Brain hiccups. We all get a case of them now and then. For some they are fleeting and all a person has to do is to take a deep breath, visualize their departure, and poof! They’re gone. Not so easy for the rest of us. If I counted up the moments I spent trying to...

If you were afraid to drive over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, as I am, would it help you to watch a friend do it first? New research suggests that watching someone else safely interact with a supposedly harmful object—like a spider, clown, small space, or ginormous bridge—can extinguish our conditioned fear responses and prevent them from resurfacing later on....

A good friend of mine recently considered applying for an executive position at her marketing firm, a step up the managerial ladder from her job. The position paid a higher salary but would require some late nights, weekend work, and would involve more of the administrative tedium that bored her to death. She procrastinated completing...

Good sleep can mean the difference between crazy and sane … between crying between meetings at work or lashing out at your husband over laundry and a semi-functional person who can fake it enough to keep her marriage and her job intact. It’s one of the members of my holy trinity of good mental health,...

Both 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 — what psychologists call “cognitive distortions”) so to be able to disarm and defeat them. This is one of the major precepts of cognitive behavioral therapy. Since Low’s...