A Tip to Try for Anyone Who Struggles with Uncertainty Many us, whether or not we struggle with an anxiety disorder, view uncertainty as intimidating. After all, uncertainty is ambiguous. It means unpredictable situations that we’re convinced have the potential for discomfort, undesirable outcomes, bad news, and big mistakes. So we avoid uncertainty. We don’t take a new route to work, because we might get lost. And what if there’s no one to give us directions? We don’t do or try many different things, because we worry that something unpleasant will happen. Uncertainty requires relinquishing control and trusting that we can cope if something does go wrong. But uncertainty is part of life. In their excellent book The Generalized Anxiety Disorder Workbook: A Comprehensive CBT Guide for Coping with Uncertainty, Worry and Fear Melisa Robichaud, PhD, and Michel J. Below are suggestions and insights from The Generalized Anxiety Disorder Workbook on conducting these experiments in your own life: Start small. Related Articles Vulnerability is scary.
William James on the Psychology of Habit “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle famously proclaimed. “Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Perhaps most fascinating in Michael Lewis’s altogether fantastic recent Vanity Fair profile of Barack Obama is, indeed, the President’s relationship with habit — particularly his optimization of everyday behaviors to such a degree that they require as little cognitive load as possible, allowing him to better focus on the important decisions, the stuff of excellence. I found this interesting not merely out of solipsism, as it somehow validated my having had the same breakfast day in and day out for nearly a decade (steel-cut oats, fat-free Greek yogurt, whey protein powder, seasonal fruit), but also because it isn’t a novel idea at all. When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits. He then bridges the body and the mind to shed light on how “habit loops” dominate our lives:
The Eternal Return: Nietzsche’s Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Key to Existential Contentment Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character. Joan Didion captured this with searing lucidity in defining character as “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life” and locating in that willingness the root of self-respect. A century before Didion, Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844–August 25, 1900) composed the score for harmonizing our choices and our contentment with the life they garner us. Nietzsche, who greatly admired Emerson’s ethos of nonconformity and self-reliant individualism, wrote fervently, almost frenetically, about how to find yourself and what it means to be a free spirit. The legacy of that deceptively simple yet profound proposition is what philosopher John J.
Light After Darkness: 6 Ways to Keep Going During Tough Times “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”– Desmond Tutu Throughout the past three years, I’ve experienced the most profound darkness in my life. A relationship that I cared about ended. A fragile marriage reached its breaking point and unraveled as I came to realize how little control I had over parts of my life. I lost my partner, grew apart from my family and became increasingly isolated. I left a legal job. I gave up my permanent address. As the storms of my life raged, I had to ask myself who I was, who I had become and where I was going. Yes, a soul-shaking series of events had led to a turbulent life crisis. I had to grieve, reflect, grow and adapt to the changes in my life. Today, I can honestly say that I’m grateful for having experienced this period of darkness in my life. Why? Because the darkness has brought me to the light I see today. I realize that my grueling and painful journey has brought me to a place of clarity and happiness. 1. Who are you?
Malcolm Gladwell on Criticism, Tolerance, and Changing Your Mind At a recent event from the New York Public Library’s wonderful LIVE from the NYPL series, interviewer extraordinaire Paul Holdengräber sat down with Malcolm Gladwell — author of such bestselling books as The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (public library), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (public library), Outliers: The Story of Success (public library), and his most recent, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (public library) — to reflect on his career, discuss the aspects of culture that invigorate him with creative restlessness, and update his 7-word autobiography. The entire conversation, embedded below, is well worth the time — there’s something rather magical about witnessing two minds of great intellect collide with great humanity — but three of Gladwell’s points gave me particular pause. Excerpts and transcribed highlights below. I feel I change my mind all the time.
“We Need to Destroy the Republican Party”: A Conservative Luminary Calls for a Clean Start Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. In his new book, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, Max Boot goes further than the handful of other prominent Republicans who have stood against Donald Trump and reconsiders the conservative movement writ large. The Mother Jones Podcast The Conservative Case for Destroying the GOP On this week's episode, Mother Jones DC Bureau Chief David Corn chats with Max Boot, the lauded conservative stalwart who now believes the GOP must be destroyed—for good. <iframe> Player Code Embed this player on your website using the snippet below David Corn: You were a golden boy of conservative punditry. Max Boot: Well, it’s basically that I could not deny reality indefinitely. DC: Well, let me pick at the scab a little. MB: There were two assumptions. DC: Why do you think it’s so hard for people now to concede they got it wrong? DC: You’ve been moved to reconsider much more than just Iraq. MB: Yes, it has. MB: Absolutely.
A Roadmap to Overcoming Insecurities By Leo Babauta There isn’t a person amongst us who doesn’t have insecurities — some are just better at dealing with them, or perhaps hiding them. We worry what other people think about us, we worry if we’re good-looking enough, we worry that we’re not doing all that we should be, we worry that we’ll fail, we worry that people will find out we’re a fraud. We worry that we’re too fat, worry if she’ll like us, worry if he likes that other girl, worry that we’re not good enough. And social media, with its culture of getting us to want approval with likes and retweets, with its showing off amazing bodies and amazing travels and food … it only exacerbates the problem. But you know all this. The question is: how do we overcome these insecurities? How do we become OK with ourselves? The answer isn’t simple, but it requires one thing to start with: a willingness to face what we usually don’t want to face. That means a bit of courage. Do you have that courage? The Obstacles Past criticisms.
De functie van de bijnieren De bijnieren zijn endocriene klieren die in de buikholte als een kopje boven op de nieren liggen. Endocriene klieren zijn organen die hormonen maken en in de bloedbaan brengen. De bijnieren produceren diverse hormonen die nodig zijn om essentiële functies van het lichaam in stand te houden. Denk hierbij aan de afbraak van voedingsstoffen, de reactie op stress en het evenwicht tussen water- en zout in het lichaam. Volg een webinar over het vinden van de beste zorg Hoe krijgt u de beste zorg die ook nog eens past bij úw situatie? Bekijk hier de webinars Bijnierhormonen De bijnieren bestaan uit twee delen, het bijniermerg en de bijnierschors. Cortisol is een glucocorticoïd hormoon, dat een rol speelt bij het de vertering van voedsel. Het bijniermerg produceert de zogeheten catecholaminen: Noradrenaline (norepinefrine). De catecholaminen zijn ook stresshormonen. Hoe wordt de functie van de bijnieren geregeld? De bijnieren staan onder controle van de hypothalamus en de hypofyse. Meer informatie
Obama's CIA Director just shredded Trump and gave us all hope for 2019 in scathing New Years tweet Former CIA Director John Brennan certainly knows how to ring out the old year. In the waning moments of 2018, he turned his thoughts to his most fervent wish for the upcoming year in a reply to one of President Donald Trump’s recent barrage of self-pitying tweets. He did not mince his words or even bother to disguise his contempt for the president as he directly called out Trump and his Republican enablers for a legacy of “malfeasance and corruption” that calls the future of America into question. The former CIA Director and chief counterterrorism advisor to former President Barack Obama had served in the U.S. intelligence community in every administration since the Clinton era and been a frequent critic of President Trump. When Trump held a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last July Brennan was so incensed that he sent a tweet accusing the president of treason for his betrayal of American interests. Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
The True Upside of Hard Times I often say if there’s two things in life that we can’t evade aside from death and taxes, it’s stress and pain. Suffering is a part of life, but the mindset we layer over it makes all the difference. I have so many examples in my life, and you may as well, where a difficult time was upon me and that very time was the seed which brought on the growth of the next moment. The reality is, we never truly know whether an experience in life is good or bad because we don’t know what’s going to happen next. In Uncovering Happiness I write about how the deepest, darkest moment of my life was exactly what inevitably opened my mind to seeking out support that led me to where I am today. I felt like I had been buried in that moment, but really, I had just been planted and now aware of the blooming. To go even deeper, while we can learn to savor the blooming (a key skill for happiness), it is impermanent. There isn’t a limit to your ability to plant seeds and water them during good times and bad. Warmly,