A Basic Meditation to Tame Your Inner Critic

Nearly everyone recognizes the inner critic, that judgemental voice inside us that heckles and cuts us down. Whatever we do isn’t enough.
This push for perfection is exhausting, but often avoidable with practice. Rationalizing with what is basically an irrational habit doesn’t help much. The inner critic is like the old two guys on the Muppet Show endlessly deriding whatever happens without reason at all. Reasoning with our inner tyrant validates it as if it deserves our attention when mostly it's just an unhelpful pattern of thinking we’ve picked up along the way.
Read more at mindful.org

Third-level students are suffering from extreme anxiety and depression, study shows

IRELAND’S FIRST STUDY into third-level students’ mental health has indicated that a significant number are suffering from anxiety (38.4%), depression (29.9%) and stress (17.3%).

The Union of Students in Ireland will later today publish the first National Report on Student Mental Health in Third Level, which shows that many students suffer from extreme stress or anxiety. In some cases this appeared to be linked with the subject they were studying. 

Those studying in the areas of health science and hospitality appear to be more likely to be within normal ranges and less likely to be extremely severely anxious, according to the survey.

Those studying engineering were least likely to be extremely severely anxious (32.9%).

Read more at The Journal.ie 

What Meditation Looks Like In Your Brain, According To Experts

You sit down, focus on your breathing, and attempt to get rid of all the stress of the day through a few minutes of meditation — but what really happens in your brain when you're meditating? The answer, experts tell Bustle, is more complex than it might seem. The neuroscience of meditation is a broad and complicated area of research, and scientists are often more interested in the impact of your meditation practice on your brain over the long term.
"If meditation just produces changes when you're meditating, it's like a drug, and it would wear off — and what would be the point of that?" Dr. Richard Davidson, PhD, the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, tells Bustle. However, the changes that occur in your brain while you're meditating build up over time to produce remarkable shifts in cognition and brain structure. The meditating brain is a very cool thing.

Read More at Bustle.com

The placebo experiment can my brain cure my body? Dr Michael Mosely

Could taking a placebo, a pill which contains nothing but ground rice, really help cure back pain?

Jim Pearce is certainly convinced.

When we first met, the 71-year-old was confined to a wheelchair and using morphine because of his back pain.

But after he took part in our study, taking our convincingly-labeled blue-and-white-striped "new" painkillers, he seemed like a different person.

The only thing was that he'd been taking placebos; dummy pills - they contained nothing but ground rice. But they worked.

"I just woke up one morning and I thought, hang about, I haven't got a twinge in my back. And it's been going from strength to strength."

I asked him which he preferred, my pills or the morphine?

"I got rid of the morphine and kept taking your blue pills."

Jim was one of 100 people who took part in a trial for our BBC2 Horizon programme: Can my brain cure my body?

It was a back pain study - with a twist. The twist being that everyone, unknowingly, was getting placebo? We wanted to see if people taking the pills would get better anyway?

Read more at BBC News