Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power.
— Anonymous
Recently, I’ve been reading another book about how our brains work. In Dr. Daniel Amen’s book Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, he describes the chemical interactions that occur as a result of our thoughts. Putting these various pieces of research together, I have learned that I can affect how my mind behaves and I can create an outlook that serves me. With that comes greater freedom from anxiety and depression and that makes it worth working at understanding the science, and developing the skills that conform with the research.
In some of my most recent posts, I’ve written about the effect of thoughts on the shape and structure of our brain. Repetitive thoughts or actions become imprinted in our brains and the more repetitive they are the deeper the imprint. The deeper the imprint, the harder it is to change them.
With the addition of Dr. Amen’s research, we start to understand how Continue reading » Get Rid of the ANTS
Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Every Sunday, after I go to Mass, I meet a friend for lunch. She has two sons, both of whom have struggled with addiction issues. Both have also been trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The younger son, Rhett, has tried to find a career of sorts but he’s struggled because he did some not-so-smart stuff a few years back. Because of his record, he finds it hard to find a job with a future and is waiting for these items to “fall off” his record. Even then, finding a job he’ll like is a challenge.
Recently, Rhett has been showing signs of moving forward. First, he decided that even though it may be difficult to succeed in this overcrowded field, he would enroll in a film study certificate program at a local junior college. (As a graduate of a junior college system, I can only say, “Thank heavens for junior colleges!”)
To get started, he enrolled in six units during the summer semester. For someone starting out cold, summer semester is a huge challenge. The same amount of study material is squeezed into Continue reading » A Story of Personal Power
OY! I have waaaay toooo much to do. (I get to say OY, I come from Chicago and it’s better than swearing.) It occurs to me that there comes a point in time when my immediate todo list (as in must get done by yesterday) becomes so overwhelming that I freeze. We haven’t spent a lot of time describing learned helplessness and how to deal with it, but I think one of the things I do is decide that since I can’t get it done, I won’t try. So, here’s my three steps on how to deal with WAAAAY TOOOO much to do.
I be grumpy this morning. It’s one of those days when the whole world seems prickly; seems like everyone I encounter is a bit sharp and sensitive – me especially. It’s like wandering my way through a huge old, rocky patch of prickly pear cactus – desperately uncomfortable and a bit scary! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
Continue reading » Prickly This Morning
Perhaps you’ve heard that one of the most influential factors in resilience and mood management is self-talk. According to Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism
, self-talk – the internal monologue going ’round in our heads – is how we make sense of our world; it’s how we explain what’s happening. And our explanations are often, by habit, pessimistic or optimistic. And that gets me to wondering about all those family clichés we heard growing up. Take my Irish/German Mother’s answers to almost every crisis:
No news is good news
It’s the luck of the Irish
You’ll be well before you’re married
What goes around comes around
Knock wood
As a kid I used to ponder over each of these sayings, wondering, what does that MEAN? Continue reading » What Goes ‘Round Comes Around: Self-Talk and Family Clichés
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