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 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
Ronald Siegel wrote this long article about mindfulness and psychotherapy for the clinician-readers of Psychotherapy Networker. Doesn’t mean you can’t give it a look. A sample: [M]indfulness is the opposite of experiential avoidance…It allows us to feel the urge to have an alcohol drink arise and pass rather than heading to the bottle, to get on the
The NYT Magazine asks, Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts… Echoing this TED
Toward a less hovering approach to parenting: How to Land Your Kid in Therapy (The Atlantic). [A]ll of this worry about creating low self-esteem might actually perpetuate it. No wonder my patient Lizzie told me she felt “less amazing” than her parents had always said she was. Given how “amazing” her parents made her out
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Variety pack from the feed: 10 Things You Should Know About Male Depression (Psych Central) Zombie Prevention: Your Child’s Sleep (NYT) Obsessive Fears Arise in Response to Compulsions in OCD (Psych Central) The Creative Power of Thinking Outside Yourself (PsyBlog) A Psychopath Walks Into A Room. Can You Tell? (NPR)
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A New Gauge to See What’s Beyond Happiness (NYT): In his 2008 book, “Gross National Happiness,” Dr. Brooks argues that what’s crucial to well-being is not how cheerful you feel, not how much money you make, but rather the meaning you find in life and your sense of “earned success” — the belief that you
From Slate: Girls don’t start out more anxious than boys, but they usually end up that way. When it comes to our preconceived notions about women and anxiety, women are unfairly being dragged through the mud. While women are indeed more fretful than men on average right now, this difference is mostly the result of a
Bryan Caplan looks at twin studies and concludes: Have More Kids. Pay Less Attention to Them (WSJ): The obvious lesson to draw is that parents should lighten up. I call it “Serenity Parenting”: Parents need the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, and (thank you
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Suffering Souls, from the New Yorker, a ways back (via MindHacks): Psychopaths are as old as Cain, and they are believed to exist in all cultures, although they are more prevalent in individualistic societies in the West. The Yupik Eskimos use the term kunlangeta to describe a man who repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, and takes sexual
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