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 […]
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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Latest by writing neuologist, Oliver Sacks is excerpted here, read from/discussed live here. A handful of Sacks’ New Yorker pieces are available in-full here. The excerpt begins like this: Dear Dr. Sacks, My (very unusual) problem, in one sentence, and in non-medical terms, is: I can’t read. I can’t read music, or anything else. In the
From The Mindful Way Through Anxiety–or, rather, from the book’s website–some audio mindfulness exercises. (The promo material at the beginning of each ends quickly.)
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Beware of iffy-seeming stats: An interview with Charles Seife, author of Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception. The issue is that in medicine or any other field of study, it’s really easy to show that two things are linked in some manner…A number of years ago there was a study that showed the higher
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
There’ve been only thousands years of monogamy, that is–since agriculture got underway–according to the newish book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. When people started farming, say the authors, they started thinking about things like ownership and where babies come from. Monogamy followed–meaning that lifelong pairing doesn’t necessarily come naturally to us. Here’s Dan Savage
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A possibility for your on-deck reading pile: Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach. A favorite in the genre for some. I could summarize, but I’ll radically accept the job done by Publishers Weekly and posted on Amazon: Brach offers readers a rich compendium of stories and techniques designed to help people awaken from what she calls
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What happens in therapy? Good question. Couch Fiction, a book-length comic by British psychotherapist, Philippa Perry, offers some answers. Based on a case study of Pat (our sandal-wearing, cat-loving psychotherapist) and her new client, James (an ambitious barrister with a potentially harmful habit he can’t stop), this graphic novel follows the anxieties, frustrations, mind-wanderings and
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Worry a lot? To consider: The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. You may know Alan Watts from oft-broadcast lectures–eager audience hanging on every wryly wise, British-accented utterance. (Lectures can be sampled via this podcast or downloads around the net.) In this short book, Watts takes on worry and anxiety–a.k.a. insecurity. He argues that to live is
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