merry on demand

It is a good time of year to review how depression affects people.

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looking for bad

What if you were trained to look for the bad?

And what if your brain evolved to look for nothing but the bad?

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keep blues away

So I got to feeling kind of blue today because I wasn’t feeling any sense of accomplishment. Then I got busy with a bunch of mundane stuff that had to get done: a bill to pay on line, a recommendation for a student, and an email I needed to send in response to a query from a company asking about my satisfaction. Normally I don’t respond to such queries, but this particular company did a really good job for me on an auto collision repair, so I filled out their survey.

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everyday bravery

There’s a lot of bravery going on right now. The young kids that must adjust from the sudden loss of limbs from shark bites this past week at Oak Island, North Carolina, and the families of the slain in Charleston, South Carolina, are all having to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Maybe South Carolina will take a brave look at a sometimes sad heritage, as well as the rest of America, face our violence, and actually do something to change this awful path.

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investing in wrong thing

Ever heard of “Theory X & Theory Y”?

First proposed by Douglas McGregor of MIT in 1960, it was one of the most famous management school innovations in business history. It boils down to this: effective managers have an optimistic view of human nature -Theory Y. Ineffective managers think that people are basically unreliable and lazy – Theory X.

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mobilize energy

Mobilizing your energy is critical towards lifting yourself up from the down feeling, or the lethargy, caused by depression. Yet this stirring oneself to action comes at time when you may feel as heavy as a stone. So how can you even begin? Here is a surefire way to start, and that is all you need to do—just begin.

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good things

There is so much evidence out there that we humans are great at jumping on bad news and dwelling there, shining our light, and focusing on it because we are wired from an evolutionary/survival standpoint to do just that. However, there is a vast and growing body of evidence from the fields of positive psychology and neurobiology that actively focusing on the small, positive events that occur on a weekly basis deserves our attention.

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