Category
How the Mind Works
Explanations of how the mind interprets experience: beliefs, emotions, behaviour, and the science behind them.
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Skewed Thinking
Thinking goes off track in a small number of predictable ways. Catastrophizing, mind reading, discounting the positive. Naming the pattern is most of the…
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What Your Brain Is Optimized For
Your brain was built to keep you alive, not to make you happy. Criticism sticks, praise slides off, and rest feels unearned. That is…
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Why Anxiety Feeds on Itself
Sometimes the alarm will not turn off because the thing setting off the alarm is the alarm itself. How a normal stress response turns…
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Nothing Is Broken
Anxiety is not evidence of a defect. It is evidence of a system running correctly on inaccurate information, and information can be corrected. Why…
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The Three Themes: Trust, Value, and Acceptance
Every difficult emotion, however complicated it feels, comes back to trust, value, or acceptance. Fear points to a lack of trust, shame to a…
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What Your Emotions Are Telling You
Your emotions are a readout of where your well-being currently stands. A difficult one is not a malfunction, it is a signal, and the…
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Feelings and Emotions Are Not the Same Thing
A feeling is a body sensation. An emotion is that sensation with a meaning attached. Two people with the same racing heartbeat can be…
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Compassion
Compassion is not in the 4-Steps™ because kindness is pleasant. It is there because awareness without kindness just gives your inner critic better material.…
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Self-Awareness
There is a part of you that can watch you think, feel, and react. It has been there your whole life. Knowing it is…
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The Science of Mindfulness
What the research actually supports about mindfulness, compassion, and belief change, why the order of the four skills is grounded in evidence, and where…
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How Our Brain Works
Your brain takes in your experience, matches it against everything you have lived through, and builds beliefs that shape how you feel and what…
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It All Starts With Being Mindful
Mindfulness is not meditation, and it is not about achieving a quiet mind. It is the skill of knowing what is actually happening around…
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Benefits of Mindfulness
Mindfulness gets credited with almost everything. Here is what awareness actually delivers on its own, what needs the other three steps, and what the…
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What Causes Our Emotions?
Emotions are not random and they do not arrive from outside us. They come from what we believe is happening. Here is how that…
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Emotions Trigger Actions / Re-actions
Every behavior we produce is aimed at feeling better or not feeling worse. Understanding that chain, from belief to emotion to action, is what…
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Identify Negative Thinking
Our thinking goes off track in predictable ways. Here are the common patterns, grouped by what they do, and what actually works once you…