If you’re anything like me, when someone close to you does something that feels hurtful, there’s a strong urge (sometimes a very strong urge) to react in a way that’s driven by that hurt. That reaction isn’t necessarily appropriate or useful, though, and sometimes it can involve some pretty dumb shit. I came up with …
Maja at Lampelina wrote quite a while back about the influence of fear on decision-making, and I’m finally getting around to exploring it on my own. Looking back, I don’t think fear was a big factor in most of my decisions. If I wanted to do something, I did it, including some perhaps high-ish fear …
How Big a Role Has Fear Played in Your Decisions? Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we’ll look at the 12 irrational beliefs and 3 major musts described by Albert Ellis, the founder of rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT). I was vaguely familiar with REBT as the therapeutic approach behind SMART Recovery. Recently, when I …
Most of us are naturally inclined towards being more rational or intuitive in our decision-making. Personally, I tend to be much more on the rational side of the spectrum. But then you layer mental illness on top of that, and it can start to get more complicated. The basic scenario we’ll use for the post …
What’s Your Mental Illness Decision-Making Style? Read More »
Who is the Should Monster? It’s that voice inside your head telling you what you should do to live up to expectations—your own expectations of yourself, as well as what you think that others (and the world in general) expect of you. Shoulds can consume a lot of mental energy, so let’s chat about them. …
The Anxiety Skills Workbook by Stefan G. Hofmann uses a cognitive behavioural therapy approach to help you better manage your anxiety. One thing I liked was the cautionary note in the introduction that the book wasn’t intended to address suicidality, severe depression, or problematic substance abuse, and anyone experiencing those should get in touch with …
Show Your Anxiety Who’s Boss by Joel Minden provides strategies drawn from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help manage anxiety. CBT is an evidence-based treatment, so while the strategies won’t necessarily work for everyone, they are legit, unlike many of the other self-help books floating around. The approach is broken down into three major steps: …
When we look in the mirror, I suspect that very few of us see what’s objectively there in the reflection. So why is that? Do we recognize what we see? Mirror recognition is not as simple as it may seem. The vast majority of animals, including my guinea pig munchkins, lack this ability. When we …
What Do You See In The Mirror? Does Mental Illness Affect It? Read More »
I got thinking about this recently after talking with a blogger friend who has the amazing ability to optimistically see the silver lining in almost any dark cloud, and I very much do not. It makes me wonder, though, whether that makes me a pessimist, or am I just a realist? To start off, it’s …
Mental Illness Life: Are You a Pessimist? Or Just a Realist? Read More »
How To Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use by psychologist Randy J. Paterson challenges us to make our lives more miserable than they already are. The sneaky bit? He’ll make us realize that we’re already doing a lot of those things inadvertently. The book consists of 40 lessons. These are divided into four cheekily …
