Discover Flourishing

  What drives you?   What gets you out of bed in the morning and ready to take on the day?   What is the larger meaning and purpose behind what you do?   These questions drive at our sense of meaning and purpose, the fourth element of PERMA, and the answers provide powerful fuel for flourishing.    Article At A Glance: There are simple, easy to implement, strategies that improve one’s sense of wellbeing, relationships, and achievement. We can increase flourishing by identify our core character strengths and finding ways to apply them throughout our lives.  Take the Values in Action survey to identify your top 5 character strengths and find ways to apply to in your life today and throughout the week.   What are some of the activities, even very simple ones, that foster positive emotions, thoughts, and behaviors?   Many positive interventions are quite easy to do and, when used with an open mind and desire to experience change, can be very po...

  I have a Doctorate of Psychology (Psy.D.) in Educational Psychology and started my professional career as a school psychologist.    Since that time, I’ve been privileged to serve others in a number of different positions.    I’ve served as a special education administrator, school district director, and psychologist in private practice conducting neuropsychological evaluations and providing bio and neurofeedback training.    All of these experiences have been tremendously rewarding to me.   At the same time, I am endlessly curious and love learning and over the past few years I’ve had a growing interest in cultivating well-being and optimizing performance.  My interest is not about diagnosing and treating disorders, but about cultivating human flourishing.  My aim in writing this blog is to  share my interest in, and knowledge of, the nervous system (i.e., brain and body), along with techniques shown to optimize functioning, in se...

We all want to feel good.   We want to have close relationships with our friends and family, a sense of meaning and purpose in the world, experience achievement, and to feel love and be loved.   All of these are part of human flourishing.   However, past events that have left an emotional mark on our psyche continue to cause us distress and get in the way of us flourishing, even when we are not consciously aware of them or their impact.   Fortunately, there are things we can due to heal past traumas and move down the path towards flourishing.   Article At A Glance: As humans, we have a biologically determined “negativity bias. \ All of us have experienced past distressing events that continue to impact our current functioning. Some of the ways we can do this are through acts of kindness, actively combating our negativity bias, and keeping a “gratitude journal.” As human beings we have what is called a “negativity bias.”    Our mind’s are naturally ...

  Article at a glance: Our current thinking around mental health is all wrong. What we should all be focusing on is cultivating flourishing. There are specific things we can all do to experience greater flourishing in our lives. Why our current thinking around mental health is wrong: As a professional in the mental health field I’ve been increasingly questioning the common definition of mental health as being free of mental illness.  Is our measure of physical health whether or not we’ve had a heart attack or stroke, been diagnosed with diabetes, or have an autoimmune disease?  I’m sure most of us would can quickly point out things ways in which we can improve our health even though we are not experiencing a serious medical condition.  Perhaps we could improve our diet, get more exercise, lose a few pounds, cut out the alcohol, or get more sleep.   And certainly there are many of us who are not suffering from a diagnosed mental illness that are not expe...