Posts tagged as:

Psychology

To Vent or Not To Vent

by Stephen Mills May 17, 2010
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We all know that venting, letting off some steam and then moving on, helps us right? Venting anger is supposed to be cathartic. Punching a pillow, yelling at no one in particular, banging your damn it doll, etc. as a way to vent anger or frustration and “get it out of your system” in a supposedly harmless way.

Actually all of that is false. Decades of research have repeatedly shown that venting does not work. Venting increases aggressive feelings instead of decreasing them.

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Put Down Those Rocks

by Stephen Mills April 14, 2010
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A metaphor that really helps me is that of picking up and putting down rocks. I don’t know where I first heard this, but it really helps when I visualize something physical like a rock. It makes the letting go seem real; you are putting down a rock and your load instantly seems lighter.

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The Science of Fear – Part II

by Stephen Mills January 13, 2010
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Most of our exposure to dangers or risk in the media leaves out a crucially important factor. What is the likelihood of it actually happening to you? If you are told taking a new kind of birth control increases your risk of breast cancer by 20% compared to an existing type, that may sound bad but you have learned nothing useful.

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The Science of Fear – Part I

by Stephen Mills January 10, 2010
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Fear is an important emotion that had extremely important survival value in the world in which our brains developed. Much of that value is now being misdirected. The emotional makeup of fear is now a big part of what leads to our miscalculation of risk. Further, those with economic or political value to be gained, use the emotion of fear to influence us. It’s easy to motivate people by scaring them. So to truly understand and react to risk in a reasonable manner, we must approach it in a cold and calculating way.

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Unconscious Decision Making

by Stephen Mills January 5, 2010
Light Bulb Brain

One of the most amazing and at the same time unsettling ideas emerging from research in the neurological and psychological sciences in recent decades, is the power and the pervasive nature of automatic unconscious (or nonconscious) thinking. It’s amazing because we have an incredible thinking and problem solving machine operating beneath the conscious level of our awareness. It’s unsettling because it is becoming apparent that some, and probably many, of our decisions are made by unconscious processing before we become consciously aware of them.

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