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How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Known as the father of the new science of positive psychology, Martin E.P. Seligman draws on more than twenty years of clinical research to demonstrate how optimism enhances the quality of life, and how anyone can learn to practice it. Offering many simple techniques, Dr. Seligman explains how to break an “I—give-up” habit, develop a more constructive explanatory style for interpreting your behavior, and experience the benefits of a more positive interior dialogue. These skills can help break up depression, boost your immune system, better develop your potential, and make you happier.. With generous additional advice on how to encourage optimistic behavior at school, at work and in children, Learned Optimism is both profound and practical–and valuable for every phase of life.

Taking prescription drugs for so called “brain chemistry imbalances” is wrong on myriad levels for most healthy people. Brain chemistry imbalances have never and still have not ever been proven. It was and continues to be a made up condition.

Moreover, prescription drugs don’t cure or fix these problems over the long term; they frequently make mental conditions they are supposedly treating worse, especially upon cessation of the prescriptions, forcing people back to them to feel “normal” again.

The prescriptions themselves frequently cause brain chemistry imbalances and mental disorders and lifelong users are born in this way. Consistent exercise and cognitive therapy (changing mal-adaptive thoughts) are far better remedies!

The majority of us can improve our lives, as well as our health, by improving the way in which we explain things to ourselves; a positive or optimistic explanation of things and others can make us stronger, a negative or pessimistic explanation of things and others can make us weaker, even leading to depression.

Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation’s children. What is going on?
 
Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix “chemical imbalances” in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals.

Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long–term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness?

This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit?

By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public?

In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.

Contrary to popular believe success doesn’t make us happy… rather being happy brings us success!

Well performed studies have repeatedly found that strong social support and friendships have as much effect on our health and longevity as smoking, high-blood pressure and obesity do. In other words, strong social support and good friendships increase health and decrease disease. Those who have good social support are across the board happier as well. Bottom line? We need healthy social relationships to thrive; we are not as independent as we assume ourselves to be!

In order to be successful at weight-loss and eating well many of us need the path to least resistance. Healthy food and snacks need to be accessible when its time to eat, while junk food kept well out of reach. In addition, when, where and how we exercise needs to be as convenient as possible.

Reward yourself with compliments and feeling good about yourself.

The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.

In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies from his work with thousands of Fortune 500 executives in 42 countries, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.

Isolating seven practical, actionable principles that have been tried and tested everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, stretching from Argentina to Zimbabwe, he shows us how we can capitalize on the Happiness Advantage to improve our performance and maximize our potential. Among the principles he outlines:

• The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunities wherever we look.
• The Zorro Circle: how to channel our efforts on small, manageable goals, to gain the leverage to gradually conquer bigger and bigger ones.
• Social Investment: how to reap the dividends of investing in one of the greatest predictors of success and happiness—our social support network

A must-read for everyone trying to excel in a world of increasing workloads, stress, and negativity, The Happiness Advantage isn’t only about how to become happier at work. It’s about how to reap the benefits of a happier and more positive mind-set to achieve the extraordinary in our work and in our lives.

Scientific American Special Edition: The Science of Healthy Aging

Volume 24 Issue 1

I don’t know anyone who hasn’t or won’t experience some level of anxiety from time to time, from general anxiety, to nerve rattling panic attacks, but there are positive actions and positive coping mechanisms available to you. We can work on that here.

Physical and mental strength, as well as intellect, logic and wisdom, require the right environment and the right choices within that environment; life is tough, unbroken is the goal. Expect that from me, I will expect that from you.

Although awareness level concerning our personal mortality fluctuates and varies, some of us certainly are more aware of it than others and some of us certainly give it more careful thought than others. Regardless, the topic of death has the power to elicit paralyzing fear and mental breakdown, or the power to illicit appreciation for the life we have and those who are in it.

Solid evidence stating that calorie restriction increases human lifespan is flimsy at this time, but restricting calories does appear to work well for fruit flies and nematodes. How’s that for motivation? However, and this is a big however, calorie restriction does appear to reduce the risk of disease as we age, as well as lengthen the period of our lives spent in good viable health. Now that should motivate you!

We spend the vast majority of our time regretting the past or fearing the future, and although both can have constructive value, in many cases they do not. It’s best to spend the majority of our time right here in the present; appreciating and feeling gratitude for the things we already have.

The dietary fiber that we consume, and frequently too little of, is exclusively found in plant-based food and it’s typically undigestable; although it can be added to low-quality processed foods to give the appearance of healthfulness. Fiber comes in countless variations within the cell-walls of plants (and the fruits and vegetables it may bear). Dietary fiber should not be consumed through man-made purchased supplements rather through whole foods designed by nature. Human engineering can’t rival the quality or the complexity of fiber found in it’s most natural state or it’s perfect delivery system. Moreover, whole foods (vegetables, fruit and grains) containing dietary fiber include numerous components that work to keep us healthy and their fiber content creates a sense of fullness that comes on us quicker and lasts longer compared to processed foods. Lastly, fiber works to clean the digestive system as it winds its way through the process, as well as absorbs unwanted products found within our digestive system as it speeds the process of digestion along.

Good “sports nutrition” is the same thing as good nutrition except the word “sports” is used in the first expression.

Many athletes and fitness enthusiasts alike fail to realize how much of a performance and recovery boost they can achieve by simply eating fresh vegetables and whole fruit.

A significant portion of why we become insulin resistant with age is the loss of muscle mass due directly to the aging process (sarcopenia); this can be mitigated and frequently reversed through consistent weight training.

Consistent and appropriate exercise has a dramatic “positive” effect upon our chemical physiology. It strengthens important systems such as our immune system and it rebalances or optimizes our hormone system. It simply improves our overall function!

An Insider’s Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life

International Bestseller

A deeply fascinating and urgently important critique of the widespread medicalization of normality

Anyone living a full, rich life experiences ups and downs, stresses, disappointments, sorrows, and setbacks. Today, however, millions of people who are really no more than “worried well” are being diagnosed as having a mental disorder and receiving unnecessary treatment. In Saving Normal, Allen Frances, one of the world’s most influential psychiatrists, explains why stigmatizing a healthy person as mentally ill leads to unnecessary, harmful medications, the narrowing of horizons, the misallocation of medical resources, and the draining of the budgets of families and the nation. We also shift responsibility for our mental well-being away from our own naturally resilient brains and into the hands of “Big Pharma,” who are reaping multi-billion-dollar profits. Frances cautions that the newest edition of the “bible of psychiatry,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (DSM-5), is turning our current diagnostic inflation into hyperinflation by converting millions of “normal” people into “mental patients.” Saving Normal is a call to all of us to reclaim the full measure of our humanity.

We have way too much faith in pills, supplements and shortcuts, and way too little trust in eating fruits and vegetables, exercising adequately and resting appropriately; rarely is popping a pill or taking a perceived shortcut the best solution.