Category Archives: Help Yourself

Calming Emotions Through Identification

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fmri“Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don’t know why it works.

“UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines, which scan the brain to reveal which parts are active and inactive at any given moment.

“They asked the subjects to look at pictures of male or female faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion—such as ‘angry’ or ‘fearful’—or two possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one female name.

“When presented with these choices, the subjects were asked to pick the most appropriate emotion or gender-appropriate name to fit the face they saw.

“When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region—an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences—became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.

ucla

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Want To Achieve Something? Picture Yourself Doing It From A Third-person Perspective

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‘Visualise yourself doing it’ is a common slice of advice for people seeking to achieve something. But there are two ways of visualising yourself in a scene: from a first-person perspective as in real-life, or from an external perspective, as an observer might see you. Now Lisa Libby and colleagues have demonstrated that it’s this latter, third-person perspective that is far more effective in raising the likelihood we will go on to perform a desired behaviour.

One hundred and forty-six undergrad participants, all of whom had registered to vote, were asked to imagine themselves going to the polling booth to vote the next day, in what were then the upcoming 2002 presidential elections. Just under half were instructed to do this from a first-person perspective, the remainder were told to do it from a third-person perspective.

Next they answered questions about their attitudes to voting: how important it is to vote, and the lengths they would go to make their vote. Already differences appeared – those students who had visualised themselves voting from a third-person perspective displayed a stronger pro-voting mindset.

But most vitally, 95 of the participants were followed up a few weeks later (an equal proportion from each of the visualisation conditions), and 90 per cent of the participants who’d imagined themselves voting from a third-person perspective reported that they had indeed gone on to vote, compared with just 72 per cent of the first-person perspective participants – a statistically significant difference.

British Psychological Society

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Oven Ready Chaos by Phil Hine

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What is Magick? Several definitions float into my mind, but none of them do it full justice. The world is magical; we might get a sense of this after climbing a mountain and looking down upon the landscape below, or in the quiet satisfaction at the end of one of ‘those days’ when everything has gone right for us. Magick is a doorway through which we step into mystery, wildness, and immanence.

We live in a world subject to extensive and seemingly, all-embracing systems of social & personal control that continually feed us the lie that we are each alone, helpless, and powerless to effect change. Magick is about change. Changing your chaos magickcircumstances so that you strive to live according to a developing sense of personal responsibility; that you can effect change around you if you choose; that we are not helpless cogs in some clockwork universe. All acts of personal/collective liberation are magical acts. Magick leads us into exhiliration and ecstacy; into insight and understanding; into changing ourselves and the world in which we participate. Through magick we may come to explore the possibilities of freedom.

Surely this is simple enough? But no, magick has become obsfucated under a weight of words, a welter of technical terms which exclude the uninitiated and serve those who are eager for a ‘scientific’ jargon with which to legitimise their enterprise into something self-important and pompous. Abstract spiritual spaces have been created in the midst of which tower the Babel-like lego constructions of ‘inner planes’, spiritual hierarchies and ‘occult truths’ which forget that the world around us is magical. The mysterious has been misplaced. We search through dead languages and tombs for ‘secret knowledge’, ignoring the mystery of life that is all around us. So for the moment, forget what you’ve read about spiritual enlightenment, becoming a 99th level Magus and impressing your friends with high-falutin’ gobbledygook. Magick is surprisingly simple.

Read the rest of this introduction to Chaos Magick in PDF form here.

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The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Hakim Bey

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taz

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The Cost of Not Caring

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As many chronic diseases are closely linked to lifestyles, an estimated 80% of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes, and 40% of cancer, could be avoided if common lifestyle risk factors were eliminated. ... Seven leading risk factors – high blood pressure, tobacco, alcohol, high cholesterol, overweight, low fruit and vegetable intake and physical inactivity – account for almost 60% of all ill health in [Europe].

medical news today

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Installing a new habit and breaking an old one

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Learning trainer Dr. Stephanie Burns shares strategies on how to break a bad habit and train ourselves to create new habits. She defines a habit as an activity that you do without thought (like brushing your teeth); and Burns says that habituating productive activities makes them less energy-consuming because you don?t have to spend time motivating yourself to do them.

Think of the benefit, if in addition to having habits for the mundane chores in life, you also had a habit of getting up a few minutes earlier in the morning. Perhaps a habit of eating a proper breakfast, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, saving a little money every week, paying your bills on time, drinking water throughout the day, staying in touch with friends, exercising, stretching, reading a little everyday, relaxing, writing in a journal.

Imagine you actually did these activities without thinking about it or without the hemming and hawing and mucking about in your mind that goes on when trying to decide to initiate an action.

LifeHacker

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Twelve Ways to Think Differently

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  1. Meditation: Or whatever ‘stand still and look until you really see’ attention techniques work for you. Anything that can still the noise of the machine in our heads, anything (like Getting Things Done) that can empty the detailed minutiae of your life from your memory and make room for something new. Because the better you are at paying attention, the more likely you are to be able to see and appreciate other perspectives.

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