U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin gave a keynote speech at the Exercise is Medicine™ conference. In charge of 6500 uniformed health officers, Dr. Benjamin is an advocate for prevention in health care, and told the audience “People need our help!”

What highly competent and incompetent students share is this: both miscalibrate the perception of their own and of others’ performance. The difference is that competent students believe their peers have done only slightly better than they have, and so they work to apply success strategies. Incompetent students believe they have done significantly better than their peers and therefore do not work harder. How’s that for a counter-intuitive finding?

“Hands up anyone who studied emotional mountaineering at school?” was Dr Chris Johnstone’s opening question. Had we been taught how to overcome low, negative or otherwise troublesome emotions? Not a single hand went up. Nevertheless said Chris, it is possible to learn how to become more resilient and to find your power. (Second in the series about the 5^th Annual Bristol Happiness Lecture, subject, Positive Psychology Responses to Depression).

Keynote speaker, Miriam Akhtar, described the Positive Emotion Kit (PE Kit) approach to countering depression. To boost mood naturally and experience more positive than negative emotion, people can form personal PE kits by selecting interventions from five essential evidence-based categories.

On an apparently meaningless bus drive home, Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany: “I am not as happy as I could be.” She also realized that the problem might not be the conditions of her life, per se, but with how she lived and perceived it. She wondered if she could change her life without actually changing her life, and made a year-long commitment to work on improving her happiness.

Dear Student,
Don’t worry when people tell you it will be hard to find a job. What the doom-and-gloom folks don’t understand is that they have something as contagious as the H1N1 virus– anxiety. Like the flu, they are probably “carriers” without even realizing it. You can innoculate yourself.

“The future is looking a whole lot better”
It was the reference to that classic film “Back to the Future” in the title of this new piece of research on future thinking that first caught my …

Earlier this month, I attended the Evolution of Psychotherapy. Billed as the world’s largest psychotherapy conference, it is held every 4-5 years and attracts over 6,000 people. I first attended the Evolution conference …

Are you looking for a way to personalize your well-being by adding and subtracting the research-based, positive psychology way? Don’t miss The Happiness Equation: 100 Factors That Can Add To or Subtract From Your Happiness, …

Your Holiday Strengths
Some people anticipate the holidays with excitement and enthusiasm. Some find it can be a stressful time with obligations to fulfil and busy schedules to juggle. Wherever you are along this continuum, …