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How Getting Out Of Sync Can Help Relationships

Therapist
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If you are always warm to a cold person, you can become a pushover. Meeting dominance with dominance can result in a fight, whereas being submissive with a submissive person can lead to inaction and boredom. Strategic interpersonal behavior in any form can feel manipulative and inauthentic. However, in psychotherapy, the idea is that occasional, high-impact noncomplementary moments can have a positive impact in the context of a trusting relationship, and this principle generalizes to other relationships as well. To read more from CHRISTOPHER J. HOPWOOD, click here.

Boosting Learning & Memory with Exercise

Therapist
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Learning requires more than the acquisition of unfamiliar knowledge; that new information or know-how, if it’s to be more than ephemeral, must be consolidated and securely stored in long-term memory.

Mental repetition is one way to do that, of course. But mounting scientific evidence suggests that what we do physically also plays an important role in this process. Sleep, for instance, reinforces memory. And recent experiments show that when mice and rats jog on running wheels after acquiring a new skill, they learn much better than sedentary rodents do. Exercise seems to increase the production of biochemicals in the body and brain related to mental function. To read more from GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, click here.

Narcissism exists in many shades

Therapist
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Does this sound like anyone you know?

*Highly competitive in virtually all aspects of his life, believing he (or she) possesses special qualities and abilities that others lack; portrays himself as a winner and all others as losers.

*Displays a grandiose sense of self, violating social norms, throwing tantrums, even breaking laws with minimal consequences; generally behaves as if entitled to do whatever he wants regardless of how it affects others.

*Shames or humiliates those who disagree with him, and goes on the attack when hurt or frustrated, often exploding with rage.

*Arrogant, vain and haughty and exaggerates his accomplishments; bullies others to get his own way.

*Lies or distorts the truth for personal gain, blames others or makes excuses for his mistakes, ignores or rewrites facts that challenge his self-image, and won’t listen to arguments based on truth. To read more from JANE E. BRODY, click here.

Love & Attachment Theory

Therapist
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We’ve all experienced the delicious madness when love first blooms — whether it happens in a bar, on a snowy street or when one person slips a hand into yours by a campfire. Your faces glow with that radiating aura. You marvel at the miraculous ways you are both the same! You’re up all night, sleepless, not eating. There are bursts of overflowing communication, and having crazy, silly fun in public. Every second apart produces an ache, and every minute together goes too fast. Your solar system has a new sun. To read more from David Brooks, click here.

Why do people act the way they do?

Therapist
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Personality Can Change Over A Lifetime, And Usually For The Better.

Why do people act the way they do? Many of us intuitively gravitate toward explaining human behavior in terms of personality traits: characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that tend to be stable over time and consistent across situations.

This intuition has been a topic of fierce scientific debate since the 1960s, with some psychologists arguing that situations — not traits — are the most important causes of behavior. Some have even argued that personality traits are figments of our imagination that don’t exist at all. To read more from CHRISTOPHER SOTO, click here.

The Soulmate Trap

Therapist
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This soulmate trap is subconscious and powerful. Like a shark, it lurks until a moment of disgruntlement invites it to take a chomp out of your contentment. So what to do? We must kill the soulmate.
Mindfulness can help us embrace others, flaws and all. In meditation, a thought arises. Examine it. Is it true? Is it real? Blast it with the lightsaber of awareness and it disappears. Then we are left with the bare experience of what is actually occurring, not our concept or storyline.

On our cushion we learn we have a choice to either indulge an illusion or dismiss it and embrace reality. Now apply this to love. We can clearly look at our sweetheart and focus on the many joys they bring to our life. And each time our mind flips a middle finger at the lovely, full, shining truth of the now and zips off to soulmate land, we can practice letting go of the fantasy person and, instead, simply choose to love the one we are with. After all, no human can live up to the perfect paramour we create in our head. With mindfulness we learn we don’t need the intellectual polo sex dude to make things better. Happiness is available right here and now. In fact, reality is pretty great. Even when reality is snoring. To read more from Cheryl Fraser, click here.

The Power of Paint In One San Bernardino School

Therapist
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How science is changing the way schools think about art
On most days, San Bernardino’s Barton Elementary looks like most other California schools struggling to make ends meet: There are the familiar modular classrooms, concrete quads and windows covered by metal latticework — an unfortunate reality for children living in high-poverty communities across the nation. But this February day is special. Leaning against the taupe walls, striking images of children’s faces, painted with the expertise and expression of true artists, peer back at the very students who painted them. Children talk excitedly about their creations. For most fifth graders at Barton, it’s the first time they’ve painted a self-portrait — and they’re loving every minute of it.

Barton Elementary, just a few miles from the Inland Regional Center, where the terrorist shooting in December shook the community and the nation, is one of 49 schools currently participating in Turnaround Arts. Turnaround Arts, a combination public-private program organized by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, has a mission across 14 states and 27 districts to use arts education as a catalyst to improve the nation’s bottom-performing five percent of schools. To read more from The New York Times, click here.

Why Are Non-Parents Happier Than Parents?

Therapist
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For years, social scientists have known that nonparents are happier than parents. Study after study has confirmed the troubling finding that having kids makes you less happy than your child-free peers.

Now new research helps explain the parental happiness gap, suggesting it’s less about the children and more about family support in the country where you live.

Based on data from 22 countries and two international surveys of well-being, researchers found that American parents face the largest happiness shortfall compared to people who don’t have children. The happiness gap between parents and nonparents in the United States is significantly larger than the gap found in other industrialized nations, including Great Britain and Australia. And in other Western countries, the happiness gap is nonexistent or even reversed. Parents in Norway, Sweden and Finland — and Russia and Hungary — report even greater levels of happiness than their childless peers. To read more from KJ DELL’ANTONIA, click here.

The Three-Minute Breathing Space Practice

Therapist
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If you spent time reading comic books as a child, you might remember those issues that presented the protagonist’s origin story—who was Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman before getting super powers? Well, I’d like to tell you how the Three-Minute Breathing Space came into being.

When John Teasdale, Mark Williams and I were developing MBCT, we positioned the practice of mindfulness meditation centrally and buttressed it with exercises from cognitive therapy. While these elements blended well, I remember us arriving at a point where we felt something was missing.

Our experience as cognitive therapists taught us that therapeutic change depended on applying therapy skills between sessions and in real-world situations. Just as was the case for MBSR at that time, nearly every mindfulness practice we embedded in MBCT was formal and lengthy, with little guidance for calling on and employing these new ways to approach experience throughout the day. To read more from Zindel Segal, click here.

A Shocking Way (Really) to Break Bad Habits

Therapist
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Every January for the past decade, Jessica Irish of Saline, Mich., has made the same New Year’s Resolution: to “cut out late night snacking and lose 30 pounds.” Like millions of Americans, Ms. Irish, 31, usually makes it about two weeks.

But this year is different.

“I’ve already lost 18 pounds,” she said, “and maintained my diet more consistently than ever. Even more amazing — I rarely even think about snacking at night anymore.”

Ms. Irish credits a new wearable device called Pavlok for doing what years of diets, weight-loss programs, expensive gyms and her own willpower could not. Whenever she takes a bite of the foods she wants to avoid, like chocolate or Cheez-Its, she uses the Pavlok to give herself a lightning-quick electric shock. To read more from JENNIFER JOLLY, click here.