Common sense says if you eat slowly over the course of, say, a 20-minute meal, you’ll eat less than someone who eats quickly over the course of that same meal. This approach to healthier eating has been confirmed by a report published in a May 2014 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, wherein 22 studies on eating rate and calorie intake were reviewed.

Different methods were used to slow down eating in the various studies. In some studies, participants were told to chew their food more.  In some, the utensils were changed to slow down eating, such as substituting a spoon for a straw. In others, the texture of food was changed to slow down eating. For instance, hard foods take longer to chew and eat than soft foods.

Overall, here’s what the researchers found:

• When you eat slower, you consume less food and fewer calories than when you eat faster.
• The more you slow down, the fewer calories we consume.
• Once you slow down, you’ll find you’re just as satisfied with less food.
• When you are satisfied eating less food at a meal, you are less likely to compensate by eating more later on.

There are several reasons the researchers say that eating slower can help you eat less.  The first, that it takes 20 minutes for satiety signals to get from your stomach to your brain, is commonly known but perhaps underappreciated.  If you eat slowly, you will have eaten less by the time that “I’m full” message is received, at which point, your brain automatically instructs you to stop eating.

When you eat slowly, there is more time for your senses to become aware of the taste, smell and texture of foods, which in turn gives you more overall satisfaction, allowing you to stop eating sooner. One of the most interesting proposals, though, is the “number of chews” theory. This theory says that when you eat more food and you eat quickly, you chew more often. When you slow down and eat less food, and also increase the number of chews closer to what you’re used to, you can feel satisfied even though you are eating less.

In at least one study, however, the positive effects of slower eating were more significant in normal weight participants than in overweight participants.  While eating slowly led to lower hunger ratings in both groups, only the normal weight group consumed fewer calories and reported increased fullness an hour after the meal began. This could mean that eating slowly, or mindfully, may not be a weight loss tool per se, but it is a habit that could help prevent you from gaining more weight and, if you are at a healthy weight, help you maintain that weight.

If you ever doubted that humans are childlike creatures, watch the video that shows New York City police arresting—and killing—a 42 year old black father of six on a Staten Island sidewalk. Eric Garner was selling illegal loose (untaxed) cigarettes—you can see why he protested the triviality of the arrest. Perhaps he had trouble understanding why handcuffs for him when Wall Street bankers triggered the financial calamity of 2008 with shifty tricks and collected bonuses instead of punishments.

The arrest and killing have the quality of a children’s game. The cops are dressed up in uniforms and enjoy bossing the tall, heavyset, mild Garner. They’re the big kids; he‘s It. His size and his attempt not to be handcuffed give them the excuse to “take him down.” Two cops close in. One, officer Pantaleo, uses a taboo chokehold to drop the big guy to the pavement as he pleads that he can’t breathe. Then there are four cops piling on. It’s the bigger boys’ version of what at age 10 we called a pig pile. It's partly a macho exercise. If you're "on top," you feel great. 

The police game, you notice, has no place for negotiation with the one who’s It, and no sense of medical emergency when the loser loses consciousness.  Various hands feel for Garner’s  pulse, nobody’s alarmed or tries CPR: the guy who’s “It” is hardly important. 

Unluckily for the players, the city medical examiner rules Garner’s death a homicide caused by a chokehold and compression of his chest during an attempted arrest. When the grand jury looks the other way, the nation is outraged, especially because since Garner’s death, US police have killed at least half a dozen other unarmed black males in trivial circumstances.

What’s revealing is that the police shirk all responsibility. Not only do they blame Eric Garner for his death, they feel sorry for themselves, milking the public for pity. “Officers say the outcry has left them feeling betrayed and demonized by everyone.” [1] The problem is, “everyone” thinks the cops betrayed the citizens they serve, in particular Eric Garner, by choking instead of talking to him or even warning him. 

"Police officers feel like they are being thrown under the bus," said Patrick Lynch, president of the police union. Mr. Lynch depicts the cops as martyrs. They’re the ones being crushed to death, not Eric Garner. To keep up this grotesque projection, Lynch complains about the protests: "What we did not hear is this: You cannot go out and break the law. What we did not hear is that you cannot resist arrest. That's a crime."

The joke here of course is that the medical examiner found the cops, not Eric Garner, guilty of homicide. That's a crime. Sometimes.

Prisons are full of folks who can’t handle the pain of guilt. They need to feel "right" as all of us do. Guilt attacks, wrecks, rots self-esteem. No wonder kids sometimes deny guilt so fast they can deny they’ve denied it. Yet coming to terms with guilt is crucial if we're ever going to escape childhood.  

The NYC police feel they played the game by the rules. And it is a game: their spokesmen, like coaches or sports dads, want to get on with the game. Don’t rattle the players or you’ll be sorry. Cop culture has no sense of tragedy. No sense that motives can betray us. No sense that like children, we’d rather deny responsibility than interrogate ourselves as suspects to find out why some guy’s dead on the sidewalk.

Rep. Peter King (R) argues that the grand jury outcome would have been the same if Garner had been white. Try to picture NY cops choking Lloyd Blankfein, the Chief Smooothie at Goldman Sachs, to the sidewalk of Wall Street. 

Officer Pantaleo told the grand jury he tried to release Garner as soon as he began pleading, but the video doesn’t show that. He insisted that he hadn’t meant to hurt Eric Garner, which is how you feel playing a game.

 Officer Pantaleo also explained that Garner’s ability to plead that he couldn’t breathe means he could breathe.

 The officer is taking a cue from the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. Like the cops, the Queen doesn’t talk to you: she bosses you. Lewis Carroll understood the cops perfectly: “The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round.”

Resources used in this essay:

Kirby Farrell,  The Psychology of Abandon (Leveller’s Press, coming soon)

 1. Tom Hays and Colleen Long, “Police: Chokehold Victim Eric Garner Complicit In Own Death,” Huffington Post, December 5, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/05/police-chokehold-eric-garner_n_6277790.html

According to the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5), there are nearly 400 different psychological disorders. Some of these disorders fit the definition of “disease,” a problem that impairs functioning and that mostly stems from biological causes. Common examples include bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Other “disorders” impair functioning but are determined by a more diverse array of causes, some of which are psychological and social / cultural in nature. In this sense, these conditions are not true “diseases.” Examples include anxiety disorders, depression, addictive disorders, and eating disorders.

The distinction between “diseases” and “disorders” helps to suggest appropriate treatments. In general, diseases require biological intervention. Research suggests, for example, that medication is very successful in helping individuals to manage symptoms that accompany bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Although it may encourage them to take their medication regularly, manage stress effectively, and help with emotional struggles, research shows that psychotherapy generally does not help people overcome the symptoms of these diseases very well without biological intervention.

Biological treatments also may help people with disorders in some cases. For example, in one of the largest and most rigorous studies ever conducted on the treatment of clinical depression, researchers in the late 1980s found that antidepressant medication helped manage the symptoms of severe depression (which I would define as involving significant suicidal thinking, that often recurs, or that is chronic) more than other treatment options, at least during the time span in which individuals were taking the medicine.

On the other hand, decades of carefully controlled clinical studies have shown that medication often is not the best treatment for many disorders. Often times, any symptom relief that medication provides ends when individuals stop taking them.

Increasingly, I also see researchers skeptical of the underlying pharmaceutical claim that “chemical imbalances” of serotonin explain why some people struggle with emotional disorders. Apparently, some of the best evidence that there is a chemical imbalance of serotonin involved in disorders such as depression is that antidepressant medications sometimes help. However, this is akin to saying that if Tylonol sometimes helps you overcome a headache, then headaches must be caused by a “Tylonol imbalance.” This doesn’t necessarily take away from the fact that antidepressant medications can be helpful in some circumstances, but it does suggest, at least, that the mechanisms by which antidepressants sometimes work are in question by many in the scientific community.

According to the most recent data released by the National Center for Health Statistics, approximately 11% of all Americans aged 12 and older are taking an antidepressant medication for some reason. Approximately 25% of American women aged 40 to 59 are taking an antidepressant. More than 60% of individuals taking an antidepressant have done so for over 2 years, and approximately 14% have been taking them for over 10 years. Many of these individuals taking an antidepressant medication suffer from significant side effects. Others believe that they are being helped by the medicine and thus do not work to resolve the underlying issues that are at the “root” of the problem. In fact, much of the therapeutic effect of medicine likely stems from psychological factors such as cathartic release of telling their doctor about their problems, the relationship between them and their doctor, or the faith or hope they experience from the treatment. Of course, there are other ways to treat psychological disorders that may provide these factors without needing to take a pharmacological substance.

The best treatment option for many people who struggle with disorders is psychotherapy. Several forms of psychotherapy – cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, and psychodynamic therapy – have been found to successfully treat many disorders, including disorders with severe symptoms. Furthermore, compared with the effects of medication, psychotherapy often seems to provide better treatment in the long-term. Perhaps one of the reasons why psychotherapy is so helpful in many cases is that it gets at the “root” causes of people’s problems. Furthermore, although psychotherapy seems unrelated to biology, research shows that biological changes happen through this treatment just like it does when medication is helpful.

Available research suggests that there is not necessarily one kind of psychotherapy that is better than the rest (the main exception being that exposure based treatments seem to work better than all other treatments for anxiety disorders). Rather, it seems that there are certain “common factors” involved in good treatment, including a trusting relationship with a treatment provider, client factors such as motivation to follow suggestions, and the faith and hope that the treatment will help. Based on this, individuals struggling with depression would do well to seek a referral to a good therapist and “try them out” to see how they “click” with them. Usually, someone can tell after the first session whether they like the therapist. If the first therapist one tries doesn’t work out, another provider might work better.

There also are other activities that might help people with disorders. Some of these might be encouraged by a therapist, and include working through self-help materials (see David Burns’ books “Feeling Good” and “When Panic Attacks” for books shown to work in comparative research), regular aerobic exercise, keeping an emotions journal in which one writes about difficult emotions, keeping a gratitude journal in which one records what one is most thankful for, engaging in pleasurable activities, talking with a trusted friend about one’s problems, performing random acts of kindness, getting lost in nature, and managing stress through effective coping techniques. Although these kinds of activities haven’t really been established as successful treatments in themselves, they are linked with mood in various ways. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these lifestyle-based approaches someday are shown to perform at least as well as – if not better than – conventional treatments available today.

In conclusion, people struggling with a mental illness should know that there is hope. Almost all conditions can be managed effectively through the right combination of treatment options. Many disorders can be overcome long-term without the use of medicine. Probably the most difficult step in treatment is acknowledging that you have a problem and taking the first step to seek help. However, with this humility and courage, people can experience relief and improvement.

Andy Tix teaches Psychology at Normandale Community College. He also regularly blogs about links between Christian spirituality and Psychology at The Quest for a Good Life.

At holiday time, our inner children want to come out and play. Even if the adult in us disapproves or if circumstances are not so happy, holiday time is like stepping into a bakery. Even if you weren’t hungry before, suddenly you want to have some of those delicious treats. Honoring your child within will help you have a better holiday no matter what the circumstances. How can we do that?

Most of us know how to honor our inner childlike needs is by enjoying the pleasure of others, especially children. What makes parties and vacations so good is that they take us back to times in our lives when we could be carefree and taken care of. As adults, there are moments when we can push back worries and concerns and relax.

When we have the “holiday blues” it is most often because our inner child has been awakened by delightful sights and smells, but doesn’t expect to be taken care of. Being a good parent to your inner child is knowing that, even if wishes can’t be fulfilled, simply recognizing them and understanding them heals our pain and disappointment. This can only happen when an attitude of warmth and acceptance encourages our young self to come into the light of consciousness.

From an early age, we value how grown up we are and learn to feel ashamed of “immaturity.” Once embedded in our conscience, these values continue to be the yardsticks by which we evaluate ourselves. Especially if playfulness or neediness once led to hurt, we shame ourselves and suppress those wonderful qualities. If your adult disapproves of your own childlike yearnings and thoughts, they will go into hiding, out of reach of understanding or healing. If so, it is time to ask whether those old values might need to be updated. After all, young qualities are a big part of being a healthy adult.

If you feel shame about your young thoughts and impulses, then think that they are coming from your creative, innovative, fun-loving self. Suppress any of your young qualities and your whole inner child will be buried. Now is the time to question your values and be accepting of needs for attention, nurturing, cuddling, play, silliness, and gifts. But what if you listen inside and find wishes that can’t be fulfilled?

Here is the trick: As children, we learn to suppress our young qualities. As adults, we can learn a better way: Split wishes from actions. If we acknowledge and honor our wishes and impulses, then we can choose whether and when to act on them. That is the key to being an adult with a beloved child inside.

Jeffery Smith MD

Author of How We Heal and Grow

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.

– Carl Frederick Gauss (1777–1855), German mathematician, astronomer, and physicist

God ever geometrizes.

– Plato (c.428–c.348 BCE), Greek philosopher.

Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter this door.

– Sign above entrance to Plato's Academy, a famous center for philosophical, mathematical, and scientific work.

There is nothing in the world except empty, curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is geometry.

– John Archibald Wheeler (1911–1908), American pioneer in nuclear and gravitation physics, who did much to prove Plato's claim—that God is a geometer—prescient.

Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics.

– Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Italian astronomer

When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager, unsatisfactory kind.

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

– Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), Irish-born Scottish physicist after whom the absolute ("Kelvin") temperature scale is named.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, that may not someday be applied to phenomena of the real world.

– Nikolai Lobachevski (1792–1856), Russian discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry

Numerical precision is the very soul of science.

The perfection of mathematical beauty is such that whatsoever is most beautiful and regular is also found to be most useful and excellent.

– Sir D'Arcy Thompson (1860–1948), Scottish mathematical biologist

All the pictures which science now draws of nature and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact are mathematical pictures. From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician, and the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

– Sir James Jeans (1877–1946), English physicist, astronomer, and writer

It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physi­cal laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.

– Paul A. M. Dirac (1902–1984), English Nobel prize-winning mathematical physicist, pioneer of quantum theory

Because the shape of the whole universe is most perfect and, in fact, designed by the wisest creator, nothing in all of the world will occur in which no maximum or minimum rule is somehow shining forth.

– Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), Swiss mathematician who developed the mathematics of extremes

God made the whole numbers—all the rest is the work of man.

– Leopold Kronecker (1823–1891), German mathematician

As far as the mathematical theorems refer to reality, they are not sure, and as far as they are sure, they do not refer to reality.

– Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

From The Wisdom of Science

I just saw something astonishing on the web. It was on MSN Health & Fitness. When I go onto the Internet, MSN comes up as my homepage, just like millions of other people. I scrolled down past lifestyle and entertainment, and started browsing health. And there it was, an article titled “Dating With a Mental Illness.” Read it here.

I was surprised to see this article on mainstream media. The subject is not something I would expect a major news corporation to publish on their website. This is a good thing; this is opening up the conversation on how to approach being in a relationship not only to the person who is dealing with the illness, but it is also raising awareness to the other person. To the person who may find him or herself sitting across the table from the person who discloses that they have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety or an eating disorder.

Maybe, just maybe the person who is sitting on the other side of the table won’t back away, won’t recoil, won’t disappear into the night. Never to call again.

Dating is one activity I haven’t considered since my depression and suicide attempt. I’m not ready. It’s not as if I was the life of the dating party before though. But it’s been a tough year or two and I don’t want to scare anyone off.

How is that not possible? Not to scare anyone off I mean. With a history like mine. I can’t imagine a man being so understanding and non-judgmental. He’d have to be a saint.

There are other barriers to my dating besides my fear of being honest with a man. That reason is the easiest to tell myself. One that is more difficult to admit to myself includes the ongoing terror that I’m not capable of a physically and emotionally healthy relationship with a man. There’s got to be a reason that it hasn’t happened for me up until now.

My first real date was when I was in eighth grade. His name was Michael and he had red hair and freckles. We went to the movies and when he put his arm around my shoulders in the dark theater, his hand went down lower to my breast. I didn’t do anything, but I felt scared and ashamed. When I got home, my mother asked me how my first date went. “Fine,” I told her. “He’s nice.” And I ran to my room. I thought I should have liked it. I thought something was wrong with me.

When I was fifteen, I was babysitting up at the bungalow colony where our family spent our summers. On Saturday evenings the teenage girls babysat for the couples who went dancing at the recreation hall and the boys would make the rounds of all the cottages. It was on the porch of one of those cottages that I was first kissed. With the stars overhead, Jesse leaned in and gave me a soft kiss on my lips. I opened my eyes. No shooting stars in the sky. Again, I thought something was wrong with me. I thought I should have liked it more.

The reason I went into therapy in the first place when I was 23 was because I was surrounded by men playing in the New York Co-Ed Advertising Softball League and none of them was asking me out. I had sequential crushes, simultaneous crushes on men that took their shirts off, but I never had a date with any of them. Several years later, one of my friends told me that Steve had a huge crush on me, but I never responded to any of his flirts. I was never aware that Steve was flirting with me. I was so naïve I wasn’t able to pick up on the signals. Last I heard Steve took over his father’s agency and was living in New Jersey with his wife (another woman from the league and their children).

In the downward launch that my life took after the first hospitalization for anorexia at 27, there was no room for men. I was busy trying to stay alive. In the good years I enjoyed before this last depression set in, I joined online dating sites, met some men, went out, but nothing came of it. I’m still friends with one of the guys I dated. He didn’t want to get romantically involved and that was okay, so we talk occasionally, have dinner now and then and it’s been a nice friendship. He’s a kind, caring man and I have been honest with him about my illness. But that is as a friend.

I look around my one-bedroom apartment and think that it is too small for another person. I think I’m set in my ways, that I’m too old to be able to be with someone, that I value my alone time too much. I think about all the people who I know whose marriages have ended in divorce.

And I think that I don’t want to grow old and die alone like my father. He had his children, but my brother and I cared for him because he was our father and we had a sense of obligation towards him.

The article from MSN makes me feel hopeful. That someone is opening a door. For understanding. For compassion. A gateway to bringing two sides together. To bringing two people together.

Human language hasn’t simply replaced the vocalizations of our primate cousins. Instead, we use language on top of the communication systems we inherited from our prelinguistic predecessors. We laugh with joy, cry with despair, shriek with terror, shout with anger. And when we’re overcome with emotion, our language faculty shuts down altogether, leaving us with only our primal calls and facial expressions.

Our close cousins the chimpanzees have somewhat different body forms from ours, so they don’t share all of our vocalizations and facial expressions, and they even have some we don’t. But laughter is one emotional expression that’s uncannily similar in humans and chimps.

Human laughter isn’t just the fare of comedy clubs and late-night TV. Rather, it’s an integral part of our social communication. We laugh so frequently and so automatically that we’re often but vaguely aware we’ve done so and have little idea why we did. In fact, our intuitions about why we laugh are often wrong.

Most of the time when we laugh, we do so not because someone said something funny, but simply because they said something, and we’d like them to say more. We laugh to say, “I like you.” In other words, it’s a kind of social vocalization, not that much different from the mooing of cows in a herd.

Laughter evolved from the labored breathing of rough-and-tumble play, but it’s come to mean playful intent in both chimpanzees and humans. We punctuate our conversations with laughter, and by doing so, we encourage our conversation partner to stay in the chit-chat game.

Chimpanzees likewise use short bursts of laughter during social interactions, and they mimic the laugh patterns of those they’re engaging with, presumably to promote social cohesion. In other words, both humans and chimpanzees use laughter as a tool for building friendships.

Laughter is also a part of the mate attraction process in humans. By far, women do most of the laughing, and men do most of the laugh getting. Human females laugh more in the presence of males they find attractive. The more a woman laughs during an encounter with a man, the greater her reported interest in him. Little wonder then that women often say they’re looking for a man with a good sense of humor in their dating profiles.

(As far as I know, the question of whether female chimpanzees use laughter to signal sexual interest is still an open topic for research. But if you know of research on this subject, please leave citations in the comments.)

Laughter and language bear an interesting relationship. Each involves the same vocal apparatus, and so you can’t do both at the same time, even though they’re almost always used in the same context. Instead, we alternate between talking and laughing in conversational interactions, using laughter as a sort of punctuation between phrases and sentences. Even listeners usually wait until the end of the speaker’s sentence to laugh.

While it’s highly unlikely that language developed out of laughter, differences in the way humans and chimpanzees laugh suggest something about what was needed for language to evolve. When chimpanzees laugh, they produce one “ha” per breath. If you’d like to see and hear what chimpanzee laughter is like, check out these YouTube clips here and here.

Humans, however, have much greater control over their breathing, which is essential for producing speech. As a result, when we laugh, we typically produce a series of short bursts—“ha-ha-ha”—with each breath. Incidentally, human babies laugh like chimpanzees, with one “ha” per breath. But as they gain the breath control needed for speech during their first year, their laughter shifts to the typically human multiple “ha”s per breath.

Links between laughter and language show that we can’t have a complete understanding of how and why language evolved without fully considering the social functions it fulfills.

References

Davila-Ross, M., Allcock, B., Thomas, C., & Bard, K. A. (2011). Aping expressions? Chimpanzees produce distinct laugh types when responding to laughter of others. Emotion, 11, 1013–1020.

Mehu, M., & Dunbar, R. M. (2008). Naturalistic observations of smiling and laughter in human group interactions. Behaviour, 145, 1747–1780.

Palagi, E., & Mancini, G. (2011). Playing with the face: Playful facial “chattering” and signal modulation in a monkey species (Theropithecus gelada). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 125, 11–21.

Provine, R. R. (2004). Laughing, tickling, and the evolution of speech and self. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 215–218.

Vettin, J., & Todt, D. (2005). Human laughter, social play, and play vocalizations of non-human primates: An evolutionary approach. Behaviour, 142, 217–240.

The senseless and ceaseless killing of Black men by White police officers in this country is being discussed everywhere: network news, political speeches, college campuses and, of course, demonstrations around the country.

Many commentators have pointed out how the fear of Black men has been so deeply engrained in White culture that White police officers like Darren Wilson really can see a 17 year old kid like Michael Brown as a "demon." It is also why Treyvon Martin seemed "suspicious" or why Eric Garner's shouts of "I can't breathe" were ignored.  

After all, memory is historical and the history of constructing Black men as dangerous and a threat dates back to Jim Crow days. It is everywhere in American culture and history. Go back to early American movies, to 1915's cinematic "masterpiece"Birth of a Nation and there is Gus, a White man in blackface portraying a Black rapist intent on having his way with the lily white Flora, a woman so pure and so unwilling to have her purity besmirched by Gus that she throws herself off of Stone Mountain. This movie scene was so compelling to White audiences that President Woodrow Wilson described it as "history writ with lightening" while the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists used the film as an excuse to attack Black citizens.  

Fast forward to 1972 and Richard Nixon's "tough on crime" policy.   "Tough on Crime" was not a response to actual crime, but rather part of the GOPs "Southern Strategy." This now tried and true Republican strategy for winning elections does so by mobilizing Southern white voters by playing on their fear of Black beasts. That's why Nixon and other conservative politicians created a whole set of policies that led to the mass incarceration of Black Americans.  As Nixon said:

"Doubling the conviction rate in this country would do more to cure crime in America than quadrupling the funds for (the) war on poverty." 

He said this as a way of winning a national election. What Nixon meant was probably closer to what his former chief of staff, H.R. Haldemann said: 

"...the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

And so rates of mass incarceration exploded, quadrupling since 1980. As a result, the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. 1 out of every 100 Americans is behind bars. Blacks, who make up only 13% of the population, account for 40% of American prisoners. And developing alongside systems of mass incarceration have been policing and sentencing policies that have consistently dehumanized Black Americans. That's why  

About twice a week, or every three or four days, an African American has been killed by a white police officer in the seven years ending in 2012, according to studies of the latest data compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That number is incomplete and likely an undercount, as only a fraction of local police jurisdictions even report such deaths – and those reported are the ones deemed somehow “justifiable”.

Mass incarceration and the resulting policing practices in this country assume Black guilt. But none of this could occur without the racial innocence of Whites. Within the myth of the Black male beast lies the story of the innocent White victim, the delicate Flora running away from the newly freed (and therefore dangerous) Gus.

This uniquely American creation myth-- writ not with lightening but a gender binary that marked White women as victims, Black men as dangerous, Black women as excessively sexual and White men as heroic saviors-- planted the seed for everything we are seeing today. And therein lies the real danger for not bringing what feminist theory calls an "intersectional analysis" to the history we are witnessing.

An intersectional analysis insists that this is not just about the construction of Black men as beasts, but White women as needing saving by White men and Black women as never innocent.  The seemingly innocent images of White female sexual purity- the white wedding dresses on white women that mark  "perfect weddings," the always White "good girls" who pledge purity till marriage on Reality TV, the White pop stars that utilize all of this to create images of themselves as "nice" and "sweet" not "nasty" and "slutty"- are not just part of our imagination of the nice girl/slut dichotomy, but also part of what allows violence against Black men and women without consequence. Beasts who threaten the innocent deserve to die; sluts who are not pure do not deserve protection from assault. 

And so the story of Michael Brown and Treyvon Martin gets wrapped up in the story of sexual assault at the University of Virginia which gets tied up with the story of Ray Rice beating his then girlfriend/now wife Janay. And like Gus, the White actor in blackface, it haunts the American cultural imaginary as White kids, just kids after all, don blackface to dress as Ray Rice and Janay Rice and Treyvon Martin and no doubt next year Michael Brown and Eric Garner.  

The images haunt us, the Black beast rapist, the Black woman so "funny" for her black eye, and the White man, always there, always armed, always willing to kill to protect the racial innocence of the White lady. 

If we are going to really get at the roots of this problem it is not enough to talk about White supremacy. We must also talk about patriarchy. And how the two work together and always have.

One of the most difficult parts of making transitions at work or in life is letting go of who you were and what once made you successful. When I teach new leaders that they have to let go of being the top performer or when I coach people who have been forced to do something they didn’t choose, they always say, “How do you let go? People say to let go but it’s hard to do.”

Joseph Campbell said, “We must let go of the life we have planned so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” Whether you choose your next move or the decision was made for you, you have to clearly see what you must release to move on. From this vantage point, it is easier to step into the next phase, one that could be just as rewarding if not more so if you give it a full try.

The shift is particularly difficult if you were in the spotlight and you now have the role of helping others to be in the spotlight. Your values must shift from I do great work (for my organization, my team, my family, my community, or all humanity) to they do great work. The attachment to “my great work” is common, whether you are moving into your first leadership position after being a superstar performer or you are stepping back due to family or life situations.

If you were good at your job, it can rattle your brain to step into being supportive, patient, and committed to helping others make decisions on their own. This is also true for parents having to deal with their children growing up.

First, you need to recognize the strength of the attachment you still have to the way it used to be and who you once were. Then you need to see this attachment as a detriment to fully accept the new role you are now in.

Step One: Take a moment to articulate what was good about the past. Were you the one who saved the day? Did people come to you for advice, honoring you as the one who knew what was best to do? Did people show how much they appreciated you? Recall how important you were and what wonderful outcomes you achieved. Declare why it will be hard to let go.

Step Two: Grieve the past. Saying goodbye to a fulfilling past can be disheartening. The moment you recognize what you are losing, no matter what you will gain going forward, can be painful. Acknowledge this discovery as a powerful revelation. Let yourself feel sad for a few days. Take yourself on a retreat. Recognizing your grief can help it pass more quickly.

Step Three: Once you grieve your loss, look to see what is possible going forward.You have to find value in the life you are now living or you may never let go of the past. What will make you feel relevant now? What achievements are possible that you can look forward to?

You can’t force yourself to love your current life but you can recognize the value today and the possibility for fulfillment tomorrow. Or maybe you need to start looking for a new role, job, or adventure that will get your old needs met. Be careful, you should not decide you are failing at your new endeavor because you aren’t perfect. Making a full transition takes time.

Step Four: Shift your daydreaming to the future. Find at least one thing to look forward to every day. Consider what will be possible a year from now if you keep moving forward. Vision what a great day will look like one year from today. Every time you catch yourself thinking of the past, shift your thoughts to the vision you created. Then make your plans to make that dream come true.

Remember—all career and life transitions are a gradual process, not an instantaneous event. Courage is needed throughout the process. Where are you on the continuum between letting go of the past to stepping into the unknown future? You can engage your heart to dream once you activate the courage to release your attachment to the past.

Note: If you are trying to help someone else move through a difficult transition, you will find techniques and specific cases that relate to this in The Discomfort Zone: How Leaders Turn Difficult Conversations into Breakthroughs.

I'm a professional writer. I've been writing since I could hold a pencil, and possibly before that. It was my dream to be a published writer. I imagined my name on the cover of books as a child. I envisioned signing my works in popular bookstores, giving speeches about my writings and connecting with people around the world. 

In the year 2014, my writing career took off. I was published by The Huffington Post several times. I had a handful of pieces go viral online including 3 Year Olds are A**holes, Stop Calling Assertive Women Bitches, and Fighting Against The Stigma of Mental Illness. It was truly an exhilarating feeling to see my name on this major website.

People were reading my content. People were reaching out to me thanking me for sharing my story with them. I was in tears with gratitude. I was so thankful for my voice to be heard. It has always been my dream to help people with my writing. That's what I was beginning to do when I was recognized Huff Post. 

Suddenly, my essays stopped being published online. The emails with notifying me of where I could find my articles disappeared with virtually no explanation. I was devastated. I was enjoying the spotlight. I was so happy to have people reading my work, especially when I began to talk about taboo issues such as mental illness.

I didn't receive any rejection letters, just silence. And that silence hurt...a lot.

It took me a while to recover from the rejection, but I realized this:

I am still a writer no matter where my words land. I am still a storyteller no matter whether I am published or not. My existence on any online publication has no effect on my talent. I had to look in the mirror and tell myself: you are talented, you can affect people with your words no matter where you go. 

Rejection as a writer is brutal. But, one thing is for sure: writers never stop writing. So my advice to you if you are coping with a rejection letter is this: keep going. Keep writing, keep telling your story. Your words mean something. 

In his book, The Soul of Autism (Stillman, 2008), author Bill Stillman provides dozens of examples of people with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) who have had a spiritual, psychical or anomalous experience – call it what you will. Stillman, who himself has Asperger’s Syndrome, writes about these perceptions with a firsthand knowledge. Another author with an ASD, Donna Williams, has recounted her own psychic experiences, connecting them with sensory sensitivity and thin boundaries. (Williams, 1998) Even among savants - who make up about 10% of the percentage of people with ASD - anomalous perceptions are not unknown. A large-scale study of child savants in the 1970s turned up a few whose parents reported that their son or daughter had extrasensory perception (Rimland, 1978); a more recent cataloguing by savant expert Dr. Darold Treffert indicates a similar smattering of cases. (Jawer, 2014)

I suspect that such accounts reflect a genuine difference in sensory processing – and, consequently, a different sense of self.  As we saw in a previous post, accumulating evidence suggests that people with an ASD (or, for that matter, a Sensory Processing Disorder or SPD) are, from an early age, bombarded by sensory input that they have trouble discriminating.  Their boundaries, we might say, are thinner than those of other people for whom the distinction between ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ is more constant, more firm.  But even among individuals living with such a condition, there is a spectrum between high functioning and low functioning forms.  People with high functioning forms of ASD or SPD will have somewhat thicker boundaries and a more fully delineated conception of self.  People with low functioning forms will be more likely to withdraw into their own world, dissociate from feelings and sensations that become overwhelming, and become less engaged and communicative.

As I have proposed elsewhere [for a fuller accounting, see Jawer, 2009], thin boundary people are most likely to report anomalous perceptions whereas thick boundary people are more likely to engender anomalies.  Perhaps the most outstanding illustration of the latter is Matthew Manning, a 58-year-old Brit who, at the age of 11, began to find himself at the center of a series of increasingly powerful poltergeist displays.  They began with the ‘mere’ unaccounted-for movement of a silver tankard and flowerpot and then, when he was 15 and living in a much older (18^th century) house in Cambridgeshire, escalating to furniture lifting off the ground and household objects variously levitating or hurtling through the air.  

Even more bizarre, the signatures of dead people – several hundred of them, all in different hands – began to appear, roughly scrawled, on Manning's bedroom wall.  The first was signed by one Robert Webbe, a 17th-century figure who left a message that indicated, as Manning puts it, that he "seemed to have no idea that he was dead."  On one occasion, witnessed by observers, Manning's father ushered the whole family into the garden, with his son's bedroom roped off, leaving a pencil on the bed.  When they returned after ten minutes, another inscription had been added.  Some of the names, which were systematically photographed, appear in historic parish registers; others were of unknown provenance. (Chalmers, 2014)

The story becomes stranger still.  The family moved to another house, whereupon, in his brother Andrew’s words, the poltergeist “just erupted, like a volcano under the house.  When it got very bad I went to sleep in my sister's bedroom.  The house had no carpet because we had just moved, and that made it all the noisier – bangings, crashings, thumpings.  We had no explanation.  We just hoped it would stop.”  When Matthew was sent away to school, his parents and siblings experienced "a tidal wave of relief that he had left." (Chalmers, 2014)  But the boarding school then suffered through a similar predicament.  One of Manning’s former classmates recalls:   

There were 24 of us in bunk beds.  Things just started to happen.  Water appeared from nowhere.  I remember my bed moving when there was nobody near it.  On one occasion, this pile of dinner plates came crashing down, out of thin air, and shattered on the floor.  Where they came from, who knows?  Matthew was frightened.  I was bloody terrified.  It was the sort of experience that, unless you've been through it, you can't begin to comprehend.

The tale takes one further turn.  While working on an essay, Matthew found that his hand began to produce writing that was not his.  This took him quite aback at first.  But then, after producing a long composition, he noticed that the poltergeist activity ceased for about 24 hours.  So he deliberately tried the strange exercise again.  “A lot of what came through,” he recalls, “was nonsense; other things purported to be messages from people who had died…I had always imagined that the automatic writing, whatever it was, was probably flotsam that was coming out of my unconscious…But when I began writing in Chinese and Arabic…well, that did freak me out a bit.  Because those languages were not, so far as I was aware, present in my subconscious." 

Nor was Matthew any kind of artist.  Upon being prompted by his mother to ‘channel’ artwork, though, he produced a number of pictures reminiscent of artists ranging from Albrecht Dürer (a 16^th century painter and printmaker) and Aubrey Beardsley (a 19^th century author/illustrator) to Pablo Picasso.  The drawings “seemed to be a striking mimicry…even though flawed in some technical detail, their style and execution faithfully mirrored the original model.” (Ehrenwald, 1978)  This remarkable capacity is exactly what distinguishes savants – but Matthew, like Daniel Tammet (who we met in a previous post), is not obviously impaired and is, in fact, quite at home as a conversationalist.  So does Matthew have any touch of autism? 

It’s hard to say but, like Tammet, he might have had a more pronounced form of autism as a child.  Matthew is recalled as “an introvert who...absolutely refused to talk to strangers.  When scolded for mischievousness, he would withdraw into a corner and remain there, sometimes for hours, curled up in total isolation.”  Some years later, the headmaster of his boarding school described him as “a loner and rather lethargic.” (psychologist Peter Bander, quoted in Ehrenwald,1975)  Manning might well have grown out of this inwardness given the many interviews and public appearances he undertook in his late teens and twenties. 

When we consider what could possibly produce someone like Matthew Manning, it’s significant that, three weeks before he was born, his mother suffered such a severe electrical shock that she feared she might lose him. (Manning, 1975)  This reinforces a point, argued throughout this blog series, that challenges to normal development in the womb may be the surest precursor of the conditions we’ve looked at – whether synesthesia, autism, savantism, prodigiousness, environmental sensitivity, or the attunement to/generation of anomalous experiences.  

If this is so, there are broader implications that I would like to speculate upon.  Given that personality can be influenced to such a large extent during gestation; might we ‘rewind’ the process and imagine the possible origin of individual human lives?  In the final posts of this series, I will venture into that mysterious terrain. 

Notes:

Chalmers, Robert. “An Interview with Matthew Manning: Poltergeist Boy.” British GQ. May 8, 2014. 

Ehrenwald, Jan. The ESP Experience: A Psychiatric Validation. New York: Basic Books, 1978, 188.

Jawer, Michael. Personal communication with Darold Treffert. May 4, 2014.

Jawer, Michael A. with Marc S. Micozzi. The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2009.

Manning, Matthew. The Link. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1975, 25.

Rimland, Bernard. “Savant Capabilities of Autistic Children and their Cognitive Implications.” In Cognitive Defects in the Development of Mental Illness. Serban G., ed. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1978.

Stillman, William. The Soul of Autism. Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books, 2008.

Williams, Donna. Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998. 

Everybody wants to be happy, but countless studies1 show: Avoiding unhappiness is more important to us than finding happiness. The moment we consider something to be emotionally risky – whether it is a small change or big love – we tend to turn away from it. People like me, who wish to spread happiness, regret this tendency, because it is often unnecessary and even completely irrational. Researchers such as Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert call this tendency the impact bias, which causes us to underestimate our inner strength to cope with our feelings in case of disaster.

We also forecast that we will experience nothing else but our unhappiness. Somehow we have difficulties imagining that ordinary events continue on, events that most certainly will get our attention. Earth is not likely to stand still because we are in pain….I think this is especially true for teenagers. Once, when I broke up with a boy, I certainly expected everybody else in the world to break apart with me. How could anybody just carry on the way they did? My mother’s remedy was to let me do the dishes. Apparently, not only teenagers, but nearly all of us exaggerate when it comes to predicting feelings, especially when we think they will be negative. Our thinking about the future can therefore become a huge obstacle to our happiness.

But that’s not all. Our otherwise impressive cognitive abilities also stand in the way when we analyze our happiness, instead of simply experiencing it. When we go into our head and become all cerebral, we automatically detach from the heart that is from the limbic system where feelings are generated. Eventually both the good and the bad lose their power—and we can no longer become touched. Thinking distances us from our feelings, which we might welcome when it comes to pain and suffering, but most certainly not when it comes to happiness.

Even though, we often think the good to death. Why is that? Most know intuitively: We clutch to all kinds of experiences and have difficulties with letting them go. As soon as we are found by happiness, we cannot get enough of it, hoping to reproduce it at will. Given our success with negative feelings – understanding a painful past helps bring clarity - this seems like the clever thing to do.

Yet more importantly, how can we remove these boulders on the way of happiness? Just becoming aware, that is of the impact bias and our tendency to overanalyze life, is very helpful. Awareness interrupts false predictions of the future and gives us pause, inviting us to come from gratitude and contentment, instead of greed. Moreover, we can learn to direct our attention to the moment with the following practices:

1) Build Confidence In You

When we worry about becoming emotionally overwhelmed, we shy away from what could have been a wonderful opportunity to invite happiness into our life. Remember how you coped with an emotionally taxing situation in the past. Most of the time, we rise to the occasion and surprise ourselves with our inner strength. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. Write down what personal characteristics appeared when you went through a hard time. It is good to know our hidden inner hero or heroine.

2) Build Confidence In the World

We underestimate not only ourselves, but frequently the entire world. We imagine that life and suffering are static and immovable facts. Here it can be very helpful to formulate a personal mantra that we can repeat to ourselves frequently, for example: “Nothing ever stays the same. My heart keeps beating. The world keeps turning around. I trust the pulse of life.” People who worry about their life ending when they encounter personal challenges need to convince themselves that “This too shall pass” and that nothing ever stays the same.

3) Still The Mind

When we stop seeing happiness as an accumulation of happy feelings and start seeing it as an open engagement with life - as I suggest in “A Unified Theory of Happiness”2 - then we direct our attention to the present moment, instead of to the past or future. In order to open up to the present moment, we need to get into the habit of taking a few minutes every day to still the mind. There is nothing esoteric about taking time out, doing nothing, and simply observing our breath. We can go inside and notice how all our experiences come in, stay for a while, and then leave again, just as our in-breath and our out-breath. It is astonishing how we open up to what is when we give ourselves to our actual engagement with life, to our happiness, and thus to the moment.

1) Wilson & Gilbert (2003) http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/WILSON%20&%20GILBERT%20%282005%29.pdf

2) You can also find a free Happiness Quiz and “The How of Happiness: Audioworkshop” on this website www.AUnifiedTheoryofHappiness.com

NOTE: If this post in any way “spoke” to you, and you believe in might to others also, please consider sending them its link. Moreover, if you you’d like to read other articles I’ve written for Psychology Today, click here.

© 2014 Andrea F. Polard, PsyD. All Rights Reserved.

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Innovation is not an event. It's a long process that depends on incremental changes along the way. These small adjustments may not seem momentous on their own. Yet in their context, they can be game-changing. Figuring out how to cook a pizza thirty seconds faster doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you make seven million pizzas a day, that tiny alteration suddenly has a major effect.

These kinds of modifications to an existing procedure are called process improvement systems. This form of innovation emphasizes the craft of production. Implementing apparently small but ultimately significant enhancements is a reliable and stable way of ensuring sustainable growth.

Process improvement systems will lead you to any of the following goals:

• Optimizing resource use
• Managing complex activities effectively
• Aligning organizational design with key processes
• Establishing and articulating clear roles and responsibilities

First, discuss the issue at hand and identify the problem that needs to be fixed. Ask yourself these questions: how does it occur? Where does it occur? When does it occur? Whose problem is it? These will help you select opportunities for improvement.

Try multiple options at the same time and then reconvene in two or three weeks to see what's working and what's not working. Now, determine the opportunity with the highest success rate and integrate these process improvements on a large scale.

Once you've made the change, it's time to extend what you've learned. Develop simple rules of thumb based on the lessons learned--rules that you incorporate into the existing structure and procedures of your organization:

• Technical rules: best ways to perform certain tasks, tricks of the trade, safety procedures
• Situational rules: time allocation, priorities, boundaries
• Behavioral rules: actions, values, attitudes
• Leadership rules: leadership styles, mission, esprit de corps
• Financial rules: expense approvals, rates of return, budgets

In our age where big data reigns, it's easier than ever to find out what's going wrong. And it's just as easy to quickly model the things that we can do to fix these mistakes. Innovation doesn't always have to be radical. The beauty of process improvement systems is that nothing big or unexpected happens. Surrender your imagination to the facts at hand. Don't try to seek out a grand vision when a smaller change will do. Remember that sometimes doing more with less is the best solution.

Apple's new device, to be worn on your wrist, is not callend an “iWatch” because they don’t want you to think they’ll be watching.

But you know they will be. 

“I wanna watch” will be the cry of those asking for a verb, not a noun.

Watching isn't the only thing they'll be doing, either. They’ll be counting our carbs and counting our steps, monitoring our fluid intake as well as our work day’s output, and weighing our acts of judgment right along with weighing our bodies.

The “iWatch”, according to the hype, will allow us to put away our wallets because we’ll be able to use Apple Pay to “buy coffee, groceries, and more” right from our wrists.

Can you believe it’s taken this long? I mean, the extraordinary exertion involved in reaching for a piece of plastic, not to mention the sheer drudgery of the act of swiping, takes an unconscionable amount of time and is one of the leading causes of muscular cramping of both thumb and index finger in many first-world nations.

Think of the value to humanity: Consider the legions of otherwise healthy women carried out of Nordstrom’s all over our great nation daily because of their retail-related injuries; imagine suffering that will be alleviated when we no longer have men on gurneys being air-lifted from parking lots next to LL Bean’s who were tragically brought low by the swift and repeated use of their cards while buying kayaks and Thules. 

Soon we’ll all be attached to a wee computer that nags—because we’ll want to be. The fact that we’re choosing this entrapment is the amazing part.

It won’t be strapped on us against our will, like an ankle monitor worn a parolee, but it’s not as far remove from one as you might think. We’ll be signing up to make sure somebody knows where we are at all times.

We’ll never walk alone, not even if we want to.

In addition to telling us how many calories we’ve burned and how many minutes of “brisk activity we’ve enjoyed” (it’s too easy to make a sexual joke here, so I won’t), it will also tell us how often we’ve taken a break from sitting down. In my case, the first number will be, oh, roughly seventeen times the sum total of the next two.

In other words, the “iWatch” will not provide information to help me improve my sense of self-esteem or improve my health but will, instead, set my invidious ways even more firmly into the unyielding cement of habit. 

Sure, it’ll try to make us a better people. It will, apparently, reward us for good behavior: “Earn special badges for a variety of achievements,” says the hype. “Not only is it a nice reminder of what you’ve accomplished, but it also encourages you to keep going.”  I prefer when the casino gives me points towards meals, to be honest.

I’m not sure what a badge or a high-five from my latest accessory will do for me in the long run except make me get nostalgic for Green Stamps. At least with Green Stamps, if you got enough of them, you could get a toaster. If you get good grades from your jewelry, I don’t think it counts for much.

Our electronic Jiminy Cricket will, no doubt, tell us when we’re slouching, when we’ve made a bad investment, eaten too many avocado halves, pacers or cannoli, made a fool of ourselves in front of a large group, bought the wrong outfit and when we’ve spent too much time with that loser who’ll never amount to anything.

All of this means it’s finally happened: Family will now be entirely replaceable by technology. Aunts will go out of business.

The most intriguing option? “The built-in heart rate sensor …sends your heartbeat. It’s a simple and intimate way to tell someone how you feel.” That’s what Apple’s advertising tells us.

You know that somebody, somewhere, is out there right now working on a way to simulate heartbeat patterns. Soon you’ll be able to fake your own heartbeat in order to lie better.

Just watch. 

One of the most intransigent roadblocks in clinical training is the young person’s temptation to believe that he will always think as he thinks now, and the older person’s temptation to believe that he has always thought this way. Perhaps this is nothing more than Existential Psychology 101 applied to clinical training, but I thought I’d give it a kick and see what squeaks.

One of the intrinsic oddities of human development is the possession of a first-class brain in the late adolescent and early adult without the executive functions, circumspection, or humility that we often associate with a first-class mind. This combination lends itself to the Rumsfeldian and generally Washingtonian-slash-academic confusion between being smart and being right. One reason young people get tattoos is because it is not enough to believe that they are already completely formed, they have to commit to the belief (like circumcision in a religious convert) to ward off any nagging doubts. A tattoo, regardless of its content, claims that the person is so knowledgeable that second thoughts are not even a possibility (intoxication, like youth, can also remove all doubt).

Enter clinical training and the young adult is suddenly awash in confusing responsibilities for other people’s well-being along with a desire to get good at something that it takes a long time to get good at. Clinical work is one of those sports like chess and not like shooting free throws where it is possible to convince yourself that you are already good at it as long as you avoid playing anyone better than you. Actually, that’s also true for shooting free throws if you convince yourself that 30% is an expert hit rate. The upshot is that a young clinician clings to a way of doing things that makes anxiety go away rather than to a way of doing things that sets the stage for lifelong improvement. Chatting, for example, seems to make therapy go well and only the most dedicated therapists will come to see chatting as an avoidance with long-term ill effects on the pair’s ability to switch from social relating to taking off masks. The young clinician adds concrete to the dam by claiming, in effect, that she will never believe that chatting is undesirable (or by eliminating anxiety about improvisation and following a mentor blindly and believing that she will never believe that chatting may be useful).

Nowhere is this allegiance effect more ridiculous than in the selection of a theoretical orientation, which I liken to the selection of a religion after having been exposed to the array of choices in only the most cursory fashion. In many clinical programs, the choice of an orientation is like the choice of a religion also in that the orientation claims that all the other orientations are wrong, even ridiculous. And there is no zealot like a young zealot.

On the other side of the training relationship, we find supervisors who are young, middle-aged, or old, and all of them for different reasons feel pressure to act as if they have always been as competent as they are now. The young supervisor wants to differentiate herself from the trainee, to appear more expert than she is. This is also true of the older supervisors who never became lifelong learners, who know no more today than they knew when they were young. The expert middle-aged supervisor enjoys her expertise and the consolidated self-image associated with it, a self-image that would suffer with reminders of old stupidities (even though it was the demonstration of those stupidities—like missed free throws—that produced the feedback that made her the expert she is). The expert older supervisor has forgotten what it was like to flounder and especially what it was like to have your whole professional face on the line when contemplating mistakes.

I wrote in the acknowledgments to one of my books that Newton said he benefited from standing on the shoulders of giants, and perhaps I have had the benefit of sitting on a few laps. I hope my supervisees, if they get anything from me, get a sense of me looking at their work with an affectionate skepticism that will help combat their understandable desire to settle for what they already know.

Some patients who come to psychotherapy see themselves as big failures in life because they believe that they have not accomplished much. When the therapist digs deeper into their "failures," it often turns out that they have not put much of an effort into succeeding at whatever it is they think they have not accomplished. When you ask why they did not go back to school to learn a new trade, look hard for the type of job they would like to have, audition for a play, go to places where they might meet a good mate, or whatever, they often say they did not do so because they were "afraid of failure."

That never made any sense to me. Does never having tried to accomplish something make you a success at it? Is that not itself a failure to accomplish it? Actually, the "fear of failure" folks often answer yes to that question, but protest that it is more painful to try and fail than never to have tried at all. Not better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, I guess. 

Of course, there is a presumption in the "I don't want to try because I might fail" protestation. These people are assuming that they will fail. Where is this presumed failure written in stone? Since they never even attempted to succeed, how do they know they won't surprise themselves? Since nobody ever gets a guarantee of success when attempting anything, we all are faced with this problem. And yet many of us persevere anyway. Why don't these folks? 

It's also true that if you only make a half-hearted effort, you are far more likely to fail than if you give it your all. These people have never given it their all.

Ironically, if you are genuinely afraid of something, you will do your best to avoid it. If you fear failure, then you would want to do anything to avoid it. In which case you have to not only make the effort, but persist when things do not seem to be going your way. These people are almost going out of their way to be failures.

Sorry, but people who say these things are not afraid of failure. They are afraid of success.

A related issue comes up in the theories of Marsha Linehan, the current high guru in the community of therapists who treat Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), in her model known as "Dialectical Behavior Therapy" or DBT. She opines that patients with BPD patients show "apparent competence." What this means is that BPD patients often appear to have very good social skills, but they often do not seem to be able to use them in emotionally-charged situations.

It's a little unclear in her writings, but the use of the word "apparent" almost makes it sound like Dr. Linehan thinks that BPD patients do not really even have these social skills that they are nonetheless able somehow to effectively demonstrate when they are not in an emotionally-charged situation. Therefore, the skills must be taught to them in her social skills training groups. Patients in DBT have to attend these groups in addition to individual psychotherapy.

My question is this: How can you demonstrate a competency that you do not have through repeated performance? Oh, you might fool many people once or twice, but BPD patients can demonstrate social skills over and over again.

In fact, they are excellent judges of character, and can determine another person's vulnerabilities quicker than almost anyone else, in order to provoke from another person any reaction they want. They are well known to be master manipulators. How can they do that if they lack social skills?

I think it more likely that they have the competencies in question, but are choosing not to use them in certain situations. It is far simpler to fake incompetency than competency.

Some readers may have seen the movie "The Killing Fields" about the genocide in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge killed anyone with an education. In the true story portrayed in the movie, a physician survives by pretending to be an illiterate peasant. In this case, acting as if he were incompetent was the most competent thing he could have done.

So the people who do not use the skills they possess are very similar to the people who protest that they are failures before they have made any effort in reaching their goals. They are afraid to use their skills in certain situations - often but not always the stressful ones - because they might succeed at something.

What could that something be? What would happen if the people described in this post succeeded?

When therapists who understand this use certain techniques to pursue the answer to this question, they usually find that the patient succeeding at whatever would provoke a lot of negativity, sometimes as serious as life and death, within their families of origin. Their parents and other family members might react with severe invalidation of the patient, as well as beginning or escalating any of the following: their own self-destructive behavior, interfamilial conflict, domestic abuse, suicidal impulses, alcohol or drug abuse, or even murderous impulses.

No wonder these patients choose to fail. By doing so they are in fact succeeding - at preventing these outcomes.

 
It’s Monday afternoon, and a friend already called me on the phone to discuss (complain about) his perceived obligation to attend a party on the weekend. “So don’t go,” I tell him. “If you’re so averse to going that you call me a solid five days in advance, then it seems that you should not go.” He then turns it around, “Jen, how do you not care what other people think of you?”

Introverts ask me this all the time – not the shy ones, necessarily, but they weigh in, too—so I felt that this deserves its own blog. The truth is that we all do care, but it doesn’t have to bother you so much. We all have to care what others think of us because having people like us is how we are able to guarantee that we have help when we need it, ensure the support and continued amiability of friends, be recommended for promotions at work, and impress that really awesome person we hope to date. Of course people need to like us. But how? And whom?

The key to mastering this worry is simple: consider relevance. If I’m walking down the street, totally lost, and I walk past the same somewhat amused gentleman four times before asking him for directions, then no, I am not embarrassed when he smirks upon my fifth or sixth meandering past him. His opinion of my navigational abilities is totally irrelevant to any of my life success, even if it is a good opportunity to share a laugh with a stranger. A research collaborator’s opinion of my choice of dress color is similarly irrelevant (salmon really is an okay color), but his opinion of my choice of research topic and the approach I assume is clearly relevant. Someone’s opinion of your appearance is conditionally relevant: others must believe that you appear professional and neat, but there is only ultimately one other human being who actually needs to think you're attractive if you are monogamous. Who cares what other men or women think if you are not interested in attracting them? (In fact, having the wrong people interested gets uncomfortably complicated.). Others are, at best, only capable of establishing some form of consensus to which you hope that someone who is actually relevant adheres. But how accurate is that?? This actually applies pretty generally. Do you have to impress or outdo your ex or a former friend? No, because by definition, their opinions are now irrelevant. The opinions they used to have were relevant, but they aren’t anymore. 

Other people are confined to their own perspectives and limited knowledge and can’t really be used as proxies for your actual knowledge of your ability, potential, or what you’ll make of your life. You’re making those up as you go along! If anything, allowing negative opinions to inform your self-opinion does nothing more than help you self-limit and self-doubt. 

So before you start wondering what other people think of you and worrying about how you come across, ask yourself if it’s relevant. Understand that when you are doing the best that you can, to the right people, that is right. Any lingering negativity lasts only as long as you let it because you’re assigning the relevance by making this important to you. 

In the world of social media a new type of currency has been created. Known as tweeps, peeps, friends, or followers, the net worth of an account is based on their number. Todays social media savvy tweens seem to want in on the action.

During the tween years, kids start to discern in which areas they are competent. This is why competition between peers is especially prevalent at this stage.

From a cultural perspective, traditionally the physically strong boys and socially competent girls have been dubbed the most popular. Now however, some tweens have been afforded the opportunity to be ‘top dog’ simply by garnering the most followers on their social media accounts.

It is of course important to highlight however, that often the tweens already deemed the most popular, are also the tweens most likely to use social media. This means that many of them have probably amassed impressive numbers of cyberspace cronies.

The anonymous nature of the cyber world however, has leveled the playing field for many tweens. Tweens who may be socially shy but are social media savvy have an opportunity to rack up large numbers of followers, resulting in awe and respect from their peers.

For parent’s who are ignorant about the Internet’s new challenge this can be concerning and even scary. After all, in reality it means that tweens are putting themselves out there to gain as many followers as they can. Although to many this may seem like a superfluous pursuit, an argument can be made for the assets.

The tween years mark the beginning of the journey to find and establish an individual identity. As children grow into tweens they gain more insight and understanding about the world around them. Tweens tend to focus in particular on how they may appear to the outside world, especially their peers. As the process of puberty begins for tweens, they become acutely aware of changes on both the inside and out. Tweens frequently experience a mix of emotions. They will often describe feelings of awkwardness and on occasion embarrassment about the changes they see and feel. This is why tweens tend to strive to be similar to their circle of friends. Unlike teens, they rarely want to be identified as unique or individual.

The ability to gather many followers therefore can be quite empowering. It suggests that a tween is acknowledged by many, someone to watch. Out in cyberspace, it matters little how one goes about gathering followers, the bottom line is simply the number. Tweens with large numbers are rewarded with accolades even envy from their peers. At such an uncomfortable life stage, this validation can be invaluable.

Parents are often understandably wary. They may wonder, “Who are all these followers?” The good news is that recent research tells us that today’s tweens and teens are less likely to engage with and/or offer personal information to people they ‘meet’ on the internet than ever before. In fact most tweens report at least some indirect connection, albeit often indirect, to their followers (e.g. friends of friends of friends). It is also rare that tweens engage directly with followers whom they do not know. True friends tend to leave comments while followers are more likely to ‘like’ or offer a thumbs up to status postings.

How an individual goes about amassing followers is a complicated craft. From ‘shout out’ contests to ‘follow-back’ promises, the business of increasing an account’s value is an interesting business. For tweens who happen to poses this particular skill set, the pay-offs in followers can be huge.

In this arena, tweens are not judged on how they look or act. Tweens who are less socially comfortable in the outside world are able to negotiate within a system in which they feel more confident and able to win. The admiration from others however, tends to turn outside the cyberspace realm. The lunchroom is filled with the sound of cyberspace-focused chatter: “Did you hear, Sally G. has over 10,000 followers on twitter, look there she is.” A little known schoolmate can quickly become a cyberspace celebrity simply by netting large numbers of followers.

While this ability to be revered by peers can help a tween feel more confident and accepted, it is important to acknowledge the downside to this type of notoriety. This type of fame is fragile. As the laws of supply and demand dictate, in time, as more and more individuals become adept at finding new followers, the value of the feat will decline along with the acknowledgement toward the individual. In addition, it is important that parents monitor their tween’s social media and Internet use. Too many hours spent finding followers can mean lost opportunities to meet real friends.

Until the market stabilizes however, tweens will continue to cash in on this new commodity. For particularly social media savvy tweens, this equals a quick and easy way to gain respect and admiration. The tween years can be a difficult time; this new hot commodity affords adept individual’s the chance to feel competent and confident.

This article was written by Jennifer Fernández, PhD, who specializes in impulse control disorders and substance misuse, abuse, and dependence. She is currently a licensed therapist at Pathways Institute  where she provides comprehensive assessments, psychotherapy, and group therapy with dually diagnosed adults and adolescents, and their partners and families. She also has a private practice in San Francisco. This article was reprinted with her permission. 

The holidays can be a time of festivities, joy, family, and friends. It can also be a time of stress, material consumption, and lots of drinking. As someone anonymously put it, "What does alcohol have to do with Christmas? One makes the other bearable." Whether at the company party or over dinner with the family, the holiday season introduces many opportunities to drink. In fact, according to the Distilled Spirits Council, the distilled spirits industry makes more than 25% of its profits between Thanksgiving and New Years.

For some, the added stress of the holidays or painful memories about family can trigger compulsive drinking (as well as other compulsive behaviors). For those who already engage in problematic drinking, the stress can worsen drinking behaviors.

Abstinence from all alcoholic beverages may be the best strategy. But for those who don't want to abstain or who simply want to be mindful of how much alcohol they consume, moderation is key.

Tips for moderating:

1. Drink on a full stomach. Pair your wine or beer with delicious cheeses. Don't forget snacks when planning a cocktail party. Plan for dinner before heading to the company holiday party.

2. Plan your night before you start drinking. Think about how many hours you will be partying and set a limit for how many drinks you'd like to consume. Remember it takes approximately one hour to metabolize one drink. And one drink is probably less than you think: a 12 oz beer, a 5 oz glass of wine, or 1.5 oz of 80 proof liquor. Tell someone supportive about your plan—a spouse, friend, coworker, or family member. Ask them to check in with you halfway through the night to help keep you accountable.

3. Count your drinks. If you're drinking beer, keep the bottle caps in your pocket or purse to help you keep count. Keep pennies in your left pocket and move one over to your right pocket each time you have a cocktail. Send yourself a text each time you get a new drink.

4. Drink a full glass of water between each alcoholic beverage. Keep yourself hydrated and keep hangovers at bay!

5. Dress up a non-alcoholic beverage like a cocktail. Cranberry juice with a lime looks just like a Cape Cod. Same goes for Sprite and soda water. If you're drinking beer, refill your bottle with water. No one will know the difference! Here are some tips from bartender Mike Hagan.

6. Lighten up! Turn that glass of wine into a spritzer with some soda water. Go for that 3% beer! Instead of a shot of tequila, how about adding some ice and ginger ale? If you start with a cocktail, consider switching to beer. The lower alcohol content will be absorbed more slowly.

7. Arrive late to the event or leave early. Seeing others sloshed may motivate you to moderate. And it will likely be very entertaining! Make an intention to mingle for 30 minutes before you order a drink at the bar. Set the tone for the night.

8. Sip, don’t gulp your drink. Go ahead, get snobby about it. Describe the notes of that IPA on your nose (“Ah, yes. It smells of a warm summer day frolicking in the grass.”)  and on your palette (“And tastes of toasty, roasted hops.”) Make believe you have a blog about artisanal cocktails and write a mental review of each drink you have. Be mindful about the experience the drink is creating for you. Is it sweet or sour? Cold or room temperature? Does it conjure memories?

9. Pay attention to self-talk. Are you trying to convince yourself to drink more because "it's the holidays" and you "deserve it?" Check in with yourself before each drink. Do you really want another one? Will it get in the way of any plans you've made for the rest of the evening or tomorrow?

10. Don’t forget to have fun! Focus on your friends, family, coworkers, and the setting. Let the experience engross you. Dance!

This should go without saying, but please do not drink and drive. It is estimated that 1,200 people will die this holiday season due to drunk or buzzed driving. Always designate a sober driver or make other arrangements to get home after a night of drinking.

If you think you have a drinking problem or are struggling with moderation, there are many ways to get help. The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism offers information and resources on their website. Find a therapist who specializes in evaluating and treating substance abuse to understand your best treatment option. You can also find support at Alcoholics Anonymous and Moderation Management meetings in your area.

The holidays may be a stressful time, but they are also a wonderful time to share with the people you love—including yourself. Make the most of this time with those you care about. Create an intention to connect with someone over the holiday; that may even be yourself.

Do you have other ideas or strategies for moderating? What has worked for you in the past? How do you manage your drinking over the holidays? Feel free to answer in a comment below.

What are you doing?

The Practice:
Do freely.

Why?

Most people spend most minutes of most days doing one thing after another. I sure do. Typing these words is a kind of doing, as is driving to work, making dinner, brushing one's teeth, or putting the kids to bed. For all the "labor-saving" devices of the past 50 years - dishwashers, phone machines, word processors, etc. - most of us are laboring more, not less. For example, in terms of employment, the average work week in America has gotten longer over the past 50 years. Meet someone and ask how he or she is, the answer is likely: "busy." Doing is a huge part of life, yet we don't usually bring much awareness or wisdom to it.

Sometimes doing feels good. There could be a sense of flow in everyday activities, pleasure in your own skillfulness or competence, or fulfillment in helping others.

But often doing feels numb, or worse: on your feet for hours, grinding through repetitive tasks, zipping from one email to another, worried about performance, pressured and driven. In America and elsewhere, the relentless pace of stressful doing gradually wears down mental and physical health, and fuels conflicts with others. It's a big problem, with many costs.

How does your own doing generally feel for you?

Personally, I'm a big-time do-er. Like most of us, I could and should do at least a little less, and spend more time just being rather than doing. But meanwhile, we still have a lot to do, much if not all of it toward wholesome ends, from putting bread on the table and helping with homework to expressing our abilities and helping the world be a better place.

So the crux is not so much the doing itself but our relationship to it. How can we do what we do without getting pressed and stressed, contracted and driven, about it?

How?

For me, the essence of the answer is to do freely - to feel at ease in the experience of doing, not trapped or bound up in it. Here are some things that have been helping me with this.

Keep returning to the high priority things - like taking care of your health, making room in your heart for others, or protecting time for the important-but-not-urgent tasks at work - and let the little ones go. In the old saying: If you're filling a bucket, put the big rocks in first.

Feeling responsible for what you don't have the power to accomplish is doomed plus bad for you and others.

Be mindful of the sense of pressure. It's a clear sign that you're getting caught up in doing. When you notice this, exhale slowly. See if you can keep on doing - even quickly - while also feeling more relaxed and at ease.

Do one thing at a time. Bring mindfulness - sustained moment-to-moment awareness - into the doing. Develop this steadiness of mind, this continuity of presence, through activities like meditation, making art or music, yoga, or committing to stay focused in everyday activities such as brushing a child's hair.

Feel the completion as you finish each thing you do. For instance, take a second to notice that you have placed a plate in the dishwasher before moving onto the next dish; after arriving at work, let it land that this part of your day is now behind you; after talking with a friend, let the experience reverberate in your mind for a breath.

Try to experience doing as living. For me this feels like using a computer or driving a car or talking with someone as simply being an animal - a friend once called me "a large male mammal" - moving through its day. The sense of living then moves to the foreground, with doing as a matter-of-fact, no-big-deal, expression of embodied life. It's a subtle shift, but a powerful one.

See if you can regard experiences of doing as "empty": made up of many parts based on many causes that come and go transiently, so that any single experience - lifting a spoon to your mouth, making a bed, reading a book - is "empty" of absolute self-existence. Like the suggestion above, this one is also subtle, yet as this felt recognition of the emptiness of experiences of doing grows in you, you'll find that you feel freer in them, and take them less personally.

Last, make the offering (you might like the JOT that focused on this particular practice). All you can do is the best you can do: you can tend to the causes, but the results are out of your hands. For example, all you can do is say what is in your heart as sincerely and skillfully as you can, but what others do with that in their own minds is up to them, not you.

In sum, simple activities such as brushing one's teeth, or more complex ones such as running a meeting or writing a report, are an opportunity right under our noses, many times a day, to come into mindful presence, feel freer, and be at peace.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and New York Times best-selling author. His books include Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence (in 14 languages), Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (in 25 languages), Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time (in 14 languages), and Mother Nurture: A Mother’s Guide to Health in Body, Mind, and Intimate Relationships. Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, he’s been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centers worldwide. A summa cum laude graduate of UCLA, his work has been featured on CBS, BBC, NPR, CBC, FoxBusiness, Consumer Reports Health, U.S. News and World Report,andO Magazine, and he has several audio programs with Sounds True. His weekly e-newsletter – Just One Thing– has over 100,000 subscribers and also appears on Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and other major websites.

For more information, please see his full profile at www.RickHanson.net.

(Image: Lolli World: Dreamer)