Science of the runner’s high and rats on running wheels in the New York Times: As the name suggests, endocannabinoids are chemicals that, like cannabis in marijuana, alter and lighten moods. But the body produces endocannabinoids naturally. In other studies, endocannabinoid levels have been shown to increase after prolonged running and cycling, leading many scientists to conclude […]
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Couples living together out of convenience–“sliding, not deciding”–gets roughed up in the NYT by psychologist Meg Jay, author of The Defining Decade: Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. But it isn’t. Too often, young adults enter into what they imagine will be low-cost, low-risk living situations only to find themselves
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For couples going through a rough patch, here’s a short video sampling of Getting the Love You Want author Harville Hendrix’s take on what draws people to each other and how to make a relationship work (short version: “be nice”). Lots more detail in the book.
Jonah Lehrer’s new book, Imagine, excerpted in the Wall Street Journal: [C]reativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it.
Couples Therapy through the eyes of couples therapists in the New York Times. “For starters, there’s an ever-present risk of winning one spouse’s allegiance at the expense of the other spouse’s,” explains William J. Doherty, the University of Minnesota professor of family social science, in his groundbreaking 2002 article on the topic of awkward couples
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NYT previews The Power of Habit–a look at the latest thinking about how habits are formed (and how that knowledge helps sell diapers and Fabreze). The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit
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Science seeks answers. A couple of possibilities: [S]tudies have discovered that as people age, they seek out situations that will lift their moods — for instance, pruning social circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring them down. Still other work finds that older adults learn to let go of loss and disappointment over unachieved
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A collection of boredom studies from Wired: The secret isn’t boredom per se: It’s how boredom makes us think. When people are immersed in monotony, they automatically lapse into a very special form of brain activity: mind-wandering. In a culture obsessed with efficiency, mind-wandering is often derided as a lazy habit, the kind of thinking we rely on
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From the Recommended Reading page, a couple of titles worth highlighting: The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety and The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression, a matching pair of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) workbooks. Instead of trying to take on and eliminate difficult thoughts and feelings, ACT encourages accepting them and getting on with what’s most
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A history, from Scientific American: [Season’s of a Man’s Life author] Levinson felt that midlife crises were actually more common than not and appeared like clockwork between the ages of 40 to 45. For Levinson, such crises were characterized primarily by a stark, painful “de-illusionment” process stemming from the individual’s unavoidable comparison between his youthful