I began thinking yesterday about what I actually do as a psychotherapist.  This lead to a light-hearted first post describing a "two-seven-two" model of integrative psychotherapy.  The initial "two" acknowledges the importance of an overview of what has been going on for the client and a good working alliance.  The "seven" describes a series of overlapping therapeutic areas that I pay attention to.  The first three of these are probably used by most psychotherapists - problem solving relevant outer issues, problem solving unhelpful internal response styles, and - where appropriate - looking at "ball & chain" contributions from the past that may be holding back progress in the present.

"Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives - the power to retell it, reexperience it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change - truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts"   Salman Rushdie 

I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database -

It is clear that there is a U-shaped association between sleep duration and mortality, with both short and long sleep linked with increased death rates.  This finding is underlined by two major recent research overviews - Gallicchio & Kalesan "Sleep duration and mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis" and Cappuccio et al's "Sleep duration and all-cause mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies".  There is so much interesting that one could write about this, but this particular blog post is triggered by a personal query that I have.  I try hard - and am mostly successful - to have a very healthy lifestyle.  I eat well, exercise well, keep a sensible weight, don't smoke, don't d