Over the past half-century, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has emerged as the most widely used approach to psychotherapy. There are a few variations of it – with each tracing its lineage to a practitioner who was likely influenced by Albert Ellis or Aaron Beck – or both. The big reasons for its popularity include the…
Many years ago, when I was in school, we would occasionally get a test where you lost more points if you got the wrong answer than if you left the item blank. In essence, there was a penalty for guessing. I could never understand why. Perhaps my thinking in that regard may have been one…
Because so many things that we deal with in psychology cannot be physically measured, the field lends itself to various interpretations about all sorts of things. There is no equivalent of an EKG or MRI or blood pressure cuff to objectively measure empathy or resilience or even love. As a result, there is no uniform psychological theory…
There are very few things that we can do during the last week in December to change the quality of the outcome of the year. Hopefully, not many of us would want to change it to any great extent, but I do feel that it’s appropriate to have a level of discontent about the past in order for us…
I’m old enough to remember when meditation wasn’t much of a thing – at least not outside of Asia. I never learned about it during my Bachelors, Masters, or Doctoral programs. When meditation began to gain some prominence in the last third of the 20th century, it was initially kind of a fringe practice before…
Willingly or unwillingly, most of us have had the experience of taking a geometry class and learning about such things a circles, trapezoids, and tangents. They are necessary components of the subject and help to build a foundation for advanced math and science applications. The tangent is a particularly interesting concept. It is a straight…
The year 2019 will soon be upon us. As happens every new year, gyms will get temporarily more crowded, cigarette sales will drop a bit, some bars will temporarily sell a little more tonic water and a little less alcohol, and more people will start eating primarily plant-based diets, at least for a little while.…
When working with people to help them change habits for the betterment of their lifestyles and health, I’m often met with a response on the order of, “I really want to – but it’s hard.” It seems like an acceptable excuse for not going on a diet, not implementing an exercise program, not going back…
This blog is being written at the end of Thanksgiving weekend in America. I hope that you had a chance to celebrate with family and friends, and I hope that you all found lots of reasons to feel grateful and give thanks. I started thinking that I may never have adequately given thanks to those…
The more that I got used to drinking water, the better it tasted to to me – and now I almost always choose water over a sugary drink. The more that I ate salads, the more it became my preferred lunchtime meal (and often my preferred dinner too), and now – despite living in Philadelphia…
I don’t consider myself to be a guy who scares very easily, but there are two kinds of people who scare me – not because I consider them to be dangerous to me but rather to themselves. The first type are the ones who don’t know how to say “No” whenever they are asked to…