Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts We all know what we should be doing—exercising more, eating better, spending less time on our phones—but most of us don’t. If I were an academic, I might describe my research interest as “the gap between what people know is good for them, what they want to do, and what they actually do.” Just about everyone experiences this gap. On one side are the behaviors we intend to engage in, and...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts This week was Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of repentance and atonement. Every year on Yom Kippur, my wife says to me, “I’m sorry for all the things I have done this year that have hurt you.” I respond with the same message. The message matters—not “If I’ve hurt you,” but the presumption that we have hurt each other. None of us are perfect, and this simple ritual begins from that...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts This first story is a classic Buddhist parable: One day the Buddha was resting with a group of monks in the woods. They had just finished a meal, and were talking with each other. Suddenly a farmer came by, visibly upset and distraught. He yelled, “Monks, have you seen my cows?” “We have not seen any cows,” the Buddha responded. “You know,” the man wailed, “I am the most miserable...
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 had an appointment with a patient who is doing really well in his recovery. He was stuck in the mud and struggling for several years, but recently his life has started to go much better. He is closer with his family, his anxiety has improved, professional opportunities have opened up, and his children are doing great. Interestingly though, he is quite focused on a long term...
30 days ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts I’ve written before about imposter syndrome—the feeling of not belonging even after we reach some milestone. I’ve also written about the hedonic treadmill—how quickly good things become normal, leaving us hungry for more. This idea of “arrival” is slippery– both the feeling that we don’t belong once we arrive, or that when we do arrive we are unsatisfied and need to achieve the next...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts In physics and calculus, there’s a classic graph that plots time on the x-axis, and velocity on the y-axis. If you draw a line on this graph, it represents velocity over time. If you shade in the area under that line (under the curve), you can find the distance– the distance is just the area under the curve (AUC), or the sum of velocity x time. How fast we travel matters, but the...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts The dictionary defines curiosity as a desire to know something– technically, true. But if curiosity were only “a desire to know something,” then love would be “a strong affection,” and the sun would be “a hot ball of gas.” Not wrong, but missing the point. Curiosity might be better thought of as a quality that we are capable of either cultivating or smothering, and one that is key to...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts For many people (myself included), we tend to try and organize our lives around goals. When we think about what comes next (or what we hope comes next), what we want to achieve, the things we hope to accomplish, they tend to revolve around things we can check off a list. The goal might be to go to college, graduate from college, become a doctor, achieve a certain level of financial...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts We all carry a mental image of what it means to be strong. Often, it’s the person who stands tall in the storm, pushes through without complaint, and never asks for help. Society celebrates toughness, control, and confidence—especially in those who endure hardship in silence. We absorb this message early, and it shapes how we measure ourselves and others. The image is compelling, but...
2 months ago • 2 min read