Here’s more information on distress versus eustress. It inspires to consider that simply changing your attitude can flip the experience over to helpful eustress.
Rethinking The Stress Mindset: Can You Find The Upside of Pressure? — PsyBlog
Is it true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or is stress always debilitating?
Alex argues that if you care to convince people to fight an injustice, such as the torture of innocents, do not talk about how terrible the injustice is. Spin it as a minor issue that can be easily fixed, or turn it into an us versus them scenario. It’s clear this strategy works on lesser issues, such as with office politics.
Torture in a Just World
If the world is just, only the guilty are tortured. So believers in a just world are more likely to think that the people who are tortured are guilty. Perhaps especially so if they experience the torture closely and so feel a greater need to overcome cognitive dissonance. On the other hand, those farther away from the experience of torture may feel less need to justify it and they may be more likely to identify the tortured as victims. The theory of moral typecasting suggests that victims are also more likely to be seen as innocents (a la Jesus).
It’s simple: remind people of their freedom. Make you case and then add, “but you are free to choose for yourself.” This rings true to me as a father. An ultimatum, when I indulge in one, is likely to be met with resistance. If I manage to make a request that’s clearly optional, I’m much more likely to get what I want.
The One (Really Easy) Persuasion Technique Everyone Should Know
It’s supported by 42 studies on 22,000 people and it’s the easiest, most practical persuasion technique available.
This data threatens those who consider depression to be solely biological and treatable by drugs only.
BBC News – Self-help books ‘treat depression’
Prescribing self-help books on the NHS is an effective treatment for depression, a study suggests.
Patients offered books, plus sessions guiding them in how to use them, had lower levels of depression a year later than those offered usual GP care.
The effect was seen in addition to the benefits of other treatments such as antidepressants, Scottish researchers report in the journal Plos One.
Such an approach may help the NHS tackle demand for therapy, they said.
This lines up with Whitaker’s investigative reporting in Anatomy of an Epidemic.
Children’s A.D.D. Drugs Don’t Work Long-Term – NYTimes.com
THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.
But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?
In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.
As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.
It reminds me of this comic. There’s a follow-up if it makes you too sad.
