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...
Why We Feel So Wonderful After A Good Conversation
Whether we think about it or not, almost everyone intuitively recognizes what a “conversation” is. When we talk to the person checking us out at the supermarket — who might ask, are these organic apples? to get the price right — we don’t go home and tell our partner,...
Leadership Lessons According To Jobs
Leaders in business are often notoriously difficult to work with and driven by huge egos. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, for example, alternately fought with and then praised each other throughout their careers until Jobs died. Moreover, Jobs didn’t just duke it out with...