This time, a long New Yorker article reviewing The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term […]
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YANSS tackles procrastination at length…quoting this Jonah Lehrer piece along the way: “Don’t.” Thinking about thinking is ID’d as key: The now you may see the costs and rewards at stake when it comes time to choose studying for the test instead of going to the club, eating the salad instead of the cupcake, writing the
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Deborah Tannen looks at why having a sister makes people happier. My own recent research about sisters suggests a more subtle dynamic. I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and,
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CBTer Judith Beck uses a client vignette to look at guilt and the “shoulds.” John holds certain values quite dear and believes he is violating those values when he doesn’t quite live up to them. He is plagued with the shoulds: I SHOULD work harder; I SHOULD be a better husband/father/son/sister/community member. Every time John
On my blog at Psychology Today, a brief interview with Trudy Goodman about the dawn of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in anticipation of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s UCLA appearance this Wednesday. Full Catastrophe Living (pictured) is Kabat-Zinn’s big book of MBSR. If you’re just curious and testing out mindfulness, you might try Wherever You Go, There You Are
A Q&A about the sleeplessness that comes with parenting. Chronic insomnia has been linked to a range of medical problems, from loss of concentration to high blood pressure…But can getting up throughout the night to tend to new baby cause long-term health problems as well?
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About.com helpfully rounds up the wisdom about couples therapy in Does Couples Counseling Work? and Benefits of Marriage Counseling. There are people who stay in an unhappy marriage until the resentment builds and they feel they have no choice but to divorce. They don’t voice their unhappiness, they go with the flow hoping something will change
Jonah Lehrer asks What’s it Like to Be a Baby? [B]abies don’t have a spotlight of attention: They have a lantern. If attention is like a focused beam in adults, then it’s more like a glowing bulb in babies, casting a diffuse radiance across the world. This crucial difference in attention has been demonstrated indirectly in a
In the New Yorker, a look at the roots of The Secret in Emersonian “New Thought.” [F]or much of its history, New Thought was viewed as a progressive project—a way to help ordinary citizens seize control of their fate. The historian Beryl Satter has argued that New Thought was, in large part, a women’s movement, and
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PsyBlog scans the research and comes up with 10 Psychological Insights About Online Dating. Number one: Internet daters are not losers: Contrary to the stereotype, there’s little evidence that internet dating is the last resort of social misfits or weirdos. In fact, quite the reverse. Internet daters are more likely to be sociable, have high self-esteem and
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