Historically, mental health is a struggle for me, and for lots of the people I surround myself with. I don’t know if there are people out there whose circle of friends and family consists mostly of people whose mental health is rosy, but if they’re out there, I haven’t met them and I kind of… Continue reading Let’s Talk Therapy
There’s not much to say about gratitude that hasn’t already been said. Major faith traditions put a lot of creativity and structure into helping people feel thankful for what they have. Gratitude puts people in a frame of mind to appreciate that even among the worst kinds of struggles, there are still struggles we don’t… Continue reading Gratitude
Negativity bias is the human tendency to look at a vast landscape of stuff that is just fine, good even, and find the one thing that is flawed. The tendency to obsess about that thing to the exclusion of all the good things. And it makes sense, right? From an evolutionary perspective, the things that… Continue reading Countering Negativity Bias
What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments During which we knew them. And they have changed since then… We must also remember That at every meeting we are meeting a Stranger. T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party If you’re a human being, you’ve probably resented someone for something in your… Continue reading Resentments
All our lives, we hear about fight or flight – our body’s response to threats to our well-being. I got the impression that we are under near-constant existential stress. It’s like there are no other experiences except a panicked or hostile reaction to threatening stimuli. There’s a lot of this in life, but there are… Continue reading Safety and Contentment
We think we all know what we’re talking about when we talk about sleep, but really we all have a different idea of what this universal need means for us. We humans, with our things to do and life stresses, have maybe a more complicated relationship with sleep than our animal friends. Every individual has… Continue reading I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead
Fear and anxiety are widespread human experiences in this modern age. In modern societies where many of the external pressures of subsistence are solved for us, our attention settles on less tangible problems to fret over. We have food and shelter and, for the lucky ones, health care, but now we worry about our careers… Continue reading Fear, Pain and Anxiety
