How ACT can help extend your workouts
Here’s a very clear-cut example of the techniques and benefits of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Parents: Careful – Kids know what you really want
An interesting study demonstrates that while many parents believe they are teaching their children to value kindness just as much as success, their kids are picking up a different message.
For Most Kids, Nice Finishes Last (5 minute radio feature)
Headstuck?
The most common reason we get stuck in our lives is because of something called “experiential avoidance”. What is that? This brief video explains it beautifully.
Benefits of living with purpose
Just in case you need scientific evidence on the benefits of living a life of purpose and valued-based action…
Study: If you think of exercise as something fun, you’ll eat less afterwards
This is a fascinating – and useful – look at how we think of things impacts our behaviors. Towards the end of the article, it reads:
“We can frame our workouts in different ways,” Dr. Werle said, “by focusing on whatever we consider fun about it, such as listening to our favorite music or chatting with a friend” during a group walk. “The more fun we have,” she concluded, “the less we’ll feel the need to compensate for the effort” with food.
Check it out…
How To Be Alone 101
Put down your cell phone and the constant quest for companionship with others, and open up to what life is like being with you…
Life With A Dog
When I suggest to clients who are lonely, isolated and depressed that they consider getting a dog, they often look at me like I’m the one in need of treatment. But this NY Times article highlights the various ways dogs can help us all…
ACT: A psychology of the normal (vs pathological)
This is one of the cleanest explanations of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) by one of its founders, Steve Hayes. Even if you aren’t interested in ACT, you’ll likely find some of the ideas in this 12 minute interview worthwhile. “Vastly more human suffering, ” Hayes says, “come from normal processes that run away from us” than from psychopathology.
The Big Think: Steven Hayes (12-minute video interview)
In Mindfulness, a Method to Sharpen Focus and Open Minds
This is a nice description of mindfulness, how it is different from meditation, and how it has a very practical application in our day-to-day lives. I love the phrase “purposeful pause”; sometimes that is all we need to get our heads out of autopilot and make conscious choices in sync with who we want to be, and the live we want to create.
In Mindfulness, a Method to Sharpen Focus and Open Minds(NY Times)
What if the secret to success is failure?
“It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you’re lucky. But it’s one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it’s quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense.”