Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts When it comes to taking care of our health, my job is often less about delivering new information and more about helping people problem-solve, reframe their assumptions, and remember what they already know. Most of us don’t need to be told that exercise matters, vegetables are good, or sleep is essential. And yet, many of us struggle to exercise enough, eat well, or get to bed on time....
8 days ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts I recently had a conversation with a patient about how hard recovery is– facing challenges, embracing honesty– there’s a whole suite of difficulties involved. And in truth, recovery is really hard. But continuing to drink or use drugs is also really hard. I think about this a lot when talking about difficult, uncomfortable decisions that we must make in our lives. We think that there...
15 days ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts Turn a world map upside down, and the almost automatic sense of understanding that we have about the globe feels less intuitive. We have to look harder at what previously for granted– and often, in that re-examination, we develop new insights. To solve difficult problems, it is helpful to look at them from another perspective. German mathematician Carl Jacobi wrote, man muss immer...
22 days ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts I recently started seeing a new patient for addiction. This man has been through an incredible amount in his life, and substance abuse has been a part of this world for many years. When talking about what brought him into treatment, described a series of religious or spiritual experiences. He was reluctant to talk about them, uncomfortable describing them, and skeptical (at best) about...
29 days ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts When people are first learning to meditate, I often provide a little warning: meditation is just a synonym for paying attention, while it is simple, it is not easy. This is why we meditate, to cultivate the skill of being attentive. Our minds’ tendency is to wander, and working to remain present and attentive takes effort. At the beginning of meditation, maintaining attention is...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts We have a tendency to think of things in binary terms—on or off, yes or no, true or false, good or bad. In reality, though, most things are better thought of as existing on a spectrum—even things that we do not often think of as that way. This can be challenging because the belief structures that we use to navigate life are often framed in binary terms. All-or-nothing thinking is a...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts Think about the people who have moved humanity forward over the past 200 years—the individuals who made a meaningful, lasting contribution to the world. Who belongs on that list? Perhaps Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, or Nelson Mandela for their leadership; Marie Curie or Albert Einstein for their scientific discoveries; Mark Twain or Gabriel García Márquez for their literary...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts I often feel my writing is a giant rip-off of what has come before me. Most of what I write about is repackaged wisdom that’s been said before– choose your observer of human nature, and the observations throughout time and space are remarkably consistent. The Stoics spoke about resilience and emotional discipline. The Buddha taught about suffering and the impermanence of life. Aquinas...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts In the 1960s in a small village in France, there was a group of teenage boys who would run around the town together. They would occasionally chat with the old men of the town, who would sit at a cafe and socialize. One day, one of the boys got a moped, and would race it around town. The rest of the boys were jealous. “See how lucky he is!” the boys said to the old man. “Look at how...
2 months ago • 3 min read