Selfies Aren't Selfish: Narcissism Is Good for You

If You Feel Less Focused After This Practice If you feel spacey or unable to focus after you use this Conscious Questioning practice, check in with your confusion in article 5. Confusion helps you take a break when there's too much to do (or too much input coming at you) or when you're overly focused. You need balance in your task-completion behaviors and full permission to zone out and give yourself breaks from focus. Your confusion often arises to bring balance to high-intensity situations. You may also feel spacey if two emotions in your Happiness Family are involved (happiness and joy) because both tend to want more, yes, yay! See article 10 to learn how to maintain your healthy focus when happiness and joy are active. If You Feel De-energized or Less Prepared After This Practice If you lose your energy and your ability to move forward, check on your situational depression in article 9. Depression arises when something in your life cannot work, and it will often reduce your energy and your ability to move forward. Setting up a regular Skype (or phone) date with your loved one is not only a great way to see how they're doing and get a chance to share your life with them, it also gives your loved one something to look forward to regularly, which can mean a lot. Get peace of mind The best way to find peace of mind in caregiving is knowing that your loved one is safe and that their care needs are being met. Obtaining this information and staying in the loop can be hard when you live far away. Often you get second-hand details on your loved one, making it hard to know exactly what's going on. To remedy this, you want to get as many eyes on the situation as you can. Connect with those who interact with your loved one, whether it be your loved one's primary caregiver at home or nurses and support workers at a care facility where they live. If they go for a doctor's appointment, call afterward and ask how it went. Take the time to find professionals who can help your loved one. If need be, hire an elder law attorney to make sure your loved one's finances and insurance needs are taken care of.

The Aftermath of Neurogenic Slowing So much of the current neurotoxic environment slows down neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. This neurogenic slowing reduces a person's capacity for change and adaptability. Neurogenic slowing brings in its wake anxiety, depression, and cognitive decline, depending upon a person's genetic, physical, and psychological vulnerabilities and age. Neurogenic slowing is one of the most insidious features of the current world, affecting most people to some degree. A neurotoxic environment can impair different brain regions, but often the hippocampus is first. Neurogenic slowing is both the canary in the coal mine and the toxic gases the canary warns of. It's both a preliminary signal or rumbling of impending trouble as well as, when sustained, a cause of reduced brain capacity that brings the host of psychological problems that the program in this article seeks to reverse. To jump-start change involves increasing your neurogenic rate until you reach your neurogenic potential. Once reached, the goal is to maintain your neurogenic stride so you are capable of rapid change and mental/emotional resilience. It's a cliche in Hollywood movies that when a woman transforms from a buttoned-up Ms. Priss to a bursting-with-passion temptress, she does two things: unpins her fussy, Marian-the-librarian bun and whips off her owlish Coke-bottle eyeglasses. This particular cliche has two morals: (1) If you don't have to wear glasses, don't. With either LASIK surgery or contact lenses, you can ensure that people have an unobstructed view of your beautiful eyes. It's amazing how a few sculpted ounces of plastic or metal can make an instant impression about your style. Glasses can make you look edgy, intriguing, artsy, intellectual, or authoritative. Just think of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. Off camera, actresses such as Liv Tyler and Nicole Kidman have whipped out sexy eyeglasses at awards shows to read the teleprompter and instant-messaged the world, Not only am I gorgeous, but I'm smarter than you think. Oprah once dedicated a show to how changing just one thing can make a huge difference in your look. For my segment on the show, I stood in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and pulled aside women wearing outdated eyeglass frames.

You feel fulfilled. How do you know if trauma is trapped in your energy body, the pranamaya kosha and/or the manipura chakra? You feel fatigue, without the energy to do what needs to be done. Energies feel divided, and there is a sense of separation from your resources. You feel as if different parts of the self are fighting, conflicting, and contradicting one another. You feel controlling and dominating and constantly want to show more power around you. You are driven by power and are territorial. A client of mine, Angela, came to me ready to leave her partner. It had been several years now of this slow, growing disdain for one another, where as soon as one of them would get triggered by the other, the arguing and yelling would ensue, and there would be back-and-forth feelings of defensiveness, dominance, and control. Neither of them was willing to surrender, and the wall of resentment, bitterness, and blame became thicker and thicker with time. Marvin had been summarizing in his notearticle again. He showed Billy what he had written: That beautifully captures the idea for the starting point in training teams, responded Billy. It was a lesson managers throughout our company had to learn the hard way. In the beginning, they thought the idea was to leave self-directed teams alone. So they abdicated their roles as coaches and then wondered why teams floundered. Everyone on our team was excited at first. But that lasted only for about a week. Then came denialnobody wanted to admit we were totally confused. We did not want to recognize the widespread dissatisfaction.

Simply understand that it's neither possible nor necessary. Stick with the people that like you for who you are. Wish a beautiful life to the ones who don't. I agree the headline sounds a bit harsh and surely every once in a while, a little feedback from the outside comes in handy. You should have 2 or 3 people of confidence around you, who tell you the ugly and naked truth whenever necessary. I'm talking about the people in your life. Those who are always quick in giving you a full character and personality and life analysis based on a very small credible foundation. These are the opinions you should ignore because many times we give a lot more importance to precisely these people's opinions about us and if they criticize us it hurts. Sometimes, it even seems like their judgments of our personality, our actions and our character are correct and more important than our own. Big mistake! Loving Your Body, Healing Your Pain The lesson today is about pain: what it is, where it comes from, what it's telling you, and what you can learn from it. Many of us live with pain or illness on a daily basis. It may be a small part of our lives, or it may take up a large portion of it. Today you are going to use your mirror work to open a new door to loving your body and healing your pain. No one wants to be in pain, but if you have it, what can you learn from it? Where does pain come from? What is it trying to tell you? Since pain can be a manifestation of either physical or mental dis-ease, it is clear that both the body and mind are susceptible to it. I recently witnessed a wonderful example of this as I watched two little girls playing in a park.

You can be more certain that you are making informed decisions since your mind can think clearly without being blinded by your emotions. Curb Your Information Intake The information that we consume affects the quality of the decisions we make. Unfortunately, the information we consume is sometimes unimportant to our lives. It only fills our minds with clutter and this prevents us from thinking clearly and making the right decisions. The worst thing is that it causes anxiety and stress as we tend to worry about the worst that could happen to us after what we have read or watched over the internet. Limiting what you consume from the internet can help prevent unwanted information from taking up space in your mind. So, instead of starting your day by checking your social media article, consider going for a walk or reading a article. The point here is that you should substitute your unproductive time on the internet by doing productive things. Spare Some Time to Unwind Virtue cannot be cultivated in a vacuum, after all. Yet another way to put the point, which makes sense of the deliciously oxymoronic phrase often used in both ancient and modern Stoicism, preferred indifferents, is that having certain externals (say, being wealthy) doesn't make you a good person, nor does lacking them (say, being poor) make you a bad person. Therefore, items that fall into the B-set and lower logically remain separate and independent of the only thing that qualifies for the A-set: virtue. THEME 2: NO NEED TO CULTIVATE INDIFFERENCE TO HUMAN LOSS For most people who approach Epictetus for the first time, by far the hardest bit to swallow is Enchiridion 3. Oldfather's 1925 translation goes like this: With everything which entertains you, is useful, or of which you are fond, remember to say to yourself, beginning with the very least things, `What is its nature? If you kiss your own child or wife, say to yourself that you are kissing a human being; It may be tempting to attribute the apparent callousness of the last bit to an inaccurate translation. But the original Greek is just as harsh.