I spent my adolescence and teenage years obsessing about this question: Am I depressed or just deep?  

"Time Magazine" just published the results of a landmark survey gauging where America stands on the battle of the sexes. The results show that women are much more powerful than they were forty years ago. In the 60s, one-third of all workers were woman. Now half are. Almost forty...

Until recently, "no" was a dirty word to me. As a stage-four people-pleaser, my vocabulary was rich with affirmatives: "yeah," "sure," "okay," "absolutely," "no problem." But my mouth just couldn't seem to form the consonant-vowel combination required to say "no," even when "yes" was simply impossible due to time conflicts...

Fears are like annoying relatives. You can't avoid them forever, and ignoring them won't make them go away. Come Thanksgiving, they'll plop down right next to you and ask to borrow your fork. So you'd better figure out how to confront the little devils before they eat your dessert too....

There's a story ... of a lovely lady ... who meets her prince charming and the two of them with their six combined children live happily ever after.

NOT!

Having been Cindy Brady myself--if you changed my stepsister into a boy and fused my twin sister and I...

You hear about peer pressure when you are in the sixth grade, but no one talks about it once you've graduated from college, have a job, and especially once you're mature enough to find a mate and make babies.

But the kind of folks you hang with influence you more...

Resilience.

That's what I'm after.

To be able to find my balance after hitting a pot hole. To wake up with hope after enduring a series of frustrations. To look beyond the circumstances of my life in order to enjoy the moment.

Yes. I want to become more resilient....

I dance the Macarena whenever I come across an article that argues against healthy living. I cautioned you against too much positive thinking a few days ago. I laughed while reading research about dark chocolate firing up the happy brain. And I high fived the doctors who warn folks...

Back in July, John Cloud wrote a piece for "Time" Magazine called "Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking." In the article, Cloud lays out the research why "cognitive restructuring," the process of retraining your thoughts--of changing self-defeating attitudes to constructive ones--simply doesn't work.

Actually, it's worse than that....

Even as I love the autumn season, it is full of anxiety for me.

I start to mourn the ending of summer when I hear the cicadas grow louder the last two weeks of August and when I feel the crispness in the air at that time, which brings...

Most of us circle a few days of the calendar year that we know will be difficult to get through: the anniversary of a death, traumatic event, or even happy occasion. These dates are charged with emotion. September 11th falls under that category for most of us, and especially those...

I was recently invited by Caren Osten Gerszberg and Leah Odze Epstein who write and compile the fun blog, "Drinking Diaries" to contribute my two-cents on where I am with the whole drinking thing. Check out the other interesting pieces at www.drinkingdiaries.com.

It's been 20 years since I...

Larry Drain of the Hopeworks Community blog wrote an excellent post on three things we can do about our moods: prevention, coping, learning. He writes "Moods are processes--not event. They have a coming and a going." Like mindfulness specialist Elisha Goldstein, he reminds us of our mood's...

I've been "mastering" my perfectionism problem this summer, as contradictory as that statement sounds.

I joined a Masters swimming program knowing full well that I would be placed anywhere from the slow lane to the medium lane ... that is, at least two lanes from the fast lane. I am...

One of my depression busters is to "become the expert." 

In June of this year, Joshua Wolf Shenk published the fascinating essay "What Makes Us Happy?" in "The Atlantic."

It was riveting.

Joshua spent about a month in the file room of the Harvard Study of Adult Development hoping to learn the secret of happiness. The project...

It's official. Depression is real among kids as young as three.

In a study lead by Dr. Joan Luby, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis, researchers found that preschoolers with depression had a 4 times greater likelihood of major depressive disorder one or two years later than...

At Eric's 40th birthday party, just as he was blowing out the candles on his cake, one of my friends asked, "What do you think he's wishing?"

I blurted out, "That every night be trash night."

She howled. She knows the history of trash night in our home....

A...

Fresh Living blogger Holly Lebowitz Rossi recently wrote a helpful post on how to get past cold feet or any second-guessing for that matter. She writes:

I have a theory about why moving inherently involves a cold-feet stage. Here it is--moving is a zillion tiny decisions all crammed inside...

Thanks to James Bishop's Optimism Software, I've become meticulous about my sleep hygiene this summer. I go to bed every night between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m., and I wake up (many times begrudgingly) at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. Eight hours I get. No more and no less. I sleep...