13. July 2009 by John Schinnerer.

Check out this interesting answer on Yedda

Self treatment of OCD

Yes, it sounds like you’re dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is defined in Wikipedia as ‘a human anxiety disorder characterized by involuntary intrusive thoughts. When a sufferer begins to acknowledge these intrusive thoughts, the sufferer then develops anxiety based on the dread that something bad will happen. The sufferer feels compelled to voluntarily perform irrational, time-consuming behaviors to diminish the anxiety.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder affects roughly six million Americans. Its symptoms, ranging from repetitive hand-washing to preoccupation with sexual, religious, or aggressive impulses, wreak havoc in people’s lives, and often cause severe emotional and economic loss.

Sufferers often try to keep their compulsive behaviors hidden from others, often to avoid embarrassment, humiliation or being seen as strikingly odd or different. If the condition is not realized by an undiagnosed sufferer, they may scold themselves in frustration as to why they are thinking or acting the way they are. Although the acts of those who have OCD may appear paranoid and come across to others as psychotic, an OCD sufferer is able to recognize their thoughts and subsequent actions as irrational, which is what makes the illness so distressing. The psychological self-awareness of the irrationality of the disorder may be painful; a sufferer may be plagued by doubt and uncertainty regarding his or her own feelings and behaviors. A principal challenge faced by OCD sufferers is learning to manage their own behaviors without constant reassurance from others.’

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to have beneficial effects for OCD sufferers. You might look for a CBT therapists in your area.

Medication is also an option. For help here, you may want to visit a local psychiatrist.

The other option is mindfulness training. Mindfulness has roughly 25 - 30 years of empirical research to back it up as sound treatment for a variety of disorders (depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, borderline personality, and more). Mindfulness has been around for roughly 3000 years and is adopted from the Buddhist tradition, but is not necessarily Buddhist in nature. One may practice mindfulness without being Buddhist.

While there are several types of mindfulness, in essence mindfulness is as simple as the following…

1.Focus your awareness on your breath.

2.When you notice your awareness is off your breath, simply return your awareness to your breath.

3.It’s about awareness. It’s not about the breath.

4.Simply observe the thoughts and feelings in your mind. You don’t need to judge them as good or bad. They just are.

Please note that mindfulness is simple but it’s not easy.

By practicing mindfulness and acceptance of the obsessive thoughts, the power is gradually taken away from the thoughts. By looking at the thoughts with curiosity and openness, the thoughts eventually become boring and not as emotionally charged.

There are a number of free guided mindfulness talks at http://www.audiodharma.org/talks-guidedmeditation.html

I also write about mindfulness, ways to manage negative emotions and thoughts, and ways to cultivate more positive emotions at http://drjohnblog.guidetoself.com.

There are also some articles which may be of interest to you at http://www.guidetoself.com/publications.htm

Hopefully, you can find some relief from these suggestions.

I have done mindfulness training with continuation high school students and found it to be very helpful to 90% of them, including one with severe OCD.

All the best,

Dr. John Schinnerer

Positive Psychology Coach

Guide To Self, Inc.

Topics:  psychology

Answered by John Schinnerer on July 13, 2009

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13. July 2009 by John Schinnerer.

A robot, designed by researchers at UCSD, can learn new facial expressions simply by monitoring itself in a mirror, a strange, and slightly eery, step towards computers and robots that learn on their own.

Courtesy of UCSD

The Einstein-like robot was first shown last February at the TED Conference last February. Now, the inventors have taken the next step by programming the robot to ‘learn’ to fine tune its own facial expressions via self-monitoring. The robot is designed by Hanson Robotics. Prior to this upgrade, the robot could demonstrate only the 31 preprogrammed expressions. Now the robot can tweak, modulate and improve upon those preprogrammed expressions creating a nearly limitless facial repertoire. Similar to the movie title ‘Flubber’, the material which the robot’s skin is made of is called ’Frubber’.

The idea was derived from the way in which babies learn vocalizations and expressions. Rather than relying on preprogramming to elicit it’s certain facial expressions, the UCSD robot uses trial and error while getting feedback of its own expressions from a mirror, and thereby slowly learns how certain micromovements lead to full emotional expressions.   The UCSD researchers presented a paper on the momentous feat last month at the 2009 IEEE Conference on Development and Learning.

The press release from UCSD states,

‘Once the robot learned the relationship between facial expressions and the muscle movements required to make them, the robot learned to make facial expressions it had never encountered.’

Creepy, but impressive, nonetheless. I’m not sure how comfortable I feel with the convergence of nanotechnology, emotionally expressive robots, artificial intelligence, cloning technology and the implantation of electronics into humans. It seems quite plausible, as many have argued, that a quick learning, human-like robot could be developed in the next 25 years. The problems seem to start when and if that robot becomes ’self-aware’ and gets a chance to self-replicate. Perhaps that’s needeless worrying, but it seems common sense to me to proceed with caution and mindfulness in these areas.

Have a wonderful week,

Dr. John Schinnerer

Guide To Self, Inc.

Posted in Consciousness, Awareness, Emotion and technology, Guide To Self Beginners Guide To Managing Emotion, Morals and values, Dr. John Schinnerer, Guide to Self, Emotional IQ, Measuring emotions | Print | No Comments »