Will Baum, LCSW

From the Recommended Reading page, a couple of titles worth highlighting:  The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety and  The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression, a matching pair of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) workbooks.

Instead of trying to take on and eliminate difficult thoughts and feelings, ACT encourages accepting them and getting on with what’s most important to you.  Identifying what’s most important to you is a big component of the approach.

For a reading-free sample of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, try one of the audio exercises linked here.  A whole sidebar full of free ACT audio and worksheets awaits at Live Mindfully.

From the recommended reading list, Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh, a short, simple call to mindfulness, personal and political.  In the book, some nice suggestions about mindfulness practice, including these lines to silently try out during mindfulness meditation:

Breathing in, I calm my body.

Breathing out, I smile.

Worth a shot for the many who find themselves distracted when attempting silent focus on breathing.  There’s also this suggestion for developing mindfulness regarding uncomfortable emotion (in this case anger):

Breathing in, I know that anger is here.

Breathing out, I know that the anger is me.

Breathing in, I know that anger is unpleasant.

Breathing out, I know this feeling will pass.

Breathing in, I am calm.

Breathing out, I am strong enough to take care of this anger.

Substitute “anxiety” or “sadness” or whatever you’re going through for “anger.”  Too much to remember?  Just try “Breathing in, I am _________.  Breathing out, I am ___________.” You may find just slowing down and acknowledging what you’re feeling (and not wanting to feel) helps more than any distraction.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness is Buddhist mindfulness–for a secularized (and, for better or worse, less eco/non-violence-focused) substitute, try Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Breathing in, you’re done reading this post.

A New Gauge to See What’s Beyond Happiness (NYT):

In his 2008 book, “Gross National Happiness,” Dr. Brooks argues that what’s crucial to well-being is not how cheerful you feel, not how much money you make, but rather the meaning you find in life and your sense of “earned success” — the belief that you have created value in your life or others’ lives.

“People find meaning in providing unconditional love for children,” writes Dr. Brooks…“Paradoxically, your happiness is raised by the very fact that you are willing to have your happiness lowered through years of dirty diapers, tantrums and backtalk. Willingness to accept unhappiness from children is a source of happiness.”

Bryan Caplan looks at twin studies and concludes:  Have More Kids. Pay Less Attention to Them (WSJ):

The obvious lesson to draw is that parents should lighten up.  I call it “Serenity Parenting”: Parents need the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, and (thank you twin research) the wisdom to know the difference.  Focus on enjoying your journey with your child, instead of trying to control his destination. Accept that your child’s future depends mostly on him, not your sacrifices. Realize that the point of discipline is to make your kid treat the people around him decently—not to mold him into a better adult.

Latest by writing neuologist, Oliver Sacks is excerpted here, read from/discussed live here.  A handful of Sacks’ New Yorker pieces are available in-full here.

The excerpt begins like this:

Dear Dr. Sacks,

My (very unusual) problem, in one sentence, and in non-medical terms, is: I can’t read. I can’t read music, or anything else. In the ophthalmologist’s office, I can read the individual letters on the eye chart down to the last line. But I cannot read words, and music gives me the same problem. I have struggled with this for years, have been to the best doctors, and no one has been able to help. I would be ever so happy and grateful if you could find the time to see me.

Sincerely yours,
Lilian Kallir

From The Mindful Way Through Anxiety–or, rather, from the book’s website–some audio mindfulness exercises.  (The promo material at the beginning of each ends quickly.)  More where these came from on the site.

Mindfulness of Breath

Mindfulness of Sounds

Mindfulness of Emotions and Physical Sensations

Mindful Observation of Self-Critical Thoughts

Beware of iffy-seeming stats:  An interview with Charles Seife, author of Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception.

The issue is that in medicine or any other field of study, it’s really easy to show that two things are linked in some manner…A number of years ago there was a study that showed the higher your credit card debt, the worse your health. The conclusion seemed to be “Don’t carry a balance on your credit card, otherwise you’ll get sick.” It’s probably just the opposite. People who are sick are running up medical bills, missing work or maybe have lost their jobs. It’s not that credit cards cause bad health. It’s that bad health causes unpaid bills on your credit card.

On my blog at Psychology Today, a brief interview with Trudy Goodman about the dawn of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in anticipation of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s UCLA appearance this Wednesday.

Full Catastrophe Living (pictured) is Kabat-Zinn’s big book of MBSR.  If you’re just curious and testing out mindfulness, you might try Wherever You Go, There You Are instead.  Short and sweet.

There’ve been only thousands years of monogamy, that is–since agriculture got underway–according to the newish book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. When people started farming, say the authors, they started thinking about things like ownership and where babies come from.  Monogamy followed–meaning that lifelong pairing doesn’t necessarily come naturally to us.

Here’s Dan Savage getting very excited about the thesis as he interviews author Christopher Ryan on his podcast [with the usual explicit language].  Not for everyone, but…if it’s for you, there’s more where that came from on Ryan’s Psychology Today blog .

A possibility for your on-deck reading pile:  Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach.  A favorite in the genre for some.  I could summarize, but I’ll radically accept the job done by Publishers Weekly and posted on Amazon:

Brach offers readers a rich compendium of stories and techniques designed to help people awaken from what she calls “the trance of unworthiness.”  The sense of self-hatred and fearful isolation that afflicts so many people in the West can be transformed with the steady application of a loving attention infused with the insights of the Buddhist tradition, according to Brach.