Health

On November 11, 2018, I had the privilege of interviewing Ed Diener about well-being and public policy. Dr. Diener is a leading researcher on happiness, the correlates of well-being, and well-being measurement.

Wendy Toh was one of my favorite bosses. She did not assume that I could read her mind about what was important to her. Wendy taught me to have Big Rocks conversations as a way to negotiate priorities. Here’s how one of these discussions might go.

Let’s take a moment to look at the ownership of your time. Some of it is yours. If you are employed, some of it belongs to your employer. But how much?

How I learned about the psycho-social costs of chronic degenerative disease and what I decided to do about it: the genesis of the HEART initiative.

Trees can teach us to embrace change. They can also teach us that with change we needn’t discard aspects of our past. We can act in ways that allow people, feelings, and experiences to fill us up and contribute to life and development of well-being. We can do this without trying to hold onto them forever and without expecting them to be a certain way.

Back in March, Dr. Attila Oláh invited people to attend the 9th European Conference on Positive Psychology in Budapest. The conference happened in late June. Here is a report on conference happenings.

Continuing the report on the IPEN conference started on July 13, I invite you to learn about Angela Duckworth’s Character Lab Playbooks, about research on the behavior changes associated with meditation, and more.

The practice of forgiveness has been found to improve health outcomes because it reduces physiological responses to stress. Forgiveness can serve as a powerful, self-administered salve. If one does not forgive, it is like handing the transgressor the skeleton key to the door of one’s life. Forgiveness might not prevent the pain of the past, but it can reduce suffering in the future.

HERO organizations are financially healthy and stable. Because the psychosocial capital exists, they are better equipped to deal with the volatile economic times that are our everyday reality.

On May 6-7, 2018, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) hosted a ground-breaking Summit on Happiness Science in Health Care: Infusing Positive Psychology into Medicine and Health Care. Participants all recognize the need to connect positive psychology and health care.

Therapist self-care represents a unique application of the principles of positive psychology. Self-care that supports and sustains clinicians’ well-being through positive evidence-based strategies has immense potential not only for the therapists’ wellness, but also for the benefit of those they serve.

Dan Tomasulo is a master storyteller with a purpose. After reading this book, you’ll face the world a little bit differently.

In sports and other major league efforts, positive psychology can help all of us deal with an inescapable reality: Bad situations happen. Those that can rise above bad situations are able to perform not by getting rid of bad feelings, but by doing what they do in the presence of negative thoughts and feelings without letting them get in the way.

Interested in positive psychology? Join us for the 9th European Conference on Positive Psychology (ECPP) and preconference meetings. The conference will take place in Budapest, Hungary, from June 26 through June 30. Luminaries in the field will explore the conference theme, “Positive psychology for a flourishing Europe in times of transition.”

If you or someone you know is going through any kind of major challenge during this holiday season you might want to read these five easy actions to help reduce holiday stress. Better yet, share this post with your friends and family and then figure out something simple that you can do together to make the holidays meaningful.

A heartwarming, delightful, and profound new HBO documentary, If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast, highlights amazing people living and thriving into their 90s and 100s!

Including psychological well-being in a company’s health promotion effort can take you from basic wellness to greater overall well-being. It helps us do more, and do it better.

A few months ago I explored the relationship between health outcomes and explanatory style in 200 executives, including 119 men and 81 women from the main companies in Peru. I divided the executives into two groups based on the Seligman’s Attributional Style Questionnaire: those with predominately optimistic explanatory styles and those with predominately pessimistic explanatory styles. Then I looked at the way their explanatory styles related to two variables of health.

Positive Psychology News (PPND) published its first article, What is Positive Psychology? by Senia Maymin on January 1, 2007. In the 10 years since then, PPND has published more than 1350 articles by nearly 150 different authors. That is a lot of points of view on bringing positive psychology to work in many different life circumstances.