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Every week, Dr. Justin Altschuler writes a post that provides new insight and perspective into the familiar parts of life, helping readers live a healthy, happy, meaningful life.
Doc’s Thoughts I was recently talking to a patient who had picked up smoking again after successfully quitting. He was off cigarettes for a while, and then picked them up again during a period of high stress. He was so angry with himself. “Why the $%# would I do this to myself?” he asked me. “I know better, I hate these things, and here I am addicted again.” His reaction is understandable. We all do things that are not in our best interest, and end up in a place where we are frustrated and...
Doc’s Thoughts I’ve written before how the way we define the opposite of something defines the thing itself. When we hear that we need to be more accepting of people, or things, there’s a lot that this can mean. If the opposite of acceptance is denial, then accepting something means facing the truth, embracing reality as it actually is. If we define the opposite of acceptance as resistance, then acceptance means something much closer to surrender, or acquiescence. If we define the opposite of...
Doc’s Thoughts When we talk about distilling something down, we’re talking about reducing it to its essence. We take something made up of many constituent parts and work to extract what matters most. The aim is not to capture everything, but to remove what is extraneous or confounding so that what remains is useful and clarifying. This is a valuable framework because we live in a world defined by complexity. Nearly any current event could justify an entire book explaining how it came to be....