Showing posts with label biology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biology. Show all posts

Friday, September 12, 2014

The DNA of Bullying: Why Society Favors the Bully...


Bullying and its affect upon individuals and society has been in the news a lot this year. It's also been a hot topic on many of the interviews I've done around the world lately.

Interviewers are often surprised when I show little sympathy for the bully. I hear things like - but they are humans too - which of course is true. The issue is that serial bullies lack one important human trait - empathy. Perversely this seems to provide them with a social advantage when it comes to manipulating and traumatizing their victims and then getting away with it.

A recent study by the University of Warwick has recommended that anti-bullying policies must focus on all of society, because as long as bullies reap the life-long benefits of increased status and opportunity, bullies will thrive, while their victims suffer life-long negative health and social impacts.*

So, here is the unadulterated truth: society loves bullies. Yes, that's right, society selects bullies for promotion, leadership, wealth and position, and has done so for thousands of years. We love winners, and despite our moralistic preaching, will look to blame the victim, because we perceive them to be a loser in the competition of life.


Neil Tippett, lead author of the review, emphasized, "This hierarchy is familiar to us all from our own school days. In my view, so long as the rewards exist for bullies in the form of social status, it is difficult to make bullies to change their behaviours as there is little incentive for them to do so."*


We are fascinated by bullies, uncompromising winners and those who pursue success at all costs. The charismatic bully holds us in their thrall, convinces some of us to participate in acts of physical, emotional or psychological harm to others, and promises to share the rewards. This phenomenon contributed to the Global Financial Crisis, and resulted in those who tried to warn government and the financial sector of the impending crisis, being ostracized and victimized.

If the bully is rewarded early in life, they are unlikely to change their behavior for the better, or develop empathy, instead hard-wiring in the mind-maps for bullying and manipulation, becoming extreme narcissists. If they are one of the 3% of the human population who is a psychopath, then this bullying behavior can set them on a path that will most likely do immense harm to others. If the psychopath is bullied, then the results can be even worse. Research suggests that when a psychopath is bullied during childhood their lack of empathy can become pathological.

So what do we do?

As a society we need to stop rewarding bullies, from the playground, to the classroom, to the shop-floor to the board-room. We need to take complaints about bullying seriously, and swallow the short term bitter-pill of removing a bully from their position of power. If we observe a bully in action, submit a complaint and then remove yourself from the bully's sphere of influence. It is not your job to fix them, it is not your job to make them better, leave that to the professionals. Take your energy elsewhere and reclaim your life.




If we are serious about creating a bully-free playground, we need to stop rewarding the teenage and adult bully; we need to champion co-operation, consultation and collaboration and reward these behaviors instead.

Are we as a society prepared to walk-the-talk?

Elisabetta is the author of The Energy Code, The DNA of Bullying, The Infidel, Veritas and D'Arc, the Legend of Saint Joan.

More from Elisabetta 


*Journal References:
  1. Neil Tippett, BSc, and Dieter Wolke, PhD. Socioeconomic Status and Bullying: A Meta-Analysis. American Journal of Public Health, April 2014 DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2014.301960 
  2.  University of Warwick. "Anti-bullying policy must focus on all of society." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 29 April 2014. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140429125737.htm.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

What is Energetic Health? Excerpt from The Energy Code by Elisabetta L. Faenza



 To celebrate the launch of The Energy Code, today's blog shares an excerpt about the very important concept of energetic health; a concept that relates to our internal well-being as well as how we interact with the world at large.


Enjoy,

Elisabetta 25th of August 2014




If we think of our bodies, cells and relationships as buckets of energy
that we can have conscious awareness of, we start to be able to better
manage our health. And by this, I am not referring solely to physical
health. The latest scientific discoveries imply that the physical, mental,
emotional and even metaphysical are intertwined via the DNA feedback
loop, and cannot be understood in isolation.


One area of our life links to another, so I use the term Energetic Health
to represent the sum-total of the health of these systems. Using the 7 Key
Principles I outline in The Energy Code, we can manage the Energetic Health of our
cells, and organs, with a flow on effect to the health of our body, mind
and spirit.

This doesn’t stop at the individual. Because of the DNA’s ability to
broadcast its health into the environment, each of us affects the Energetic
Health of everyone we interact with. So managing our own Energetic
Health, by implication, helps us to manage the health of our close
relationships; whether at home, at work or at play.

The alternative to Energetic Health is Energetic Disease - a state that
leaves us vulnerable to the over or under methylating (silencing) of our
genes, toxic overload of our organs and cells, mind-blocks rather than
healthy, flexible mind-maps, and negative feedback loops between our
peptide receptors and information/emotion molecules. Perpetuated over
time, this leads to a state of chronic fatigue or unwellness, eventually
resulting in acute illness. It is clear we are all born with the
mechanisms to self-heal; we are in fact a self-healing organism, with all
the mechanisms and back-up systems to promote health.

For some, the decline into disease, whether it be classed as mental or
physical illness (I believe the distinction is a misnomer, as the mind is
the body), leads rapidly to an under functioning in many areas of life;
for others, it leads to acute illness and death. For a great many, the path
is slowed by watching the actions of those around us and changing our
behavior to mimic theirs. If we adopt the habits of the energetically
healthy, we can return to wellness bit-by-bit.

If you think of our body’s ability to store physical and mental energy as
akin to a battery that is recharged through rest, diet, exercise and healthy
thought patterns, then just like a battery, we can be drained - in our case -
by poor diet, lack of exercise, not enough rest, and negative thought patterns.
Just like a car battery can be used to jump start another car battery that has run flat,
so the human energy system can be drained by those around us.

All too often, we charge ourselves up by stealing energy, often
learning these techniques at quite a young age. The energy theft required
is unsustainable as one-by-one those we have stolen from succumb to
illness or leave for self-preservation. Bullying is a common example that
drains the victim and temporarily tops up the bully. Countless studies
have shown that both the bully and the victim have increased incidence
of mental illness, depression and incarceration as young adults. The bully
has learned this behavior by observing adults or older children and
then mimicking it. You can often see this playing out in family groups
where a dominant, aggressive parent will berate and bully their spouse,
draining them of energy, who may then use passive-aggressive techniques
to gain pity and sympathy, from friends or family draining them in turn.

Children observe this and learn to adopt either:
♦ A passive aggressive, ‘poor-me’ style, demanding sympathy and assistance without any serious
   intention to change their situation
♦ An aloof, detached style, requiring others to spend a lot of time and energy trying to    
    connect with them
♦ An interrogating, critical style, seeking to undermine others through criticism, sapping
    all joy
♦ Or the more aggressive and overt, dominator style that seeks to overpower and intimidate
    others

I class all energy theft as a form of predation, and the thinking that
goes with it as ‘the predator’, because regardless of whether the technique
is covert or overt, it involves the theft and devouring of someone else’s
energy - their life-force.

In extreme cases, this is obvious - the work place psychopath, the
sociopath and narcissist have developed successful techniques for stealing
energy from others in a conscious, planned way, literally draining the
reserves of those around them. Do not be fooled however, we all do it to
some degree if we are not taking care of our system’s energy needs through
healthy means.

Entertainment and media, especially, reinforce these patterns by
feeding the dominant thought patterns of this predatory mind-set,
through fuelling our fears, anxieties and insecurities, prompting division
over gender, race or beliefs and draining society and the individuals
within it of energy. Ill-gotten gains are never sweet, however, and the
predatory path of energy management leads to more despair, insecurity
and ill health, leading us to consume more of the earth’s resources, trying
desperately to re-charge our batteries.

Clearly the predatory path is not sustainable and it is at the root of
many of society’s ills. It is the voice in your head telling you ‘I’m not
good enough’ that fuels jealousy, greed, anxiety, violence and addictions.
It sets in motion chemical feedback loops within the body/mind that
may persist for years, reinforcing and deepening our unhappiness, until
we believe that voice is us, forgetting that it is something we learned and
adopted. It is a false mind that prevents us from activating our natural
predisposition to living in harmony with each other, our environment
and ourselves.

Fortunately, we can free ourselves from this negative energy pattern, by following
some common-sense steps that free our body-mind to be healthy and energized, allowing
us to be the best we can be, and make the most of our time on this precious planet.*

To discover the 7 Keys to Energetic Health go to:
The Energy Code by Elisabetta L. Faenza

*Faenza, Elisabetta L., The Energy Code, Motivational Press, New York, 2014, pp88-89

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

DNA and memory



You’ve probably heard the term ‘muscle memory’ before.

Well it turns out your muscles literally have a memory, along with every other cell in your body.

The same researchers that discovered that our DNA processes light and sound waves have discovered that each cell in our body has three Gigabytes of memory storage.

They believe that what we have termed the ‘subconscious mind’ is actually the function of the DNA in every cell of our bodies.

This memory holds our inherited and learned behavior patterns, memories, experiences, beliefs and skills.

It’s like a massive database of information that makes us, well us... it makes each of us unique.

Now it is estimated we each have 70 trillion cells in our body, so with three Gigabytes of memory per cell that equates to some 210 thousand, trillion Gigabytes or 210 Zettabytes of memory per human.

That’s 210 with 21 zeros after it, worth of memory storage in your body.

In 2013 the world’s computers were estimated to have reached 4 Zettabytes of combined storage capacity, less than one fiftieth of the storage capacity of a single human being’s DNA.

The ladder of our DNA Double Helix holds enormous storage capacity
And what is even more amazing is that just like a computer, we are able to switch the biological codes on and off and re-program the behavioral software within this DNA database.

Recently scientists have discovered that the every piece of DNA code is read by the cell in multiple ways, doubling or even quadrupling the amount of information that can be simultaneously encoded.

This appears to be the reason humans don’t need nearly as many DNA codes as was previously believed to be necessary to account for our complexity.

It’s the infinite potential of DNA’s interaction with our experiences that makes us so complex.

You can learn more about how DNA and environment interact in Elisabetta's upcoming book - The Energy Code, published by Motivational Press. 

Elisabetta's other books include The Energy Bucket, The Infidel and the soon to be released Veritas.

Learn more about Elisabetta and her work at:

 elisabettafaenza.com

7 Essential Tips for Anxiety - Part 5 Mindfulness

  Anxiety is an extremely common problem. It is estimated that Approximately 1 in 4 people in the UK will experience a mental health probl...