I've been struck by the response to my posting about failing to follow an intention, like the story of sleeping instead of getting out for the early-morning run. Readers have said that I have it wrong. I see it differently. It's not about choice. Read More

Sophisticated handmade textiles--pillows, duvet covers, sachets, albums, vases--are what Brooklyn-based designer Aviva Stanoff creates in her studio. Products that are gorgeous, upscale, drool-worthy to the likes of necessarily frugal writers like me. A $1000 pillow?! But I knew Aviva long before she found her design niche. As a little girl, she lived next door and hung out in my back yard with her sister and my own kids. I can still see her concentrating intently on her kid-sized art projects. Even then, she knew how to enter creative flow... Read More

As an older dad, Paul Raeburn's most recent blog, "More bad news on the risks faced by the children of older fathers" caught my interest.  Read More

Medications are the most frequently recommended treatment for low back pain. Read More

It's that time of year when grad school hopefuls check the mail every day to see if they are Accepted or Rejected. Let's address the bad news first. Read More

Human beings have a deep-seated need to grow and learn throughout their lives. Meaningful work fulfills that basic need to learn and grow. Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers discusses the characteristics of meaningful work: it is complex, it offers autonomy, and there is a relationship between effort and reward. Read More

Synonyms of television include "idiot box," "boob tube," "goggle box," and other equally unflattering descriptors. The viewer is denigrated as a "couch potato." Is it true that the one-eyed monster robs us of the ability to think for ourselves?Pejorative attitudes to TV are older than most of us. Read More

Recently I've been thinking about a concept that really has no precise name, but which I started calling the "Nemesis." I was teaching a class called Autobiography, Fiction, and Self-Invention, and I was struck by the number of people, my students included, whose life story prominently featured an "adversary" figure. This nemesis tends to haunt the person's early childhood. Read More

It was important for Emilia to learn how to regularize her eating by sticking to three meals and three snacks a day-before she started dieting. I demonstrated how important this skill is (pages 89-93), by asking Emilia to set aside one day where she would make a note every time she wanted to eat when it wasn't a meal time or snack time. Read More

The first part of this post described how we make movies in our heads starring the people we love and how our movie scenes are destined to become more negative over time, irrespective of actual behavior and family of origin histories. This post describes how our internal movies control the way we regard loved ones and the way they regard us. Read More

Children are, in my book, off limits when writing about personal experiences.  This week I was shocked and appalled by a story in a British newspaper about an acclaimed writer named Julie Myerson who decided to write the story of her decision to cut off all ties with her 17 year old son. Because he refused treatment and became unmanageable to live with, she took the advice offered by drug abuse experts to throw him out of their home and in effect, to disown him.  To put it another way, she resigned from her job as Jake’s mother.  Read More

When you delve into snowboarding or base-jumping, or any other extreme sport, you'll find many parallels to the art of innovation. In essence, innovation and extreme sports are pursuits that require energy, skill and courage...in spades. Read More

A study of the children of older fathers has found subtle impairments of intelligence and other mental abilities during infancy and childhood.This is only the latest in a series of problems identified in the children of older fathers, an area of study that has been widely overlooked.  Read More

The question remains whether we want the school day planned in such a way so that our children's learning is optimal, or so that it is merely acceptable, while making sure that parents are able to get to work on time. It should be recognized that these (and other) conflicting needs result in a compromise which is not always to the children's advantage.  Read More

The last few weeks at work have been incredibly busy. Each day, I feel like I get to work, and the next thing I know, it is time to get home. The days feel like a blur. It has been so busy, I haven't even had time to put up any blog entries. It has been a few weeks since the last one. It feels like it has been a very long time since the last time I wrote an entry. That is a bit strange, though. Read More

Prominent Republican women can't get no satisfaction. Can psychological research help? Read More

"So too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts." Peter Ubel quotes Aristotle in the final paragraphs of his book, Free Market Madness, with an appeal that we "Return to Aristotle." Read More

I speed through feedback.  Yes I’ll listen to it. You can’t be a decent person without listening to feedback. But lord, it’s always too long for my taste. And why?  Because I feel threatened by it. So when I get criticized on paper I speedread it before quickly posting my response.  And when I’m given feedback in person, I want to find the fast-forward button.  “Yeah, yeah,” I want to say. “I understand. I get it. OK already.” Even when the person is not going slowly, I want him to go faster. Read More

 As a child, I used to watch grown-up ladies writhe in envy of skinny supermodel Twiggy. I watched the same grown-up ladies chuckling with delight over the self-deprecating antics of plus-size comedienne Totie Fields. In those days, Totie and Twiggy exemplified how the media turned famous females into fat-and-skinny caricatures: Size was the main feature of their fame, and the media played it so relentlessly that hundreds of millions of females felt hideous and ludicrous. That was ages ago. Yet virtually nothing has changed. The media still obsesses over the size of famous females, only now it does so behind a vaguely feminist false mask of concern.  Read More

If you saw a child in danger of drowning in a shallow pond, and all you had to do to save the child was wade into the pond, and pull him out, would you do so? When I ask my students that, they all say that they would. What if wading into the pond meant that you would ruin your most expensive pair of shoes? That wouldn't make any difference, they insist. Read More

Sitting across the table from my Aunt and Uncle at a post-funeral lunch my Aunt blurts out "I wish my daughter was more confident." Hmm I think. Her 8 year old seems happy but shy. There's nothing wrong with being shy but I understand her wish for her daughter to really emerge from childhood feeling confident. So I began thinking what is confidence? What is the root causes of confidence? Read More

 Semrad proved clinically what philosophers seek to explain logically: delusions are not just about faulty cognitions or biological abnormalities (though they usually involve both) - they also involve something more deeply human, a basic existential fault, perhaps, reminding us that even in the most severely ill psychiatric patients, our clinical work involves - first and foremost - contacting the person beneath the patient, and saying hello. Read More

Soulmaking is patiently cultivating one's soul. It is not that one either has a fully formed soul or doesn't. The soul is always in a state of ascension. You should not be discouraged if you don't experience the soul's full presence. The first step is to find out the real nature of your self-your simple, rough form-and become transparent to yourself. Read More

It seems like such an easy thing to do, to recall a person you saw weeks, days, or even hours earlier. But it's not... Student: "That reminds me of a presentation I sat through during freshman orientation." Me: "Right, I was one of those presenters." Student: "No, there was a Black professor and a White professor, but the White guy was someone else." Me: "Actually, that was me. I conduct diversity workshops, including that one at freshman orientation." Student: "No, the White professor wasn't you; it was another guy." Read More

Generally I love UPS. Well "love" might be an overstatement; their tagline synchronizing the world of commerce is sleek and conveys an Obamalike sense of efficiency, but hardly the intoxicating poetry to stimulate romance. Nor do we want our delivery service to be sexy (although I've heard many oohs and ahs about UPS men in their brown shorts). Read More

I have received a number of emails from readers asking about the disappearance of my postings to "In Practice." I am grateful for the expressions of concern and encouragement, but I have decided to set this blog aside - at the least, to stop contributing to it regularly. From the start, the blog was a one-year experiment. Read More

Stressed at work or school?  Recent research has suggested that houseplants can lighten our mood and improve productivity. Read More

This month I took yet another nosedive into the jagged canyons of depression and agitation. I am able to describe the descent quite well.But I never, ever see it coming. There is usually a 24 hour period - when I have a vague sense of unease. The winds shift ominously and the clouds steal the light. And. then, BAM,I am knocked down again. Read More

At a recent bookstore appearance, a gentleman raised his hand to tell me that six days after he started reading Positivity his friends and family started calling him "the new Jim." Read More

When we form emotional bonds with others, we also form dynamic internal images of them. In other words, the people we love star in movie scenes that we continually play inside our heads.Our internal movie scenes give us a persistent sense of the significant people in our lives when they are absent. Read More