- By Hal Mathew
Someone with panic disorder does not know how to turn off the false alarm process once it gets going and must endure a terrifying experience of unknown duration, even if there is nothing apparent to fear. We all take in squintillions of units of information daily. Our brains have to filter data so that we can conduct some what rational lives without being overwhelmed.
We do not teach people how to fail in our education system. The purpose of exams is to get questions correct. The people who are rewarded in school are the ones who get the best grades, not the ones who take the biggest risks or the ones who learn from their mistakes.
It’s said that success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. In the modern world of business, that’s not quite true. Increasingly, when things go wrong, CEOs depart, with failure’s paternity quickly ascribed to the boss in the big office.
Your brain does a lot when you are asleep. It’s when you consolidate memories and integrate the things you’ve learned during the day into your existing knowledge structure. We now have lots of evidence that while you are sleeping, specific memories can be reactivated and thus strengthened.
Most differences between family and friends rarely end in serious squabbles. But let the conversation turn to political parties and lively disagreements can get downright ugly.
Imagine you just received a great bit of news at work – a promotion, pay rise, new car, an acceptance letter from the top journal in your field. If you are like me, you would probably like to open your door or pick up your phone and share your happiness with co-workers and friends. But research that colleagues and I have recently carried out suggested you should think twice.
- By Lisa Garr
When you’re living an aware life, it’s important to avoid black holes that tend to pull you down into a churning mess of negative emotions. It’s very easy in this hectic world to get sucked into a momentum of negativity until that’s all you can focus on.
Only in my life’s rear-view mirror do I see that I began to write “The Un-Game” long ago. As a cross-culturally naïve eleven-year-old, my world was rocked upon my arrival in New York City with my immigrant family. The assault on my German mind-set felt like an earthquake snatching away all my precious, unquestioned certainty.
The more committed we are to achieving a goal—catching a train, buying a movie ticket, getting groceries—the more likely we are to assume others have exactly the same objective. The new study by New York University psychology researcher Janet Ahn points to the types of assumptions we make about others’ behavior, which may have an impact on social interaction.
A simple experiment with a small group of college students suggests that punishments influence behavior more than rewards. In fact, punishments—in this case, losing money tokens—had a measured impact two to three times great than winning money. The results appear in the journal Cognition.
There are two different types of acknowledgment. There are compliments which are more superficial and then there are deeper appreciations that involve your character and inner qualities. How do you handle acknowledgment from others?
Life teaches us that we cannot be released from powerful, stressful emotions by resisting, ignoring, or repressing them – no matter how hard we try. In fact, life teaches us just the opposite. We learn from experience that resisting, repressing and ignoring unpleasant emotions just tend to make things worse.
Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi once advised, “We must become the change we want to see in the world.” Perhaps if we were each to expand forgiveness, gratitude, and love in our own lives, the collective influence of our healthy, loving relationships would reverberate across our generations and into the future.
- By Hal Mathew
Most of us walk around with heads busy as beehives, aware of some thoughts as they come and go but not fully aware of the buzz of mental activity just beneath the surface. Every once in a while, it’s a good idea to stop and ask yourself, What was I thinking?
I have been playing for around twelve years now, and I still take lessons. The best lessons I have are the ones in which I leave feeling like I don’t really know anything about playing at all. During those lessons, my teacher has identified yet another weakness in my playing. I have to learn new skills to overcome those weaknesses to get better.
Disgust is a universal emotion – we all get disgusted by things, just as we all experience other “basic” emotions, such as happiness and sadness. Disgust has many functions. It protects us from products that might cause us harm (food that has gone off), it can give us a moral compass (when we see someone being treated unfairly) and it keeps us away from things that remind us of our animal nature (dead bodies).
Trust. Not trust. Trust. Not trust. The human free will tries to insert its dominion. Trust in a higher power is the most difficult thing to sustain, and the most important thing to sustain. I can’t see angels, but I trust they are there helping me every step of my journey.
Experiments dating back to the 1960s show people have less of a reaction to viewing an unpleasant image or experiencing an electric shock when they know it’s coming than when they’re not expecting it. That’s because uncertainty, a long-known cause of anxiety, makes it difficult to prepare for events or to control them.
“Deviant individuals can exist in almost every society, even in the most strict and ruthless ones such as Nazi Germany. These deviant group members serve as an opposition to the opinions of the majority and can also differ from the majority in their emotional experience.”
Billions of people enjoy music; many feel that they can’t live without it. Why? It’s a question that has puzzled scientists and philosophers for centuries. 2,400 years ago Aristotle wondered, “Why does music, being just sounds, remind us of the states of our soul?”
Many of you have your crown chakra and third eye open and connected to very high vibrational states and yet the heart remains broken, hurt, or only conditionally opened. It is of utmost importance to have a balanced opening and clearing of all your chakras. The more efficiently you heal your unresolved aspects of self...
Stoicism promised that a good life is available to us even in the face of overwhelming circumstances, which might partly explain its attractiveness to even the mighty emperor of the most powerful empire of its time. Central to this life, according to the Stoics, is a certain set of cognitive approaches to what goes on in the world around us.
Have you ever been lied to or betrayed by someone you loved and trusted? Has anyone not believed you when you were telling the truth? Has anyone you loved walked away from the relationship and refused to try to work out the differences? Everyone has been hurt by someone else. How do we get rid of the hurt and move on with our lives. How can we forgive?