Articles

Just when did your life get so complicated and how did ‘busy’ end up replacing ‘happy’? Is this how you wanted it to be when you started out? Or has your life slowly evolved into an endless to-do list? You tick off ‘achievements’ at the end of every day, but that doesn’t make you feel...

Paul came to see me about his anger management problem. It had already lost him one job due to a violent outburst with a co-worker. Now his relationship was in difficulties. ‘I’m angry all the time’ he said. ‘I can’t understand it. I feel like I’m always on edge, like a pressure cooker and it...

February 13 (or 14, or 15, depending on who you ask) is Singles Awareness Day. But while the acronym may be SAD, singles don’t need to be. “Though our society sometimes seems consumed by coupling up, there are many advantages to being single,” says NYC psychotherapist Jennifer Howard, Ph.D., host of the radio talk show...

‘There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.’ Aldous Huxley How often do we challenge our view of reality? I bought an old-style Volkswagen campervan while on holiday recently in Suffolk. It is blue & cream, a little battered but, to my eyes, it is a...

The Sunday blues. No, that’s not the title of a country song. It’s that palpable melancholy-mixed-with-anxiety that we sometimes experience as the sun sets on our weekend and we contemplate the coming workweek. (Freaky but true: As Christiane Northrup, MD, notes, more people die from heart attacks on Mondays than any other day of the week. Crap!)...

Try as we might to be peppy and positive, sometimes life gets the better of us and even the perkiest folks can feel a little blue. What happens next, though, is up to us: Research has found that happiness is 60 percent circumstances and genetics — which means that 40 percent of it is within...

Happiness is a commodity that never loses its value. People often mistake it for money, but actually it has more to do with the people around us. It affects the way we live, how we spend our time, and most importantly how we see ourselves. Here are seven tips on how to live a happier life. Smile When...

For some time now, optimism has been touted as the one-way route to ultimate health and happiness. Books like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret promise prosperity and personal fulfillment with just a few cognitive tweaks to your thinking. However, recent studies have disclosed a few potholes in this smiley-faced philosophy. In...

The Rumor: Laughter is the best medicine The best part of hanging out with my nieces and nephews isn’t the glittery nail polish or scratch-and-sniff stickers I’m inevitably adorned with, but how those kids supercharge my spirit. Knock-knock jokes, whispered secrets and madly kicked soccer balls make us collapse in giggles and belly laughs, which...

The Rumor: A positive outlook helps create positive experiences Bad stuff happens. But is it possible that simply approaching life with a glass-half-full attitude can actually cause better things to occur? The Verdict: Happiness is born of both positivity and negativity Turns out a healthy dose of pessimism can, at times, be a good thing. A study...