Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing. Wandering Mind Is a Sign of …
Author Archives: brownstudy7975
Safety paranoia
Here’s a quote from Stephen Fry’s novel Making History, one of the few passages that struck me as admirable in that lamentably bad book. If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by the way of the …
When actresses like Hathaway (and, to a lesser degree, actors like Gyllenhaal) decide to bare all, they inevitably justify the choice by saying it was integral to the character. Of course nudity is integral to the character; so is buying groceries and paying the bills, yet directors don’t feel compelled to show that stuff. There’s …
Career Fare
Attended a career fair for master’s and PhD students yesterday. I haven’t been to such a thing in a long time and it was personally instructive, even though it may not turn out to be professionally lucrative. There were two facing rows of tables lining a long lobby, with tchotchkes and mini-candy bars available occasionally, …
More on panic and discomfort
Mark Z at ZhurnalyWiki paid me the great honor of referring to my panic post. He ended with this thought: And of course there’s my favorite strategy: try to identify what causes panic and avoid situations where it might arise. Sensible (and I think a little tongue-in-cheek) advice, though I believe there is more to …
In fact, study after study has shown that simply monitoring your behavior is a powerful intervention in itself. The problem is that self-monitoring required planning, motivation and vigilance – things that most of us trying to change a behavior lack (hence the reason we have a problem to begin with). Fortunately, there are a range …
I remember some years ago someone (unfortunately I can’t remember who) wrote to me to describe his time management method. He had a tickler file numbered with the days of the month, i.e. 1-31. Each day he would put all correspondence received into the tickler file for that day. So today is the 16th, and …
Last month, husband was in a grumpy mood. We have a rule for those moods: Accomplish something! Pick something off the list, pretty much anything, and do it. Usually, it’s something that’s been bothering you for a while so getting it off the list will be a load off your back, but not something that …
You are young, and have not met the big disasters of life yet, like a divorce with children, the death of a loved one, the bad decisions with life-long consequences. At your age I liked keeping track and archives, even bank statements many years back. Not a good idea. Your past starts to grow on …
Brooks applies chaos theory in an interesting way, too, by boiling its lessons down to three actionable questions: What do you know? What do you not know? What can you learn? Asking — and answering — those three questions can help you take all of that panic and uncertainty and wrestle it into something you …
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