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24 McCurdy Road N1G 4Z9 Guelph, ON, Canada

Personal Framing of the Pandemic... A recent study by Prof Hannes Zacher, a psychologist at Leipzig University, shows that our personal framing of the pandemic has already had a significant effect on our responses during the crisis so far. His survey, which was set up before the pandemic began, ran from December 2019 to May 2020 and as you might expect, there was a significant drop in life satisfaction and positive mood after the pandemic hit Europe. But certain psychologi...cal characteristics and coping strategies seemed to protect some people from the worst effects. This included active coping such as setting up a proper office at home, scheduling home-schooling times for the children, and making sure to eat well, sleep well, and exercise, Zacher says. The most resilient participants also managed to recognize the potential opportunities in the crisis such as learning something from the experience, or trying to grow as a person as a result from the experience, Zacher explains. Zacher emphasizes that the aim is not to sugar-coat the situation or to deny the difficulties that we will face; we can’t hide from the shadow cast by the pandemic, any more than the citizens of remote towns above the Arctic Circle can pretend that the sun is shining in the middle of winter. By recognising our own capacity to control our responses to the lockdown and the changing seasons, however, we may all find some hidden reserves of strength and resilience to see us through the days ahead.

How to Stop Taking Things Personally... A side effect of our consciousness is that everything we experience in our lives involves us somehow. The car in traffic today cut ME off. The cable news show last night upset ME... As a result, we tend to have an inherent bias towards assuming that pretty much everything that happens to us is actually about us.... Just because we experience something, just because something causes us to feel a certain way, just because we care about something, doesn’t mean it’s about us. This is hard to remember. And not just because we’re so embedded in our brains and our own bodies. But because making everything about us, in certain ways, feels good for short periods of time. It feels good to think that everything that’s good that happens in our life happens to us because we’re this good, amazing person. But the price we pay for making those good experiences about us is that we must also make the bad experiences about us we must interpret all of the bad things in our life to be about ourselves as well. And as a result, we place ourselves onto a self-esteem roller coaster, where our self-worth bobs up and down, experiencing dizzying highs and crashing lows with the merciless tides of whatever happens to be going on at the time. What is constant is our unconscious sense of deserving. And it’s this constant sense of deserving that can turn us into an emotional vampire, an anti-social black hole that only consumes the energy and love of those around us without ever offering energy and love in return. OK, maybe that was a bit dramatic. But you get the point.

Hi Everyone! A reminder that my webinar Mindfulness: Techniques to Enhance Mental Health hosted by the Canadian Mental Health Association Peel Dufferin branch is coming up on Tuesday, November 24 from 9:00 am to 12:00 noon. Please register by clicking the link. ... Have a great day! https://secure.e2rm.com/registrant/startup.aspx

Either We Run Our Day, or Our Day Runs Us... How we wake up each day and our morning routine (or lack thereof) can dramatically affects our levels of success in every single area of our life. Focused, productive, successful mornings can generate focused, productive, successful days which can create a successful life in the same way that unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre mornings can generate unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre days, and ultimately a mediocre quality... of life. By changing the way we wake up in the morning, we can transform areas of our life, faster than we ever thought possible. Rather than depending on our mood and our circumstances for a great start to our day, we can choose to be proactive and make mood and circumstances respond to our work. A default routine for so many people is to immediately pick up their phone, check the news, email and social media and go about their day. There’s no way we can think clearly, focus and do our best work in the morning if we are constantly reacting to others’ expectations or getting distracted by the news. Jocelyn K. Glei, founding editor of 99U, and author of Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done says, Kicking off the day without a plan opens us up to the dangers of ‘reactive work,’ letting other people’s demands dictate what we do with our day. Our minds and body are fresh in the mornings, so we need to take advantage of our clean slate. Resist the urge to replay yesterday’s soundtrack, get sucked into worrying about tomorrow, or get distracted by the news. According to social psychologist Dr. Ron Friedman, if you spend the first 10 minutes of each day checking and answering email, you’re priming your mind for a reactive state. If you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is check your phone to read your email or scan through your social media before you event get out of bed, you are being reactive instead of proactive.

Our Brains Tend to Like Familiar Themes Dressed Up In New Costumes... In the past decade, superhero movies and TV shows have gained massive audiences and made billions of dollars. But many non-superhero movies and shows have caught on with those same audiences. The ideal movie or show is a character-driven journey in which old stories wear new costumes. In Sons of Anarchy, the popular FX drama about an outlaw motorcycle club, you might think upon initial viewing that it’...s this super-über-macho motorcycle show, but it’s also a soap with handsome and rugged guys, and the plot is basically Hamlet. In The Americans, a series about Soviet agents posing as a married couple in the United States, the spy genre has been subverted to tell a classic story about marriage. These shows are not Marvel’s infinity loops of sequels, which forge new installments of old stories. They are more like narrative Trojan horses, in which new characters are vessels containing classic themessurprise serving as a doorway to the feeling of familiarity, an aesthetic aha.

How We Can Persuade Others To Change Their Mind.. One of the first things we have to do in order to give someone permission to change their mind is to lower their defenses and prevent them from digging their heels in to the position they already staked out. If we immediately start to tell another person all the ways in which they’re wrong, there’s no incentive for them to co-operate. But if we start by saying, ‘Ah yeah, you made a couple of really good points here, I think th...ese are important issues,’ now we’re giving the other party a reason to want to co-operate as part of the exchange. This gives us a chance to give voice our own concerns about their position in a way that allows co-operation. If we have an idea, we feel we can claim ownership over that idea, as opposed to having to take another person's idea, which means I have to explicitly say, ‘I’m going to defer to you as the authority on this.’ Not everybody wants to do that.