Anyway, now you can have a look at moodr.blogspot.com

The content is a little different. In fact the content is not only different but it is broader than what I have done here.

I will not delete this blog, I will just freeze it.

Hope to see you there.

I’ll let you know details later.

The post which was visited by a couple of thousands was Your Charm Does Not Depend On Your Body

I suggest you to read the comments section. I have the feeling that most people didn’t find that article fit for a psychology blog. I don’t totally agree with this however i can’t simply disagree either.

First, psychology is a broad concept. When I hear the phrase “psychology blog”, first web site I have in my mind is the Psy-Blog.  Especially the post “Top Ten Psychology Studies” is a typical post which people expect when they hear something like psychology.

On the other hand, my psychology blog is mostly about clinical psychology and then mostly about alternative tips and techniques in clinical psychology. Therefore it is quiet natural that most people will not see fit that this blog has such a title.

Having said that, I am thinking of a solution on this. One solution might be to freeze this blog as it is now and go for another domain and continue from there. I have several domains in my hand lik this one (hayatkisa.com) on which I can make use of meaningful subdomains. Well this isn’t a big problem anyway because there are hundreds of millions of web sites out there and people remembering a web site with its unique domain name is a little bit history. I’ts valid for a handful of big web sites only.

I believe that starting anew with over one year experience in blogging would do better for me and for my visitors. Please comment about this. I am not going to delete this blog or any single post in it, nor will I move the posts elsewhere.  I will just setup a new blog that has a better title with a deeper meaning than Psychology Blog.

What do you think?

There two major concepts in contemporary psychotherapy: “here and now” and self-responsibility. Being responsible of each and every event, good or bed, is a notion that psychotherapists would like their patients to gain. If you are robbed, that is your responsibility. You had to know that that street was not safe. You had to know that in that time of day, this area is not secure. You had to know that carrying that much money / valuables by you is not a good practice. Irvin Yalom puts out that if Sartre was living today he would say that the Iraqi invasion and hunger in Africa are your responsibilities because you could do something to prevent them both.

Psychologists today are no different than Sartre in that sense. Many books on psychotherapy talk about how you are responsible of a misbehaving parent, spouse, friend, society. This is not to advice to save the world. The idea is that you have the choice to avoid such situations. You are responsible for putting yourself into trouble or not. You choose what you will live and experience. You also choose how you feel about this and that.

This was the Sartre part. On the other hand, contemporary psychology is deeply affected bu Buddhist perspective. Here and now approach of solving daily problems or working on complexes that emerged from the past is highly similar to Buddhist teaching.

On any day you feel blue, both a zen master and a psychotherapist would say that this life, you have to live through your stress and anxiety. Thus you will solve it. Beyond that, they would also say that you should forget thinking about yesterday and worrying about tomorrow. Today, this moment is the most important to you.

Therefore, it would be accurate to say that contemporary psychotherapy relies really much on Sartre and Buddha.

Both of them are very much related to one’s anxiety about his/her own end.

In dynamic therapy, the notion of death, or consciousness thereof is a mean to open the individual’s path to activate his/her will to life.

Theory believes that the fact to know that someday you are going to die would help your therapeutic process. It’s true that for some people, it acts as a motivating force to know that he/she isn’t immortal. However, for some people its just like “if I am going to day anyway, why would I bother about my life”. So this awareness of death would help or not, it depends on the person.

To create this awareness, some techniques are used. Most of them are about dreaming of one’s own funeral, burial, etc. Writing of one’s own obituary is another method of initiating awareness about death.

Dream analysis and interpretation is also used in this process. Symbols such as seeing yourself wounded or your body modified is usually interpreted as referring to your fears of death.

Briefly, it may help if you realize that you are not going to live forever and every second of your life is worth living.

There are lots of methods for developing a kind feeling towards your responsibilities but I don’t like many of them because they lead people to more stress and anxiety.

I prefer an analytical method, an analysis of what I want to do and how my current responsibilities are related to that. That means, whenever you have to carry the garbage and this is not something you like, know that this is something on your path that goes to another thing you like. If what you like is snowboarding and if snowboarding takes the act of having the garbage carried already, then it is very real that carrying the garbage is on your way to something you would like to do.

Why? Because life isn’t divided into pieces, a person’s life is a whole thing. There isn’t only the most favorite meal of you but also the time and effort it takes to eat it, if not prepare it or taking the walk to a restaurant.

And no, this isn’t about reward and punishment. This is something else. I don’t believe in reward and punishment systems either, not in religious terms I mean.

Briefly, realize that something labeled as responsibility that came along your way is most probably the step or the mean to what you really want. You can do this judgment.

Another issue here is to define responsibility. Anything can be labeled as responsibility but what responsibility is yours? Is drug recovery a responsibility for you if you are addicted or is it your health personnel’s responsibility? How is this responsibility divided? I hope to come with some definitions with that in following days.

If you take something good and make so much fun out of it, it becomes the new bad thing. So, under peer pressure, we decide that optimism is not good to deal with life. Everybody looks like that they would accept us and agree with us when we tend to be pessimistic about life. Therefore many people try to win the race of being the first who criticize the other. It feels like when you are the first to criticize the other or simply yourself, then there is no room for others to criticize you.

The truth is that we don’t like to hear criticism, even the ones that people call constructive criticism. Once the name includes criticism, it signifies that somebody is going to have a say over our behavior. Of course, this is a wrong perception. However perception becomes reality.

In fact, most of the time, human being’s depression and anxiety is about living and being. Since you exist and most probably you are not going to die in the moment, you have every reason to feel better. Better than nothing.

Well, now, this was really so brief. Please bear with me while I’ll have more time to cover this topic.

However, I see that many people have the urge to seize the day so much that they end up with seizures about the day instead of seizing the day.

Any teaching can become an anxiety. Our main failure with our lives is that we only pay attention to it when there is a problem. In fact, there is always the problem of being.

And when we start paying attention only after life hits somehow, then our teachings, life-hacks, therapies etc. become our new disorders and sources of anxiety.

The exit point of such an anxiety is to understand that if we want to seize the day, the method is not talking about seizing the day a day long. It’s about to stop talking about carpe diem and  trying to understand that we live anyway, the day is not ahead but within us.

Depending too much on wise quotes is just about preparing yourself a new prison and this is a strong way of maintaining depression and anxiety.

We all have been witnessed to Saddam’s execution who committed crimes against humanity and caused hundreds of thousands of people to experience live traumatic events if not millions.

However, thanks to our lightning fast technology of information networking, Saddam made us experience another trauma indirectly while saying goodbye to world.

Now, when people witness such events which seems like they have a mild effect, in fact our mind and unconscious are highly affected. When you see somebody executed by hanging on a movie, your brain helps you to forget what you feel during this experience really quickly. However, the feeling and the experience are not gone too far. They reside in your mind, they hide themselves from your conscious and find themselves places in your unconscious.

Furthermore, they become connected to your past self-experiences, feelings, etc. without making you feel anything on the surface. It is very possible that you have had headaches, low mood, less sleep or less appetite after having seen the execution somehow, without having the scenery in your conscious mind. This is sufficient enough to present you with a mild trauma.

Well, this is the world we are living in and unfortunately there are no room to escape from such occurrences. What we can do about it may be paying attention to our children so that they don’t have this traumatic experiences. Children tend to become a little more affected by scenery like this. They feel guilty. Save them.

However physically beautiful or good looking you are, a minor drop in your mood would make you look like less charming than you normally are.

If you pay close attention to your friends, relatives, co-workers, etc. you will notice that there are so many people that attract you who are not physically beautiful or good looking at all.

Imagine that your favorite actress had breast cancer and she had a surgery and suddenly she left one of her breasts. What would change in you in terms of your liking against her. Not much, because you have an idea of her in your mind that goes behind her physical being. You have seen her in a couple of movies or shows and you have not only her image in your mind but also an experience of her aura.

So, if you insist on just making up things physically on your body and not pay attention to your soul, you are building a destructive force for your charm. It’s like shopping for food while you are hungry and thus get everything in the market regardless of whether you need it or not.

In order not to end up with countless effort for your beauty with no avail, start beautifying your soul first and when you feel that you love yourself enough then pass on to the physical side, and continue to beautify yourself that way too.

Try it, It’s good for your health.

After giving the formal and scientific definition of what OCD is, I would like to mention that most people who suffer from OCD have their own definitions of OCD, of course a definition affected by their OCD.

That is, they usually think that their OCD is not right. There have to be a more accurate OCD than they have.

Just from this point, it is not difficult to imagine the anxiety and stress that OCD may bring on any given day.

Unfortunately, many methods fail. Cause of the failure is, if somebody would want to do something, she/he would do it immediately anyway. Do you remember any moment that you felt uneasy to eat your favorite meal? This should be so rare, if any. Then think about this: How would life be, if each of your responsibilities were like eating your favorite food? Most probably you could be the most successful person on earth.

Now, it looks like that action isn’t necessarily dependent on the best time. Instead, action usually depends on your will and liking. So therefore, it is usually the best to do to start from something you really like. If there is liking in it, believe that there won’t be any difference between watching your favorite movie and washing the dishes. It all depends on whether you like the act or not.

So, then how am I supposed to like my responsibilities? That’s the topic of my next post.

Tired bodies that haven’t took their time to rest for some couple of 15 minutes fail. Poor human being. The same is valid in business life, romantic love, theeth whitening, washing your car, paying your bills etc. etc.

Do take a break before it is too late. It may seem that you are capable of working nonstop. However, this is only a decision. You may even think that this post is not something that would apply to you but if you are human then it is very possible that you need to take a break.

You may also prevent depression and anxiety, and even other several mental diseases like alzheimer for instance, by taking your time and taking necessary breaks when you have to.

If you are unable to allocate half an hour for yourself, that obviously means that you are already in trouble.

Have a nice weekend.

It is surprizing to me that a vast majority of these blog’s content are about recent technological innovations and products instead of human mind and psychology. Recent technology and products are not the proper means of change, they don’t play much of a role when your goal is to hack your life and become who or what you want to become. I don’t underestimate the productivity that technology and its products brings to us. I just want to emphasize the misinterpretation of a word like hack (that has positive connotations  most of the time before Kevin Mitnick became popular) into something related other than the core-subject, which is human mind, in my humble opinion.

Of course, there is an assumption behind the argument. I believe that the majority of visitors to these blogs are aiming to change their lives either that way or this way. They would like to become more productive, they want to do more good in less time. I don’t believe that people visit those blogs just to get informed by the bells and whistles of what is the most recent.

Since change, transformation and thus feelings are involved in this, life-hacking is more than just being informed of Zune and being the first who use it.

Change and transformation of one involves knowing herself better and sticking with the idea of a better, healthier self.

Every end and every beginning brings stress and anxiety. Probably this is why we celebrate our birthdays, graduation, marriage, circumcision, etc… Those signify milestones of our life that brings us closer to the unknown end.

Realize that Monday is just a word and it can have many  connotations with it. Moreover, you can manipulate these connotations in your mind when you have to confront with your Monday anxiety.

What you will face on every Monday is the same thing you face on every Sunday, or every other workday. Bear with it. Monday is neither king nor a serf. You can treat it anyway you like just realize that it’s not necessarily the beginning of a work week. It is our minds that make Monday a symbol for the beginning of irritating series of events.

Maybe you can evaluate the weekend for preparation if the coming week is a little more busy than usual. Thus you may feel prepared and more powerful against the anxiety of monday.

Having a good sleep would also prevent unnecessary anxiety. Sleep is always good for your body

I have seen the movie V for Vendetta yesterday night, finally.

There is so much to write about in the movie but first things first, I would like to talk about the fear factor in V for Vendetta.

Apart from the notion of fear that is used by governments, it is also very important on individual basis what V has done to Evey.

It would not be polite to tell scenes in detail since it will involve spoilers from the movie.

Instead of doing this, let’s focus on fear and freedom.

Being free from fear might be a real definition of freedom. Freedom is not necessarily being happy. Freedom is taking your own decisions without interfering environmental pressure.

V for Vendetta is a must for see for all of us who have to deal with fear.

Social phobia is a kind of anxiety that occurs in social engagements. Like any other kind of anxiety, causes may differ from one to another.

Since it’s a kind of anxiety, anti-anxiety medicaton is helpful for social phobia. Apart from anti-anxiety medications some anti-depressants among ssri’s are also helpful.

One technique of relaxation with social phobia might be about thinking that you are not special. Yes, right; realize that when you are walking in a crowded street, you are as special as everybody else and not as special as everybody else.

That means when anxiety hits you with the idea that other people may criticize you for who you are, how you behave etc., try to realize that you are not that special and people don’t always have time to bother with you.

The feeling that you are somebody special to them in a negative sense and the feeling that everybody is staring at you is totally nonsense. You are equal to every one of them and the possibility of them criticizing you and you, criticizing them is 50%.

Thus, you can have this relaxation to know that you are not that special to get ciriticized everytime.

The same as valid for the anxiety you may experience in front of an authority figure. If you were in her shoes, how far would it be important to deal with you to a negative extent as well as a positive extent.

So, the next time you experience social phobia, repeat yourself that you aren’t that special to fear from society. You don’t have to.

Like many other psychological disorders, besides medication, you should also try talk therapy.

Have a nice and sound mind.

Talk therapy is advised for a variety of psychological disorders. Depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder are among them.

The best practice would be medication and talk therapy going hand in hand.

The therapist should be experienced, clever, patient and an up to date person.

Empathy is a core aspect in psychoteraphy. The therapist should comprehend tha patient’s uneasiness to the fullest extent possible. She should peacefully destroy the patient’s scenario of the dead end.

environmental factors are not among things that the therapist or the patient are able to change. However, it is cruical that the therapist should lead the patient to a healthy transformation of the self and his/her perception of the reality so that the patient can be able to transform his/her own attitudes to life. Thus, he/she can develop a better life for himself/herself.

Talk therapy, also known as psychotherapy is about bringing the consciousness and awareness in the patient, without being tackled by his/her pessimistic views about everything.