In our house we avoided assigning chores and instead focused on teaching our kids to be responsible for their fair share of the work as a “duty.” We can also try to frame our responsibility to develop self control as a duty we owe to ourselves and to those around us. Self-control can be defined […]
The Responsibility of Self-Control Read More »
One of the keys to living the life we want to live is learning to master our emotions. The goal isn’t to minimize or repress them, that’s a dangerous path that leads to suffering. What we should aim to do is understand them so we can benefit from their positive effects and mitigate their harmful
Exploring Emotions: Anger Read More »
Overwhelm is a real problem for a lot of people, me included. This emotion can trigger a cascade of thoughts and behaviors that bog us down in the swamp of inaction and stagnation. The swamp of overwhelm is filled with nasty little critters. Thoughts that have us focused on everything that’s going wrong (mental filtering),
Slogging through the “Swamp of Overwhelm” Read More »
This morning I was reading about “cultivating indifference” and I had the thought… Hey man, just relax. And that thought really annoyed me. Here is why I think it annoyed me. When we sit in judgement of the things around us we are putting them into categories that might look something like “this is good”
Hey man, just relax… Read More »
I like this concept as a general framework for understanding the temporal orientation of depression and anxiety to our thoughts. When we ruminate on the past we can start to feel down, guilty, ashamed, or angry. Dwelling on the future can lead us to feeling worried, uncertain, timid, or scared. Of course it can be
Depression lives in the past, and anxiety lives in the future Read More »
Let’s do some thinking about fear this morning. Fear is a core spectrum of emotions that help us respond to our perception of threats. These threats can be either real or imagined. Regardless of the source the physiological response is the same. Hyper focusing of the senses, quickened breathing, tense muscles, and increased blood pressure
In my observation, philosophies like Stoicism can fall short because they have been distilled down to quippy platitudes that lack truly actionable methodologies, tools, or skills. For example, the Stoic idea of the dichotomy of control asserts that the only thing within our control is our well reasoned response to the world around us. That
Beyond Philosophies Read More »
From the Stoic perspective, gaining control of our impulses allows us to be intentional about living the life we want to live. Oftentimes I think this is viewed as raw discipline and or a brute force method of self control. Fortunately there are ways to train our minds to be a more effective tool for
Controlling Impulses Read More »
If you find yourself living at the mercy and whim of raging emotions this may be a sign you need to increase your capability and capacity to regulate your emotions. In the years that I have been studying philosophy I often see quippy snippets of wisdom that advocate for some form of emotional control or
Regulating Emotions Read More »
One of the trends I see in my role as a teacher and as a counselor is the harm that can be caused by oversimplification. Typically what I see is that someone will exaggerate their thoughts or emotions by using language that may speed up expression of thoughts and feelings but can also minimize or
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