Posts tagged with 'meaning'
Therapeutic writing & speaking: inspiration from values (specific instructions)
18th December 2010
See the two earlier blog posts - "Therapeutic writing & speaking: inspiration from values (background information)" and "Therapeutic writing & speaking: inspiration from values (how-to-do-it)" for fuller details of these self-affirmation, self-transcendence approaches. This "instructions" post is downloadable as a Word doc. introduction: Affirming key personal values and life areas …
Therapeutic writing & speaking: inspiration from values (how to do it)
12th December 2010
I wrote yesterday about "Therapeutic writing & speaking: inspiration from values (background information)". Today's post looks more at how-to-do-it details. Self-affirmation research describes a number of effective ways to reduce stress, clarify thinking, and boost effectiveness. If the affirmation exercise is being done in response to a particular stress or …
Therapeutic writing & speaking: inspiration from values (background information)
11th December 2010
Writing (or speaking) about our values or areas of our lives that are of particular personal importance can help us feel less threatened by stresses and more able to see situations clearly. There are many research studies demonstrating this. For example writing about personal values has been shown to reduce …
The effects of leaders on organizations: a 'transformational', inspirational-caring style looks particularly effective
6th December 2010
One of the joys of writing this blog is the way it encourages me to think more deeply about issues that matter to me. Another is the opportunity it provides to chew over interesting new research studies. A couple of recent papers that caught my eye were Vianello et al's …
Recent research: six studies on mindfulness, values & meaning
27th May 2010
Here are half a dozen recent research studies on mindfulness, values & meaning - fuller details, links and abstracts for all studies are listed further down this page. Hofmann and colleagues' meta-analysis on "The effect of mindfulness-based therapy on anxiety and depression" found encouraging effect sizes for mindfulness training and …
Recent research: articles from March journals
1st April 2010
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 14,100 abstracts. Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas …
Berlin weekend: approaches to happiness
12th December 2009
Berlin, Saturday morning. We flew in from Edinburgh pretty early yesterday. Direct flight. Easy. Guilt over air travel a little allayed by buying carbon offsets through ClimateCare. We're staying in a Miniloft, one of the really nice set of self-catering apartments designed by Matthew Griffin & Brita Jurgens, an architect …
Recent research: two studies on panic, two on attention training for anxiety disorders, and three on the effects of child abuse
19th November 2009
Here are seven recent papers on panic, attention training, and the effects of childhood sexual abuse (all details & abstracts to these studies are listed further down this blog post). Pfaltz & colleagues report on a novel ambulatory respiratory monitoring system that seems to demonstrate that panic sufferers are not …
Assessing and encouraging enjoyable activities
25th October 2009
What we've seen in our work is that most people don't give themselves permission to live until they've been given a terminal diagnosis. Stephen Levine I came across an interesting research study recently: Pressman, S. D., K. A. Matthews, et al. (2009). "Association of Enjoyable Leisure Activities With Psychological and …
Autogenic training: seventh session
12th October 2009
Here are handouts and recordings for the seventh Autogenic Training session. The initial "Autogenic relaxation training" page gives introductory details of this method. In the face-to-face trainings that I run, I would typically start the two hour class by practising last time's Autogenic Training exercise together - in this case …