"Why is it that some people are more vulnerable to life's slings and arrows and others more resilient?" In this eye-opening talk, Richard Davidson discusses how mindfulness can improve well-being and outlines strategies to boost four components of a healthy mind: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. Richard Davidson is researching how mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains and what we know about people's brains of individuals showing more resilience than

Addressing the trauma-trouble link in therapy. While the notion that early trauma may be linked to psychological and behavioral problems in adult life is rather old news, recent work has refined our understanding of this link in two major ways. First, research has shown quite convincingly that early trauma is a major predictor-and causal agent-not only of neurotic-spectrum problems such as anxiety, depression and relationship issues, but also of physiological health outcomes

Uncontrolled anger can be problematic for your personal relationships and for your health. Fortunately, there are tools you can learn to help you keep your anger in check. Wrath, fury, rage — whatever you call it, anger is a powerful emotion. Unfortunately, it’s often an unhelpful one. Anger is a natural human experience, and sometimes there are valid reasons to get mad like feeling hurt by something someone said or did or experiencing frustration over a situation at work or

We all know someone who is convinced their opinion is better than everyone else’s on a topic – perhaps, even, that it is the only correct opinion to have. Maybe, on some topics, you are that person. No psychologist would be surprised that people who are convinced their beliefs are superior think they are better informed than others, but this fact leads to a follow on question: are people actuallybetter informed on the topics for which they are convinced their opinion is super

Ocean Escape (with music): Walk Along the Beach Guided Meditation and Visualization

Howard Hughes spent the last two decades of his life hiding from human contact. Notorious for taking extreme measures to avoid germs, he even wrote a manual for his staff on the “healthy” way to open canned goods. A psychological autopsy published by the APA in 2005 pinpointed the origin of his fear as Hughes’ childhood of isolation managed by a highly protective mother. The major health threat at the time was the polio epidemic, which caused public swimming pools, playground

In our daily lives, we are often mindless. Not because we’re lazy or deficient, but because we are geared to function efficiently. Which means we are geared to not doing something unless we absolutely need to do it. And we certainly can get away with being mindless much of the time. For instance, there is no need for us to have anything like the degree of mindfulness our hunter-gatherer ancestors had when we walk in the woods. So being mindful requires us to override our defa

As coronavirus spreads, many people have been advised (and in some cases required) to engage in social distancing, which involves avoiding non-essential social interactions and staying home as much as possible, among other precautions (up-to-date information from the CDC can be found here). Social distancing is believed to be critical for slowing the rate of infection so that hospitals don’t become inundated. But for many, especially those who live alone, social isolation can