My absolute favorite essay on depression is a piece Kay Redfield Jamison wrote for NPR’s “This I Believe” collection of testimonies. It’s about learning to love our jagged edges. I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense...
David Burns, bestselling author of Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, and Abraham Low, founder of Recovery, Inc., teach techniques to analyze negative thoughts or identify distorted thinking so that we can be more aware of them and to disarm them by teasing apart truth and fiction, attaching logic to the misguided stories we weave about ourselves. Since Low’s language...
I have battled insomnia off and on for the last three years. At first I tried sleep medication (Lunesta and a few others) but they made me more depressed and anxious, so I have experimented with all kinds of natural remedies, many of them suggestions from fellow friends with sleep problems. Here are a few of them. ...
Winston Churchill once said, “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” Giving feels good. We’ve all experienced that high from doing something good: donating our used books to the library, feeding the homeless at the soup kitchen, walking for AIDS or another cause, calling or visiting...
People with Season Affective Disorder (SAD) or the clinical version of the winter blues aren’t the only ones who struggle with the shorter days, colder weather, and the general blah of the winter season. Less sunlight can affect our circadian rhythm, the body’s biological clock that governs certain brain wave activity and hormone production. If...
I am a writer and chaplain trying to live a simple life in Annapolis, Maryland.