I was struck by a quote I saw by philosopher Eric Hoffer in the Boston Globe: “The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life.”
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Having just returned from the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington, DC, I am bursting with new ideas and approaches to try both professionally and personally. This annual conference has a cadre of instructors that represent the best psychotherapy has to offer in the the field: Jon Kabat-Zinn, John and Julie Gottman, Esther Perel, Daniel Siegel, Bessel van der Kolk, Diane Ackerman, Margaret Wehrenberg just to name a few.
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.
Habits are a bit like pointillism, a period of art, as in this picture of Georges Seurat’s best-known and largest painting, where he depicted people relaxing in a suburban park on an island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte.
Quite simply put, without it we die, right down to the molecular level. For example, here is what happens in the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease, quoted from the book Still Alice by Lisa Genova: Read more
And what is flow anyway?
Creativity. Submersion. Involvement—so deep that you lose yourself to it with joy. Read more
Did you know there is a special part of the brain that is called the fusiform face area that is used to analyze faces? Read more