There’s a good reason that country music songs have a long tradition of lamenting romantic breakups. From What If I Never Get Over You to Die From a Broken Heart, breakup songs are popular because almost everyone can relate to them. The simple fact of life is that...
Tips For Becoming An Expert Conversationalist
One of the joys of parenthood is witnessing your child’s “firsts.” Their first smile, their first step walking and, most preciously, their first words. Many parents sit in awe as their child almost magically learns to talk. Although this is a natural process — with...
New Fronts In The Battle Against Addiction
It’s a sight that verges on both the comical and the tragic: teenagers in a social setting all with their eyes locked on their smart phones. Research is piling up fast that there’s a lot more going on here than kids keeping tabs on their friends’ social activities. In...
Five Seconds To A Better Life
Evolutionary biologists keep discovering new ways that our physiological development affects our everyday behavior. One of the fascinating things about our development is that brain function that developed over countless millennia may simply not have a good use for...
No Shortcuts To Deep Relationships
When it comes to developing a deep and stable long-term relationship, there is valuable wisdom in the age-old saying patience is a virtue. That’s because creating a healthy relationship is a process that defies shortcuts. Partners in a romantic relationship need to...
How Science Can Help Us Understand And Cope With Grief
There’s an old saying: Grief is the price we pay for love. This simple statement reflects the reality that loss is inevitable. The only tragedy would be if you never loved anyone and so never had to endure their loss. Because grief is a virtually universal human...
Who’s Really In Control Here?
The “feel good” hormones that we’ve discussed in previous blogs can have wonderful benefits for your mental and even physical health. (See The Virtuous Cycle of Feel-Good Hormones.) But, as we also touched upon, hormones do not function according to a value system —...
What’s Behind That Drive For Perfection?
People in therapy are often exposed to the idea of attachment theory. Research has been accumulating about this idea since the 1930s, so it’s hardly a new concept. Basically, it’s an attempt to explain how our childhood affects our relationships as adults. It...
The Virtuous Circle Of Feel-Good Hormones
Understanding how hormones affect our physical and mental health is important because there are things that we can do to influence our brain’s production of hormones — not control, but at least influence. In a previous blog (Hormones, The Runner’s High And More) we...
Hormones, The Runner’s High And More
Most people have heard of and probably have a pretty good understanding of how hormones affect your mood. But brushing up on the role that several important hormones play can be valuable because hormones not only affect how you feel — they affect how your body...