The anatomy of procrastination – and how pupils can beat it

Procrastination is more instinctive than you might imagine. The art of avoidance comes from our lower mammalian brain, which is equipped for survival. It's adapted to focus on what we need immediately, making it harder to focus on attention-demanding, longer-term tasks.

For schoolchildren, getting the brain to engage in tasks that are not recognised as valuable survival goals or potential sources of pleasure is even harder. It's not until our 20s that we develop the mature neural networks that override the lower brain's reactive responses. This means that young people may need help resisting distractions to achieve their goals. Here are some ways you can assist your students in breaking through the roadblocks of procrastination.

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7 Things You Shouldn’t Say to People in Therapy

You may judge, but therapy saved my life.

My best friend and I are constantly playing phone tag. But there's one person who promises to have my undivided attention once a week, no matter what: Dr. R, my therapist.

For the past 2.5 years, we've spent 55 minutes every Tuesday evening together, and for that, I'm grateful.

My adventures in therapy began during my sophomore year in college, when I walked into my campus's mental health center after a close friend suffered a mental breakdown.

4 Ways You're Sabotaging Your Life

We were so alike, I knew that if I didn't do something, my fate would be similar. Now, five years later, I consider that decision the best choice I've ever made.

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2015/09/01/7-things-you-shouldnt-say-to-people-in-therapy/

Stress Is Your Brain Trying to Avoid Something

Stress exists in every workplace, and all of us have probably tried a few trendy stress-management approaches. But rather than trying the latest fad, it may be more effective to understand how stress works and where it comes from, so that you can create your own methods for dealing with it.

Stress is an emotional response; like all emotional responses, it emerges from the functioning of the motivational system. Your motivational system engages goals and gives them energy so that you can pursue them. Simply put, when you succeed at your goals, you feel good, and when you don't succeed you feel bad.

Stress is a negative emotion, so the first thing we can see about stress is that it reflects a goal you are not currently achieving.

https://hbr.org/2015/08/stress-is-your-brain-trying-to-avoid-something

What It Really Means to Love Yourself: 3 Aspects of a Deeper Self-Care

We often hear that it's important to love yourself. Sounds good, right? But what does it actually mean to love and care for yourself?

For some people, self-love might mean taking a warm bath or pampering themselves with a massage or manicure, which might help us. Yet, the elusive self-love that we seek requires something deeper.

Self-love means finding peace within ourselves — resting comfortably within the depths of our being. We might find temporary respite by doing something to nurture ourselves. But a deeper inner peace requires cultivating a certain way of being with ourselves — a warm and nurturing attitude toward what we experience in life.

The suggestions that follow are derived from Focusing, developed by Dr. Eugene Gendlin. Sometimes called the Focusing Attitude, this is simply a way of being nonjudgmentally kind, present, and mindful toward whatever we happen to be experiencing.

Gendlin has stated, "The client's attitudes and responses to the felt sense need to be those of a client-centered therapist." In other words, we need to have empathy and unconditional positive regard for whatever we are experiencing inside.

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2015/08/22/what-it-really-means-to-love-yourself-3-aspects-of-a-deeper-self-care/

8 Creative Techniques to Cope with Painful Emotions

Many of us have a hard time coping with negative emotions. This makes sense. "Painful feelings like anxiety, sadness, anger and shame tap into the parts of our brain that are connected to survival," according to Joy Malek, M.S., a licensed marriage and family therapist. For instance, the anger we feel when we're hurt is the same as the flight, fight or freeze response we experience when our survival is seriously threatened, she said.

We also tend to learn very early that getting mad or crying is not OK, said Meredith Janson, MA, LPC, a therapist in private practice in Washington, D.C. who specializes in expressive arts therapy. "As a mother of a toddler myself, I see every day how children can easily become overwhelmed by their feelings of sadness, frustration and anger. There is a temptation to distract the child or to cheer them up in order to make all the 'fuss' stop."

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What Suicidal Depression Feels Like

I don't know if you have noticed, but ever since Robin Williams died, I have removed the filter from my writing that keeps me safe of jaw dropping, disappointing head gestures, and all kinds of judgments that authentic writing invites. I just really don't care anymore what people think because lives are at stake.

If this brutal beast of an illness is strong enough to kill someone with the passion, determination, and genius of Robin Williams, than we must do everything we can to protect those who are more fragile. That means being brave and writing as honestly as I can, on a taboo subject so few people understand, even if it means getting disapproving stares from other parents at my kids' school.

When I first heard about Robin's death, my first reaction was this: "The poor guy sneezed."

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