mpPsyD
Clinical Psychology -Technology - Motivation - Gamification
Check out the new website at mppsyd.com
- 7 Tips for Better Decision Making
- Narcissistic Behavior and the Lost Art of Conversation
- Without a Prayer: Atheist Dad Address Family Crisis of Faith
- The Structure and Consequences of Repetitive Thought
- Why Corporations are Psychotic (With Great follow up Articles)
- What is Consciousness?
- Workplace from Hell.
- Protect Yourself from Anger
“The ultimate takeaway of McGraw’s paper was that the evolutionary purpose of laughter and amusement is to “signal to the world that a violation is indeed OK.” Building on the work of behavioral neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, McGraw believes that laughter developed as an instinctual way to signal that a threat is actually a false alarm—say, that a rustle in the bushes is the wind, not a saber-toothed tiger. “Organisms that could separate benign violations from real threats benefited greatly,” McGraw says.
Nothing more, nothing less, therapy is the art of teaching someone to overhear himself.
Stephen Metcalf (via psychotherapy)
Rory McIlroy's Masters failure only natural - ESPN →
“Failure is the default setting of everything we know. Of everything human. Sports. Politics. Science. Art. To win is the rarity. To exceed, to transcend, to excel, to make something beautiful or lasting is a singularity. This is how and why we make legends and heroes.
To create order or peace or empathy or warmth or comfort or joy is nearly impossible. Day in, day out we try to do these things, and we fail. In almost every case, we simply remain as we were. As we are. Human. Flawed. Earthbound.
This is the natural order of things. There is no malice in it, just the indifferent turning of the Earth. The only cruelty is human. The only absurdity the question, “What happened out there?” or “How does it make you feel? “
And to call what happened to Rory McIlroy a collapse is to miss the larger point of the human experiment. It was not catastrophe; it was just a return. An explorer came back to us, having found only himself. It was a homecoming.”
Bill Simmons: The inspiration and the gift of Tiger Woods →
“I am supposed to think that he’s a poor role model — that he’s an adulterer, that he’s selfish, that he’s a phony, that he behaves badly on golf courses, that he’s someone I wouldn’t want my son to emulate some day. That’s horses—-. I want my son to know that people screw up, that nobody is perfect, that you can learn from your foibles. I want my son to watch “The Natural” someday, hear Roy Hobbs say, “Some mistakes you never stop paying for,” and know that it’s not just words in a movie. I want my son to know that you haven’t lived until you’ve fought back, that you haven’t won until you’ve lost, that you can’t understand what it’s like to relish something until you’ve suffered, too. I want him to understand that it’s the 21st century, that we sit around picking our heroes apart all day, that we expect them to be superhuman at all times, that we get pissed off when they aren’t, that it’s hypocritical if you really think about it.
I want my son to know that great athletes are meant to be appreciated, not emulated. He can steal Tiger’s fist pump without wanting to become him. He can play Tiger’s video game without feeling like Tiger is his best friend. He can imitate Tiger’s swing without getting the urge to bed every cocktail waitress and model he meets. We should have learned by now that athletes aren’t role models in the traditional sense — they exist to entertain us and inspire us, and that’s really it.
If my son needs a role model, and he will, that person should be me. I don’t need Tiger to teach my child how to behave. I need him to teach my son that it’s fun to watch golf. Yesterday was the first lesson. There was a putt, and a roar, and a fist pump, and then my son screaming “Again!” Only Tiger Woods could have made it happen. It’s a gift.”
“Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.”
(via 3eanuts)
This site is brilliant, and so true.
“To achieve meaningful behavior change, the most salient question is this:
“What kind of person do I want to be?”
No easy question to answer. But a good starting place is to decide what you want to motivate you. There’s always a choice, provided that you don’t spend your life on automatic pilot or wondering what kind of person you are…
There is a unique drive within humans to create value, to invest appreciation, time, energy, effort, and sacrifice in certain persons, groups, objects, and behaviors. Note that we don’t literally experience value so much as create it. A sunset has value only if we actively invest the time and effort to appreciate it. Civilization is not a by-product of the instinct to survive and reproduce, as I recently read; it is a result of the drive to create value.
Unlike mere excitement or indulging in what you like and enjoy, creating value makes you feel like a better person.”
Dan Pink - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
OS X Lion represents a transition. We’re moving from the “point & click” to the “flick & swipe”.
The Power of Lonely (Boston Globe) →
by Leon Neyfakh
But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.
“You’ve got a gift, Roy, but it’s not enough. You’ve got to develop yourself. Rely too much on your own gift and you’ll fail.”
In honor of opening day. Let’s go you White Sox.
“This emotional muddling between analyst and patient is known in the trade as “transference”, and it’s important because it’s the way most of our relationships play out in the real world—as ambiguously defined contracts. This isn’t to say the analyst is short of techniques for managing that muddle, but it is to say that there’s no naively “clinical” position to be assumed. The consulting room thus transforms itself into a laboratory in which patients can learn about their impact on someone else in real time, and thus grow in self-awareness—which is the prerequisite for self-improvement.
The respected therapist and writer Irvin Yalom, among others, argues that depression and associated forms of sadness stem from an inability to make good contact with others. Relationships are fundamental to happiness. And so a science that has the courage to include the doctor’s relationship with the patient within the treatment itself, and to work with it, is a science already modelling the solution it prescribes. What psychoanalysis loses in scientific stature, it gains in humanity.”
