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How Therapy Works
 
Our minds and bodies are brilliant.  When we experience situations that overwhelm us, our minds protect us by helping us not know what we actually do know.  It’s hard to make sense of these difficult experiences, and so we create narratives to explain why these things happened to us.
 
Good therapy offers experiences that help us get back in touch with what we actually know.  This can only happen once we feel safe enough to go there, by building trust with a therapist who understands how

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Falling in love can feel like diving off a cliff.
 
For me, it’s exhilarating and terrifying, dizzying and dazzling.  It breaks me open to a fresh view of the world.  Suddenly, everything seems possible, and I overflow with hope and beauty and profound respect.  My heart is tender and raw, and I am rich with love to share.  I bubble over and laugh easily and look people in the eye.  Something is different with you, they say.  You are glowing.

When the object of my love does not

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We hear a lot of advice about how to be happy.
 
In fact, I just wrote two blog posts (How to Be Happier in 5 Minutes and Warning: You Are Missing Out) highlighting what I think makes people happier.  We hear people telling us to follow our passions and create our dream lives.
 
On this rare overcast day in Denver, I’m thinking about the pitfalls of pursuing happiness, and the value of dropping it altogether.
 
On days like this, when I’m low energy and less than cheery, I question whether it’s

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In the last post, Warning: You Are Missing Out, I talked about the negativity bias, and how seeing the good parts of our lives goes against our natural tendency to look for problems.  So how do we shift our perspective to recognize what’s going well?  I have a few ideas, starting with the basics and moving toward the master level.
 

Begin with the Basics.  Go to bed at a decent hour.  Raise your heart rate daily.  Don’t let yourself get too hungry, and feed yourself with tasty,

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Why do we think life is so hard?
 
I was listening to an episode of the podcast Freakonomics the other day, talking about our tendency to believe that we face more headwinds than tailwinds, and how this breeds resentment.  Also, we tend to overlook what is going well, or in other words, we don’t recognize the
tailwinds that have boosted us along, thus missing out on the chance to appreciate gifts and opportunities we have had.  This leaves us ungrateful and unhappy.

 
The tragedy of this really

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