How Hard Should You Try with Depression?

a post by Therese J. Borchard for the World of Psychology blog



With depression we are told to “fake it til we make it,” to “act as if,” to go through the motions until we can feel again. But what if doing so sabotages your health? What if you push yourself straight into a wall of debilitating symptoms? Conversely, what if efforts to baby yourself keep you where you are?

This issue of knowing when to push yourself and when to coddle is undoubtedly one of the most challenging aspects of recovery from depression. I ask myself this question a few times a day.

When trying too hard backfires.
It turns out that trying too hard to reverse depressive ruminations can definitely backfire. A study published in August 2007 in The Journal of Neuroscience showed that there was a breakdown in normal patterns of emotional processing that prevented depressed and anxious people from suppressing negative emotions. In fact, the more they tried, the more they activated the fear center of their brain — the amygdala — which fed them more negative messages.

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Be Kind, Retrain Your Mind: 3 Tips to Overcome Negative Self-Talk

a post by Nadia Colburn for the Tiny Buddha blog


“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”  ~Buddha

In 1990, in an early encounter between the Dalai Lama, the foremost Tibetan teacher of Buddhism, and Western students, the Dalia Lama was asked a question about how to deal with self-hatred. He was confused and didn’t understand the question. The translator translated the question again and still the Dalai Lama was confused.

Finally, the Dalai Lama understood that the question was about how to manage negative feelings about the self. This was a new concept to him: he knew that people had negative feelings about others, but he had not encountered the challenge of self-hatred.

I wish I could say that I had never encountered the problem of self-hatred, but I’d be lying. Like so many people, even if I didn’t necessarily recognize my self-talk as such, I was inundated with internal negative self-talk.

My process of coming first to recognize what that voice was up to, then to listen to it with more compassion, and finally, once and for all, to ask it to grow up and step out of the room has been a journey of self acceptance, growth, and ultimately, freedom.

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Are Your Hitting Your Losada Line of Happiness?

a post by Claire Dorotik-Nana (Leveraging Adversity) via the World of Psychology blog



It has been said that positive emotions expand our consciousness in ways that help us solve problems. For Barbara Frederickson, the author of Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life, positive emotions build upon one another in ways that extend beyond the present moment.

Rather than focusing on developing an overarching or all-encompassing habit of happiness, Frederickson argues, we should focus on small “micromoments,” or opportunities for happiness. It is from these moments that we can then broaden and build upon a larger goal of more lasting happiness.

So just how many “micromoments” do we need?

In her early work with Marcial Losada, Frederickson answered this question. In what is now known as the “Losada line” Frederickson and Losada showed that the ratio of positive to negative emotions that fosters flourishing, learning, optimism, and even overcoming various negative physiological factors that accompany negative emotions, is effectively 2.93, or three positive emotions for every negative one.

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Which Clutter Personality Type Are You?

a post by Maureen K. Calamia for the World of Psychology blog



A cluttered room makes us feel overwhelmed and unable to focus, according to this study published in The Journal of Neuroscience. But clutter not only impacts our mental processing, it also affects us on every level, including physical, emotional and spiritual.

Clutter impacts our mental processing, but it also affects us on every level, including physical, emotional and spiritual. On a physical level, clutter prevents us from moving around freely and using our space to its fullest potential. Some people have entire rooms dedicated to storing stuff that they no longer need or use.

On an emotional level, it connects us to feelings of guilt (“How could I throw away this ugly lamp that my aunt got me?”) or fear (“I never have what I need when I need it”). These emotions build up over time and become fixed in our spaces, like they do in our minds!

On a spiritual level, clutter limits our ability to proceed on a spiritual path. We are not able to process the negative emotions and cannot move forward.

On every level, our homes mirror back to us what is going on in our lives and where we’ve put up obstacles. We intuitively know this and that’s why we are so interested in the topic.

According to the blockbuster sales of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, many of us are looking for guidance on decluttering our homes. But are we just using this as another avoidance tactic? Is even this topic of managing clutter itself a distraction? It can be for some of us.

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I found the related links useful as well.

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