 THE UNDEFEATED MIND Fall 2012 |
 Photo: Steve Keys Email, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, blogs (of course), and scores of others—all part of the new and wonderful ways we can now connect with one another electronically, each with its own culture and unique set of rules. In one sense, the planet has never been more interconnected. And yet, this interconnectedness, while wonderful, hasn’t come without cost. Continue reading…  Photo: tosaytheleast Twenty years ago, the first woman I ever loved broke my heart. Like many break ups, the end came in stutters and sine waves rather than as an abrupt but mercifully irreversible amputation. However, for reasons I couldn’t understand yet quickly began to resent, my ex-girlfriend continued to ask favors of me. And I continued to grant them. Then one morning while chanting I found myself ruminating about how inappropriate it was of her to keep asking, and the more I thought about it, the more irritated I became. My indignation continued to intensify after I’d finished chanting and began showering, finally reaching a peak as I rinsed the shampoo from my hair, causing me to make a sudden and angry determination that the next time she asked me for a favor, I’d refuse. Continue reading…  Photo: peteSwede My patient smiled a toothless grin and told me, “I feel fine, doc.” But he was far from it. His liver enzymes had risen into the thousands, his skin was a pasty yellow I didn’t need the benefit of sunlight to see, and his albumin (a protein whose level indicates the liver’s functional capacity as well as a patient’s degree of malnutrition) had fallen far too low. Further, he’d been admitted to the hospital with a chief complaint of vomiting blood, which turned out to have been caused by esophageal varices, a potentially life-threatening condition seen in end-stage alcoholics. Continue reading…  Photo: The U.S. Army From quitting smoking to eating healthier to exercising regularly to getting more organized, most of us have a list of behaviors we’d like to begin (or end) that resist our attempts to do so. As a physician, I find myself giving advice about changing habits on a daily basis. Even though many of my patients are able to succeed in making desired changes in the short term, most of them revert to their original behaviors in the long term. What, then, are effective ways to alter behavior on a permanent basis? The psychology that underlies the changing of behaviors is complex. Two researchers named Prochaska and DiClemente developed a way of describing it they called the Stages of Change Model. Though originally developed in the context of smoking cessation, it’s five stages actually describe the process by which all behaviors change. Continue reading… |
|
|
Copyright © 2012 Happiness in this World - All Rights Reserved
|
||
