Month: March 2013

  • Productivity 101 Recap!

    On Tuesday night, we gathered together to discuss the productivity techniques that me and Divia actually use in our daily lives (instead of the ones we think would be helpful, but never use in practice). Some of the main topics we covered were: Goal setting and formulation Reducing cognitive load Utilizing social pressure Taking very…

  • 24 Weeks of Lydia

    This week was a hard one for me, for reasons that had nothing to do with Lydia. So it worked out well that it was a happy week for her! I’m definitely telling people she’s five and a half months old now, and she’s learning more and more all the time. I still take her…

  • Things IFS Teaches

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    A while back, I made a list of things that I think people tend to learn from engaging with the IFS process, so I thought I would post it here. (There are obviously tons of other ways to learn these things, and many people will already know a bunch of them.) These are in no…

  • 23 Weeks of Lydia

    It’s been another week! No huge updates this week, but there have been a bunch of little things. I keep meaning to take more regular notes about what’s going on during the week, but I’m mostly just glad that I’ve been getting around to making these updates every Wednesday, since it all changes so quickly.…

  • How I Think Pathological Guilt Works

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    “If I do something wrong, I have to feel bad about it forever.” I used to believe that, and that belief has been on my mind because I really don’t believe it anymore, and I was just talking to someone who expressed pretty much that exact belief.

  • 22 Weeks of Lydia

    Lydia turned five months old this week, and also went on her first camping trip. I got a really mild cold for a few days last week, though Lydia didn’t seem to be affected much. She was a bit sneezy, and I think she may have been sleeping more because of it. We were camping…

  • Heuristics for Spotting Distorted Thinking: “It Would Be One Thing If… But…”

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    I have a whole bunch of heuristics I use to notice distorted thinking. I’ve covered some of them here. Today, I wanted to highlight the speech pattern “It would be one thing if X, but Y,” typically used to describe why someone’s behavior is objectionable. The language can vary a little: “I know that she…

  • 21 Weeks of Lydia

    Lydia will be five months this Sunday, and I’ve started telling people she’s “almost five months” instead of “four and a half months”. Sleep I don’t think she’s woken up in the middle of the night this week and stayed up for a while. I skipped swaddling more times this week, so those nights were…

  • Your Past is Never the Reason

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    I’m a huge fan of the Internal Family Systems therapy method. This method involves (among other things) digging into your past to find emotions you never finished processing and sorting them out. I’ve seen this method work very well to shift repetitive thoughts and behaviors relatively effortlessly. Doing the work is often fun and rewarding.…

  • Beyond Rationality

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    I called this post “Beyond Rationality” because I wanted to move past the unfortunate connotations and bad habits associated with the word “rationality” in our culture. With tongue firmly in cheek, Divia and I often refer to the cluster of ideas I am about to present as post-rationality, and you may well encounter us using…