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Science of Happiness
Kindness Makes You Cuter: Science of Happiness, Week 3
While it may seem like we’re born to be cutthroat, studies show that humans are actually innately wired for kindness. It is in our very nature to see ourselves in one another and want to help those in distress. Compassion is part of being human. It’s a key element of happiness and health, and it’s […]
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Four (harder than they sound) Steps to Releasing Emotions
Meditation teacher Roger Gabriel has been giving a talk each week on Deepak Chopra’s “Healing the Whole Self” workshop. During week three, Gabriel said that all the organic food and yoga in the world won’t help if our lives are “emotionally turbulent,” and he outlined four steps for letting go of emotions so we don’t […]
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Poetic Inspiration (that I didn’t write)
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination…” Recently deceased and magically transcendent with simple language, Mary Oliver wrote the gift of the poem below in 1986: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesFor a hundred […]
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“You can’t think your way into well-being. You can only act your way into well-being.”
How frustrating, right? Especially to those of us for whom thinking and intellectualizing feels like a serious investment of effort. Dr. D has said these words to me many times (which was probably just as frustrating to her, I now realize). Thinking my way into well-being had been my main strategy. I learned about healthy […]
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Tiny Tip
Tuesday’s Tiny Tip: Find and Post a Childhood Photo
You can increase your capacity for self-kindness and self-compassion with this tiny tip: Put up a childhood photo of yourself and look at it often. If you’re like me, you’ve spent decades being your own harshest critic, giving short shrift to your achievements and aiming your internal telescope unflinchingly on perceived shortcomings. A common affliction, […]
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Ten Minutes to Fight Arm Flab
For many of us, the challenge with exercise isn’t knowing what to do, but actually motivating ourselves to do it. I’m trying to add weight training to my regimen, and I bookmarked a bunch of 10-minute online workouts that I intended to incorporate daily. Shockingly (not shockingly) I haven’t actually been doing the workouts. All […]
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Self-care
Essential Self-Care, Vol. 1: The Hard Stuff
Before we get into all the little things we can do to treat ourselves well each day, we’ve got to get into the three biggies: rest, exercise and sustenance. These elements of self-care are so essential, all the self-help in the world can’t help if we’re not attending to these critical components. Entire books have […]
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Deepak Chopra shares three ways to instantly combat stress
(What I learned from the second week of Deepak’s “Healing the Whole Self” free online workshop.) (Also, I have to call him Deepak instead of Chopra because Deepak is so fun to say. Deepak.) Deepak started his healing workshop by talking about the “bodymind” and self-care. He continued that theme this week, with an increased […]
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Science of Happiness
Science of Happiness, Week Two: Connection
The first week of the UC Berkeley’s Science of Happiness course was all about defining happiness and why it’s worth seeking. Week two centers on the biology of connection: how humans are hard-wired to make deep social-emotional connections with one another, and how these close relationships contribute to overall happiness. Work prevented me from bingeing […]
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Tiny Tip
Tuesday’s Tiny Tip: Pomodoro Technique
This timer technique can be incredibly effective, especially when you need to focus on a task you’re reluctant to handle. Developed in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo, who I guess invented setting a timer, the pomodoro technique is a time-management approach that calls for working in focused 25-minute blocks separated by five-minute breaks. (He apparently […]
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