There are numerous variations on these simple activities but the original intervention (Emmons and McCullough, 2003) consisted of taking time once per week to reflect upon five things in life that one was grateful for and writing these down, and then repeating this for ten consecutive weeks.
Marriage and marriage quality is an important determinant of happiness in life and many other aspects of human flourishing for both spouses and children (Waite and Gallagher, 2000; Wilcox et al., 2011; VanderWeele, 2017a) and easy-to-use resources to strengthen relationships and improve marriage quality have tremendous potential to contribute to... See more
Often, there’s a desire to cling onto how we thought life should go, sometimes until it outweighs the reality of how it is going — what makes us happy, versus what we feel should; what is truly stimulating or fulfilling, versus what we’ve been told should be chased and sacrificed for. A question I ponder is: How do we untether ourselves from the... See more
Cognitive behavioral therapy is focused on changing the thought processes and behaviors that may contribute to depression and numerous forms of cognitive behavioral therapy have been shown to be effective in alleviating depression in randomized trials (Cuijpers, Cristea, Karyotaki, Reijnders, and Huibers, 2016).
The key to finding the right mission is finding something that is hard, like genuinely hard, because learning to love the struggle and the person it chisels you into is part of the magic that happens over time.
Money was supposed to provide safety. Instead, an obsession with money made me feel anxious and inadequate... I was also setting myself up to feel miserable. Because, frankly, I haven’t been very good at money—at making it, compounding it, keeping track of it, and protecting it. Using money as a scorecard was bound to lead to perpetual... See more