Articles

I’m a silver lining person, usually able to see the positive in any situation, no matter how glum or dire, but I confess that it has been increasingly difficult for me to maintain my optimism in light of what’s been happening in our world over the past year.   Each natural disaster, each horrific mass shooting, each bizarre pronouncement from the tweeter-in-chief is worse than the last....

This fall it seemed every week brought a new calamitous disaster: hurricanes, massive flooding, earthquakes, firestorms, and the worst mass shooting in US history. Because the topic of social support was on my mind, I was particularly tuned in to how people support one another during and after a disaster. Here are some of my observations:   During the disaster In the face of immediate,...

  I read a startling statistic recently: that over 25% of Americans said they had no one in whom they could confide or share a personal problem. While I haven’t yet tracked down the original source of this factoid, I did find out it was from a survey done in 2004, and that in a similar survey from 1985, the average number of trusted confidantes that respondents reported was three....

Picture this cartoon: a squirrel is lying on a psychoanalyst’s couch, a bearded bespectacled man with a notepad sitting next to it. The squirrel is saying “When I learned that you are what you eat, I realized I was nuts!” There is no doubt that what we eat affects our mood, energy, and cognitive function. The nutrients and/or chemicals in our food influence how well we sleep,...

It is common knowledge that exercise is good for your health, but did you know that exercise is just as important for your mental health? The human body was simply not designed to do as much sitting as most of us now do, between our jobs, commute, and time spent in front of TV/computer screens at home. This increasingly sedentary lifestyle has led to increased rates of diabetes and obesity,...