OCD meets CBT: The Data Driven Life profiles people precisely measuring what’s going on in their lives. A few months ago, Barooah began to wean himself from coffee. His method was precise. He made a large cup of coffee and removed 20 milliliters weekly. This went on for more than four months, until barely a […]
The middle-aged brain is “better than ever,” says Barbara Stauch, author of a book on the subject: The thing the middle-aged brain shares with the teenage brain is that it’s still developing. It’s not some static blob that is going inextricably downhill…during this period…we’re better at all sorts of things than we were at 20.
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Mind Over Meds or “how I decided my psychiatry patients needed more from me than prescriptions”–a psychiatrist’s story, from the NYT Magazine. [L]earning the formal techniques of therapy was like navigating without a compass. While I learned how to form an alliance with my patients and begin a good dialogue, becoming a skillful therapist requires
Take a look at the Workaholics Anonymous Brief Guide (pdf). In addition to the 12-steps (pretty much the same as A.A.’s, with “work” replacing “alcohol”) and a quiz (“How Do I Know if I’m a Workaholic?”), there’s Tools of Recovery list. What’s especially striking about them to this reader is how completely they sync up
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A lively takedown of pay dating sites on the OkCupid Blog–simultaneously demystifying the online dating process. There is a negative correlation between the number of messages a man sends per day to the reply rate he gets.The more messages you send, the worse response rate you get. It’s not hard to see why this would
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A piece of Bill W’s story that didn’t make the Big Book, reported by the New York Times: Were Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening and influential sobriety the products of a belladonna hallucination shortly after his discussions with his friend Ebby Thacher? Could they have been incited by his alcohol withdrawal symptoms? Or did something else
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Jim Taylor, PhD asks, Are you raising a human being or a human doing? Having internalized their perceptions of being a human doing from their parents, children come to love themselves only when they are successful and experience nothing less than self-loathing when they fail. Meanwhile, back in 2007, Po Bronson sounded the alarm about
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From Time.com: How Not to Raise a Bully. (In short: teach empathy.) Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age. Over the past decade, research in empathy — the ability to put ourselves in another person’s shoes — has
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A big NYT Magazine piece by Tara Parker-Pope surveys the research about marriage, health, and happiness, and finds mixed messages. [W]hile it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage
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The L.A. Times profiles Beit T’Shuvah. The Venice Blvd. rehab combines the twelve steps with Jewish spirituality . At the helm, Mark Borovitz, con man turned rabbi–his autobiography is The Holy Thief.
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