Do you love the people you work with?

Love is so beautiful, we can find it here and there; it doesn’ t need hugs, and I think the essence of love is putting another people before your ownself .

Love at the office? No way! In these weeks of mandated sexual harassment training, we’re continually warned to hold our even mildly lascivious feelings and emails, let alone our arms, to ourselves. However, human being nature may trump the rule. I make it a practice to hug one and all who works for me and most of those that work around me, both males and females. In my opinion, if I hug everyone this cannot be construed as harassment. I even do this with people I meet for the first time.

Sure, some odd academic can get away with this, but let’s get real, doing this at General Motors won’t fly. Hold that thought. General Motors is exactly a company that needs love. It was recently on the verge of bankruptcy and only survived with a government bailout, downsizing, and layoffs. GM workers are not feeling loved.
Think about that for a minute. Do we need to love those we work with? Imagine the CEO of a distressed company who refuses his or her multimillion-dollar bonus so that one thousand employees would not be laid off. That would be love. How about an employee who agrees to work late so someone can go home early to care for a sick child? That would be love. Or, an employee who drops off a forgotten package to a customer’s home after leaving work? That would be love.

The funny thing is when we are loved, we return love. Yes, this is an oxytocin response. When we care about others, they care about us. Biologically, love is the foundation for trust – both trust and love arise when oxytocin is released in the brain. My research has shown that trust is the secret behind many profitable companies. The benefits to managing with love include higher employee morale and productivity, lower employee turnover, fewer sick days, and legions of return customers.

The New York consulting form Edelman has published the Edelman Trust Barometer for the last nine years. In 2009 they reported that trust in businesses was at the lowest point they had ever recorded. Sixty percent of employees surveyed reported that they needed to hear information three to five times before believing it. Shockingly, only 17% of employees trusted statements made by their CEO. Managers simply cannot do their jobs effectively when trust is low.

Managing with love is the way to build trust. It’s a no-brainer. So why do so few companies do this? The autocratic “manage with fear” model is what business began with hundreds of years ago when managers whipped employees literally and figuratively to compel them to work. In modern businesses with skilled and empowered employees, the top-down approach is slowly starting to fade away. The open-door policy is replacing the executive suite. For example, my university built me a new lab last year and the builder wanted to know where my office would be. I said I didn’t want one. I prefer to embed myself with my team because we work together on projects. Why would I want to separate myself from those I collaborate with?

There is a growing number of successful companies that manage with love. Southwest Airlines is an example: their corporate slogan is “How do we love you? Let us count the ways.” In fact, their stock ticker symbol is LUV so this is a big part of their corporate identity. If you have flown Southwest, you know that their employees love working for them. Southwest Airlines has never laid off an employee. Southwest’s CEO Gary Kelly was paid $903,000 in 2009, and half of that was a one-time bonus. Compare that to former GM CEO Rick Wagoner who was paid more than 14 million dollars the year before GM went belly-up.

My investigation shows that the molecule of love, oxytocin, makes us dependable and motivates us to assist to others. Most managers would sacrifice a limb if their workers embodied these virtues at work.

Sometimes, business can be a little tedious, but if you have business with love and passion, I strongly believe that your business can change to the other side, and this is why companies like South West.

Ken is Victim?

Last night on a Show, Joan Stwart called Ken Mehlan a hypocrite and no doubt a lot of people. In the course of the Bush reelection movement, Republicans, led by Mr. Mehlan, fanned the flames of fear, and intolerance to gays and lesbians. Denying lesbian and gay people their civil rights, including the right to lawfully wed, was a middle part of the campaign, seemingly planned to activate conservative voters. It’s maddening to consider that a gay man, albeit a closeted gay man, not only aided and abetted but in some ways led the charge. Nevertheless, before we rush to judge Mr. Mehlan, a closer look at the varied pressures gays and lesbians face are in order.

In spite of slowly growing advancements in the public’s attitudes toward homosexuality, intolerance continues to be alive and well. In a recent Gallup poll, close to half of these sampled believed that homosexuality really should not be”considered an appropriate alternative lifestyle” and about 39 percent thought homosexual relations between two consenting adults should be illegal. Thus, there still very much exists what stigma expert Gregory Herek and his colleagues call a homosexual stigma, which they define as “society’s shared belief system through which homosexuality is denigrated, discredited, and constructed as invalid relative to heterosexuality.”

Amazingly, kids, especially gay kids, learn about this quite early. At very young ages, gays and lesbians come to know that same-sex attractions are wrong-sometimes even before they are aware of these feelings within themselves. For the gay and lesbian youth interviewed for my book Coming Out, Coming Home: Helping Families Adjust to a Gay or Lesbian Child, their stories of coping and adjustment began long before they understood what their feelings meant. Once they faced their attractions head-on, they knew they were in trouble. If their peers or their parents discovered their sexual feelings, they risked becoming objects of rejection and abuse-and their attractions threatened to pull them away from everything and everyone they knew, leaving them lost and alone.

Interpersonal interaction is one of the primary domains where stigma manifests, and many of the young people in this study first learned that their homosexuality was wrong at the hands of their peers. Their classmates saw their cross-gendered or otherwise atypical behavior as justification for cruelty. As I wrote in a previous post for this blog, many gays and lesbians recall being physically assaulted by peers who sensed they were gay long before they recognized their own same-sex attractions.

Stigma in the form of discrimination is also embedded in institutional policies and practices. Most of the youth I interviewed who were verbally and physically harassed by peers recalled how school employees who witnessed their abuse did nothing to stop it. The confusion and shame experienced by these kids was compounded by the indifference of adults who could have protected them but didn’t.

So, how do kids growing up gay or lesbian deal with stigma? One way many oppressed people protect themselves is to form groups with like others so they can learn effective coping methods such as externalization, which is when people place the blame for their stigma on its source where it belongs. However, for the most part, a resource such as a supportive group of gay peers is usually not available and it certainly wasn’t for the young men and women in my study. As stated by a sixteen year-old young man: “As far as I knew I was the only person who was gay.”

Alone and isolated, gay young people learn painfully and powerfully that their burgeoning homosexuality is shameful and punishable by social exclusion and violence, and therefore hide their attractions in an effort to protect themselves.

If one is good at it, hiding becomes second nature-and some never stop, even in adulthood. Others are so skilled they manage to hide their sexual orientations even from themselves, compartmentalizing their feelings into fantasies or fleeting sexual encounters which they keep hidden and walled off from their self-identities. Some of these individuals adopt the perspectives and sympathies of their oppressors, and in a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome, identify with their aggressors in order to survive.

So, by hiding his sexual orientation from others and as well himself, Mr. Mehlman was doing what his peers, friends, family, and society educated him to do. What makes him different from the lots of gays and lesbians who come to terms with themselves, come out, and fight against societal intolerance, instead of contribute to it, remains a mystery. Without knowing Mr. Mehlman personally, but being familiar with the case of Jim McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor who also came out as gay late in life, I can guess that burning ambition could have something to do with it.

Another lesson is that no matter what our political persuasion, we need to recognize that gay persons are everywhere-even places you don’t expect to find them and we are interacting with them all the time, even if we might not know it. Societal intolerance and stigma might force lesbians and gays underground but will never erase their existence. As being a gay man, I am certainly angry that Ken Mehlman supported and helped spread the idea that lesbians and gays are unworthy of civil rights-he no doubt contributed to a destructive force that wounds many and continues to damage our society. However, as a therapist and researcher I can understand and even sympathize with his coping techniques along with his desire to avoid obstacles to his ambitions that heterosexuals never have got to think about.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches air jordan 9 and fashion things on the Internet.

It’s Time for us to Look Beyond the Classroom

Preposterous and needless contrast between reducing the racial achievement gap and lowering one’s golf score. It really should not be about reducing the racial achievement gap, rather helping everyone reach their full potential. Now, suggestion on thinking more scientifically about life outside the classroom and the way it relates to what occurs inside the classroom, what exactly do you plan and how exactly will such an attempt do a world of good?

The Black-White achievement gap is living and well in the United States. Take New York City just as one instance. Based on a current article in the New York Times, in the town’s 4th-9th grades, about 39% of black college students met state standards in the 2010 arithmetic exams. This is in comparison with about 74% of white students. In English, about 32% of black students were talented, compared with 65% of white students. These numbers unluckily put to break earlier statements that New York City’s racial achievement gap was considerably shrinking.

The Black-White achievement gap the phenomenon whereby white students consistently perform at a higher level on tests than their minority counterparts is as old as our nation itself. Educators and policy makers have funneled a significant amount of time, money, and resources into trying to diminish it. However, with the exception of a period between the 1970s and 1980s, the gap has stayed fairly steady.

Recently, there seems to be a renewed interest in teachers’ role in shaping student test scores. For instance, federal funds now seem to be tied to whether schools link teachers’ performance to student scores. I suppose one can read this funding issue in a variety of ways, but one interpretation is that the government is saying its teachers who should be held accountable for the low test scores of their students. Although teachers certainly play a role in student success, I think it’s easy to forget that factors outside the classroom play a big role in minority students’ performance as well.

A few months ago, Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that when there is a murder in a black child’s neighborhood, his or her math and verbal standardized test scores go down. This is true even if the child doesn’t witness the violence directly and isn’t personally impacted by it. Just being in close proximity to a homicide is enough to hinder academic performance.

To measure how local homicides impact students’ test scores, Sharkey compared the test scores of black children directly after a homicide in their neighborhood with other children in the same neighborhood who took the test at a different time. Black students tested directly after a local homicide scored substantially lower than their peers who live in the same neighborhood, but were tested at different times. Of note, Sharkey was unable to find enough murders in predominately white neighborhoods to see if white children were affected, suggesting that this homicide effect is really most damaging for black kids. Indeed, the drop in black children’s scores after a homicide account for about half the difference in the typical racial achievement gap.

Keep in mind that it’s not just violence outside the classroom that has the potential to contribute to the racial achievement gap. Culturally-held stereotypes that constantly hang over black students’ heads in school and out may also play a role. For instance, psychologists have known for some time that when blacks are made aware of negative stereotypes about intelligence and race, they perform worse on standardized tests than when this information is not as salient. Indeed, something as simple as checking off your race before you take the SAT lowers black students’ scores while having no effect or even increasing white students’ performance.

Although scientists and educators are still working on finding the exact cause of these relations, it’s not hard to imagine how knowledge of violence in your neighborhood or the awareness of negative stereotypes impugning the intelligence of your race could prevent you from devoting you full attention and effort to what’s going on in the classroom. Humans are limited capacity systems, meaning that we only have a finite amount of attentional resources to devote to learning and performance. When these resources are co-opted, for example, by worries about your safety or confirming a stereotype about your ability, performance in the classroom can suffer.

There are actually little doubt lots of factors that develop the racial achievement gap. However, besides focusing on what professors are doing inside the classroom, it appears careful to think more methodically about life outside. You never know, such attempt might do a world of good in reducing the gap, which, like your golf score, is a number that is much better when it’s lower.

In nature, nobody will do their best in the classroom while they do not have satisfaction and their essential desires met outside the classroom, for instance, family troubles, economic stressors, poor nutrition, unsafe surroundings, regardless of race, age, or gender. So, please explain what specially you want to put into practice that might make things better for all.

Which is The Most Appeal of Apology?

People are unlikely to forgive someone they don’t believe is building a truthful apology. Furthermore, people don’t desire to forgive people they think enemies. They want to hate them, so that they hate to forgive them. They want to have the transgression substantiate their earlier appraisal or viewpoint.

Apologies could be enormously useful when it’s time to resolving conflict, repairing hurt emotions, nurturing forgiveness, and improving relationships in both our individual and specialized lifestyles. They enhance relationship promise and satisfaction, employee faithfulness and pleasure, emotions of belief, and cooperation. An apology can even keep you out of the courtroom. Despite the fact that attorneys are inclined to caution their customers to avoid apologies such as plague, fearing that they are equal to an admission of guilt, reports show that while possible plaintiffs accept an apology, they are more likely to settle out of court for less money.

But as anyone can tell you, apologies don’t always work. At times they seem to fall on deaf ears. This can be because the person or persons we are seeking forgiveness from really aren’t interested in forgiving, or because the transgression itself is deemed simply unforgivable. But more often than not, our apologies fall flat because we apologize the wrong way.

So what is the right way? How should you apologize to your coworker, customer, friend, or spouse, in order to be sure that your already bad situation doesn’t end up even worse? Until recently, there has been very little psychological research focusing on what constitutes a “good” apology. A new set of studies, however, reveals that different kinds of apologies appeal to different kinds of people, and that the key to an effective apology lies in thinking carefully about your audience.

Offers of compensation are an attempt to restore balance through some redeeming action. Sometimes the compensation is tangible, like paying to repair or replace your neighbor’s fence when you inadvertently back your car into it, or running out to get your girlfriend a new phone when you accidentally drop hers into the toilet.

Expressions of empathy, on the other hand, involve recognizing and expressing concern over the suffering you caused. Through expressions of empathy, the victim feels understood and valued as a partner in the relationship, and trust is restored.

People who have an independent self-concept think of themselves primarily as individual, autonomous agents, completely separate from others. They tend to be focused mainly on their own rights, feelings, and goals, and as a result, experience transgressions as a personal injury or betrayal. No surprise then that they respond most favorably to apologies that offer compensation. The United States is a particularly independent, individualistic society, which may explain why American juries seem to love doling out lots of money as compensation for pain and suffering.

People with a more relational self-concept see themselves as primarily defined by their relationships with significant others. This type of self-concept is more common among women, for whom relationship ups and downs tend to loom large. When your self-concept is relational, you are focused on creating, maintaining and strengthening the relationships in your life. Transgressions are experienced as betrayals of mutual respect and belief, and consequently, apologies are most effective when they include expressions of empathy, rather than offers of compensation.

Finally, people with a collective self-concept see themselves first and foremost as members of the important groups, organizations, and cultures to which they belong. When you are a part of a group, whether it’s your family, your company, or your society, there are rules that govern how you are supposed to behave. For instance, baseball players aren’t allowed to take steroids. Accountants aren’t allowed to fool around with the books. Politicians can’t break the laws that they are elected to create and protect. Members of my family aren’t allowed to violate the rules of grammar. Transgressions are experienced as betrayals of the rules or values of the group, and thus, apologies that offer acknowledgment of violated rules and norms are your best bet for restoring your good standing with the other group members.

When crafting your apology, remember to ask yourself: Who am I talking to, and what are they looking for in my apology? What troubles them the most about what I did? Was my transgression perceived as a personal injury, betrayal of the relationship, or betrayal of the code of behavior of our group?

If you are not certain, consider how a wounded party most often discusses on themselves do they concentrate on their own personal qualities, their main relationships, or the significant communities to which they belong? Knowing something on how the person you aggrieved thinks of him or herself is your first evidence to what might be bothering them most, and may help you to apologize in the best way.

When I’m sad, everyone seems to be sad. I do not feel a part of the group. I usually guide the group, or am a key to it. I usually don’t mind about the current group, but the future one. Like, my family right now means crouch. When I insult them, it effects very little. But my future family means much more to me than the present. If you endanger my future family, or make fun of my idea of this future family, I’m hurt. And I feel for not just myself, but all people.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches air jordan 9 and fashion things on the Internet.

MLV Joins XMRV As The Latest Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Psychology has moved quite a few distance in the final 20 years from a period when we viewed lots of diseases including lots of psychiatric sicknesses as resulting primarily from emotional trauma. The technical facts of organic etiology for lots of those conditions is far large to ignore, at least for most psychologists. Those of us who have worked in the disability field recognise our role is to assist and support people to cope with their illness.

The spinmeisters are spinning, the technical society keeps discontented, and also the chronic tiredness syndrome patient continues on the roller coaster ride supplied by investigation demonstrating replicating retroviruses that isn’t always replicated in several investigation labs.

In a paper published today by “The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”, scientists found traces of murine leukemia virus related viruses in 32 of 37 chronic fatigue syndrome patients; but in only 3 of 44 healthy blood donors.

The researchers did not find XMRV, as had been erroneously reported last month by a variety of sources. A paper published by the CDC at that time found no XMRV or other MLV-related viruses in patients with the syndrome.

Dr. Harvey Alter of the National Institutes of Health, the senior author of the work published today, stressed that his study does not prove that any of these viruses causes harm. It may be that individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome are more vulnerable to infection, including infection due to the several MLV-related viruses found in the patients in this latest research.

MLV are known to cause cancer and neurological problems in mice, but it is not known whether they cause any diseases in human beings. XMRV is among several different members of the MLV family; and its conspicuous absence from the results in this study means that there remains no resolution as to the role XMRV may play in chronic fatigue syndrome.

It remains unclear why only two research teams have found evidence of these retroviruses. It is possible that different research teams are using significantly different methods of detection; and federal health officials are attempting to standardize the process. Of concern is the fact that the head of the federal tissue safety laboratory has been unable to isolate XMRV, whereas the group in Reno, Nevada claims to have done so.

Despite all the uncertainty, certain individuals are calling for treating chronic fatigue syndrome with agents used to treat another retrovirus, HIV. The pharamaceutical companies, while always interested in a new market for their wares, are wisely demurring, citing the need to await stronger evidence that such viruses cause chronic fatigue syndrome before launching large clinical trials of anti-HIV drugs for the treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome.

So, there is no intrigue this summer time. There was no agreements this summer. It might behoove us to reflect on all of the vitriol and misinformation that appears to be the simply thing that it has been exposed to cause this long, warm summer.

I am not building an ethical censure. My theory is about an amoral, developed propensity which can exist hard-wired in brains in such a great way that it is very hard to avoid. We are confronted with drives, while there is a panoply of other drives that can be abrogated to larger or lesser degrees, but in any case they just exist in human nature. And like basically all psychological traits, the one I speak of could be expected to vary by individual. Psychogenecists may consist largely of those among doctors and thinkers who have a very strong instinct that the patient have to be responsible for the sickness in some way, when in fact this might be not normally the case or at least cannot be radically proven to commonly be the case.

Why Are the rich Less Generous?

Wealthy people pay a far lower part of the riches in taxes than do most middle-class or lower-class people, There is possibly a few serious psychological distress involved in giving to the destitute. It calls for acknowledging the necessary injustice of life.

It isn’t reports any longer, however, it’s still a shock: the needy tend to be more generous than the wealthy. “For many years, surveys have shown that upper income People are particularly ordinary as givers when compared with the destitute, lower income Americans give proportionally more of the incomes to charity than do upper income Americans.”

A PhD candidate at Berkeley, Paul Piff, recently repeated that finding and more: “lower income people were more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than were those with more wealth. They were more attuned to the needs of others and more committed generally to the values of egalitarianism.”

It’s tempting to think that the rich are richer because they are more selfish or single-mindedly focused on their own advancement, but Piff’s research suggests otherwise. His experiment primed subjects by showing sympathy inducing videos and encouraging them to imagine themselves in different financial circumstances. That changed their reactions for both sets of subjects. In other words, the poor, imagining themselves rich, became less altruistic. The rich, imagining themselves poor, became more generous to the destitute and ill. Piff concluded: “Empathy and compassion appeared to be the key ingredients” in the generosity of the destitute.

If we think of this in group terms, it makes perfect sense. Members of each group will identify with other members of the group to which they belong. Their issues will resonate more deeply. The rich will find it easier to give to the cultural institutions they and their friends patronize as well as the colleges and universities they attended. The destitute will give to the neighbors suffering from the same problems they are struggling with or to the causes closer to home.
 

As the gap between the rich and destitute in our society grows as it has been growing this divide will only get greater. Crossing over will not only be more difficult to accomplish economically, it will be harder for us to project ourselves imaginatively across it. The rich will not get the point of extending unemployment insurance, and could even easily talk themselves into believing that such a helping hand might make workers lazy. The destitute will get bitter about the tax cuts the rich keep insisting will trickle down benefits for all.

In other words, the psychological effects of group process will intensify our communal harms and help it become more hard for us to function politically like a whole. It’s already on the fringe of impossible.

Rich people love to tell themselves that they deserve what they own, that they worked hard for it. Of course, this implies that the destitute don’t work hard and somehow deserve their destiny in life. Liberality needs us to face just how fortunate we are and to accept that it really is fortune, not our greater moral qualities that led to our success.

What can show how stressed you get under pressure

Seems like nearly all excellent athletes have a partner with them before they perform and then really watch them carry out. For instance, on the PGA Trip lots of wives travel with their husbands on the street and walk the route with them outside the ropes. On the LPGA Tour you might see a father travel with the daughter and caddy for her on the course. I also know there is a big family section for all the major sports. For recreational athletes, seems improbable that you would have your partner with you before and also when you are performing.

Picture it. You pace into the crane and your leader is standing there. He asks your view on a big deal your firm is putting together something on weighing short-term payoffs versus potential long-term gains and you have fewer than a minute to wow him with your thoughts, reasoning, and choice making skills. What predicts whether you will panic or get through the encounter without losing your cool? New investigation suggests that one factor is your relationship status.

People who have strong social support techniques are less likely to be stressed out by anxiety-provoking situation such as having to give a speech, take a big test, or pitch to their boss, Dario Maestripieri and colleagues, researchers at the University of Chicago, recently showed.1 These researchers investigated cortisol levels in a sample of over 500 MBA students before and after they took a set of computerized economic decision-making tests where the students were under quite a bit of pressure to perform well.

A hormone produced by the adrenal gland, cortisol is associated with several stress-related changes in the body, such as lower pain sensitivity and a quick burst of energy under duress. When people are in stressful situations, cortisol is secreted at higher levels and, because of this, it is often referred to as the "stress hormone." This means that cortisol is a quick and easy way to get a handle on a person’s stress level at a particular time and conveniently this can be done by having someone spit in a tiny tube.

What the researchers found was that being in a relationship was like a stress vaccine. The cortisol levels of MBA students without a spouse spiked after the economic decision making test. This was not the case for people who were in relationships. Indeed, even the extent of the relationship commitment mattered. MBAs who were married with children showed less cortisol reaction than those married without children, who showed less of a cortisol spike than MBAs with partners but who were not married.

Of course, we have known for some time that social support can mitigate stress. For instance, in 2008, researchers at the University of Zurich found that men who were able to spend time with their spouses before having to prepare a public speech showed less of a cortisol increase in anticipation of the anxiety-provoking speaking situation than those who didn’t spend time with their partner. However, Dr. Maestripieri’s work is unique in that the MBA students’ partners were not asked to join them before the decision making test. This suggests that spousal benefits aren’t just about having someone present. Moreover, the MBA students were in their mid-20s to mid-30s, suggesting that you don’t need years of compounding social support to reap the benefits of a partner.

Of course the question of why spouses serve as a stress vaccine remains unanswered. One possibility is that being in a relationship changes your general attitude about challenges. Having a stable home situation may make you less reactive to high-stakes performance situations in general. A second possibility is that people less prone to stress out in the first place are more likely to be in a committed relationship. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, both could be going on.

Lastly, there are a few caveats to the benefits of societal support that ought to be pointed out. It’s been shown that having a partner present before a do-or-die situation is helpful only if you are in a healthy relationship. The chance to spend time with your partner before a stressful performance situation, when you are not in a fine place with this person to start with, is really more destructive than if you were alone. Furthermore, guys appear to benefit more from their partner’s support than ladies do. This is true in Dr. Maestripieri’s work and in other work as well. In reality, in one research, women’s cortisol levels went up more during a stressful situation when their boyfriends were present beforehand relative to when they were not. Whether this was due to a lack of support on the part of the boyfriend or an inability of the women to receive it is still a question open to debate.

I believe it relies upon the relationship. Getting a helpful societal network or close important other relationship can be very helpful, but if those relationships are less than supportive, they might be of little help, and maybe even make the situation worse, my partner will think I’m unintelligent, my parents will be disappointed, or my friends might lose respect for me".

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with coach handbags on sale.

Make Good Food Choices and Have Fine Weight

Do you know the importance of picking up some type of treat at the grocery shop, ideally a relatively guilt-free selection that still satisfies a typical craving. These days, if I want something sweet at night I’ll still go to the shop, but will pick up some delicious berry like fresh blueberries, along with a few granola. I’ll go home and have a great bowl of heaping blueberries with a little amount of granola and some soy milk, sweet, delicious, filling and loaded with antioxidants and fibre.

I’ve struggled nearly my entire life with food. During my late teens I was obsessed with a diet and calorie-counting, which turned into compulsive eating and a strong addiction to sugared, greasy foods in my 20’s and 30’s.

Obviously, having scientific knowledge about food and health isn’t enough to help someone control their uncontrollable behavior around food, you need to understand the real roots of compulsive eating patterns, something I was never taught in medical school and only really began to understand and heal from in the last few years.

1) At the supermarket, you let yourself purchase belongings that sabotage you
My control of my eating behavior starts at the supermarket, as I’m more likely to enjoy triumph there than I am at home. Otherwise, if I’m tired or stressed that no-no food’s already in my cupboards (with a flashing neon sign over the cupboard door that screams "you know I’m here, what’s taking you so long?"). Make a pact with yourself not to buy problem foods when you’re out shopping for groceries.
Practice making yourself look away when you start eyeing up a tempting shop display. Focus on the people or non-food items around you or just keep on walking determinedly towards the foods which are supposed to be on your list.

2) You can’t tell the difference between hungry and appetite
Before you reach for that junk food snack (which you promised yourself yesterday that you wouldn’t give in to today), check in with your body. Are you truly hungry? Where is your urge to eat coming from your stomach or your mind? Can you tell the difference? If you ask yourself enough times, you’ll begin to be able to tell the difference. Will an apple or other healthy snack begin to satisfy your need for food? If not, you’re probably not truly hungry and just wanting to snack.

3) You let your mood push you towards food
Again, the next time you feel like reaching like something too sweet, salty, or fatty,check in with how you’re feeling. Are you sad, bored, or stressed? Once you start connecting the dots between certain moods and certain foods, it’ll be much harder to fall into what was once "automatic" behavior.

4) You don’t pay attention to when you hit full
Years ago I saw a dietitian who taught me this golden rule about food and maintaining your ideal weight: "Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full." When you start paying attention to this, you’ll be shocked by how often you push past full (and move into the land of totally stuffed) just because you’re liking the eating process and don’t feel like stopping.

This is especially risky when eating with others, as studies have shown that’s when we’re most likely to overeat. Eat slowly, and as the meal or snack progresses, check in with yourself regularly before the next bite or before serving yourself again. Are you hitting full? If so, time to stop.

I shock myself now with how often I say no to dessert these days, simply because I’ve learned to notice when I’m full. And when I’m full, I stop. If we push past full, we’re not respecting our body, and it’s just going to end up on our hips anyway.

5) You don’t get enough sleep
If you get less than 7 hours of sleep a night, your brain actually starts producing appetite-stimulating hormones, and you’ll feel hungrier (and eat more) throughout the day without meaning to do so. Lack of sleep also affects your body’s ability to regulate blood sugar, and can make you susceptible to diabetes. Many experts now believe that our excessive sleep deprivation as a society is partially to blame for the epidemic of obesity.

Have more sleep, and your mind will create another kind of endocrine that really suppresses appetite. How simple is that?

I also believe that the best finest to keep good health is just by doing the most observable things like getting sufficient sleep, eating a resonable diet, and especially knowing your body. And I think that the body is at its healthiest when you are adhereing to a routine of these matters. So get to know your body. Learn to respond to your body when it needs either food, no more food, sleep, and activity and you will be a much happier healthier person.

Would you change anything about your life if you could?

We all have regrets whether we want to confess to them or not. Someone saying they don’t have regrets, its pretty much saying they’re ideal and never make errors. How can you regret a decision you made if you intelligently calculated the dangers. If you go into a choice open minded, intelligently, with patience and intellect, you did all you can, why feel sorry. But the question is, everyone has made a choice that wasn’t well calculated and made intelligently, that’s when you have a regret. Decisions made on impulse are most of the time regrets later on.

When I give seminars in schools and companies, I usually ask if anyone has regrets in their life. If so, I inquire them to raise their hand. Would you raise your hand? If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be lonely. More than 7 out of 9 people look me in the eye, stick out their chest with pride, and shoot their hands into the sky for all to see. 79% of people enjoyed a whole life without any regrets. Either I am surrounded by the most mindful, compassionate communicators and problem-solvers in the world or what I am witnessing is how people are worried with their public image.

While I do listen to the Butthole Surfers on occasion, you might be amazed to know that they are not the definitive authority on the subject. I define regret as what we feel when we understand that our current situation might be better if we decided to act differently. It’s a backward looking, unpleasant feeling where you blame yourself and wish you could undo the past. Perhaps you felt regret when you shared the good news with co-workers that your heroin problem last year should have little effect on your pregnancy.

Here are a few attractive scientific discoveries about regret to meditate on:
1. The majority of regrets relating to inaction are less troublesome to us. When we get upset, these feelings are often less intense than regrets about action taken. There are often immediate repercussions for poorly chosen behavior. You get suckered by a gypsy scam while walking along Las Ramblas in Barcelona. Instead of resisting your email for three minutes, you whip out your iphone while in the bathroom and lo and behold, your slippery fingers deliver it to the toilet bowl.

2. To feel sorry, you have to recognize the consequences of what you did or didn’t do. You need to be introspective and patient to know if an action not taken was a poor choice. It takes a long time to find out that visiting Moscow as a single, 19-something male would have been a smart choice. The same goes for decisions about careers and voting for political candidates. We often don’t find out the benefits of the paths not taken until later. Have you felt screwed for not knowing that you could make a living by testing video games for Microsoft?

3. You seldom discover regret in youthful kids. 7-year olds make a comparison about what happened and what might have been. They can imagine that their present situation would be better if they made better options in the past. Younger children still relish a sweet, oblivious state of mind. But there is nothing our 3-5 year olds can do. Eventually, like the rest of us, they will ruminate, and toss and turn through sleepless nights. Bide your time and schadenfreude will be yours!

4. Apologize for inaction or paths not taken do not go away as easily. They linger and fester in our brains. While we actively cope with poorly chosen behavior, options foregone lead us to wonder incessantly. Regardless what unsatisfying car you buy, it can still be compared to even worse models that other people are driving. But what about the beautiful stranger that you had a deep, emotional connection to after 8 hours of breathtaking conversation that you failed to follow through on? It haunts you as you will never find out whether you made the right call.

5. Regret exists because it is useful. When we feel regret, when we feel guilty and embarrassed by what we do, we are motivated to undo any wrongful things we did and make better, more careful decisions in the future. Regret is unavoidable because there are opportunity costs for every choice made. When you select a path, you immediately forfeit other choices and their benefits.

People that attempt to minimize regret usually feel a sense of fretfulness and paralysis where they are more focused on not making mistakes and mistakes and less focused on taking calculated risks toward difficult, aspirational goals. To be succinct, without regrets, you are done evolving, You will be ineffective at coping with an uncertain, unpredictable world where mistakes are inevitable.

Confess that you have regrets and you are mostly saying that I am open-minded and eager to get calculated dangers with a wish to continually grow and learn.

I think many people tell they have no regrets as they want to be able to respond "no" to the question – Would you change anything about your life if you could? People believe saying "no" to this is synonymous with having no regrets. One can take lots of regrets in life but still be very glad with their life and not want to change everything in the past as the past has set up our present level of growth and eventually sets the tone for how we will approach the future. Will we approach future situations open-mindedly, ready to make errors?

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with coach bags and coach handbags on sale.

Who’s Haiti’s New President

Haiti was filled with so much corruption and devastation prior to te earthquake, this small country has never had any kind of stability, what’s necessary now is an experienced leader with a long background in politics, developed knowledge in economy repair and the power to rebuild nation. Of course its probably not likely to happen anytime soon, but the last thing the people of Haiti need is a man who can’t handle his own personal funds or that of his Haitian fundraiser for the earthquake.

A choice about who is qualified to be the leader in Haiti has been delayed from Monday, leaving famous people Wyclef Jean and the other hopeful people in limbo, said Berto Dorce, Jean’s attorney.

Haiti’s election commission was scheduled to have a choice Tuesday night.
Jean’s eligibility was under question after claims that he has not lived in Haiti for five consecutive years before the election, a mandate in the nation’s Constitution.

Jean’s lawyer said his client meets that criteria.

"His candidacy has been contested and we went to court and proved that he is legally entitled to run for president," Dorce said. "Jean’s position is pretty strong. He should be on the list."

Dorce said Jean has been paying taxes in Haiti, which makes him eligible.

"Wyclef has been a shareholder of the local TV corporation called Telemax, and was paying taxes at least for five years; this was sufficient for the Justice of the Peace to issue a certificate of residence for Mr. Wyclef and confirm his residency," Dorce said.

Jean announced August 5 on "Larry King Live" amid fanfare that he had filled out the paperwork to run for president.

But since then, Jean’s announcement has met with some criticism.

Pras, who once performed alongside Jean and Lauryn Hill in the ’90s group The Fugees, said he supported Jean’s opponent.

Actor Sean Penn, who has lived in Port-au-Prince for months helping displaced Haitians, also questioned whether the Haitian-born musician could make moves to lead the devastated nation.

And now, Jean said he has received multiple death threats.
"We have been getting threats since last night telling me if I know what’s good for me, I would get out of the country," Jean wrote in an e-mail to CNN late Tuesday.

Jean’s lawyer also talked about the alleged threats.

"Wyclef has been repeatedly getting nameless terrors from someone who are saying that he ought to think twice before running for the leader. We cannot tell who are sending these terrors, but the nearer the statement, the more terrors Jean is getting," Dorce said.

I believe Wyclef hasd good intentions for Haiti, but that does not make him qualified to be president of this country that is facing so much turmoil. I suggest that he slowly break into the politics of Haiti, maybe in a lower position, supporting the president, and if he still has this passion and learns what is really involved, he can run in future elections down the road.

Right ways to success

I’ve listened to people on the right who oppose building of the mosque at Ground Zero, together with Limbaugh, Hewitt, and the rest of that crowd. I’ve heard none of them quarrel that the Imam has no right to create the mosque at that place. They have all said that they hold his right to do so. They simply believe, as do I, that it is in poor form. It’s akin to building a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor. No one objects to Japanese cultural centers, just don’t put one.

That’s the reason it’s named demagoguery helping to the bad thoughts of the people is always famous. And the thought that we appreciate brave people? balderdash. That’s the reason people who speak up to defend minorities are brave, as they will always be attacked punished for it. Keep in mind the Freedom Riders who were spat upon and worse for sitting in at lunch counters in the South? They were lucky if they came out of there alive.

What we can’t get our brains around is that the people who spat on school children going to integrated schools, politicians who barred young children from entering school buildings, people who beat, yes and even murdered, freedom riders felt GOOD because they were doing the right thing and everyone they knew agreed with them (which is why they couldn’t be convicted in open court).

When we look back on those time, we want to think: "bigoted people were so dumb then; thank God we’ve learned better."

We’ve educated nothing! We are as bigoted as ever; we’ve just moved our bigotry down the street. While the white Protestant male elite endorsed slavery in the Constitution, and didn’t give ladies the right to vote (which had to be fought hard for almost 150 years later), as late as World War II, almost 174 years later, the overwhelming majority of soldiers surveyed refused to serve with "Negroes" or Jews.

Through memorizing enough civics texts in middle schools, we’ve drummed it into the heads of the majority of people that such prejudice is "wrong." But the idea that prejudice, bigotry, teaming up against people unlike us is alive and well.

And anybody with the boldness to go up against prejudice and who supports the rights of different types of people will pay a cost just ask somebody who backpedaled so fast from his "bravery" that he almost fell on his ass. That kind of caution gets you elected president.

I think anyone who inquiries the placement of the mosque simply must be a racist. Because I discover the mosque at that place(not mosques in general) to be distasteful, you are comparing me to racist murderers. And Nancy Pelosi wants an investigation of anyone who opposes it. It takes a moment for that to sink in. I’m the equivalent of a murdering racist, and I ought to be investigated by the government.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes collecting things, shopping online and playing computer, has a coach outlet online with lots of fashion things.

If You Don’t Like Yourself

Do you think that people do not welcome you because of your physical beauty, in terms of your grade, weight, sense of fashion, etc and because you may be less outgoing. We know people are not shallow, in the sense that, they don’t stop and tell, “you’re not pretty”, as a result, we will not be friends with him or her, but rather they are just not compelled by you or may not want to be your friend.

A few of people have the misfortune to have been born to abusive parents who belittled them and prevented them from developing a healthy self-esteem. Other people are born predisposed to view themselves in a bad light because of their physical appearance, a disability, or for no reason anyone, including themselves, knows. Investigate has consistently supported the idea that it’s hard to be glad without liking oneself. But how can one learn to like oneself while one doesn’t?

People filled with self-loathing typically imagine they dislike every part of themselves, but this is rarely, if ever, true. More commonly, if asked what specific parts of themselves they dislike, they’re able to provide specific answers: their physical appearance, their inability to excel academically or at a job, or maybe their inability to achieve their dreams. Yet when presented, for instance, a scenario in which they come upon a child trapped under a car at the scene of an accident, that they recoil in horror and would want urgently to do something to help rarely causes them to credit themselves for the humanity such a reaction indicates.

Why do self-loathers so readily overlook the good parts of themselves? The reply in most cases turns out to relate not to the fact that they have negative qualities but to the disproportionate weight they lend them. People who dislike themselves may acknowledge they have positive attributes but any emotional impact they have simply gets blotted out.

Before such a change will happen, however, the essential cause of one’s self-loathing needs to be apprehended. By this I don’t mean the historical cause. The situation that initially lead people to dislike themselves do so by triggering a thought process of self-loathing that continues long after the circumstances that set it in motion have resolved, a thought process that continues to gain momentum the longer it remains unchallenged, much like a boulder picks up speed rolling down a mountain as long as nothing gets in its way. It’s this last idea, not the memory of your parents ignoring you, which gathers the power within your life to make you loathe yourself if not checked by adult reasoning early on. Once a narrative of worthlessness embeds itself in one’s mind, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to disbelieve it, especially while one can find evidence that it represents a true account.

But a narrative is just that: a story we tell ourselves. It may very well contain elements of facts that we are unattractive, that we do fail a lot of the time, or that our parents didn’t find us all that lovable, but to proceed from facts such as these to the conclusion that we’re deserving only of our own derision constitutes a significant thought error.

But we only need to experience the loss of any one of these supportive elements to recognize the danger of relying on them to create our self-esteem. Looks, as we all know, fade. Unwanted weight is often gained. Illness sometimes strikes, preventing us from running as fast, concentrating as hard, or thinking as clearly as we once did. Past accomplishments lose their ability to sustain us the farther into the past we have to look for them.

I’m not arguing that basing our self-esteem on our good qualities is wrong. But we should aim to base it on optimistic qualities that require no comparison to the qualities of other people for us to value them. We must awaken to the necessary goodness to what in Nichiren Buddhism is termed our “larger self” that lies within us all. If we want to fall in love with our lives and by this I don’t mean the “we”of our small-minded egos we must work diligently to manifest our larger selves in our daily lives. We must generate the wisdom and compassion to care for others until we’ve turned ourselves, piece by piece, into the people we most want to be.

In other words, if we want to like ourselves we have to earn our own respect. Luckily, doing this doesn’t require that we become people of extraordinary physical attractiveness or accomplishment. It only requires we become people of extraordinary character-something anyone can do.

An easy thought test supports this notion: think right at the moment of your favorite people and ask yourself, what is it about them that attracts you the most? Chances are it isn’t their physical appearance or their accomplishments but rather their generous spirit; the way they treat other people. This is the main quality that makes people friendly, even to themselves.

Treating other people well, it turns out, is the fastest trail to a healthy self-esteem. If you hate yourself, stop focusing on your bad qualities. We all have bad qualities. There’s nothing special about your negativity, I promise you. Focus instead on caring for other people. Because the more you care about other people, I pledge the more in turn you’ll be able to care about yourself.

Dr. Laura Is Not a Psychologist

Before Dr. Laura is permitted to go any further, somebody over her requests to require that she seek out continuing teaching on diversity and the new cultural movement among academics and aspiring mental health professionals today. Her work should be postponed until she meets the criteria of cultural competence. When she may not be a psychological health professional, she is in the forefront as if she is and this needs the suitable training.

Rather than concentrate on the caller’s query, Dr. Laura takes protective and starts spewing her frustration. She states that it’s “hilarious” that “we’ve got a Black man as president and we have more complaining about racism than ever.” It is mostly in answer to her deeming the caller hypersensitive. So rather than calmly explain to the caller, Jade, that in her view, her husband’s friends were not being racist, Dr. Laura minimizes and invalidates the woman’s experience.

It’s unfortunate that we have to continue to remind people that the act of one man unluckily does not erase the racial disparities that persist. Black little ones did not miraculously stop dying at higher rates compared to White babies the day Obama was inaugurated. Trends such as infant mortality rates are one example of the myriad of troubles that Obama being in office did not remedy. Individual acts of racial triumph do not result in the amelioration of institutional racism.

As the call continues, Dr. Laura appears to imply that if someone asks “Do Black people really think?” or “Why do Black people do?” the caller should be willing to engage in the discussion. Despite an empty caveat that one does not exist, she continues to assert that there is a “Black think.” She instructs Jade to simply refer to a poll of Black people while answering such questions. Seriously? I’m not sure where to start with this one, except for that counseling 101 would remind Dr. Laura to listen to her caller. We don’t get enough information from Jade to know the true nature of these questions. Dr. Laura appears to assume they coming from a place of pure curiosity. Yet Jade is clearly experiencing them as antagonistic.

Dr. Laura treats Jade as if she is certain Jade is misinterpreting the interactions. She extrapolates this misinterpretation and maps it onto what she sees as Black people being hypersensitive. And she continues her messy tirade by accusing Jade of taking her out of context: “Don’t naacp me.” At this point, it is clear that Dr. Laura is not only talking to Jade, but she is bringing into the “room” all of her own “stuff” about race.

These excerpts sums up why the difficulty with Dr. Laura is beyond the words she is using. After the call ends, Dr. Laura is ranting and declares “we have to be able to talk about these things. Discuss the issue.” Well, she surely did not serve as an exemplar nor did she facilitate a conversation about the issue. She shut the conversation down by being defensive, condescending and off-topic.

Cultural competence is not only a main aspect of psychology, but it is becoming a requirement for navigating our increasingly diverse society. Knowing our blind spots is key while it arrives to sensitive subjects such as race. And Dr. Laura seems to have some baggage to process before she is quick to invalidate another person’s experience of racial discrimination.

I’m uncertain where the bit about favored groups or obsessing about the past comes from. It might have just as easily been about someone being dismissive of a associate of a number of “groups.” It’s more generally about respecting the various identity communities that make up who we are rather than one specific group.

Do You Really Know More From Those Online Images

A friend of mine associated me to her bike-trip images on Facebook. It wasn’t the same, viewing them alone without the stories. I really wanted her to tell me the stories. I wanted to hear her getting sucked back into that time and reliving the journey and I share it with me one on one. Perhaps web images do reveal sides of people you wouldn’t otherwise know about. My experience is that they reduce the interaction, and the barrage of exposure really imparts less information.


We are an increasingly polarized country, right? That was the premise of a book named The Big Sort; its slogan is "why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart." Writer Bill Bishop made the case that Americans are sorting themselves not just into large, broad groups such as lefties and righties, but much more particular ones. We seem to choose neighborhoods that have just the progressive, funky, artsy feel we like, or the affluent, tidy, conservative bent that feels most comfortable, or some other favored change. The blogosphere sorts itself, too, with clusters of like-minded people who chat to each other a lot but typically spend much less time on websites with very different perspectives.

I believe that polarization is real and that the web makes it easier than it used to be to find people who share our values, perspectives, life experiences, and quirks. So I was intrigued by a finding reported in a paper I discussed in my last post, by Keith Hampton and his colleagues. The authors asked about 2,151 Americans to name their confidants. The participants also reported their use of the internet and various social media, including photo sharing. Among the information they provided about themselves and their confidants were their political affiliation.

If our use of web opportunities is pushing us in just one direction toward a sorting into groups that are becoming less and less diverse then people who use social media the most should also report the most homogeneous set of confidants. But the authors found something very different. People who more often shared images online were more likely to report at least one confidant of a different political party than their own.

So are new technologies actually increasing the diversity of our core social networks? That’s not what the authors think. Instead, they suggest the possibility that when we use new media such as photo sharing, we learn things about each other that we hadn’t known before.

Think about how you interact with someone face to face. Possibly you avoid some topics that might be upsetting. Or, you just assume the other people agrees with you, and that other person never corrects you. If those kinds of interactions are the only ones you ever have with somebody, perhaps you’d never know some of the important ways in which you differ from each other.

I think some polarization is usual, there isn’t much basis for me, a free thinking, independent single, to form a friendship with somebody who goes to a minster where they rail against demonize childless females. I’m more likely to state my opinions diplomatically, but when someone comes out and says "God hates you" to my face, frankly I don’t have a lot of desire to bridge that gap. I have a realistic idea of how much I’ll be able to change that person’s heart, and no desire to accept that person’s attempt to educate me on the error of my ways. We are becoming more divided and there’s an all out culture war going on. I don’t know if there’s an answer to bring us back together.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with coach handbags and fashion things.

What significance can suicide have?

Due to mental illness and substance abuse, my mother took her own life in 1990 while I was about 11 years old, and I kept her suicide a secret out receiving any mental health help for 15 years.


The medical field has always offered great profession chances and appears to provide not only job security but favorable incomes in many facets of the medical environment. The demand is a constant and unless people quit getting sick, it appears there wont be any troubles in the future finding a need for the medical professional.


At about this time last festival, I clicked "Publish" and put out into the world an incredibly individual piece of writing. I struggled for months to make a decision whether or not I should publicly claim an identity as someone bereaved by suicide. I determined that taking the danger was better than sitting with what had become a kind of secret.


What happened was remarkably different. I was immediately supported by partners and friends both virtually through comments and in person. I came to appreciate, by hearing this feedback from others, that I'm someone who can hold in balance a personal and emotional connection to the issue that I've made my occupation. Most importantly in my mind, I confronted the disgrace that I'd held on to for over about 19 years.


I'd underestimated everyone's ability to hold about three seemingly contradictory things that I had trouble holding that someone can be a person and a statistic. It meant something for me to identify as a survivor, because it made my mother's death count in a new way. It made me count among the hundreds of thousands of people bereaved by suicide. It allowed my mother's death to be counted as what it was - the end to years of unbearable emotional pain and a courageous struggle with a mental illness, bipolar disorder.


I'd also failed to imagine how greatly I might honor my father by writing about her death. Now, I get to talk about him more than I did before, because people ask and want to know. I've been asked so many good questions about her that gave me the chance to remember him, but also to extend her memory to others.

Through answering some of these questions, I was given the opportunity to realize, and articulate, that my father worked very hard to live. She fell in love, married, and had three children. He had lifelong friends and made a valuable contribution to the world through her career. He lived with mental illness in a way that I think many people, including myself, often do not picture.


Critical to his story, though, is that she died because of her illness. I think some people believe that people who die by suicide are weak, failures at life. Suicide deaths are so often seen as selfish, and because the act of suicide is self-inflicted, the person who dies is blamed for her death. Thinking that way leaves out that mental illness is influenced by multiple factors, biological and environmental, just like physical illness. I wouldn't blame someone who died after years of having cancer, especially if they were able to get treatment and the treatment couldn't fight the disease.


Someone asked me last year if there was anything we in the suicide prevention field could have done differently to prevent my father's death. As public health professionals, we don't take a lot of time thinking about how to prevent individual deaths, so it meant a lot to me to be asked that question.


Throughout my mother's adult life, when he was struggling with and being treated for bipolar disorder, the treatments available were also extremely limited. My mother engaged with treatment the best she could, but I know that he also didn't always take medications she was prescribed, and it's pretty clear to me now that he was released from hospitalizations without adequate safety plans.


I'm proud that I'm able to be a part of the field at this time, that I can honor my mother's memory through my job, and that I've integrated this missing into the way I think about my life, and I'm thankful to the society for providing support and inspiration.


I wish it can encourage openness about difficult life experiences, and helps people know they're not alone. At the same time, I am always sad to hear about others who've lost loved ones to suicide.

Save a Plastic Bag is help Destroy the World?

It is convenient to do something with plastic bags, but they are not safe and healthy. Save a plastic bag is help save the world or help destroy the world?
I was at the shop the other day and my curiosity was tweaked by a symbol close to the checkout counter: "Save a Plastic Bag, Help Save the World." The consideration, of course, is that if we throw away lesser number plastic bags, nature will help. Some such small virtuous actions can, in gather together, impart a huge benefit.

Also underlying the slogan is another thought, which is generally unexpressed explicitly yet a part of our collective folk psychology, that good actions leads to a virtuous circle: doing one good deed puts us in a beneficial mindset that leads us to do more good deeds.

Just yesterday I saw a TV idea that neatly summed up this idea. On a split screen, it showed a woman taking two different paths in the course of her day. On the left side, she had an unhealthy breakfast, and proceeded to make more unhealthy eating choices throughout the day, had no energy, came home from work exhausted, watched TV, and was basically a loser. On the other side of the screen, she started out her day with the advertiser’s nutritious snack bar, proceeded to eat healthily throughout the day, exercised, and went out after work and had fun with her awesome friends. The difference in the two outcomes was all down to that single, simple decision at breakfast: to be a winner, or a slob?

Unluckily, as psychological research has shown, human behavior doesn’t work like that at all. On the contrary: single, small acts of virtuous behavior actually predispose us to behave worse.

In a 2006 paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Uzma Khan of Carnegie Mellon and Ravi Dhar of Yale reported a series of research in which they asked undergraduate students to imagine themselves engaging in various virtuous activities, such as donating money to charity or volunteering to teach children. Compared to control subjects, who spent the equivalent amount of time working on word puzzles, these do-gooders were more likely to indulge themselves by buying luxury items like designer jeans than practical items such as vacuum cleaners.
Why? Khan and Dhar suggested that behaving virtuously subconsciously boosts our self-image. When then presented with an opportunity to indulge ourselves, we feel better prepared to afford the dose of self-criticism that accompanies indulgent behavior. In effect we have been "licensed" by our prior good behavior to behave badly.

A more direct expression of the "licensing effect" is described in a paper just out this month in the Journal of Consumer Research. Sam K. Hui of New York University led a team that analyzed data take from radio-tracking tags affixed to shopping carts, so that the movement of consumers through stores could be recorded. In particular, they looked at whether the shoppers were frequenting areas of the store that carried "vice" items, such carbonated drinks, or "virtue" items, such as diet food. As the licensing effect would predict, the team found that "after purchasing virtue categories, customers are more likely to shop at locations that carry vice categories."

The important upshot of this study is that, if we’re not careful, small attempts to better ourselves can have a paradoxical effect, and cause us to sabotage ourselves. You could call it the "diet-soda effect." One would assume that the appeal of nonfattening drinks is that help waistline-watchers cut down on their total calorie count. But in reality, many consumers seem to buy diet sodas primarily for their licensing effect. How many times have you seen someone load up their fast-food tray with supersized triple meatburgers, and then finish the order with an extra large diet Coke? Indeed, research has shown that on average, the more diet sodas a person drinks, the fatter they are.

Marketers understand consumers’ brains better than customers do. Not long ago Subway used to run an ad in which a husband gets up in the middle of the night, turns on the living room light, and finds his wife on the sofa, bingeing on a pint of ice cream. It looks like she’s been caught red-handed in some illicit diet-busting, but instead of seeming ashamed, she boasts: "It’s okay, I had Subway for lunch!" I don’t know if the ad sold a lot of Subway sandwiches, but to me it demonstrated an impressive understanding of the licensing effect.

When this bad undermining effect is pervasive, it doesn’t have to weaken our labors at self-control. The deception is just to be conscious of the psychological effects of our own actions. Don’t let little acts of morality mislead you into thinking that you’ve accomplished your goals. Consciously resist your unconscious tendency to license goal-undermining indulgences. Sure, save a plastic bag, but don’t pretend that you’ve just saved the earth. Instead, take the chance to remind yourself of your promise to the long-term process.

As I think, we should not use or reduce the chances of using plastic bags, as they are harmful to our environment and future.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches juicy couture bikini and fashion things on the Internet.

The Third Stage of Tiger Woods Syndrome

Imagine if today’s men used this revolutionary concept of candor in dating. Our society would be strengthened with healthy relationships. Instead of desperately searching for somebody to accept his romantic overtures, the healthy man would defer his need for instant gratification and use the dating process to select likely partners among those women of compatible temperament and like interests.

The people who have the third stage of Tiger Woods Syndrome choose between their aged life based on fake intimacy. For lots of guys this is a simple option as their aged life was a mess.

Such was the miserable example of actress Brittany Murphy and Simon Monjack. Simon Monjack left behind quite a checkered past. He never told Brittany about the two children he had fathered from two prior liasons. According to US Magazine,  he also left behind two warrants  for his arrest in Virginia for alleged credit card fraud and theft, an unpaid about $6088 legal bill, about $20,001 in unpaid debt to his former fiancee, a half million dollar judgement against him by a British investment firm and a stint in jail for overstaying his visa.

If poor Brittany had known of his past, she would have understood his sudden desire to get married to avoid deportation. If she had known how he told his prior fiancee he had bought her a diamond ring but it was actually cubic zirconium, she would have known to stay about 9 miles away from this deceptive man.

Unfortunately, in the third stage of Tiger Woods Syndrome small details like a criminal record and deceit are ignored as the relationship builds momentum leading to the peak known as the Honeymoon stage. Cautions from friends are ignored as the couple becomes increasingly isolated. This works out perfectly for the sociopaths and con men.

In an earlier America, courtship was used to link honest men and women of compatible temperaments and shared interests and weed out mismatches. There was no need for guile, for withholding the reality of each other until some far-off day after irreversible commitment was made. It looks hard to believe, but once upon a time Americans did not fear the truth.

In the 1800s, the prospective bride and groom were integrated into each other’s life. If one could not abide the friends and relations, it was considered proof of incompatibility and the relationship would be terminated. That was the point of courtship. Instead of dating like an ostrich with one’s head in the sand, the fact that two people might not be compatible for a lifetime commitment was faced with eyes wide open. Early Americans knew that a person’s friends were a mirror of their true self.

We had an example of Brittany Murphy. Within months of starting another relationship with a factual outlander she was staying together with him and ignored the words of her partners and friends. Only a few weeks after starting to see each other they shocked partners and friends by marrying in a secret house. Only then did the real Simon Monjack start to emerge. Ladies, love at first sight is a fantasy. Get to know your guy before you have to bail him out of jail and pay off his debts.

If we can only look at the person we’re dating pasts or history to determine if they’re good candidates. We should look at them as if we were employers trying to hire them for a job. Where we can go and call their exes as a reference. We’re not going to hire someone that got fired for stealing, always getting to work late and or being lazy. Choosing a partner is thee or one of thee most important decisions we make in our lives. Why not take the time to make a wise decision. There are so many people out there; it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are all choices. Some people are clearly not an option.

What are we doing to our minds and bodies with absolute noise

Last night I dreamed I was trying to teach a huge community college creative writing class. They were chatting and texting and talking on their cells. Finally, one kid wised off loud enough for me to hear. I walked over to him and said, "shut up." It felt really good.

I usually step out from my home onto a path that is anything but wild. I walk the streets of my charming neighborhood, past charming homes and charming gardens and more than a few charming people on their charming bikes. Regardless of the charm, there are presents. Chewy, the gray snurfling Pug waddles to the fence to greet me; there is the osprey nest above the stream; the stream itself and the four bridges I cross on my path. There is also silence.  

        

Two days ago I walked the trail. Chewy was as always wildly enthusiastic. As I bent to give him a chin rub, I realized there was an incessant hit thump coming from upriver. I gave Chewy a last scratch behind the ears and walked up the alley to the first bridge. The thumps grew louder. Despite my best intentions, I found myself walking in time with them. I stopped. I didn’t want the noise ruling my body. 

I knew what was happening. There is a big amphitheatre up-river, across from an even bigger up-scale and banal chainstore and restaurant complex. I made myself walk toward the sound. I’d been reading George Michelsen Foy’s new book, Zero Decibels: the quest for absolute silence. I’d become intrigued and frightened by the knowledge that on an ordinary day in this town, I live in a toxic sludge of sound. I wanted to learn more not just by reading but by paying attention. I walked over the second bridge into the opposite of zero decibels. I walked steadily toward a sound that began to violently jar my cells, not just my hearing, but each cell within my body. 

The thump of the bass notes was not like the rumble of thunder nor the roar of a slab of sandstone spalling off a cliff. There was nothing natural about it. I felt irritated, then irritation shifted into anger, anger into rage. I moved toward the din till I realized I felt murderous, turned and headed back toward the second bridge. I walked by summer residents sitting on the decks of their snazzy condos, and tourists strolling with a desperate mellowness. Nobody seemed to notice that they were being blasted by nuclear noise. I ran to the middle of the second bridge and hollered at the top of my lungs, "Shut the fuck up.

By the time I stepped back onto the first bridge, the sound had faded to a necrotic heart-beat and I felt calmer. I climbed down to the edge of the stream, sat in the cool grass and wondered what had happened to me. I had been, after all, the hippie chick who stood in front of the speakers at concerts, believing in what Ginger Baker called bone conduction, believing that the music was carrying me out and away. I had danced not to melodies, but to the pulsing of my bones.

I walked home, checked out our weekly arts and entertainment rag to see who I’d cussed out. As I read the name of the band I wondered if I had finally crossed the line into cranky geezerette-hood. The musicians I had sent into oblivion were Michael Franti and Spearhead, a band I’d danced to more than once. I wondered if I’d been in the amphitheatre would I have loved the music. Then I remembered walking out of concert by the gifted and soul-stirring Joan Armatrading back in the Nineties because the volume had hurt my ears. What had once carried me into bliss had become excruciating.

I thought about what I had learned through the meditation practice of doing nothing. To do and think nothing was almost impossible. The few moments I’d break on through, I’d notice I’d broken on through and be off in a brain-storm of noticing and craving. But now and then, something less dramatic than a break-through would occur.  My heart would slow. My breathing would feel as though it was occurring in every cell in my body. I’d hear my heartbeat shushing in my ears. And I’d be grateful.

As did the bludgeoning bass notes pounding the stream air. And the knowledge learned long ago from an Air Force engineer who said, "Fighter jets don’t have to make that screaming sound. We make them that way. That’s the sound of raw intimidation." 

One time, a kid in my research class who always wore one of those receivers on his ear was muttering in class. I was mystified about to whom he was speaking. I was also pissed because this was a very difficult to handle class, more like 8th grade than graduate school. So I asked him if he was responding to internal stimuli or if he had something to say to the rest of us. I got a laugh and he stopped his dialogue.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with coach handbags and fashion things.

Redefine midlife is the starting of adult challenges

People in their twenties can play at life and make a few mistakes and recoup, but it is at ones peril to walk away from a long term marriage only to find boredom, unhappiness is just part of the human condition along with joy, kindness, and self sacrifice. But if you are old, and you just change partners it will be all better. So what if your partner doesn’t want what you want, and what does that mean anyway?

A lady in her early 40s was telling me on her work life problems. She has a busy job, four kids, and a husband who travels a lot for his own work. She suddenly stopped, recalling a latest, horrible dream: She’s on one of those moving paths, and can’t move. Passing by on either side are scenes of herself, but living different lives with unknown person. All of a sudden, she recognizes the Grim Reaper standing at the end of the path, arms outspread, awaiting her.

I think sadness does rise among some people while the new conflicts and needs converge with a second psychological shift: Old emotional defenses, rationalizations and self-deceptions from your childhood and adolescence, as well as from your adult decisions, begin to erode and crumble under their own weight. They no longer work so well as you age.

One reason that occurs is as we always know the truth inside, and truth always keeps trying to rise to the surface. We may have remained unconscious about old conflicts – and puzzle over repetitive patterns or underlying unhappiness – but the pull towards resolving them is a strong developmental need. It tends to blossom more fully as you become older. In fact, the current economic meltdown has intensified that pull, out of necessity. In that sense it may prove to be a blessing in disguise for many people; an aid to redirecting their life choices in more fulfilling ways.

Sadly, though, some do descend into that “death spiral” of despair and resignation. That can segue into sadness, from mild to severe. Suicide attempts may occur, as the investigate found. An example of downward drift is a man who realized that he never really liked his career, felt underutilized and unfulfilled; and then was let go by his company. At the same time, he was going through a divorce. He asked me a tearful question in our first meeting that sounded like a Zen koan: “How do you start over when you can’t start over?”

Many people are better able to move through this period with greater clarity and hopefulness. This may account for some of the other data, about an upswing of happiness during one’s 50s. In reality, investigate shows that older people show greater brainpower, increased judgment, perspective and wisdom when solving problems. In addition, those with a sense of humor tend to live longer. These qualities can enable one to feel gratitude  and appreciation for what one has in life. That can enhance overall well-being and positive energy, as distinguished from day-to-day fluctuations in “happiness.”

But I believe there’s also a darker reason for the reported rise of happiness among some: masked resignation and accommodation. Some people more or less give up trying to grow or change. They decide, consciously or unconsciously, to lope along in the life they’ve been living and then define that as “happiness.”

I’ve worked with many such “happy” people: A lady who feared what changes she might have to make in her life to feel more alive, more vital – until one day she discovered her husband had been conducting an affair for several years, and her world crumbled. Or the man who had become more withdrawn at home, burying himself in job, alcohol and Internet chat rooms with the silent agreement of his wife. Meanwhile, he gained weight and developed high blood pressure. When he consulted me, he said that whenever he had tried to “break free,” he reverted back to his “old ways,” so he had decided to just stop trying.

But more positively, I’m seeing a growing number of people who grapple with their “midlife” challenges right from the start. They do some self-examination and work towards creating clearer purpose and more integration within their lives. That can open up a sense of renewal and positive resiliency.

Maybe a time will come while people choose a marriage partner on the basis of raising healthy children in a stable environment, and then later seek a different partner with whom one feels a greater romantic, soul mate connection. But for now, you can face whether the two of you can rebuild the kind of relationship that you both want. Get the help of a good couples therapist if necessary. But if you decide it’s better to end it, do it now, with mutual respect.

The result, at this point, is that the majority of people are competent of self-directing their lives during the adult time. What you experience isn’t some relentless course that just happens to you. It’s the effect of how you manage the changes within your spirit; how you deal with the new possibilities that lie ahead.

But there is a question that how in the world can we help clients end a marriage with mutual respect if one person wants out and the other person doesn’t? I see that situation with over 40 and especially over 50 couples far more often than cases where each spouse feels roughly the same about the condition of the marriage.

Marriage Promotion Programs

There was one I ran across some time ago who was of a distinctly libertarian bent. He made what I thought was an excellent point that the entire gay marriage debate misses the much larger and more general issue that the government has transitioned from protecting inherent individual rights to granting them, or not as the case may be.

Singalism may be a problem, but people aren’t banished from their families for being single, at least not at the rate gay youth are. Get a grip, singalism is a choice while homosexuality is not. We should own our choice.

While I heard that the full text of the judge’s ruling on Proposition 8 was accessible, I put everything else aside and dug into the 136-page file. Prop 8 had banned gay marriage in California. Adjudicator Vaughn Walker said that unconstitutional.

First, those statements about the transformative power of getting married that I’ve been trying to bat down for so long – they get taken seriously in the ruling. That was disappointing. The Judge did not need to claim that marriage makes people healthier or happier or any of the rest of it in order to rule that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

Another gloomy side of the story: In order to argue for the potential importance of marriage to same-sex couples, the ruling, I believe, added to the discourse of singlism and matrimania.

Now here’s the more interesting and less depressing part. The judge maintained that the opposition to same-sex marriage was based largely on untrue stereotypes and private moral views, and that neither could provide the basis for legislation. “California’s obligation is to treat its citizens equally,” he said. So shouldn’t singles be treated equally, too? That’s what I argued.

I’ll save them for later. So it was just moments ago that I caught up with the lively discussion of the post on dealing with put-downs. I loved discovering that readers were mulling over the same concept I was blogging about at the Huffington Post marital privilege. The title of my post over there was, “Does the Prop 8 ruling make the case for ending marital privilege?”

I think if people can find a church who will marry them, then there should be no government interference, or encouragement. Instead of trying to get the state to grant equal rights, we should be trying to get the state out of meddling in the marriage business and people’s private affairs all together.

Though I paraphrase to a large degree based on memory, I pretty much agree with this take. That’s the real argument against federal marriage promotion programs, not that they’re founded on bogus research and false claims, which is taking the idea behind such programs seriously and as a given that the government would be justified in promoting marriage if the claims were sufficiently demonstrated to be true, or if enough people believed they were true.

Good Tone, Good Communication

I try to reflect on how I sound when I talk to people especially my family, and I'm often not pleased with myself. The thought of recording such interactions is truly frightening, but likely also very enlightening.

A few days ago, I was editing together some video footage for a home film and was amazed to find how angry, negative, and just simple mean I sounded while discussion to my partner. I remember most of communicating that was filmed but not any of the emotions I was quite clearly projecting. In one part, my wife was trying out a tripod and having difficulty figuring out how to use it rightly. "You're holding it wrong," I snapped sharply. "That's not right at all!" "It's working for me," she answered, somewhat taken aback.

Watching this was a humbling experience, to say the least. As a Buddhist, I strive to be tolerant, optimistic, and kind, and was hurt to see how far from exhibiting those qualities I was. Ironically, I’d been wondering why my wife and I seemed not to be enjoying one another’s company as much recently. The video gave me the answer. The cause was me.

Watching it taught me three things:

   1. Whatever the content of the things we say, it's our tone that communicates what we're feeling when we say them. Our tone tells the truth even while our words don't, even while we're ignorant of that truth ourselves. And it's our tone to which others respond. We can even say "I love you" in a way that provokes bitterness and then innocently argue we're being unfairly attacked while the person to whom we've said it quite rightly responds to our tone rather than our words. Don't be fooled by this kind of faux denial from others. What you think you hear in another person's tone is almost always present. And if someone accuses you of an attitude or feeling you don't think you have, unless they're particularly thick or have some hidden agenda, what they have to say likely represents something you need to hear.
   2. We're often unaware of tensions and attitudes brewing underneath the surface. When others respond to us negatively or in ways other than what we want or expect, rather than criticizing or attacking them, we might pause to reflect on how our tone  may have caused the reaction we received. For me, this is far easier said than done.
   3. Because my ability to identify my underlying mood is less honed than I previously thought. I think many of us have difficulty observing our feelings when we're in the middle of feeling them especially if what we're feeling runs counter to what we want to be feeling or what we think we should be feeling.

One reason I practice Nichiren Buddhism is to recognize my own negativity and transform it. And it works one way or another, bit by bit, epiphanies have come, enabling me gradually to shape myself into the person I want to be. But a few relationships give a more ready proving ground than others for unmasking the parts of us that need to change. A principle of Nichiren Buddhism teaches the oneness of life and its environment, which from one perspective means all our relationships represent mirrors. If we don't like what we see what's coming at us from another person, it often represents what's coming at them from us, delivered by our tone. In my experience, those to whom we feel closest and love the most generally represent our best opportunities to see ourselves as we really are.

I've had the chance to watch myself on video before as a medical student when I was first learning to obtain medical histories from standardized sufferers, and it taught me a lot about how I appeared to sufferers. It made me a better doctor. Catching myself on video interacting with my wife and friends, however, has provided me the unexpected opportunity to make me a better human being. It turns out that I've been frustrated with a particular situation I've been feeling somewhat powerless to affect and watching the video showed me that I've been taking out that frustration on those closest to me. So I've decided to apologize to them by making a determination to stop expressing my frustration inappropriately and become more aware of the tone I use while I speak.

If you haven't ever watched yourself interrelate with others in your everyday life on video while you weren't concentrated on being filmed or even aware of it, I greatly recommend it. It might be a miserable experience as mine was, but if you're eager to be truthful with yourself and recognize the reality of what you see and more importantly the truth of what you hear, you can use it as a springboard for excellent individual growth.

As I think, when we get irritated or frustrated, sometimes we know is that We have a twisty feeling in our gut, and sometimes we want to cry. If we pay attention we can feel our brow is tense. Sometimes though, we are stomping around being impatient and short with people before we realize we are doing it, and then we have to sit and take stock about what it is we are feeling. Hopefully we can do this while still alone.

Copyright by Lucy, a beautiful girl who likes swimming, shopping online and has a shop with cheap coach purses and fashion things.