Overcoming Stress-Induced Brain Fog by Jill Weber covers ten strategies to find focus and make your mind work better. It’s aimed at people who are experiencing brain fog due to chronic stress rather than due to illness. The book draws on concepts from cognitive behavioural therapy (ACT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness. The …
Book Review: Overcoming Stress-Induced Brain Fog Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is attention. We are constantly bombarded with a steady stream of stimuli, both internal and external. Attention is the process by which we narrow our focus to certain pieces of information. This is necessary because our capacity to …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is thought-action fusion. Thought-action fusion (TAF) happens when people believe there is an equivalence between thoughts and actions. It was first described by researchers in relation to OCD, although it’s not exclusive to OCD. There are a couple …
Violent actions are obviously a bad thing, but what about violent thoughts? It’s not exactly socially acceptable to talk about, which makes it hard to get a sense of how common it is. I would guess that it’s fairly common to have the occasional thoughts of violence, even if they’re just fleeting and there’s no …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we’re going to look at logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are reasoning errors that people make quite commonly when making arguments. While such fallacies don’t necessarily mean that the conclusion is wrong, they’re a weak link in the argument, and …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is belief perseverance. Belief perseverance is the tendency to hold onto beliefs even after the information that they’re based on is shown to be false. I’m a big fan of this line from a paper by Savion (2009): …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the illusion of causality. The illusion of causality is a cognitive bias that makes us see causal relationships between things that aren’t actually related. This often comes into play in superstitions and pseudoscience. We naturally look for …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the frequency illusion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Do you ever find that once you start to notice something, all of a sudden, it’s happening a lot? There’s a name for that; it’s a type of …
What Is… the Frequency Illusion (Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon) Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we have two beliefs that conflict, or when our beliefs and actions don’t match, making us feel uncomfortable. The concept was originally described back in the 1950s by psychologist Leon Festinger. …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is mentalization. Mentalizing is something you do, but probably haven’t heard of. My browser’s spell-checker tells me it’s not a word. Okay, so what is it? Well, that’s not the easiest thing to explain. Defining mentalism The American …
