Description: I was teaching a summer course called Psychology for Everyday Life last summer in a dual credit format which meant that it was a real university course, but it was being taken by 150 senior high school students who would receive credit for the university course as well as receive a number of senior… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Anxiety OC PTSD
Psychology of Covid-19: Name Your Experience – Languishing
Description: Perhaps you have had enough of trying to summarize how you are feeling and doing “these days” as the pandemic rumbles along and has not vanished at the sight of the first few raised vaccination needles. There have been many, many attempts to explain what we, or may be, experiencing: it is a problem… Read more »
Pandemic Dreams: With or Without Anxiety?
Description: How are your dreams these days? Not so good? Rather frightening? Does it make sense to say that the unsettling nature of your dreams are, in some way or ways, tied to our current Covid circumstances? If that makes sense, what is the mechanism by which our dreams are influenced by our current socially… Read more »
Therapeutic Use of Magic Mushrooms in Oregon
Description: Even if you are not old enough to have experienced the 1960’s and 70’s personally you are no doubt aware that one of the things that era was known for is the illicit use of drugs and of psychedelics like LSD, peyote, mescaline and magic mushrooms. Within what was referred to as counterculture (outside… Read more »
Service Dogs and PTSD (In Humans)
Description: You have heard of service dogs, right? They help out people struggling with PTSD and help them get on with their lives with fewer of the issues that can be associated with PTSD. However, what do you know about what having a service dog actually does for a person with PTSD? Perhaps you just… Read more »
Anxiety and Entrenched Habits: Treatability
Description: I will not even ask whether you know what anxiety is, of course you do, especially given how much experience we have all had with it recently. Have you also heard about the Yerkes-Dodson Law? Basically, it says that for most tasks that we take on, a certain amount of stress increases our performance… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: Re-emerging and Adaptation
Description: No matter how you spent the past year I suspect that it was different than the previous 5, 10, or many many more years and that the biggest difference was the nature and extent of your social contacts. Perhaps you got really good at zoom (despite the force personal appearance fixations it can produce);… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: Pandemic Negative Thought Patterns
Description: Try this statement on for size. The way we think, the way we focus our attention, the way we organize and reflect upon our thoughts are, in large part, best thought of as adaptations to the world we are living in (the physical AND the social world). Does that make sense? OK, now, how… Read more »
Video Games, Social Media and Mental Health: Research Debates on Screen Time Continue
Description: The debates and the research focused upon the impacts of video gaming and social media use on developing children and youth are heated and ongoing. The primary difficulty in sorting out the effects of video gaming and social media use is tied up in the comprehensive nature of their uptake in the population. As… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: Hitting the Pandemic Wall
Description: Have you heard of something called the General Adaptation system (GAS)? Hans Selye (1907-1982) working at McGill University in Montreal was trying to find a model with which he could use rats to study the impact of longer-term exposure to moderate to high levels of stress. What he came up with as a rat… Read more »
Books for Success!
