Habits

Have you ever noticed how food influences mood? What should you eat to be alert and persuasive for the big presentation? Or to be a divine conversationalist for the cocktail party? What, then, is the optimal brain food for good moods? Here are the four golden rules…

Nearly all of us have had the sudden awareness that while we have been driving along, sometimes for many miles, we have not been paying attention. How did I get…

If you have not read it, I highly recommend Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis. One of Haidt’s metaphors, more thoroughly explained in the book, is the very accessible image of…

Usually, the difficulty resides not in understanding why we should exercise, but in finding and maintaining the motivation to get it done. If you need extra help committing to an exercise routine, here are my top 10 recommendations, based on positive psychology research, to help you overcome the challenge.

Last week, I had the extraordinary privilege of hearing J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter mega-series, deliver an electrifying commencement speech at Harvard University to a sold-out, standing room only audience of young and adult alike. Although I knew she’d be entertaining, I had no idea how profound Rowling’s talk would be, nor how tightly entwined her speech would be with the themes and message of Positive Psychology.

In education there are a number of cookbooks. They serve the same purpose as kitchen cookbooks (attempting to guarantee a consistent outcome) and are bound by the same limitations. However, in an education system under fire, cookbook education can sometimes rightly be seen by administrators as the most easily defensible program a system can take.

On the outside, busy seems to rhyme with happy. Busy people seem successful, needed and important. Busyness is, after all, serious business. Yet on the inside, busy is often a cousin of misery. We make it through the day, run to soccer practice, shorten our night’s sleep, survive through the week, and finish off what is left on our to-do list over the weekend. It is customary to describe our workload with words like crazy and expressions like “no time to breathe.”

I love to reminisce. When I get together with friends or family we tell the same stories again and again. Like the time we stared death in the face in…

I was blessed to have the opportunity to attend a two-day seminar on “Caring in Education” led by Nel Noddings, professor emeritus from Stanford University. I had known of her…

It was 1976. I was in the fifth grade. The fifty-yard dash record for Lake Bluff Elementary School in Shorewood, Wisconsin was set in the mid 1950s. I had a…

“How do you propose we share positive psychology with strangers?” a participant at one of my recent seminars asked. The question took me by surprise, but in a flash, I answered intuitively,…

They weren’t PhD’s. They didn’t have millions in NIH grants, or access to well-oiled research and development labs. In fact, neither Augusto nor Michaela Odone had even a basic background…

I’ve been a bit of a grump today.  Not a bad, grump.  Just some tacky, negative comments.  I said as I started out this morning that I was feeling that way,…

Last summer, the journal Insulin published What people with diabetes want their caregivers to know: Development of the TCOYD patient concensus statement” based on the results of a workshop I…

“Raindrops on roses and Whiskers on kittens Bright copper kettles and Warm woolen mittens” Julie Andrews sang about them. Oprah has them. And so I now want to do a…

My husband and I took my godmother’s new dog, a 10 month old schipperke, for a long walk across Duke East Campus, as far as the statue of Sower. What…

Florida State University researcher K. Anders Ericsson is best known for his work as the expert on expertise, studying top performers in fields as diverse as medicine, athletics, chess and…

I love peanuts. I like them salted or unsalted. I like them sweet or savory. You can put them in my dinner or in my dessert. I never met a…

In the spirit of the Oscars, I nominate Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want for best single book about positive…