“

Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

” - Epicurus

                                   how to live well – a shared exploration 

what is it? This course is ambitious. It aims to help us live longer, healthier lives that are more energised, happy and fulfilled. We will work to improve our knowledge and activities in three interconnected areas – optimising wellbeing, nourishing relationships, and living with health, energy & resilience. The course is constructed partly on the recent state-of-the-art, evidence-based ENHANCE intervention for building wellbeing, with ingredients that focus on our values, self-determination theory’s needs/goals/motivations, mindfulness & compassion, positive emotions & savouring, and the central importance of relationships. 

             "Be regular & orderly in your life so that you may be violent & original in your work."     Gustave Flaubert                

                                    "Fall down seven times. get up eight."   Japanese proverb

A major new research paper was published in the Lancet last week - "Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990-2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016."  It's the biggest and best overview of damage caused by alcohol that has ever emerged.  It's available in free full text and it makes concerning reading.  Here's the abstract:

“ Any unexplained phenomenon passes through three stages before the reality of it is accepted. During the first stage it is considered laughable. During the second stage, it is adamantly opposed. Finally, during the third stage, it is accepted as self-evident. ” - Arthur Schopenhauer

This chapter aims to cover: What are the main forms of dependency?  Smoking, alcohol, other drugs, junk food, gambling, pornography.  How big a problem is dependency for health & wellbeing?  What are the effective treatments?  Identifying one’s own dependencies & working out a personal response.

So yesterday was the second full day of the BABCP conference.  I have already written initial blog posts about the first day of the conference and about the pre-conference workshop I went to on emotion regulation.  This is a bit of a pre-breakfast scamper over yesterday's experiences.  As with the other blog posts I've written about the conference & the emotion regulation workshop, I intend to re-visit the more personally relevant subjects in future posts.

Ouch, a very interesting international health survey, that has just been released, reports:

"Middle-aged Britons are experiencing a mid-life health crisis, according to new research from Bupa, which shows that those aged 45-54 are more likely to be obese, more likely to smoke and more likely to suffer from depression than their peers around the world.

The international Bupa Health Pulse study, which asked more than 13,000 people in 12 different countries questions about their health and lifestyles has shown that late-middle age is the toughest time health-wise for Britons. No other country in the survey - which included Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia showed such a consistent range of unhealthy results for this age group.

The study, which questioned more than 2,000 people in the UK, found:

“ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. ” - Walt Whitman

 "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."  John Donne

So yesterday we had the fourth evening of this twelve session course.  I posted on the third session last week.  What we covered is illustrated on the Powerpoint handouts I gave out as two six-slides-to-a-page handouts.  Click on slides 1-6, Powerpoint or slides 1-6, PDF and slides 7-12, Powerpoint or slides 7-12, PDF to see.

"Alcohol is the third leading cause of disease burden in developed countries".  This month the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) published the first two parts of a three-part guidance on alcohol-related problems.  The first section is "Alcohol-use disorders: preventing the development of hazardous and harmful drinking" which covers public health guidance on the price, advertising and availability of alcohol, how best to detect alcohol misuse in and outside primary care, and brief interventions to manage it in these settings.  The second part is "Alcohol-use disorders: diagnosis and clinical management of alcohol-related physi