When was the best time of your life? While the forward looking approach of goal-achieving psychotherapy may legitimately lead to the belief that the best time hasn’t happened yet, we can look back and identify a best time – at least so far. Too often, traditional approaches to psychotherapy have taught us that we can’t…
Letting Go
It is fashionable to make New Year’s resolutions during this season. In fact, my December podcast addresses the issue of making them from a position of strength to enhance the likelihood that you will keep them. Today, however, I’d like to look at the other side of the coin. Letting go is an approach…
The Holiday Season: a Time for Positive Change
The holiday season serves as a mental health test for many people. It’s a time of the year that can be fun and exciting, with opportunities to renew friendships and strengthen family ties. Yet some find the holiday season to be stressful and depressing. Because so many people share good times around the holidays,…
Finding Good Where it Doesn’t Exist
There is very little of a positive note that has come out of the recent revelations of child sexual abuse by a former assistant football coach at Penn State. It is a tragedy that will undoubtedly leave the victims with emotional scars for the rest of their lives. Those victims, and indeed all victims of…
The Two Sides of the Depression Coin
In the northern hemisphere, we are entering the depression season as the days get shorter and the opportunity to do activities that are naturally rewarding are more limited or non-existent. Gardens don’t grow, and for many of us it’s too cold to hike and enjoy nature or play golf or outdoor tennis. While some people…
Making Things Easier By Making Them Harder
Many of us have learned tricks and techniques that we can put in place to ensure the likelihood of us meeting our goals. We might set out our next day’s clothing the night before – when we’re not too groggy to notice whether clothing matches and doesn’t have embarrassing holes or spots. If we absolutely…
It’s Not That Hard To Be Reasonable
The political systems in the United States and elsewhere appear to be more polarized than at any time in our memories. If one political party proposes something, the other party seems to have the knee-jerk reaction of opposing it – regardless of the content of the proposal. This polarization is maintained by the proliferation of…
The Importance of Practice
You have probably heard the story of the tourist who visits New York City for sightseeing and asks an elderly New Yorker, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The New Yorker advises him with one word, “Practice!” While the advice to practice may not be necessary for a sightseer, it is actually pretty good…
Moving On From Procrastination – By Confronting or Eating the Frog
Mark Twain once advised that you should eat a live frog every morning, and you will then know that everything else that you do during the day will be more pleasant. Author Brian Tracy has used that concept as a metaphor for overcoming procrastination. In his book, “Eat That Frog,” Tracy advises us to think…
Setting Your Active Defaults
Last Thursday I planned to get to work on time. Unfortunately we had tremendous rain and flooding in the Philadelphia area. All three train lines that stop at our local station were unable to function. I figured out an alternative and drove to a more distant station that was a stop for a different train. …
Lemonade from Lemons
Versions of that quote have been ascribed to various famous individuals, and large numbers of not-so-famous people have had a chance to test it out over time. Many members of The Mental Health Gym live within the area that was hit by Hurricane Irene in recent days (and some of us had that added benefit…