click here for this edition’s table of contents
Psychology, Mental Health, Mind Training
- “Stress is now the achiever word for fear.” -Tony Robbins
1) Empathy and self-control reside in the same area of the brain.
“Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s, and step into their shoes. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self—a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person. So think of self-control as a kind of temporal selflessness. It’s Present You taking a hit to help out Future You.”
2) Develop some authentic pride to become a better person.
“While a desire for authentic pride pushes people to put in the kind of work that might earn them higher grades, hubristic pride pushes people to work hard when doing so might impress others”
4) 50% of people “remember” events that never occurred. This is a problem, especially with today’s social media frenzy and the fake news problem.
5) “Catch them when they’re good. It reinforces the good behavior and builds self confidence” -Ivan Joseph
6) Pets are the best mental health drug you can get!
“Caring for a pet also gave owners a feeling of being in control, as well as a feeling of security and routine. This provided participants with a sense of ontological security, by generating a sense of order and continuity to their day-to-day activities.”
7) Thinking out loud will make you smarter
8) Develop a creative hobby.
“Everyday creative activity may lead to an “upward spiral” of increased wellbeing and creativity in young adults, new research from New Zealand’s University of Otago suggests.”
9) 21 ways to improve your mental health
10) “The biggest distractor is not your iPhone — it’s your own mind. You can’t stop your mind from secreting thoughts, but what you can do is not be caught by them. That’s an art form and that’s what mindfulness training is about.” –Jon Kabat-Zinn
11) The answer is in the eyes. It’s a subliminal way we communicate.
“We use others’ eyes – whether they’re widened or narrowed – to infer emotional states, and the inferences we make align with the optical function of those expressions”
12) Sex, drugs, and rock & roll. They all release opioids. “When researchers blocked the production of natural opioid substances, people no longer liked their favourite songs as much” Maybe we need less pain-killers and more good music.
12) “blood vessel growth is modulated by neurons”
13) Yin/Yang, Excitation/Inhibition, Glutamate/GABA, and complex systems.
“To better understand SOC (self-organized criticality), Bak and his colleagues imagined a familiar scenario: building a sandpile at the beach. The sandpile grows bigger until its slope reaches a certain steepness that results in a critical state. Adding more sand then triggers avalanches of various sizes. In fact, the critical state persists even as you add more sand—it is truly self-organized.”
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