Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D.

There's a funny cartoon out there of some cows in a pasture eating grass. One cow's head is lifted up with a sense of horror on his face and the caption reads, "Hey wait a minute! This is grass! We've been eating grass!"

Have you ever been sitting...

Why are bad habits so hard to break? What if the bumper sticker "Just Say No!" actually works against us? Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, may just have the answer.

If you have 10 minutes or so, watch the 60 Minutes video...

Before Stephen March wrote his thoughts in The Atlantic that Facebook was making us lonelier, there were several people arguing both sides for years. It's intriguing to consider how technology is changing how we relate to one another as it is happening.

We're living in a time of...

I see it every day. We all hold grudges against other people who we feel have hurt or offended us in some way or another. We even hold these grudges for people who aren't even alive anymore. We do this with the false idea that somehow we are making them...

Most of us have some kind of habit in our lives that we're either trying to change or want to change. Throughout the days of our lives, most of us have experienced moments of clarity that for a moment help us break free from these habitual cycles and also give...

While there may be many books out there on parenting, there really isn't any definitive guide because every baby and child is unique and all parents come with unique baggage from childhood and genetics. Becoming a parent is wonderful for stirring up all of those old memories and connections from...

It's important to understand that making changes in life isn't just about sheer willpower. For most of our lives, we're on autopilot and our brain is making rapid decisions for us. It references our history, mood and environment to come up with the most adaptive response. However, when we're trying...

Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Life is routine and routine is resistance to wonder." As we get older this statement may seem to ring true more often, but it doesn't have to be this way.

With children, research has shown that play has a significant impact on...

It's no secret that there's more stress now than there ever has been. Maybe it's a result of having more things than ever to pay attention to, or perhaps it's the increasingly panicked way the news comes at us, or maybe it's that people are feeling more alone today than...

Prior to becoming a psychologist, I was in the corporate world leading teams of people and becoming intimate, maybe too intimate, with being overwhelmed and feeling stress at work. In the many years that I've been working with people in the field of mindulness and psychotherapy, it appears that I'm...

Over the course of thousands and thousands of years our brains have become wired toward creating, fixing, solving, and basically just doing. It's been a great benefit; we have roofs over our heads, cars to drive, chairs to sit on and even this technology to connect around. But when it...

"A man lies dying in a hospital bed. He has spent his entire life building for the future, doing what needed to be done to amass wealth and raise his status to a level he thought worthy. Now he has reached the end of his days and finds himself filled...

If you were sitting in a room and just outside you heard the waves of the ocean on one side and a jack hammer on the left side, assuming the decibel level was the same, which would your brain be drawn to?

If you guessed the jack hammer, you're right....

Addictive behaviors are universal. According to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, abuse of alcohol and illicit drugs costs the United States upwards of $400 billion annually.

In addition to addictive behaviors potentially having a strong genetic link, the increasing stress in our culture makes...

Here's what I'm thinking about for 2012:

"May we all recognize in this New Year that the moments of our lives are rare and precious. Open to them, bask in them, we are alive."

The reality is we often hold things that are rare in our world to be precious....

In this past year I've become acutely aware of the mounting stress that has been rising in our work culture. More than ever we've become a round-the-clock operation. Now, in a slumping economy, we are hounded with external pressures, overwhelmed with information overload, asked to deliver more with less, work...

It's no secret that for a long time now there's been an increasing pressure from parents to push kids in the direction of achievement. In the past if your kid got into Stanford, Harvard, or any of the top schools, you could rest and pat yourself on the back for...

Whether it's sadness, fear, shame, guilt or anger, sometimes when these are here, all we want to do is be somewhere else and it seems like it's going to last forever. Here's one practice to consider in regaining control of your mind during the difficult moments in life.

Try this...

A couple decades ago, if you told people you were going to a yoga class, you may have looked into a face of confusion or judgment where the other person was thinking you were part of some new age movement. Now in the most conservative town, men and women throw...

The burgeoning field of mindfulness, neuroscience and psychotherapy just never gets old to me. I am on a panel with Ron Siegel, PsyD, author of "The Mindfulness Solution," and Ruth Buczynski, Ph.D., president of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) talking about a...