10 Facts About Bedwetting

Hypnosis has been used to successfully treat bedwetting (mainly) in children for many years now. Dr Sears here gives some interesting points in what is an often misunderstood behaviour. 

1. The medical term for bedwetting is "enuresis," which refers to bedwetting that is not due to an abnormality of any portion of the urinary tract. Primary enuresis means the child has never been dry, whereas secondary enuresis is the term used for a child who has previously been dry but then starts wetting his bed. Bedwetting is sometimes referred to as "nocturnal enuresis" or "nightwetting." Sometimes it's called "sleep wetting," since some children may also "nap wet." Bedwetting really should be called "sleep wetting" because it occurs during sleep.

2. 15% of five-year-olds or around three to four children in a first grade class, are not dry every night

85% of children eventually outgrow bedwetting without treatment. In the teenage years, only 2-5% of children, or one child per class, continue to wet their bed. Bedwetting boys outnumber girls by a ratio of 4 to 1.

3. Bedwetting is not an emotional or psychological problem, nor does it reflect a dysfunctional family. It is a problem of sleeping too deeply to be aware of bladder function.

4. The genetics of bedwetting are similar to that of obesity. If both parents were bedwetters, the child has a 70% chance of being a bedwetter. If only one parent was wet at night, the child will have a 40% chance of following his parent's nocturnal habit.

5. It helps to first understand how children usually achieve bladder control. In early infancy, bladder-emptying occurs mostly by the bladder- emptying reflex. When the bladder reaches a certain fullness and the muscle has stretched to a certain point, these muscles automatically squeeze to empty the bladder. Sometime between 18 months and 2½ years, most children have an awareness of bladder fullness, the first step toward bladder control. Next, the child becomes aware that he can consciously inhibit the bladder-emptying reflex and hold in his urine. As a result of his urine-holding efforts, his bladder stretches and its capacity increases. When the child can consciously inhibit the bladder-emptying reflex, he achieves daytime bladder control. Nighttime control occurs when the child can unconsciously inhibit the bladder-emptying reflex.

6. Think of bedwetting as a communication problem: the bladder and the brain don't communicate during sleep The bedwetting child literally sleeps through his bladder signals. Delay in bladder control can occur if there is a delay in awareness of bladder fullness, a small bladder, or the bladder-emptying reflex continues to be strong well into later childhood. These components of bladder maturity occur at different ages in different children. Bedwetting is simply a developmental lag in the mastering of a bodily skill. There are late walkers, late talkers, and late dry-nighters.

7. Bedwetting is a sleep problem. New insights into the cause of bedwetting validate what observant parents have long noted: "He sleeps so deeply, he doesn't even know he's wetting the bed." These deep sleepers are not aware of their bladder sensation at night, let alone how to control it. In addition to bedwetters sleeping differently, the hormonal control of urination may act differently in some children.

8. Some bedwetters may have a deficiency of ADH (anti-diuretic hormone), the hormone that is released during sleep and concentrates the urine so that the kidneys produce less of it during sleep and the bladder doesn't overfill.

9. Normally, bladder fullness works like supply and demand. The bladder fills with just enough urine at night so that it does not overfill and demand to be emptied. Bedwetters may overfill their bladder so the supply outweighs the demand, but because they are sleeping so soundly they just don't tune into their bladder fullness.

10. A small number of children have small bladders that are more easily overfilled.

Source: http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/sleep-problems/bedwetting/10-bedwetting-facts-parents-should-know

Why Celebrities Use Hypnosis

Now and again you see articles about celebrities going for hypnotherapy. And for many people this may come as a surprise. Hypnotherapy has been recognized as a totally natural thing, just as any other natural healing such as meditation, reiki or yoga. Due to the significant and permanent advantages of hypnotherapy, it has already gained huge popularity amongst celebrities as well.

Those celebrities visit their hypnotherapists for a variety of reasons. Either it can be to earn a sporting edge, give up smoking, overcome a phobia or to lose weight etc. Hypnotherapy is now more popular among the celebrities than any time before. Whether they are athletes, movie stars, TV actors, musicians etc, celebrities from all fields have been known to choose hypnosis.

It surely gives a boost to the hypnotherapy business when celebrities disclose the positive results they received from it. Take the example of English recording artist Lily Allen, who has dropped her size from 12 to 8 with the help of hypnotherapy. Tiger Woods is one of the best golf players of all time, and he also received hypnotherapy treatments. Actually he credits his strong mental health to the years of hypnosis he got since he was a child. Steve Collins, another sports star has successfully used hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy has become a big part of many athletes because it can give them motivation, or make them immune to distractions, or to step up their mental strength. (More on hypnosis for professional sports)

Mel Gibson underwent hypnosis to help him deal with his problems, while Kevin Costner hired a private therapist to treat his phobia. Smoking is a big problem among celebrities, and because of all the stresses and controversies it becomes very difficult to beat the addiction. But a lot of celebrities have successfully been treated with hypnotherapy to get over it, Ellen DeGeneres, Billy Joel, Matt Damon and Drew Barrymore to name a few.

TV actress Tina Malone lost 6 stone in weight using only hypnotherapy. It helped her to alter her eating habits and allowed her to lose the weight. A good hypnotherapist will identify the root cause of the problem then assists to treat in accordance, like Lily Allen who dropped her size mostly by going to gym and not just altering her eating habits.

Richard Lee, the goalie of Brentford Football Club has also benefitted from hypnosis. Charlotte Church, a Welsh singer also quit smoking when she was pregnant with her children. You will discover so many celebrities who have tried hypnotherapy that it would certainly be much easier to list those celebrities who have not advantaged from it!

It shouldn't come to us as a shock that so many celebrities currently use hypnotherapy. It's surely not a new trend. People such as Mozart, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison etc. all have been known to use hypnotherapy to resolve their problems. Despite the fact that it can be sometimes relatively expensive to hire a good hypnotherapist, it surely does not mean that only celebrities can afford it. It's actually an affordable therapy (especially given its speed, effect and the money it would save in the long run if you no longer smoke/eat/consume drugs etc any longer). The benefits of hypnosis are almost limitless and the effort is minimal, this is what has made hypnosis really popular both among celebrities and the rest of us.


Taken from original Source: http://www.fullhypnosis.com/2011/06/why-celebrities-are-using-hypnotherapy.html

Video: Gaming to Re-engage Boys in Learning

The Psychology of Disgust

Chances are, there's a special something that's guaranteed to turn your stomach. Perhaps it's the sight and smell of a decomposing pigeon at the side of the pavement, maggots wriggling from its vacant eye sockets. Or perhaps you squirm whenever you think of your grandma's mucky dentures by her bedside.

Whatever your pet hate, disgust is a basic emotion common to all humans. But for decades, nobody really understood why it existed. Scientists now believe we can find the answer by examining the things that disgust us.

At the end of the 1990s, Dr Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine began to survey people in different countries to find out what things they found disgusting. Curtis uncovered some interesting cultural peculiarities. For example, food cooked by a menstruating woman was a frequent cause of disgust in India. While fat people scored highly as disgusting in the Netherlands.
But overall, people kept reporting the same things as revolting wherever they were from. It seems that whether we live in Islington or Isla Pinta, Margate or Marrakech, we are all disgusted by:

• Bodily secretions - faeces (poo), vomit, sweat, spit, blood, pus, sexual fluids
• Body parts - wounds, corpses, toenail clippings
• Decaying food - especially rotting meat and fish, rubbish
• Certain living creatures - flies, maggots, lice, worms, rats, dogs and cats
• People who are ill, contaminated

These universal sources of disgust led Curtis to hypothesise that disgust might be genetic; hard-wired in our brains and imprinted on our biological code by millions of years of natural selection. But what persistent force in our past drove us to evolve such a powerful emotion?


The things people consistently find disgusting also make us ill. This link convinced Curtis that disgust was a biological mechanism for avoiding infectious disease. Faeces, pus and corpses are all sources of dangerous bacteria and viruses; faeces alone being the source of more than 20 dangerous bugs.
The genes for disgust probably arose by accident and then became common through natural selection. The observation that most animals avoid eating each other's faeces suggests that disgust could have evolved a very long time ago.


Curtis still believes that upbringing plays an important role in determining what we find disgusting. But she believes that we have evolved genes that predispose us to find some things more disgusting than others.
"Imagine a child had never come into contact with either a rat or an orange. If you showed the rat and the orange to that child for the first time, they would probably be fascinated not disgusted," says Curtis.
"If you then decided to condition that child to be disgusted by both things, I think you would find it easier to get them to be disgusted by a hairy, smelly rat than to be disgusted by a nice round orange," she adds.

Crucial to this instinctive reaction are visual rules of thumb, which we use to decide what is and isn't a disease threat. Visual cues are so powerful, we often squirm at the sight of things we know are harmless, simply because they happen to look like a disease threat. Take worms for example. While many species of worm are harmless - like the humble earthworm - some have evolved to become human gut parasites. Over millions of years, we have evolved an instinctive avoidance of gut parasites in animal meat. And this same visual aversion to long, slimy, wriggly animals makes us squirm at the harmless earthworm.


Another vital trigger is our sense of smell. Smell causes such a powerful response in the brain that the US Army has been trying to develop a stink bomb with an odour foul enough to be used for riot-control. The Metropolitan Police have already expressed an interest in the weapon.
But we can override the disgust response. People find family less disgusting than strangers. And when it comes to sex, we compromise between our instinctive avoidance of disease and our urge to reproduce.


But not everyone believes that we have a genetic predisposition to be disgusted. Unlike Curtis, Paul Rozin of Penn State University thinks that disgust is culturally acquired. Rozin carried out his own survey on the things people found disgusting and discovered that causes of death rated the highest amongst his North American subjects. "Anything that reminds us we are animals elicits disgust," Rozin writes. "Disgust functions like a defence mechanism, to keep human animalness out of awareness."


But few people argue that the way we express our disgust is universal. Humans use a distinctive facial expression to signal disgust. Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco found that this was identical in different cultures across the globe. We make this expression by screwing up our noses and pulling down the corners of our mouths. MRI scans also reveal that we use a special part of the brain when we get disgusted: the anterior insular cortex.


Curtis has even claimed that disgust could have been one of the first words uttered by humans. "The word 'yuck' is similar in languages all over the world. It seems to be a proto-word," says Curtis.
Despite rapid advances in medicine, disease still poses an unprecedented threat to human life in the 21st century. If disgust really is as crucial to our survival as some scientists believe, then we're likely to be saying 'yuck' for a very long time to come.


Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/

Psychopathic Traits and Brain Reward System

People who scored high on a test that measures impulsive and antisocial traits had exaggerated brain responses to certain “rewards,” like winning money or taking stimulant drugs. The new study provides evidence that a dysfunctional brain reward system may underlie vulnerability to a personality disorder known as psychopathy.

Psychopathy is characterized by a combination of superficial charm, manipulative and antisocial behavior, impulsivity, blunted empathy and shallow emotional experiences. Psychopathy is a reliable predictor of criminal behaviour and repeat offenders. Research also suggests that psychopathic people are at increased risk for substance abuse.

Many studies of psychopathy have focused on the emotional and interpersonal aspects of the disorder, like lack of fear and empathy. But Joshua W. Buckholtz and his colleagues at Vanderbilt University decided to take a closer look at a different facet of psychopathy that’s linked to socially deviant behaviour, impulsivity, aggression and substance abuse.

In a study supported by NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the researchers used different imaging techniques to scan the brain’s reward responses in more than 40 healthy adults, ages 18 to 35, who had no history of substance abuse. None had psychopathy, but some scored high on measures of traits associated with psychopathy.

In one experiment, the researchers used positron emission tomography (PET) to image the brain’s dopamine response when participants received a low oral dose of amphetamine. This stimulant drug is known to activate the release of dopamine, a brain chemical associated with reward and motivation.

In the second experiment, participants played a computer a game in which they could win money. Their brains were scanned using functional MRI as they anticipated their monetary rewards. The findings were reported on March 14, 2010, in the advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

The results in both cases show that people with higher scores for impulsive and antisocial traits had greater responses in the dopamine reward areas of the brain. In the first study, the amount of dopamine released was up to 4 times higher in those who scored high for these traits, compared to those with lower scores. In contrast, scores for the emotional and interpersonal aspects of psychopathy did not correlate with the brain's reward responses.

The researchers speculate that heightened responses to an anticipated reward could make such individuals less fearful about the consequences of their behavior. This, combined with a reduced sensitivity to others' emotions, could lead to the manipulative and aggressive behaviours common to psychopaths.

"By linking traits that suggest impulsivity and the potential for antisocial behavior to an overreactive dopamine system, this study helps explain why aggression may be as rewarding for some people as drugs are for others," said NIDA Director Dr. Nora Volkow. "However, while having an antisocial trait may be a driving factor, it is clearly not sufficient to trigger aggressive behaviours; thus, we need to continue to investigate the other contributors to psychopathy."

Source: http://www.nih.gov/