"Jane Adams PhD was a founding editor of the Seattle Weekly. Among her twelve books is Seattle Green, a novel . She is a contributing editor at Psychology Today, and coaches parents of adult children."
How we consider what risks to take is processed in our brains as well as our psychology and lived experience. We like to think we assess risks rationally, but our fears and desires play a bigger role in decision-making.
Despite my attempts to avoid it, news seeps in from the ozone layer, which is a kind of mental media that tells me what people are doing, feeling and thinking about.
Doggerel inspired by a grave in Ireland whose tombstone reads "Tell Me the News", which, being a lifelong news junkie, I always thought I'd like mine to read too.
We know more about herd immunity in these pandemic days, but as the nation struggles with how or whether to reopen its schools, the notion of inducing it by deliberately exposing children to the corona virus is trending on social media.
The head-spinning change that seems to characterize our daily existence induces a kind of mental and emotional vertigo that imposes its own kind of stress on our systems: unable to respond in the usual ways, fight or flight, we can only try to stand upright in the moment. Welcome to Present Shock.
A study published in the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education investigated how recent graduates’ experiences in what the authors called “ideological bubbles” consisted of few meaningful, effective efforts that prepared them for the ideological divides they faced after graduation.
Despair is sometimes difficult to distinguish from all those other sad words that begin with a D like depression, despondency and desolation. It’s all of these and none of these, omnipresent in this doubly difficult time that stresses the physical, mental and emotional health of our institutions as well as our individual selves to their limits.
I was no Gael Green, the glamorous NYM food critic, but I’d been eating solid food for over 30 years, and I owned a set of escargot plates as well as a mortar and pestle, so I bellied up to the task of dining around town on an expense account.
