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Between dream and reality or should I say different realities, please have a look at Daniel Barreto's photography here, a young man living and studying in Boston.
We start communicating as soon as we are born. However, spontaneous as this drive may be, good and effective communication is hard to learn.
It's a life process and a never ending one. It's crucial to our professional lives but also to the way we deal with family and friends.
According to Scott Edinger, on the HBR blog, the three pillars of a good communication were devised by Aristotle more then two thousand years ago. They are: ethos, pathos and logos. Nowadays, says Scott, we should speak of integrity and credibility, emotional conexion and reason.
Do read Edinger's post interesting post here.
Art as been used for many years as a terapeutic technique. The link between mental health and creativity has been well established.
Philosopher Alain de Botton created a site in the same vein, based on the creativity of painters trough the centuries. It's not about your creativity but it helps. You can have a look here.
The idea is to choose the words that better describe your state of mind. I tried with "anxiety" and then "I worry about everything", a state I guess most people experience now and then.
The picture that came up is of one of my favourite painters ever, David Caspar Friedrich: "Rocky Reef on the seashore". Do try it. It's soothing and makes you think.
This is the last line of an interesting article by Esther Perel. She's a well know sexologist and a specialist in relationships.
In this article she analyses what she calls the perversions of intimacy: "There is sometimes a coercive element to intimacy that wants to force the adhesiveness of transparency. You want to force yourself onto someone else. Sometimes discursive elements as a disguised control. “I need to be able to tell you everything.” “If your conscience is clear, there’s nothing you can’t tell me.” Jacques Salome calls it a form of “intimate terrorism.” You have to listen to me. You have to take care of me. If you don’t, then you don’t love me".
This terrorism of intimacy may well take place under the disguise of love. That's what makes it dangerous and perverted.
You may find this article by Esther Perel here:
http://www.estherperel.com/the-perversions-of-intimacy-or-intimate-terrorism/
Cave paintings are fascinating. The one above is from Chad and the other from Altamira (Spain).
What made these men who were dealing with surviving 24/24 to indulge for hours painting ceilings and walls? Was it about religion? The effects of alucinogenic drugs? You may want to read the book by Davd Whitley "Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief".
Who painted? Men? Women? Children? Who made those wonderful inks and pigments that lasted for centuries? I like to think that everybody could paint. Not only priests of some kind but anybody.
And why did they paint? I believe for two reasons: because they were human and because it was therapeutic. I mean, art is an intrinsic part of our mental set. Many of us just forget it and think that art is for kids or artists. We're all artists, we're all creative human beings.
Only sometimes we just don't know. Depressive people have often a tendency for not even trying. They give absurd reasons, like: "I was told when a child I was not artistic".
Who says so? Some long forgotten teacher in elementary school?
We're to blame. Nobody has the right to deprive you of this most basic human right: to express yourself. To create.
There are so many forms of artistic expression today. Painting, composing, writing, acting, sculpting, dancing, crafs, singing, playing. And also those allowed by the new technologies, which are countless: video, photo, music, etc. Try for yourself, pick up something that gives you pleasure, don't let anyone tell you what you should do or not. It's therapeutic, makes you better, improves communication, fights isolation. As the cave people had already found out.
If in doubt, look in the net for what Martha Beck has to say about art, therapy and depression. She wrote some good piece of advice.
The bottom line is: We're human, therefore we create.
In this small video Dr. Dan Seigel, psychiatryst, suggests we can use our hand to explain how the mot primitive brain, the lymbic system, evolves to our thinking brains.
Simple and effective from the communicational point of view!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD-lfP1FBFk
Americans prize themselves, and rightly so, for being great innovators, capable of figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do.
Quoting from Peter Gray of Psychology Today:
"Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity. In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset".
It seems things are changing for the worse. According to new reasearch, "the scores on these tests [Torrance tests of creative thinking apllied to schoolchildren] at all grade levels began to decline somewhere between 1984 and 1990 and have continued to decline ever since".
The explanation? Maybe the following, according to Peter Gray: "more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes. We are also (...) increasingly depriving children of free time outside of school to play, explore, be bored, overcome boredom, fail, overcome failure—that is, to do all that they must do in order to develop their full creative potential".
Are we over-protecting our children and getting the results of this? I'm quite sure this is not a problem exclusive to Americans. Although I don't know of any research in Europe, I believe conclusions would point in the same direction.
If the subject interests you, you may want to have a look at the following link in Psychology Today:
http://www.careerealism.com/interviewer-competitive-intelligence/
Fear of heights is quite common and often comes with other types of phobias. Psychoanalysis considers phobias as an excessive ansiety in particular situations but also a kind of defense against more primitive kinds of anguish. It may seem pradoxical, but fear of heights often goes along with attraction for dangerous situations.
In cinema, "Vertigo", the movie by Alfred Hitchcock, is a particularly disturbing illustration of this kind of psychic phenomenon. Vertigo was recently voted the best film ever made and those who saw it know why.
No the movie, James Stewart is an ex-cop who has a paralysing fear of heights. He suffers from vertigo but also from a particular attraction for dangerous situations - and dangerous women.
The photos below come from a BuzzFeed link and don't have anything to do with the movie, except for one. They are of specially beautiful and vertiginous stairs. Hold on to the handrail!
A very interesting post about (un)hapinness from the Moodscope team.
When you look back, how do you remember yourself? Memories ann moods does't always coincide.
Read more:
http://moodscope.blogspot.pt/2013/05/what-is-happiness-anyway.html
From Time:
"When faced with a challenge, whether you deny the problems it poses or dive in to solve them in a positive way may determine how much anxiety you feel overall"
http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/13/how-you-deal-with-your-emotions-can-influence-whether-you-have-anxiety/?xid=newsletter-healthland
Have a look at this awesome photo taken from the orbital station.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2505.html
Listen to this wonderful TED talk by Kenneth Robinson
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2013-05-10&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=talk_of_the_week_button
According to James Pennebaker, writing about our feelings and emotions or about what's upsetting us, can help not only mental health but also pshysical health.
Prof. James Pennebaker, from the University of Texas, has been conducting experiments for decades and found that writing 15 min a day for, say, 4 days in a row, can be truly helpful.
I have been listening to his interview to BBC 4 and was specially struck to the benefits in general health felt by women with breast cancer who followed Pennebaker's instructions.
The procedure is quite simple. I'll quote from Prof. Pennebaker's site:
Promise yourself that you will write for a minimum of 15 minutes a day for at least 3 or 4 consecutive days.
Once you begin writing, write continuously. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. If you run out of things to write about, just repeat what you have already written.
You can write longhand or you can type on a computer. If you are unable to write, you can also talk into a tape recorder.
You can write about the same thing on all 3-4 days of writing or you can write about something different each day. It is entirely up to you.
What to Write About
Something that you are thinking or worrying about too much
Something that you are dreaming about
Something that you feel is affecting your life in an unhealthy way
Something that you have been avoiding for days, weeks, or years.
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/pennebaker/home2000/WritingandHealth.html
“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you".
- Neil deGrasse Tyson's response on Reddit when asked "What can you tell a young man looking for motivation in life itself?"
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments
Amazing pictures by Jean-François Rauzier, a French artist.
See more at
http://www.yatzer.com/jean-francois-rauzier
I read this interesting article in Big Think about the techniques for learning. New studies have lead to different conclusions from what was previously believed.
Being a lifetime learner I was drawn to some of these conclusions. The most striking one seems to be about the time period you should re-study taking into consideration the time you want to remember the suject.
Quoting: "Research has found that the optimal level of distribution of sessions for learning is 10-20% of the length of time that something needs to be remembered. So if you want to remember something for a year you should study at least every month, if you want to remember something for five years you should space your learning every six to twelve months. If you want to remember something for a week you should space your learning 12-24 hours apart."
Interesting, uhu?
I believe most people know by now that things have changed and we have to keep studying for all our lives. The pace of change is such that you really cannot avoid to freshen up what you know and if need be to learn again.
if you want to know more go to
http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/assessing-the-evidence-for-the-one-thing-you-never-get-taught-in-school-how-to-learn?utm_source=Big+Think+Weekly+Newsletter+Subscribers&utm_campaign=c48eac05b9-_Here_s_What_s_New_at_Big_Think2_22_2013&utm_medium=email
(photo credit: NASA)
LL Ori is the name of a star in the Orion nebula. This young star produces a stellar wind that is much powerful than our sun's, who is not so young anymore. In this beautifull photo you can see it on the left, burning like fire.
One can see the nebula and some of its stars with a naked eye if the night is clear.
We shoud tell our chidren more about what's happening in the skyes above. Going to an observatory shoud be a good start. NASA has wonderful pictures of the universe that children can see on the screen. However, knowing that they can see them for themselves if they know where to look is another kind of experience.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2442.html
We're living uncertain times. The more the need to invest in ourselves. Us as people and us as professionals.
In the old times you got a degree for the rest of your life and you'de be living on that. Not now. Now we have to keep up constantly with change. We have to keep fit mentally and physically. We have to learn or improve different skills and capabilities. The boundaries between private life and profession become fuzzier and that's also a cause for rising anxiety. We have to keep improving some aspects of our personalities and behavior and learning new skills. Knowledge is very precious and no one will do it for you. It takes self-motivation and will power.
Flexibility, adaptation, communication, empathy, assertiveness, resilience - these are the keywords. These capabilities are part of knowledge in the broad sense. How to improve or acquire them?
Many people don't know what goes between a psychotherapist and his (her) client. In fact, it's a process of learning for both parts. The important thing is that the client is able to improve communication, empathy, awareness, self-perception. He's supposed to acquire skills that will be useful for the rest of his life.
Private life and work being so entangled nowadays, the more important it is to know yourself, your limits and your strenghs and make use of them.
Schwartz and McCarthy in a paper for Harvard Business Review ("Manage your energy, not your time") argue that the capacity for work can be re-energized with greater and bettter output than by working more hours.
How can we achieve that? According to the authors, our energy comes from body, emotions, mind and spirit. Those forms of energy come from:
Physical energy: comes from nutrition (for example light snacks every three hours), exercise, sleep and rest (regular breaks respecting ultradian cicles every 90 min or 120 min)
Emotional energy: awareness of whar triggers negative emotions, expressing appreciation to others.
Mental energy: fully focusing from 90 to 120 min, establishing priorities for next day.
Spiritual energy: sense of meaning and purpose, establishing a few rituals (gratification, living one's core values).
Re-energizing seems to be hard work but feasible. Our quality of life certainly deserves we dedicate time to it.
