Blog #49 – Mindfulness As highlighted last time, Jon Kabat-Zinn has become the primary face and name attached to the introduction and popularisation of what we call mindfulness in the Western world. As such, he has developed one of the most used mindfulness-based approaches – Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The three key components of this…
Blog #48 – Mindfulness In recent posts, we have been focusing on conscious awareness and our tendency in the modern world to spend more time in a kind of auto-pilot state on a day-to-day basis than is necessarily healthy. In highlighting this tendency, we identified the desirability of cultivating conscious awareness, but acknowledged the difficulty…
Blog #47 – Being present – part 2 In our last post, we highlighted the issue of conscious awareness in our daily lives, with an emphasis on how for many of us this awareness can slip intermittently, with our daily routines sometimes facilitating a kind of auto-pilot, which in turn is partly responsible for the…
Blog #46 – Being present One of the things that we often hear said is that the years go by faster as you get older. Objectively speaking, we know this cannot be true – time does not speed up when a child becomes an adult and, neither does it further accelerate as an adult moves…
Blog #45 – The power of the negative In our last post, we focused primarily on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, in which Barbara Fredrickson proposes that the experience of more positive emotions in daily life can have massive benefits across a range of fronts, including basic well-being, problem solving, and general…
Blog #44 – The Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotions Barbara Fredrickson is one of the most well-known psychologists currently active in the field of well-being-related research. The United States-based university professor is concerned first and foremost with positive emotions, and perhaps her most notable contribution to knowledge in the area is the…
Blog #43 – The benefits of nature – Part 2 In our last post of 2017, we considered aspects of the relationship between the environment in which we live and overall well-being. We highlighted the troubling links between urban life and mental problems, but, of more interest for a series focusing on the cultivation of…
The benefits of nature An article published last year on the website of Scientific American magazine asked and sought to address the question of whether city life poses a risk to mental health. While it is impossible to offer a definitive answer to such a question, there is a wealth of research evidence which suggests…
Mindset theory A recurring feature in this series has been the highlighting of the proposition that our attitude and how we think can have a strong bearing on our decision-making, with any consistent tendencies on that front capable of impacting strongly on the direction of our lives. Recognising that how we see the world can…
Happiness & introverts – Part 2 Last time, we highlighted the popular tendency in media coverage of psychological research on happiness to focus on what works for extraverts and to brush over the fact that these strategies might not yield the desired results for introverts. In fairness to the media, this trend is not evidence…