental health conditions as a pathology, they see the conditions as adaptions. Personally, I do want to jump in here quickly and mention something. I do want to flat out point out that yes it is very modern and helpful to move away from the “every single mental condition is a problem” mindset that is flawed and we’ve covered the damage this mindset does on the podcast before. However, not every single behaviour is down to evolutionary, but it is an interesting subfield of behaviour but it isn’t necessarily correct. Because like everything in psychology and human behaviour everything is caused by a range of factors, and not all that factors include evolution. Additionally, Brune (2016) based the idea of Borderline Personality Disorder being an adaptation on the original work of John Bowlby and his work about the early in life child development of an “internal working model” of the world. And in short, this is a mental picture that tells them what the world is like and how to survive as well as thrive in the world. Therefore, to some children, they see the world as an essentially friendly place with plenty of resources for them to enjoy. They also see the world as a place where interpersonal relationships are durable and great, as well as the child can expect their emotional and material needs to be met long into the future. And Bowlby believed children with stable attachments are more likely to develop this sort of internal working model. On the other hand, to some children the world is a hostile and extremely unpredictable place with their attachments being fragile and fleeting by their very nature, and there is absolutely no guarantee of resources for them. These resources include emotional support and material resources. Resulting in Bowlby to believe that these children don’t tend to have stable early attachments and at the extreme end of the spectrum, these children can and do experience neglect, abuse and a range of other traumas. These children are most likely to develop this sort of internal working model. As a result, now we know the child development aspect of the adaptation model, we need to connect it to Borderline Personality Disorder. As a result, children who develop the second type of working model could and would behave very differently to the first type of children. Since these children could mistrust others, they could be hypervigilant in protecting themselves from rejection and abandonment, as well as they could have lower expectations about access to future resources. This might cause the child to have more of an “all or nothing” approach to life, which we, as outsiders, might see as them being impulsive or reckless. In other words, the second type of internal working model might cause them to develop the traits of Borderline Personality Disorder. Although, it is worth mentioning that Brune himself doesn’t believe that Borderline Personality Disorder in itself is an adaption, he sees it as an extreme and maybe maladaptive version of an adaptation. But it doesn’t matter what we or he see Borderline Personality Disorder traits as an adaptation or not, the most important thing is that his argument forces us to consider the potential value that these traits have, or the value they give a child in their formative years. Personally, this is what I like about these more modern clinical psychology episodes because they really do help us to question the status quo of mental health, and it helps us to realise that maybe the outlook and the negativity of the past is a horrific thing, that does need to sectioned to the past. So moving forward we can make our thinking more modern and hopeful towards mental health conditions like Borderline Personality Disorder. The Evidence For This Adaptationist Model As psychology is a science, we must always focus on the evidence and thankfully there is a good amount of evidence for this adaptationist model. For example, we know that abuse, neglect and other trauma are all risk factors for Borderline Personality Disorder and up to 80% of people with Borderline Personality Disorder have reported these types of adverse childhood experiences. This supports the adaptationist model because it shows that a high amount of children could have developed the second type of internal working model and Borderline Personality Disorder traits could have helped them to survive in their formative models. Furthermore, Borderline Personality Disorder affects up to 6% of the general population and the condition does have genetic factors. As well as I have mentioned on previous podcast episodes how evolution tends to wipe out most genetic disorders and flaws so they affect a tiny amount of the population, and a 6% is not a tiny amount. So if Borderline Personality Disorder is so bad for us, then why didn’t natural selection get rid of it from our genetic makeup? Finally, people with Borderline Personality Disorder have a high level of emotional empathy, meaning they can “read” other people’s emotions very well. Therefore, this could be seen as an adaptation as it allows them to navigate relationships and intimacy better than people who don’t have high levels of emotional empathy. Clinical Psychology Conclusion To wrap up today’s podcast episode, if Borderline Personality Disorder is in fact an adaptation and not a disorder, then a lot of the language we currently use for the condition are extremely damaging, misleading and just flat out false. And like most clinical psychologists, I completely agree that this is extremely troubling considering all this negativity surrounding mental health conditions only leads to stigmatising people with these conditions. And whilst I have mentioned it on other podcast episodes, but there is supporting evidence for this sort of thinking in other mental health conditions. For example, Hans et al. (2022), a preprint, suggests at the very least that depression is a coherent response to the problems in a person’s life rather than a disease in its own right. Therefore, all of this does beg the very simple question, could the same be true for Borderline Personality Disorder? And if that’s true then how many mental health conditions could this be true for? Personally, I really hope that it is true for a very wide range of conditions so we can seriously start to move away from the damaging, unhelpful and stigmatising mental illness models from the last century, but without more research we simply cannot know for sure. The future will definitely be interesting, that’s for sure. I really hope you enjoyed today’s biological psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Personality Psychology and Individual Differences. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Clinical Psychology and Personality Psychology References Brüne, M. 2016. Borderline personality disorder: Why ‘fast and furious’? Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health 1: 52-66. Del Giudice, M. 2018. Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schroder, H., Devendorf, A., & Zikmund-Fisher, B. (2022, May 16). Framing depression as a functional signal, not a disease: Rationale and initial evidence. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2pbzt I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

I know the podcast’s main audience is psychology students and professionals and this is still a critical topic for all of us to understand. Not only because it helps us to better understand our clients and their thought process about coming to us, but because there is a good chance we will all need to see a therapist at some point in our lives. For example, a psychology student might need to see a therapist to help them deal with the university workload or another pressing difficulty, as well as psychologists might need to see a therapist to help them cope better after the stresses and listening to potentially heart-wrecking events in their therapy sessions. This is a critical podcast episode for everyone. Today’s episode has been sponsored by Clinical Psychology Collection. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Why Do We Need To Know What To Look For When Looking For A Therapist? To elaborate on what I put in the introduction, as psychology students and professionals, there are a lot of different tough decisions we need to make. Students need to make good choices so they have a good foundation for their career and knowledge base in their pursuit of a career in psychology. As well as psychologists make tough decisions about their clients, interventions and treatment courses. Therefore, these stressors and other factors can add up over time to decrease mental health in a person, if they’re sad or worried then it can affect their performance and ability to function in everyday life. So acting fast and getting professional help is critical. Additionally, as psychology students and professionals, we’re all familiar with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, that is the gold standard for a wide range of conditions, including depression from Beck (1964) and anxiety and other behavioural “problems” (David et al., 2018). As well as chances are we would all or most of us would seek out a cognitive behavioural therapist at least first of all, if we need psychological help. However, just in case there are any listeners, that aren’t overly familiar with CBT or want a refresher, here’s some basics. CBT is mainly defined as a conceptual model (Beck, 2021) and the psychologists practising CBT conduct themselves according to the principles of guided discovery and collaborative empiricism (Beck et al., 1979) with the therapy involving homework assignments and review, regular process monitoring and eliciting client feedback all being important features of each session. In addition, CBT techniques are properly applied in an experiential, here-and-now way so treatment is focused on the present, not the past. This is helpful because it focuses on your present concerns at this moment in time instead of dismissing them (Friedberg and McClure, 2015). Lastly, practitioners of CBT employ a wide range of change-inducing techniques. For example, mindfulness, behavioural activation, social skills training, exposure and cognitive restructuring. As well as exposure techniques are very important when it comes to treating anxiety disorders. But this raises the question, for ourselves and our clients, of how do we know the psychotherapist is competent and effectively at applying this flexible approach? Especially when I’m sure the psychology professionals amongst us can back me up here, but there are always some co-workers we see and we suddenly question how they got professionally licensed in the first time. This is even more important to consider when Creed et al. (2016) found that whilst many therapists said they faithfully followed CBT, some failed to follow the basic principles, so they were using a fake type of CBT for lack of a better term. 5 Signs Of A Potentially Effective CBT Therapist As a result, when it comes to interviewing a prospective therapist (of course this is if you go private because in the public sector you tend to just be given one to the best of my knowledge), it’s important to know the sort of answers and information you need to know if the therapist is a CBT therapist or not. Firstly, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is action-oriented, so the vast majority of therapists will set you self-help or homework assignments throughout the course of the therapy, because CBT is an active, goal-oriented treatment that might be short-term but gives you skills for the long-term. Now I say the vast majority because one of my clinical psychology lectures did do CBT but she often forgot to set it by accident. These assignments help you to use your coping skills that you learnt about in therapy and apply them to your real life by generalising them. This is a critical part of the process. Secondly, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy involves a lot of collaboration with you and the therapist effectively co-designing the treatment plan. Since in the first few sessions your therapist will interview you by conducting an assessment and they’ll ask questions about the symptoms’ intensity, duration, frequency and interference with everyday life. Then after you get a diagnosis, you and the therapist will collaboratively discuss a treatment plan and estimate a treatment timeframe. Giving you the opportunity to ask questions and actively participate in the treatment. Which is why I much prefer these more open forms of therapy with the therapeutic alliance playing more of an active role, because it seems fairer on the client at the end of the day. Especially as I will always remember what my lecturer said, we are the experts in the knowledge and theory, the client is the expert in themselves. These more collaborative therapies definitely make that truer. Thirdly, the therapy sessions of CBT focus on helping a person to challenge their thoughts and activate their behaviour. Therefore, if you’re wondering how you would deal with these maladaptive coping mechanisms and negative emotions, most therapists will say that you can manage your distress by facing your fears and anxieties. As well as you can learn to tolerate these negative emotions by active coping and learning to approach and accept previously avoided situations, feelings and thoughts. But all of that would of course be examined in more depth in a therapy session. Penultimately, the agenda of the sessions is always set at the beginning of the meeting, because psychology is very precise and no therapy session is never chaotically done. There is always a plan. And to counter a common myth here (that is more for any non-psychology readers here) instead of you lying on a couch venting about past problems, your therapist will discuss and plan out the agenda of the session within the first few minutes of every session. With last week’s homework being reviewed, you prioritising the agenda items and a plan for addressing the difficulties you face are collaboratively done. Finally, symptoms are tracked to make sure there is progress in CBT. Due to assessment measures track your progress throughout the treatment and qualitative reports, like your beliefs about your progression, and Quantitive reports, symptomatic measures and guide treatment planning are used too. These trackers are really useful in therapy because they help the therapist to know what’s working and if they need to pivot their plan, because something is or isn’t working for you as the client. That’s why CBT must always in flexible. Clinical Psychology Conclusion Personally, whilst this episode really did end up serving two audiences. The podcast’s main audience of amazing psychology students and professionals, because it helped to understand the sort of things that our clients need to understand and expect from us, and it helped psychology students to improve their understanding of CBT. As well as the episode would have also helped non-psychology people understand therapy better too, there is another point to the episode. I want to remain us all as psychology students and professionals, that just because we study and work in a profession that specialises in mental health as one of its many subfields. It doesn’t mean we are immune to decreases in mental health and mental health difficulties. So this is an unofficial reminder to always seek out professional help if you’re struggling and get support from friends and family as well. Never suffer in silence. I really hope you enjoyed today’s biological psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Clinical Psychology Collection. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy References David D, Cristea I, Hofmann SG. Why Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Is the Current Gold Standard of Psychotherapy. Front Psychiatry. 2018 Jan 29;9:4. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00004. PMID: 29434552; PMCID: PMC5797481. Beck, A. T. (1964). Thinking and depression: II. Theory and therapy. Archives of general psychiatry, 10(6), 561-571. Beck, JS. Cognitive behavior therapy: Basics and beyond (3rd Ed.). New York, Guilford, 2021. Beck, AT, Rush, AJ, Shaw, BF, Emery, G. Cognitive therapy of depression. New York, Guilford, 1979. Friedberg, RD, McClure, JM. Clinical practice of cognitive therapy with children and adolescents. New York, Guilford, 2015. Creed TA, Wolk CB, Feinberg B, Evans AC, Beck AT. Beyond the Label: Relationship between community therapists' self-report of a cognitive behavioral therapy orientation and observed skills. Adm Policy Ment Health 2016; 43: 36-43 I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

Continuing with the sort of unofficial theme of looking at clinical psychology and mental health from different angles, this week I really wanted to revisit the gut-brain connection as we first explored in Episode 101. Since having a healthy gut-brain connection could be critical for having healthy cognition as well as mood. Hence why this is of interest to psychology and this podcast. If you’re interested in mental health, biological psychology and more then definitely keep reading. This episode has been sponsored by Cognitive Psychology: A Guide To Neuropsychology, Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Note: Nothing on this podcast is ever any sort of medical or official advice. What Is The Gut-Brain Connection? Whilst in the past, the brain and body have been thought of as two completely separate entities that didn’t affect each other in the slightest, in more recent times, we have been beginning to understand the complex and fascinating links between our body and our brain, and a great example of this interaction is the very impressive and rather stunning communication network between what’s happening in our gut and our brain, and vice versa. This is called the gut-brain axis. In other words, our brain and gut are in constant communication with each other. Leading researchers and psychologists to propose that by improving the quality of the data sent through this communication network, people might be able to improve their mental and brain health, and there are three easy ways how this might be possible to achieve. Promoting A Healthier Gut Immune State The vast majority of our immune cells are based around and inside the gut itself, so it is little surprise that the gut immune state could play a critical role in our overall health. Including having benefits or at least knock-on effects for our brain health and mental health, as well as there are multiple connections between our brain health and the health of our gut immunity. Firstly, our gut immune signals might influence our Vagus nerve, since it has nerve fibres located right next to our gut immune cells, and this carries data to the brain that might affect us cognitively and the overall state of our brain. Secondly, our gut immune system could send signals into our bloodstream and then these signals get to our brain, where they could affect brain health. And whilst it is very tough to know how exactly each aspect of a person’s lifestyle could affect our gut immune state, it has been suggested that too much stress might lead to the gut lining becoming damaged. Resulting in an increase of molecules from our gut that could activate the gut immune cells, leading to our whole body to become inflamed. This has been linked to worse brain health in several studies. Therefore, at the most basic of levels, by consuming a balanced diet that is rich in vitamins s well as minerals could help support a balanced function of our gut immune cells and our immune system overall. And it certainly seems to be the case that the gut microbiome and our gut immune cells spend a lot of time communicating, so by tackling or helping our gut microbes with the balanced diet suggestion, we are most probably helping our gut immune cells as well. Personally, this is something that I love about psychology and our biology as a whole, because everything is interconnected, and in a therapy context, yes that technically makes it harder for us to help clients. But it also makes our jobs more interesting, exciting and more skilfully, and to me that is definitely something to celebrate. Prioritising A More Balanced Gut Microbiome Maybe this one should have come first but we’ll all get the same information in a moment, because right now there are trillions of bacteria in our guts and they’re communicating with our gut cells as well as they’re influencing our immune and nerve cells just below the gut lining. These bacteria make up a lot of our gut microbiome, and it is believed their made-up could seriously influence our gut-brain connection and our overall gut health. As well as some early research has found a connection between changes in a person’s gut microbiome and a risk for brain conditions ranging from depression (Foster et al., 2021) to dementia (Luc et al., 2021). Whilst in the grand scheme of things, it is still too early to draw any firm conclusions about the impact of our gut microbiome and mental health conditions, it is still beneficial and maybe an unofficial good idea to start taking better care of our microbiome. Some basic ways to do that is prioritising dietary fibre, like whole grains, nuts as well as seeds, fruits and vegetables, and polyphenols. These are plant nutrients that provide plants with vibrant colours and anti-stress benefits. As well as eating more fibre and polyphenols has been linked to better brain health (Yamagishi et al., 2022), and is believed to help promote a healthier gut microbiome (Pei et al., 2020). Focus On Good Sleep and Being In Time In Nature For Setting Up Your Brain For Gut-Friendless I’ll be the first to admit that the title of this suggestion does sound like guru rubbish but there is a lot of supporting evidence that I’ll get to in a moment. Therefore, what this section means is it’s important to remember in the gut-brain connection that it is a two-way street. Or it’s bidirectional to put it in more scientific terms. As well as whilst it is great to prioritise gut health to promote brain health, it does also work the other way around. For example, researchers have studied the effects of people being briefly exposed to nature photos, and found that the brief exposure was enough to influence people’s thinking (Berry et al., 2014). More specifically, they found when people looked at nature, people made less impulsive decisions, which is exactly the sort of choices that makes us stick to food that is good for our gut, rather than us falling for junk food that damages our gut and overall health (Berding et al., 2021). Therefore, it is just critical to remember that what we put in our body physically can and does affect us mentally by impacting our cognitive processes, including our decision-making. Additionally, researchers have found our decision-making, they were using this as a brain function measurement, can be dramatically impacted by our lifestyle factors. For example, if a person misses out on a good night's sleep then this has been linked to a stronger preference for sugary foods (Tajiri et al, 2020) and in teenagers, an increased amount of unhealthy food is eated compared to gut-health food (Duraccio et al, 2022). Suggesting that by optimising our brain health with good sleep, this can help us to make better choices that promote our gut health. Biological Psychology Conclusion I always like to return to these stranger little topics within psychology because I tend to find that they help me to remember to be humble in psychology to some extent. Because in psychology we often forget the basics of everything is connected, there is always so much more to learn and we will never ever be able to even scratch the surface of human behaviour in the grand scheme of things, because there is simply so much to do. And I know lots of students and professionals might question that’s the point of it then, if there’s no chance of ever learning everything about behaviour. But the point is, the more we try the more amazing things we’ll discover, the more we’ll learn and most importantly, we can then apply this new knowledge to old problems and hopefully improve people’s lives in the first place. There are so many amazing things to discover in psychology and that is what keeps me going with my learning, books and the podcast, because I’m always waiting and ready to learn something brand new and possibly life-changing. I really hope you enjoyed today’s biological psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Cognitive Psychology: A Guide To Neuropsychology, Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Biological Psychology and Clinical Psychology References Łuc, M., Misiak, B., Pawłowski, M., Stańczykiewicz, B., Zabłocka, A., Szcześniak, D., ... & Rymaszewska, J. (2021). Gut microbiota in dementia. Critical review of novel findings and their potential application. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 104, 110039. Foster, J. A., Baker, G. B., & Dursun, S. M. (2021). The relationship between the gut microbiome-immune system-brain axis and major depressive disorder. Frontiers in Neurology, 12, 721126. Pei, R., Liu, X., & Bolling, B. (2020). Flavonoids and gut health. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 61, 153-159. Yamagishi, K., Maruyama, K., Ikeda, A., Nagao, M., Noda, H., Umesawa, M., Hayama-Terada, M., Muraki, I., Okada, C., Tanaka, M., Kishida, R., Kihara, T., Ohira, T., Imano, H., Brunner, E. J., Sankai, T., Okada, T., Tanigawa, T., Kitamura, A., Kiyama, M., … Iso, H. (2022). Dietary fiber intake and risk of incident disabling dementia: the Circulatory Risk in Communities Study. Nutritional neuroscience, 1–8. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/1028415X.2022.2027592 Berding, K., Vlckova, K., Marx, W., Schellekens, H., Stanton, C., Clarke, G., ... & Cryan, J. F. (2021). Diet and the microbiota–gut–brain Axis: Sowing the seeds of good mental health. Advances in Nutrition, 12(4), 1239-1285. Berry, M. S., Sweeney, M. M., Morath, J., Odum, A. L., & Jordan, K. E. (2014). The nature of impulsivity: visual exposure to natural environments decreases impulsive decision-making in a delay discounting task. PloS one, 9(5), e97915. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0097915 Duraccio, K. M., Whitacre, C., Krietsch, K. N., Zhang, N., Summer, S., Price, M., ... & Beebe, D. W. (2022). Losing sleep by staying up late leads adolescents to consume more carbohydrates and a higher glycemic load. Sleep, 45(3), zsab269. Tajiri, E., Yoshimura, E., Hatamoto, Y., Shiratsuchi, H., Tanaka, S., & Shimoda, S. (2020). Acute sleep curtailment increases sweet taste preference, appetite and food intake in healthy young adults: A randomized crossover trial. Behavioral Sciences, 10(2), 47. https://www.connorwhiteley.net/post/3-surprising-facts-about-gut-health-and-behaviour-clinical-psychology-and-biological-psychology I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.

As humans we all like to look into how to live better and longer from time to time, so I thought it would be great to look into this great topic in today’s episode. And even if you don’t want to know how to live longer, this is still a fascinating podcast episode looking at how our biology at the cellular level impacts our behaviour. Today’s episode has been sponsored by Biological Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. And as always nothing on this podcast is ever any sort of official or medical advice. How Does Autophagy affect our behaviour? In terms of biological psychology, it is rather rare for us to focus on what happens at the cellar level and how our cells affect us. However, there is a process called Autophagy that does affect our behaviour and this is just critical for us to look at now. Due to Autophagy is the process that our cells use to get rid of all the “rubbish” inside them by releasing them or letting the “rubbish” degrade. The things that our cells get rid of include things like proteins, organelles and debris that are no longer effective or efficient to have in the cell, so it is packaged up and effectively kicked out. In terms of behaviour and our wellbeing, Autophagy does not only dictate how well we can live our lives but it might also dictate how long we live for. As a result this is a key physiological mechanism that has been conserved throughout human evolution for the sole purpose of allowing our species to thrive. Therefore, when our Autophagy mechanisms are dysfunctional or overwhelmed, our cells are unable to perform at their peak, and this can result in a person to age more rapidly or get a disease. Especially, as the process of Autophagy also includes other biological processes. Including lipography, this is the breakdown of lipids (fats) by lysosomal organelles, mitophagy the removal of our damaged mitochondria which is critical for respiration, and aggrephagy, this clears out other cellular proteins as well as debris, amongst other biological processes. And what makes this really interesting to psychologists is that most neurodegenerative conditions. For instance, Parkinson’s disease and certain forms of dementia are associated with the increase and build-up of both pathologic as well as misfolded proteins. Therefore, if someone has ineffective Autophagy and their cells are not being cleared out properly then this can have serious negative consequences. However, whilst these mechanisms are not fully understood, there are a number of different factors involved here. As well as regardless scientists know that the regulation of a person’s Autophagy can be affected by our environment, nutrient status, lifestyle and our own internal and external stressors. And to sum up, the simple reason why this is important to all of us to understand is because optimising our Autophagy could be a way to decrease our own likelihood of dementia. 5 Ways How Can You Optimise Your Autophagy Avoid Oils, Diary, Sugar, Processed Foods and Saturated Fats I won’t lie and pretend that this is easy to do in the slightest, but I think this point is more about trying to cut down where we can. Due to these foods are pro-inflammatory and these can burden our mitochondria resulting in an impairment to their function and their role in Autophagy. Caloric Restriction When I first read this I was still concerned that it was going to be part of some crazy starvation diet. Yet the restriction of calories by using intermittent fasting increases Autophagy, and I must admit that the benefits of intermittent fasting are well researched too. Additionally, studies have showed that caloric restriction is associated with an upregulation of Autophagy in the brain, liver, fat as well as muscles, and it’s associated with a longer healthier lifespan as well. The reasoning behind this is believed to be because of an increase in the availability of precursors and substrates for other essential biochemical reactions. Exercise For Autophagy, exercise has a lot of great benefits because doing regular aerobic exercise helps to improve the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to our cells by increasing blood flow to our vital organs. As well as it improves the transportation of packaged and degraded inflammatory metabolites and waste by-products. Basically, the things that Autophagy is trying to remove from the body. Get Outdoors Getting outdoors is definitely something we’re covered a fair bit on the podcast before and now we add something else to the list of benefits it has. Due to exposure to nature has been repeatedly showed to upregulate Autophagy and decrease inflammatory mediators in the body. Like interleukins and prostaglandins. Restorative Sleep This is definitely a critical factor that I left til last and this is probably the factor I’ve heard the most about. Therefore, restorative sleep and Autophagy work by both Autophagy and our glymphatic system are highly active when we’re asleep. Both of them work in synergy to improve the functioning and health of our brain, and I know I’ve said it before and it is something I am personally trying to work on more, but we do need to respect the circadian nature of our bodies and brains, as this does help to improve the quality of our sleep for a range of reasons I’ve mentioned on different podcast episodes and in my dementia psychology book. But this does require motivation as well as dedication. Something I must admit I sort of lack at times. However, to sum it up, getting a better night sleep is helpful for our cells to get rid of all the rubbish and debris in them, which can have long term health benefits. Biological Psychology Conclusion I know that this podcast episode was definitely different from what we normally cover on the podcast, but I truly believe that this is a good thing. It is good to change things up from time to time and it is always great for all of us to take a step outside of mainstream clinical psychology and the other things we normally cover. As well as I think the nice thing about episodes like this is that they do contain unofficial tips and little pieces of information that we can take away straight away. Like you could be listening to this and decide that from this point onwards you want to try to improve your sleep. Which is rather funny because as I write this it’s past 9 pm at night and I’m yawing so I’ll be off to bed very soon. So just because this is different, it doesn’t mean it isn’t something we should look at and possibly learn from to improve our own lives. I really hope you enjoyed today’s biological psychology podcast episode. If you want to learn more, please check out: FREE 8 PSYCHOLOGY BOOK BOXSET Biological Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Buy Me A Coffee Have a great day. Biological Psychology and Clinical Psychology Reference https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-neurology/202206/9-ways-live-healthier-and-longer I truly hope that you’ve enjoyed this blog post and if you feel like supporting the blog on an ongoing basis and get lots of rewards, then please head to my Patreon page. However, if want to show one-time support and appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you do that, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you. Which I am going to say right now. Thank you! Click https://www.buymeacoffee.com/connorwhiteley for a one-time bit of support. Click www.paypal.me/connorwhiteley1 to go to PayPal.