Using Williams & Penman's book "Mindfulness: a practical guide" as a self-help resource (4th post) - second week's practice
29th December 2011
Last week I wrote about "Using Williams & Penman's book ... as a self-help resource (3rd post) - first week's practice". It's time now to move on to the second week's practice described in chapter six - "Keeping the body in mind". Read through this chapter (pp. 91 to 110). …
Encouraging recent research on social anxiety: being embarrassed can lead you to be judged more, not less, positively by others
24th December 2011
There is a steady river of emerging new research on social anxiety. So earlier this year there was the paper "Social phobia and subtypes in the National Comorbidity Survey-Adolescent Supplement: Prevalence, correlates, and comorbidity" with its finding that, in a representative sample of over 10,000 US adolescents aged 13 to …
Using Williams & Penman's book "Mindfulness: a practical guide" as a self-help resource (3rd post) - first week's practice
22nd December 2011
Time to roll up our sleeves and start turning Williams & Penman's book's "meditation recipes" into genuinely nourishing meals. I have already written a first blog post on why we have good reason to be optimistic about the benefits we can achieve with this kind of self-help venture. The second …
"Sleep well and live better: overcoming insomnia using CBT" - the links between sleep disturbance and depression (2nd post)
20th December 2011
I wrote a first post last month about a workshop I went to given by Professor Colin Espie - "Sleep well and live better: overcoming insomnia using CBT". I mentioned that he went through the sequence: What is insomnia? Why is it a big deal? Why is cognitive behaviour therapy …
Particularly if you're socially anxious, try to stay task-focused rather than self-focused
17th December 2011
(This & last week's social anxiety blog posts are available as a PDF file or a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it) "Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point" C. …
Using Williams & Penman's book "Mindfulness: a practical guide" as a self-help resource (2nd post) - getting ready
15th December 2011
I wrote a week ago about using Mark Williams & Danny Penman's excellent book "Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world" as a self-help training in mindfulness practice. In today's post I want to look more practically at getting started with this process. Obviously you have …
An intriguing and encouraging development in therapeutic writing
14th December 2011
(This blog post is available both as a PDF file and as a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it) "You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness." Jonathan Safran Foer "No man was ever wise by chance." Lucius …
Fear of blushing is more a problem of hyperawareness than of facial temperature
10th December 2011
(This & next week's social anxiety blog posts are available as a PDF file or a Word doc - you may need to 'save' the latter before you can open it) "At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and …
Using Williams & Penman's book "Mindfulness: a practical guide" as a self-help resource (1st post) - introduction
8th December 2011
This is the first in a series of intended posts about using Mark Williams & Danny Penman's excellent recent book "Mindfulness: a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world" as a self-help training in mindfulness practice. My hope is that these blog posts will provide some back-up resources …
Recent research: articles from November journals
5th December 2011
I read a lot of research. When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 16,900 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …