Any time you have been told not to do something because of the bad things that might happen or that you had to do something just right to avoid a disaster, someone was pushing your anxiety button. Our parents started pushing our anxiety button when we were tiny. They were using it to teach us […]

Many conflicts in life come from confusing needs with wants, so the differences between the two must be made crystal clear so more informed choices can be made. If you stop and evaluate the things you want, your goals and desires, you will see plainly that many, if not most, of the things you want

 Fear and Anxiety are actually very different.  Even though they may feel the same, they are different in four ways. their origins are different, they take place at different times in the thinking sequence, they are processed by different parts of the brain. One is completely automatic and the other is consciously created. Fear developed

Prevention is the only long-term workable solution, but how can we prevent poor life skills? The answer to that is understanding how we learned the life skills we each have in the first place. Thanks to people like Clyde Hertzman and Michael Tomasello, we have a much more accurate picture of how all primates, not

Math, Language, and Driving are obviously skills. We are taught how they work, and we practice them until we develop a degree of competence. After some time, our level of ability to use them becomes a subconscious habit, and we perform the skills without even thinking about how they work. It may not be nearly

The more effort we put into trying to shape children into model citizens, the more one thing becomes clear, the techniques we are using to teach our children how to be the kind of adult we would like them to be are not effective enough to change the trajectory of “modern” society. In spite of

Hans Selye, the “Father of Stress,” explained exactly what stress is and gave us the key to preventing nearly all of our distress and managing the times when our distress is unavoidable. Selye was a Physiologist, not a psychiatrist. He studied what was actually going on in the body, instead of imagining what might be

Consolidation is a term for the mental processes that come together to turn an experience into a memory. It turns out that memories are actually fragile things. Every time we recall one, the very act of recalling it opens it up for editing. Our brain updates the memory with any new information it believes is in

The following skill, called Change the Channel, is extremely effective for helping you quickly interrupt the thinking habits that are causing your anxiety and stress and get the smart part of your brain back in control. The skill combines two process that already exist in our brains. We can all change our minds instantly when