Psychology Blog

Take it off and let it drop…, originally uploaded by BidWiya.

You have always the option of getting miserable anytime you want.

You can think about how and where the world is going, and dream about wars, torture, tears, and the most bad things that can come to your mind.

You can get miserable by not being able to change this.

Or more simply, you can also think of a loved one that you have lost a couple of years before.

Getting miserable in seconds is an option. We choose it so often that we cannot believ to ourselves that we leave ourselves into the cold but safe hands of depression and anxiety.

If we just choose not to get miserable and accept our current situation as is, then we would be able to cope with what we don’t like and what we want to change. We will have the energy for this coping and change just if don’t choose to get miserable.

Life is shorter than you imagine.

day 596: odin studies up on the gyroscopic effect, fearing of an imminent pop quiz., originally uploaded by snowdeal.

Anxiety, fear arise from the fallacy that we don’t have options.

Whenever something “bad” occurs, we tend to think that we are stuck to this event. We don’t have any other option than being harmed by it.

Instead of this helplessness, you can always “choose” living “through” an event that makes us unhappy. Thus, we’ll be able to see that we have options. We’ll see that we choose to live the misery.

Although this is very open to discussion, human experience is telling us that we are the creators of anxiety and fear, and we are the creators of the idea that we don’t have options, we are unable to choose.

Try it, fast, now. Life is really short. Enjoy.

La Siesta, originally uploaded by solea.

There have been ways and methods for interpreting dreams for various objectives. One of them is tellin the future in which we are not interested here. That type of dream interpretation is called oneiromancy. Its roots go back to ancient egypt.

We are interested in the way dreams reflect our unconscious thoughts and feelings. This has been mentioned mainly by Calvin S. Hall, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

The symbolization in dreams are very important in understanding what a dream is about. It may contain meanings with cultural connotations. It may find its material in everyday life. At the end, it prepares a mixture, a fully symbolized theatre in front of us.

For instance, if you see a tree in your dreams, that may have the object to mention about the time that you have climbed to a tree and what happened that day.

It is like a sunday newspaper game. A friend of you in your dreams may come and say to you that you haven’t done your homework. However in real life, it may be that you are not in a school. Well this has other meanings like you have a feeling or thought in your subconscious about not having done something which is your responsibility. A thing in real life that has nothing to do with a homework or your friend.

You may try this at your home, you may try to interprete your dreams, find the symbolism and decode it. It would be entertaining at times.

the eye in the mirror is the mirror of the eye, originally uploaded by solea.

In many silly self-help books, I see this “love yourself” thing. No, I am not against this. I just oppose the way some books emphasize self-love and then impose things that would lead to self-hate.

Recently, I discovered how self-hate is hidden or how it finds itself ways to get hide under covers of self-help, self-healing, self-love, etc.

The main idea, what I believe to be true is this: whenever a person “forces” himself to do something and sets himself an objective, then life gets poorer just because there is an objective. That is to say whenever there is an objective in mind, be it losing weight, learning a new language, earning more money, doing more exercise, etc., we tend to forget the very moment that we are in and start to dream about our objective.

This is usually why objectives do not get accomplished. Aims, objectives need processes. There have to be a process that leads you to this objective. If you deny the process and just concentrate on what you want to happen, anxiety rushes and then there is no time left to work on it to be able to make it happen.

By self-love, we mean that you have to accept and love yourself as you are. Only then you will be able to understand that there is a present time where you are accepted by yourself completely as you are, and now you have this time, not to dream about the future but to work on the process towards your objective.

Hard to tell though.

Blue Sky, originally uploaded by Pamela Machado.

Fear is the feeling towards something that has not happened yet.

We are always afraid from possibilites, things that may happen.

I am afraid of death that is not happened yet. Somebody else is afraid of being lonely, being seperated from her husband/lover/boyfriend, that has not happened yet.

Therefore, fear is an empty feeling. The anxiety it brings is trash. You can move away from fear because it is generated by your thoughts. Usually it is not generated from something that is definitely and exactly going to happen.

The worst side of fear is that it makes us behave towards those negativity. We believe something bad is going to happen and we live fear and anxiety.

As a result, something bad happens out of our behaviors, that’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

Il mare d’inverno (#2), originally uploaded by giuvax.

If you realize that you feel very sad, try to talk to this sadness immediately.

Ask it about what it really wants from you.

Especially when you feel sad and there is no obvious reason, that usually means your mind tries to tell you something.

It may remind you a sad event, an upcoming anniversary of a sad event, or simply a near-past event that forces your feelings.

By this point, better don’t try to “cope” with it. Instead, look at it and try to define it.

What does your sadness looks like? What color is it? In what area of your body is this sadness.

That’s the beginning to talk to your sadness.

Fear and anger are borthers. If you look at them closely, you can see the bond between them.As Yoda of star wars said: “fear is the path to the dark side. fear leads to anger. anger leads to hate. hate leads to suffering. i sense much fear in you.”

Well, whenever we feel fear, it comes out of a feeling of being threatened by something. Thus, it can lead to anger towards this something.

You can easily understand this relationship between fear and anger if you try to remember that both anger and fear have the same effects on your body. Same heaviness in the stomach, same difficulty and/or change in breathing.

It’s worth thinking about.

taming, originally uploaded by hkvam.

Hell yes. They do have a psychology of their own.

The psychology field that studies on animal psychology is usually called as comparative psychology.

Mostly pets have been dominant in the area of comparative psychology. There have also been research on dolphins, birds, especially pigeons.

First known psychological experiment on comparative field is the famous Pavlov’s Dogs experiment.

Recently, a “Brrreeeport” wind is going on in search engines.  So now is the time to talk about some blog psychology and the impact of  search engines on that psychology.

Human beings are after instant feedback. The more instant the feedback is the more people are interested in it. For instance, although many people very well know the hazard of smoking, they still smoke because smoking usually gives no instant feedback on health, no swift injuries, no immediate effect on breath.

So, while blog world is getting bigger day by day, instant feedback increases on search engines, comments, etc.

This is the search engine psychology.

Jackie’s Big 2-1, originally uploaded by crume.

I don’t want to tell classical known facts here. This will be a quick post just to tell that alcoholism isn’t alcoholism.

If you think that you are an alcoholic and you should seek help, then of course do it. And this is what I want to talk about, exactly.

Sometimes, we just want to bring ourselves to a therapist where we can deal with our problems and give a try to change.

Alcoholism, if you just think that it started recently for you, it may just be an indicator to some other problems. You may not be alcoholic but claim to be alcoholic so that you can bring yourself to a therapist where you can talk what you cannot talk to yourself.

Life is not long. Enjoy.

A traumatic event is something that gets you extremely confused. For instance, if someday, you are going to see that there is no-more gravity on earth, that is a traumatic event.

A traumatic event is something that you cannot really believe on the first hand. If you strongly believe that your lover wouldn’t cheat on you, than her/his cheating will be a traumatic event.

Traumatic events occur often in natural disasters and wars as well as everyday life. Their interpretation as being a traumatic event may differ from person to person. One can believe that someday there will no longer be gravity on earth and thus when someday a pig flies, this will not be a traumatic event for her/him.

Most often, traumatic events make us feel guilty towards what have happened. When you experience an earthquake as a traumatic event, you may immediately think “what have I done to deserve this?” If not in your mind, you probably feel it unconsciously.

While it is not necessarily a traumatic event, loss of a loved one also makes us feel guilty about ourselves as if we killed her/him. Unfortunately, this is one aspect of human psychology and experiencing a traumatic event has usually relations with our guiltiness.

To be continued.

I have always been in rejection towards cognitive psychology, I don’t know why this is so.

However, I feel that cognitive approach is much more better than analytic approach when it comes to some movement in life, especially after a long major depression.

Whenever there is anxiety, there is this fear. People may think that fear comes form other people or other subjects apart from self. Thus, people tend to save themselves from fear that is caused by other factors, other than self

For whatever reason, anxiety is very much related to the self, and the fear is usually about self. About being nothing, about vanishing, passing away, etc. By this time, it is not useful to think about the reason. The fear is big.

The solution lies in accepting yourslef. Knowing and verifying that you exist. It’s not other people or it’s not this everyday life that bores you or depresses you. It is the very important fact that you exists. The fear come out of the question: “do I exist?”.

From now on, whenever anxiety catches you, try to remind yourself that you exist. You are safe and you exist. Thus, you are there to cope with whatever that makes you think that it gives you fear.

Although it is very easy for us, human beings, to fall into tears, misery, and agony, that does not necessarily mean that we are in a depression. Medically speaking, depression is assumed to be the decreased traffic of serotonin in the brain. So, that means it is an illness and it can be cured.

Having said that, being miserable does not always mean that you are in depression. Here are some basic guidelines that you can test yourself briefly, whether you are suffering from depression or not:

• difficulty in sleeping, sleep disorders: if you sleep less than usual or more than usual, and if this continues longer than two weeks, this may be an indicator of a depression.
• abnormally increasing or abnormally decreasing sexual desire: if you feel that you need less sex than usual or you need more sex than usual and if this continues longer than two weeks, this may be an indicator of a depression.
• abnormally increase or decrease in appetite, if this continues longer than two weeks, this may be an indicator of a depression too.

Apart form this basic, mini test, you may feel miserable and depressive after a loss of a loved one, an end of a romantic relationship, a financial loss and alike, that doesn’t mean you are in a depression medically. So, that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with your flow of serotonin in the brain.

Depression is rather like diabetis, generally, people suffering from depression can be cured by medical help and talk therapy, and their depression may occur again in the future. It is medical. It can be cured. Not every misery and agony is depression, although they may lead to depression.