Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t use Facebook like you or me. The 33-year-old chief executive has a team of 12 moderators dedicated to deleting comments and spam from his page, according to Bloomberg. He has a “handful” of employees who help him write his posts and speeches and a number of professional photographers who take perfectly stage-managed pictures of him.
Silicon Valley residents have opened up about their unease with the habit-forming nature of modern technology. A growing number of coders and designers are quitting their jobs in disillusionment at what their work entails. Many of the workers at the coalface of interface design have had second thoughts.
Others have had the same realisation, but have decided to embrace the awkwardness – such as LA-based retention consultants Dopamine Labs. The company offers a plugin service that personalises “moments of joy” in apps that use it. It promises customers: “Your users will crave it. And they’ll crave you.”
If this is the case, then social media executives are simply following the rule of pushers and dealers everywhere, the fourth of the Notorious BIG’s Ten Crack Commandments: “Never get high on your own supply.”
The addiction recovery experience has been sliced and diced in all manner of categories: secular, spiritual, and religious; natural recovery, peer-assisted, and treatment-assisted; and abstinence-based, moderation-based, and medication-assisted, to name just a few. Recovery achieved through any of these frameworks is often referred to as a pathway of recovery. The growing consensus that there are multiple pathways of long-term addiction recovery marks an important public and professional milestone within the alcohol and drug problems arena…
There are millions of people living in recovery within [some of the better-known] established frameworks of recovery, but there are also innumerable people in long-term recovery who have crafted a style of personal recovery at or beyond the boundaries of these approaches. But many recovery experiences are metaphorically more aptly described as an evolving patchwork, mandala, mosaic, medley, or hodgepodge rather than through the image of the well-marked path. This style of recovery may combine unusual and even contradictory elements, the whole of which may resemble no established style of recovery. Those experiences are “dynamically evolving” in the sense that critical ingredients are regularly being forged and exchanged without a predetermined map or fixed point of completion …
Long-term recovery involves a rebirthing and assertive reconstruction of one’s life across multiple zones: physical, cognitive, emotional, relational, and spiritual health—all unfolding and evolving across the stages of life and within one’s unique personal responsibilities and aspirations. Achieving such reconstruction over time and maintaining balance within and across these zones is for some people far closer to improvisational jazz than to playing scored music written by one’s predecessors.
Read more of Bill White’s RecoveryBlog on Faces and Voices of Recovery
The Center for Internet and Technology Addiction offers us this test so we can gauge the level of our smartphone compulsion. It only takes a few minutes to answer the questions. I scored 7 out of 15 so my diagnosis is …
It is likely that you may have a problematic or compulsive Smartphone use pattern.
Addiction treatment as a stand-alone intervention is an inadequate strategy for achieving long-term recovery for individuals and families characterized by high problem severity, complexity, and chronicity and low recovery capital. In isolation, addiction treatment is equally inadequate as a national strategy to lower the social costs of alcohol and other drug-related problems. Here’s why.
Specialized addiction treatment as a system of care in the U.S.:
1) attracts too few–only about 10% a year of people in need of it and only a lifetime engagement rate of 25%,
2) begins too late–with years and, in some studies, decades of dependence preceding first treatment admission,
3) retains too few (less than 50% national treatment completion rate),
4) extrudes too many (7.3% of all annual admissions–more than 130,000 individuals–administratively discharged, most for confirming their diagnosis),
5) ends too quickly, e.g., before the 90 days across levels of care recommended by the National Institute on Drug Abuse,
…
read more of this article
by Bill White addiction researcher
https://facesandvoicesofrecovery.org/news-events/blog.html/article/2019/01/25/addiction-treatment-by-itself-is-not-enough
The colour in fruits and vegetables tells us a great deal about their antioxidant content.
T
he rich golden and orange colors of carrots, winter squash and mango speak of beta-carotene.
Green foods offer beta carotenes and lycopene, as do red foods like tomatoes.
The deep red of beets and prickly pear fruits offer unique betaine antoxidants, while crimson in pomegranates and concord grapes hold the promise of polyphenols.
Deep purple foods like purple cabbage are rich sources of anthocyanins.
Brown foods such as whole grains contain B vitamins.
And while refined white foods, like white bread, white sugar and white rice, are major culprits in ‘brain rust’, some naturally white foods such as onion, garlic and cauliflower are excellent sources of glutathione.
What might surprise you is how easy it is to be diagnosed with an AUD. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), if you answer yes to two out of the 11 following questions, you would be diagnosed with an Alcohol Use Disorder.
In the past year, have you:
- Had times when you ended up drinking more or longer than you intended?
- More than once wanted to cut down or stop drinking, or tried to, but couldn’t?
- Spent a lot of time drinking? Or being sick or getting over the aftereffects?
- Experienced craving—a strong need, or urge—to drink?
- Found that drinking or being sick from drinking often interfered with taking care of your home or family? Or caused job troubles? Or school problems?
- Continued to drink even though it was causing trouble with your family or friends?
- Given up or cut back on activities that were important or interesting to you, or gave you pleasure, in order to drink?
- More than once gotten into situations while or after drinking that increased your chances of getting hurt (such as driving, swimming, using machinery, walking in a dangerous area, or having unsafe sex)?
- Continued to drink even though it was making you feel depressed or anxious or adding to another health problem? Or after having had a memory blackout?
- Had to drink much more than you once did to get the effect you want? Or found that your usual number of drinks had much less effect than before?
- Found that when the effects of alcohol were wearing off, you had withdrawal symptoms, such as trouble sleeping, shakiness, irritability, anxiety, depression, restlessness, nausea, or sweating? Or sensed things that were not there?
Alcohol Use Disorders
Of course, the first step in addressing a problem is becoming aware that you have one. If you did answer yes to any two of these questions in the past year, visiting a health professional who can perform a more formal assessment, and coming to a Yoga of Recovery retreat may help ward off an addiction in the making.
Read more from of John Douillard’s article here
The insurance provider is replacing Oxycontin with Xtampza and Morphabond, whose formulas make them more difficult to crush and delay the high.
Although the replacement drugs cost more, BCBS will keep member co-pays the same as they were for Oxycontin.
BCBS is also lowering the daily maximum morphine milligram equivalent (MME) of any opioid, patch, pill or syrup, to 120 ml.
“We feel that’s still too high, but that’s where Medicare will be,” Willis said. “Higher doses overtime have not been shown to reduce pain anymore.”
As an alternative to opioids, BCBS will now cover acupuncture, a traditional Chinese medicine practice in which thin needles are inserted in key points of the body to relieve pain and treat other conditions.
Acupuncture has been shown to have a relevant effect on chronic pain that persists over time that cannot be solely explained by placebo effects, according to research by the Acupuncture Trialists’ Collaboration, published in the May 2018 edition of The Journal of Pain, the official journal of the American Pain Society.
BCBS is encouraging providers to ask questions such as — have you ever been diagnosed with addiction? does addiction run in your family? have you ever had a problem getting off of a substance? — to identify members who could be at risk of opioid addiction.
“The beauty of all these efforts is to let everyone know they can be at risk,” Willis said. “People may not know they have a predisposition until asked.”
Confidential, evidence-based, digital programs help individuals consider their drinking and/or drug use and decide what, if anything, to do about it. Our programs then help these same individuals develop the skills to be successful if they decide to change, at Check up & Choices
Let me know if you make use of this and how you like it and how it helps.
Here’s to change! Durga
