Category Archive for Neuroscience/Psychology

It’s raining and it’s so dark that I have lights on in the afternoon. Weird in Hawaii!  I drank hot jasmine tea and have a great working buzz going.
I’m reminded of a story that I’ve been using a lot recently that was one of the inspirations for Men Are Easy:

For a while, twenty-five years ago, every Saturday morning, my husband and I argued. I would cry. By noon it was over and we both forgot about it until it happened again the next week.  One Saturday the arguing seemed particularly vicious. In a moment of clarity, I said, “This is it. We have to go to counseling.”

It seemed to be the smart thing. Nip this in the bud before it gets worse.

Then I had a flash of insight. From Monday through Friday my husband drank 3 to 4 cups of strong coffee. I don’t drink coffee. He’s an addict. I fixed him a cup and the fighting disappeared.

The frightening thought is that I could have forced us into counseling. I would have been doing the “right” and “responsible” thing. I would have insisted on exploring he said/I said and unearthing our past faults and family horrors, and  he would have been “in denial” about anything being wrong.

I would have appeared to be right and he would have been made all wrong.

I wonder. . . Would we still be together today?

Martin Seligman’s happiness movement, “Positive Psychology,” is popping up everywhere: Learn to think positively and optimistically, and you will experience health.Of course, Dr. Seligman is absolutely right, and his ideas are wonderful:

1. Consciously raising your mood opens your mind and expands your perspective to new possibilities.
2. Creating health is an improvement over simply treating illness.
3. You feel good when you do good for others.

But the problem is:

1. You can’t feel good when your work, health, time, money, and relationships are a mess, and you have no framework or simple process for improving it all.
2. You can’t be happy when your life is not aligned with your values, or when life has hit you so hard that you don’t even know what you value any more.
3. You can’t effectively help others if you haven’t first cared reasonably well for yourself.

Tradition has evaporated. A quagmire of so-called “expert advice” has replaced it. There’s so much to figure out in a day!

Stress is a wakeup call. When I feel it, I do the laundry and file papers. I work on what Coach U calls my “personal foundation.” When I clear the small stuff and free up my head, the big problems either go away or they become just another design challenge.

When it gets bad, I call my girlfriends. Nancy will always put it into perspective with a laugh. She always reminds me of what I know already: Happiness is only one thought away.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been telling you all to “get curious,” and today, I’m taking a little of my own advice…

I once took birth control pills for five days. I instantly turned into a bipolar, weeping wreck. Every few years thereafter, a new, lower-dose pill would come out, and, being the modern woman I was, I’d try again. Every time, it turned out to be a disaster.

The pill was (is) a seminal component of the women’s movement. Instantly, women had more time, choices, and opportunity. The secret to having it all was simple: one pill, once a day.

Today, though, I see young women dealing with all the same issues I did and more. The urge to nest away, to care for everyone around us (all hormonally driven), has expanded from the home into the working world. It inevitably becomes overwhelming.

While contemplating my daughter’s similar experiences with birth control pills, I ran across this article, and it made me wonder:

How many women started taking the pill in puberty and really don’t know themselves today? How many are needlessly stressed, struggling with life crises, and nervous about everything from dating, to work, to their futures? Could it be because their natural chemistry has been altered for so long?

At scienceblog.com, one post says that estrogens may increase brain cell viability; another says that estrogens may be a cause of mental illness in young women.

Geez.

I’m not categorically down on hormone manipulation. Certainly, for some women, estrogens are a lifesaver. I just wonder: How much of this stress I see — in my clients, family, friends — might be due to estrogens?

To be continued…

In “Relationships: Beginning, Middle, and End” on blogher, Liz Rizzo gives three examples of blogs by women describing different stages of relationship. According to Shelley Taylor, UCLA sociologist, connecting to each other is how women deal with stress.

So does blogging about our lives reduce stress?

90% of stress research has been on males. It took two women researchers at UCLA to notice that when the women in the lab were stressed, they hung out together. The men would hide out. Read the rest »

On an Oprah rerun a few days ago Kristin Richard, former wife of Lance Armstrong, spoke heartfully of how she left her career to build her husband’s life and dream. Then, four years later, slammed with celebrity, a toddler and twins, in a foreign country, without defining work of her own, she no longer knew who she was. She and Lance divorced.

Kristin spoke of how important it is in a marriage to keep a sense of one’s self and not to give it up for a marriage or a man.

She was missing a big fat piece of information.

Psychologist Robin Smith then presented her new book and told her story of young marriage, loss of self, and divorce. She and Oprah interviewed two young brides-to-be, fiances in tow, on their doubts and fears about their upcoming weddings. One of the brides broke down, saying that maybe she wasn’t at all ready for marriage. The other said that she and her fiance agreed that they would deal with whatever problems they had now after the wedding. That really fired Robin and Oprah up. How could she go into marriage like that? Read the rest »