Helping You Live The Life You Deserve

1 in 4 Canadians has depression significant enough to warrant treatment at some point in their life. (www.health.gov.on.ca/en/public/publication/mental/depression aspx) Yes, 25% of Canadians struggle with depression. It’s that significant of an issue. As a matter of fact, according to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Take a moment to...

For those of you looking to get a little more help from the people in your life, I’ve got a study for you! Expressing gratitude, simply in the form of saying, “thank you” can motivate people to help you, even after they have already lent you a hand. In a study by Grant and Gino...

Have you been accused of being cold-hearted? Maybe, you’re struggling to empathize with someone’s situation? Let’s assume you’ve come to the realization that it’s meaningful to be able to empathize with other people’s situations. What’s the best way to do it? Put yourself in their shoes. Zhou et.al. (2017), in the journal, Psychological Science, tested...

If you are guessing, I’ll start with a hint.  One’s for the mind and the other is for the body. The answer… for the body, it is aerobic exercise and for the mind, it’s meditation.  And a quick qualifier here, when it comes to exercise, it doesn’t have to be aerobic. There are numerous studies...

You’ve just had an upsetting experience.  You know that you need to shake it off and not drown in it. How do you reset emotionally and turn the page? According to research in the journal, Cognition and Emotion (Bernstein and McNally, 2016), 30 minutes of moderate exercise should do the trick. To test this theory,...

Do you need to be creative for work?  Is there a problem to solve at home?  Or are you just bored? If you need more creativity in your life, a study completed in the journal, Thinking and Reasoning, can point you in the right direction (Salvi et al., 2016). Researchers had study participants complete puzzles...

As a parent, you want your child to have every advantage in life.  And one of the biggest fears is that your child won’t meet important developmental milestones in areas such as socialization, learning and communication. “Infant Start” is the name of a new behavioural therapy, carried out largely by parents, that is showing excellent...

For those of you really short on time, the answer is ….. labelling anxiety! But hopefully, you’ll hang tough for the next minute or so and read on! A study in the journal, Psychological Science (Kircanski et. al., 2012) found that simply putting anxious feelings into words can help to reduce anxiety. And what was...

I suspect after a difficult altercation with someone and a few expletives muttered under your breath, you’ve probably pondered this very question. And the answer is …. Possibly! Helper and Albanacin (2013), in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have hypothesized that people may be wired to inherently like or dislike things, even if...

Let your imagination run wild here. We used to get away with a lot of things in psychology in the 1970’s that we could never get away with now. What could this technique possibly be called? The What-The-Hell Effect. Well, to be fair, it is also known as counterregulatory eating in the area of overeating...

Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to consider new points of view once your mind is made up? It is likely the Confirmation Bias at work. According to this theory, people tend to search for information that supports their point of view and ignore information that doesn’t fit. Let’s take a look...

It’s not uncommon for people to be uncomfortable in social settings; especially when there’s a lack of familiarity with people in the group. One simple way to boost your confidence is to use the “acceptance prophecy”. What is that? It means that when you meet someone new, if you hold the belief that you are...

Change can be hard.  It is easy to get complacent in life or simply become “stuck”. To make lasting change, it is important to figure out what you want and why you want it.  The “why” is the hard part, as it needs to be meaningful and impactful to you. A study in the Proceedings...

No cutting edge stuff here.  No new innovations.   It’s simple!  Just take 1 week off from social media (and yes, we get the fun irony that we are posting this on social media!). Researchers at the Happiness Research Institute tested 1095 regular Facebook users. They asked half of the group to stop using Facebook for...

Any guesses here?!?! It’s gratitude. Researchers (Dickens and Desteno, 2016) in the journal, Emotion, found that being grateful helps to increase self-confidence and reduce impulsive behaviour. Participants in this study were asked to use daily gratitude boosters over the course of 3 weeks and to record their emotional states. After 3 weeks, people were asked...

I believe there is. I don’t think there are any panaceas when it comes to treating mental health but it appears that Probiotics may be a cog in the wheel when it comes to treating depression. Yes, Probiotics.  The stuff you get when you eat yogurt (although you probably can’t eat enough yogurt to get...

Hmmm.. Should you go with the seemingly logical answer or take the contrarian point of view? The answer…  they are both equally as bad for your long-term health. Those little stressors in life that should be just a minor nuisance in life can accumulate to have a significant negative impact on your mental health. Aldwin...

Well, the answer to this one may not be too big of a surprise if you are a fan of the Big Bang … or you happen to be over 40 years old. The answer is BOREDOM! For fans of the Big Bang Theory, Sheldon once worked briefly as a waiter (a task he considered...

Let’s start with a few guesses. Deep breathing? Relaxing self-talk? Exercise? All of these are helpful but I’m looking for “interesting” here. The answer is …. an intense attentional training task. Cohen et. al., (2015), in the journal, Neurolmage, found that a demanding attentional task, such as computer training, can help to reduce feelings of...

This sounds like an easy question.  Surely, you know what makes you happy, right? Let’s assume you do.  How do you go about setting goals to achieve it? Rudd et al (2014), in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, explored this question over the course of six separate experiments and came out with an interesting...

Is it Nature? Nurture? A combination of both?  And if it’s both, is one a greater factor than the other? A recent study in the journal Nature Genetics (Poldesman et al. 2015) examined over 14.5 million pairs of twins to help answer this very important question.  To access this many people,  the researchers reviewed almost...

(Insert Image Here) The title of this article probably sounds a bit like click-bait. But the social media giant and its massive user base provided a very unique opportunity for researchers a few years ago. In 2012, Facebook, while working with researchers from Cornell University and the University of California, manipulated the news feed of...

Any guesses? Enjoyable activities? Time with friends? A vacation? Nope. It’s expectations. Researchers at University College London (Rutledge et al., 2014) have been working on a mathematical formula to predict moment-by-moment happiness (yes, psychology is going mathematical!) Here’s the formula: (copy and paste from the original article – “The HappinessEquation: It Can Predicat How Good...

Maybe you are a student who needs to study for a test?  Or you have licensing requirements to meet for work?  Time is short and you need to pay attention.  This one’s for you! Kuo et al. (2018), in the journal, Frontiers in Psychology, found that simply learning outside in nature can double your attention...

So, you’ve screwed up and want to make things right! Or perhaps, you didn’t screw up, but are sensitive enough to want to preserve someone’s feelings. This will likely take more than a simple “sorry”. According to research, there’s work to be done here. A study in the journal, Negotiation and Conflict Management Research (Lewicki...

Feeling overwhelmed?  Just relax and chill for a long period of time, right? That might not be the best idea. A study by Teychenne et al. (2015), in the journal BNC Public Health. shows that low energy activities like watching TV, sitting in front of a computer, playing video games, etc. can actually increase anxiety....

What Is Worse For Your Physical HealthSmoking or Mental Health Problems? Home >> Blog >> Catagory >> Whats Worse Smoking or Mental Health Problems? Smoking…. there aren’t many things you could do, which would cause you to be more vilified than smoking. I mean, it pretty much comes with a skull and crossbones on the...

Have you ever had that experience where everything in life seems to be going as planned, yet you simply aren’t that happy? You are plugging along, usually pressed for time, going to work, raising kids, spending time with family, paying bills and it just feels like the same… stuff, different day.

Seasons change. Fashions change. Technologies change. Looks change. Laws change. Songs are written about change. So, if change is so common, why is it so hard to do? And why is it so hard to change something that we want to change?

Why Do We Worry? Good question. One could view worry as a complete waste of time. Put another way, whether you worry or you don’t worry, whatever happens is going to happen, so why bother, right? Wrong? If it were only that simple!

Life has never been busier. With advances in technology, life was supposed to get easier, less stressful and provide more free time. Not so much! For many people, a lack of time is a primary complaint as we lead busy, hectic lives that commonly involve going to work or school, raising kids, paying bills, running a household and so on.

I was sitting in my office and it was 8:10pm. I had just completed a free presentation earlier in the evening and I was ready to pick up my daughter at gymnastics at 8:30pm. My administrative assistant knocked on my door and asked if I would take a call. She explained that it was a client who had attended my presentation earlier in the evening and she was in the midst of having a panic attack...