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Edited by Jill Wright,
More and more these days, I'm convinced that we are in the early stages of a mass mindfulness movement. Yesterday, for instance, I belatedly caught up with a BBC Horizon show from last year, called The Truth about Personality, which suggested that mindfulness meditation can help us live longer by changing our mental orientation from pessimism to optimism. According to...
Edited by Jill Wright,
I can only hope an Australian publication picks up the series of two New York Times articles on maternal mental illness in their entirety [so far I've seen only a small, but still shocking excerpt in Essential Baby], because nothing I've seen elsewhere quite conveys the vulnerability of young mothers and their babies and the widespread ignorance of their plight. And...
Edited by Jill Wright,
A study that looked at the effect of low blood sugar on aggression in marriage must have been quite a hoot: it measured glucose levels in 107 married couples over 21 days and compared the effect of lower levels - essentially the effect of being hungry - on the relationship ... using voodoo dolls and headphones. The participants were told...
Edited by Jill Wright,
I can imagine that there will be a lot more happy faces in Melbourne management circles in the next few weeks, as leaders and would-be leaders digest the message of an article in The Age by Sylvia Pennington that suggests "If you want to be a successful leader, you're going to need to stick on a happy face." The article...
Edited by Jill Wright,
We all know how stressful work is these days. Everyone talks about the insane demands of unreasonable bosses, out-of-control email inboxes and the impossibility of achieving a healthy work-life balance. So how do we reconcile that with a recent Pennsylvania State University study that measured cortisol levels (a principal marker for stress) in 122 men and women and found that...
Edited by Jill Wright,
Author and journalist Paula Span, who blogs about "the new old age" for the New York Times, recently highlighted just how important it is for good physical, as well as mental health, to have a sense of purpose in life: it can help you live longer, and avoid cognitive deterioration in old age. I couldn't help but wonder whether having...
Anyone who is undergoing therapy with a psychologist very quickly learns that not all the work happens in the session. It's not enough just to show up at the clinic once a week. If you're going to get the most out of treatment, you have to commit to continuing the work between sessions. Your psychologist might ask you to do...
Edited by Jill Wright,
A recent article in the American Psychology Association journal Monitor on four psychologists who moonlight as novelists offered some useful insights on the healing power of reading. As an inveterate reader myself, I'm always delighted to find anything that eases one's conscience about leaving the busy world and curling up with a good book - or in my case a...
Edited by Jill Wright,
I think we must be in the middle of a mindfulness explosion right now. Over the past few months I've been coming across articles in everything from Harvard Business Review to Time magazine, the New York Times, The Times of London etc., etc. about a practice that can achieve extraordinary results in everything from alleviating anxiety to improving clarity of...
Edited by Jill Wright,
A recent opinion piece in the New York Times has some valuable insights on happiness. The first is that taking the risk of chatting to strangers on public transport can bring unexpected joy. A 2004 study reported that commuting is associated with fewer positive emotions than any other activity, and most people believe that their fellow commuters wouldn't want to...