Yet More Questions My Clients Asked Me

11 Keys to a Happy Life

"My Life's Great, Yet Is That All There Is?"

Finding Moments of Happiness

What if You Could Be Happy All the Time? A thought experiment

Getting Less Sad

My Secrets for Improving Mood

My First Commandment: Be happy now

Yes, "Be happy now" sounds cliched or unrealistic, but I make the case in my Medium.com article today.

What Are You Looking Forward To? 29 things that could bring you out of the dump

Especially if you’re down in the dumps, you’d probably welcome something to pull you up. One thing that my clients have found helpful is rather simple: Just think of something you're looking forward to. Or if you can't think of anything, think of something you could do that you'd look forward to.

To illustrate and to trigger your thinking, my Psychology Today article today offers 29 possibilities.

Toward Contentment

There's something better than the pursuit of happiness.

To explain, some people could be happy, at least for a while, being high all day while being ministered by sycophants. But contentment is more encompassing, more permanent. and more worthwhile. 

How can you gain greater contentment. My Psychology Today article today offers thoughts.

My Ten Favorite Quotes on Happiness

Here is the link.

Could "Think Happy" "Really Work?

A client called me the day before yesterday. He was ebullient. He had previously lived with mainly three emotions: fear, anger, and sadness. But at the end of our previous session, he decided to try to be happy. My Psychology Today article today describes what happened.

In Search of Ecstasy: Bringing more peak moments into your life

Ecstasy is the pinnacle feeling. Perhaps the ideas I offer in my Psychology Today article today will help you foster more of those peak moments.

The Weather and You Making the most of it, psychologically and practically

Both psychologically and practically, weather affects us all, every day of our lives. Are you making the most of its good and minimizing the impact of its bad. My Psychology Today article today aims to help.

“What Are You Sad About?” How answering that question can help you get happier

During a session today, I asked a question I had never asked before: “What are you sad about?” The client raised a number of new issues: about a relationship, an ailment, even the meaning of it all.

I then asked a friend the same question, which also unearthed new and surprising concerns. I then asked myself the same question and it too was evocative.

So, what are you sad about? It may be easier to answer that question if it's posed within categories and with an example. I do that in my Psychology Today article today.

Becoming Happier

For most people, happiness is the holy grail, Of course, the question is how to get happier? The ideas in my Psychology Today article today may not sufficiently help clinical mental illness sufferers, but these suggestions should be of value to people with garden-variety malaise.

11 Low-Risk, High-Payoff Actions: Ideas for improving your relationships, work, and happiness

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers distilled versions of ideas that my clients have found particularly useful.

An Audacious Wish List for 2021

 

Dear Santa,

Forgive the graphic term, but 2020 pretty much sucked.

 

I’m not just talking about COVID with its shutdowns, lockdowns, and snotty masks — and that assumes you didn’t have to go on a ventilator.

 

 We also had a presidential campaign that should embarrass anyone—Were those two the best that America had to offer?

 

Then there was the racial roiling: If you are a liberal, you called it “unrest,” “protests” or “activism.”  If you aren’t liberal, you called it, “rioting,” “looting” and “burning down cities.” 

 

Plus, if you lived in the “land of dreams,” California, following years of drought and water restrictions, 2020 treated you to wildfires that turned even a health nut into a chain smoker.

 

Oh for a better 2021. Regression to the mean promises that, but Santa, I want to be much greedier:

 

 I want a vaccine that doesn’t knock people out for a day, which understandably makes them hesitate to come out for Round 2. Better still Santa, give me a one-dose vaccine, like the Johnson & Johnson one that’s in Phase III trials. Oh, and I want my vaccine to have no side effects, and oh, one that confers lifetime immunity.

 

And Santa, the zillions spent on a COVID vaccine should offer lessons for creating a vaccine against other scourges. Could you thus give our COVID nightmare the dreamy side effect of birthing a vaccine for AIDS, even cancer?

 

 And while I’m thinking ginormous:

 

Santa, I want an economy that comes back enough to restore jobs but one that isn't so robust that it encourages the over-materialistic lifestyle that cheapens people’s existence. Too many people focus on the Wise Men’s gift of gold, far fewer people on the frankincense and myrrh.

 

Santa, my next wish is very personal to me. I waste so much time every year keeping tax records and preparing my income tax returns. We need a tax system that replaces all that, not to mention the tax-avoidance shenanigans — Cayman Islands? What we need is a value-added tax. Santa, in case you're not up on taxation systems, a VAT is pretty much like a sales tax paid by consumers and manufacturers so it adds up to the same amount that the income tax yields. No tax return, no cheating, well, less cheating.

 

Santa, we also really need an election system that doesn’t require candidates to double-talk and press tawdry flesh for four years. No surprise, that deters the best people from running. Instead, elections should be just two weeks long, publicly funded, with a true debate — no biased moderators — and if one candidate rudely dominates (a particular presidential candidate rushes to mind), it’s there for all to see. The campaign would also include candidates’ voting record and platforms compiled by, say, Consumer Reports. 

 

And while we’re reinventing systems, education is ripe for that. The EduBlob — district, county, regional, state, and federal bureaucracies — each mandate a Manhattan phonebook of rules and regulations, some of which contradict each other. That means that a fortune in our tax dollars and educator efforts are wrested from where it matters — the classroom.

 

Speaking of the classroom, at the high school level at least, classroom lessons should be presented online by the world’s most transformative instructors, so that all students, from Harlem to Hollywood, can get the best. A live teacher would be in the classroom to answer questions, lead discussions and interactive activities, explain homework, and keep kids from dancing on their desk. I never danced on my desk but I think of how much time I spent chained to my school desk bored or befuddled. Santa, please save the next generation from that!

 

Dear reader, you may make fun of me, calling my wish list no more realistic than is Santa Claus, but seriously, we all need to dream, to aspire, to believe in something more hopeful than what we’ve experienced in 2020. Here’s to a Santa-Claus 2021.

I read this aloud on YouTube.

Savoring What You Can Control

Amid the pandemic and its economic fallout, it’s easy to feel out of control.  And our happiness is affected by how much control we have.

Fortunately, we have more control than we may realize. My Psychology Today article today offers example, which, in turn, could help you attain a bit more happiness, even in these trying times.

Aim for Easy: A counterpoint to our strive-hard society

Sure, there’s a time to go hard, for example, when competing in the Olympics. But perhaps surprisingly often, it's wise to aim for the easy. My Psychology Today article today offers easier options for approaches to activities in both your professional and personal life