I found myself strongly empathizing with practitioners, administrators, and behavioral health care personnel of all stripes who spend their days trying to provide quality mental health services to their patients…and then spend their nights worrying about what has occurred that day that might get in the way of or assist them in doing their job, but not having the time or the energy to pursue that information. Certainly, the information is readily available on the Internet, but who has time.

There have been numerous discussions of the effects of too much information (TMI) on our functioning. In July, 2008 Nicholas Carr wrote an article in The Atlantic called Is Google Making Us Stupid? This year he has written a book length exposition of that subject called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain. His thesis is that our brains are literally being changed by the way the Internet is organized. He posits that jumping from one place to another by way of hyperlinks results in shallow pursuit of topics rather than the in-depth exploration of a subject allowed by books. In my brief exploration about his book, I found an extremely articulate review and commentary by Venkatesh Rao who mentioned and hyperlinked to the blog of Jason Kottke, a writer whose name I had heard but had never read. I have demonstrated for you an example of Carr’s thesis. I got distracted from obtaining support for my original thought by the way the Internet presents information and by the ease of pursuing that linked information.

Back to my original thought…here I am adding one more place where there is a bit more information for you to take a look at…or not. You might find this a convenient place to check for information about behavioral health care and its place in the world-at-large, or you might drop in occasionally just to see if there is anything that interests you.

For those of you checking in for something interesting, here are a couple of tidbits.

1. ONC (Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) has published a final rule in which it establishes a temporary certification program for electronic health records as required under HITECH. As reported by Healthcare & Technology blog, this rule should allow progress toward approval of certifying organizations for EMR products.
2. iHealthBeat reports on release of final rules for “Meaningful Use”. Many observers believe that the easing of requirements for the meaningful use of an electronic health record required to receive stimulus funds made available under HITECH will make it easier for eligible providers to receive funds. Other observers believe that even the easing of the standards will not make it simple for stimulus funds to be acquired, even for those who have already purchased and implemented EMRs.

It appears that life gets more complicated all the time, even if we have information. Since I do believe that knowledge is power, I will keep trying to pass some of what I come across on to you. Thanks for reading. Please let us know what you are thinking about. Just enter your comments below.

Last weekend, we watched the critically unacclaimed remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still starring Keanu Reeves. While the movie left a great deal to be desired, it reminded me of the ongoing issue of human behavior and how we affect our world. This particular movie ends on a hopeful yet doubtful note that we will be able to change our behavior in time to keep climate change from destroying our species.

The American Psychological Association’s Climate Change Task Force Report has now been published in a nice booklet format. I am hopeful that the shorter, more attractive read will make the report accessible to more readers.

Section 2 of the report discusses the human behavioral contributions to climate change along with psychological and contextual components of the contributions. As is frequent in reports and studies by psychologists, ethical concerns are high on the list of issues to be considered. Since population growth and consumption of raw materials to manufacture those things which increase our perception of quality of life are two factors documented to contribute to the manner by which humans impact climate change, how we address population growth and consumption is crucial. Expecting developing nations to forego growth and consumption while the developed countries (like us) continue to consume is blatantly unjust. Many argue that expecting the developing world to forego growth is unjust even if we were to completely alter our own patterns of consumption.

Demographers have developed formulae to demonstrate the effect humans have on the environment. The basic

and widely known formula from the 1970s is I = PxAxT where I = Impact, P = Population, A = Affluence per capita and T = Technology. (APA Climate Change booklet, p 30, from Ehrlich & Holdren, 1971; Commoner, 1972; Holdren & Ehrlich, 1974)

Newer models take into account that countries with the highest per capita Gross Domestic Product plus intense consumption of goods and services requiring greenhouse gas production (environmental consumption) produce the most emissions and therefore the greatest environmental impact. These models are lovely ways to show in graphical form the impact of our reproductive and consumption choices. They do not, however, in any way address the variety of factors that contribute to growth in population (for example , individual and cultural religious beliefs; gender role beliefs; beliefs about individual vs. government control of reproduction; norms about when to start having children and how many to have; infant mortality; availability of food resources; and longevity. Population growth is a very complex phenomenon).

Consumption is an even more complex set of events and requires equally complex analysis. Each consumption behavior is multifactorially determined and requires analysis at different levels including institutional, sociocultural and physical environment context, individual factors such as demographics and psychological drivers, consumption of economic resources, consumption of environmental resources, greenhouse gases produced and emitted, and specific climate change.

The APA report discusses the need to separate consumption behaviors so we can determine which have the greatest impact on climate change. To spend significant resources researching behaviors with minimal impact will not be cost effective. To spend our time and energy learning about and affecting behaviors which have the most direct and largest impact on climate will be the best expenditure of psychological expertise.

While this report assesses what psychologists and the behavioral science community can do to impact climate change, the booklet is an articulate and readable explication of human behavior and climate change.

The question I have asked you before and will ask you again is the following: should we just sit helplessly by while the world (and our climate) changes around us, or should we learn what each of us can do in our individual and organizational lives to affect that change? What do you think?

On Saturday night, we finally saw Avatar. Among the themes explored in this movie was the strong prejudice that exists today against science and scientists. Technology…the practical outcome of scientific endeavor… is valued. Everyone on that space settlement was a technician of some sort. But the science that got them there and the science allowing the use of real avatars was denigrated by the majority.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about behavioral health professionals use of evidence based treatments. Behavioral health professionals and psychologists in particular are generally well-trained scientists, having a good understanding of the scientific method plus training in critical judgement of research. One goal of this education is to choose the soundest methods of providing care. And yet, large numbers of psychologists indicate that they do what they “believe” is best for their clients rather than what scientific research indicates is likely to provide the most effective course of treatment.

Numerous writers and commentators have bemoaned the state of science education in this country. At one time the U.S. was generally regarded to be the place to get the best education in science. Students from across the world came to the U.S. to study. Some stayed, some returned to their home lands to teach others. A 2007 article in the Christian Science Monitor ranked U.S. high school students 29th in the world in science literacy. While others would argue this figure, the common perception is that we have slipped as a nation in our interest in, and understanding of, science.

Simultaneously, we have become technology addicts. I would venture to say that many young people who are technology drones have never really thought about the science that went into creating the devices they cannot live without. Nor do they care that they do not know about the science. Just make sure that they continue to have access to their toys and to the technological infrastructure that supports them.

I believe this trajectory puts us as a nation in a very vulnerable position. Technological innovations are only one aspect of scientific endeavors. The knowledge gained from pure science is one of the things that keeps me most in touch with my creativity and my humanity. Take a listen sometime to Science Friday, an NPR program and podcast that weekly explores a whole variety of science topics and themes. It is impossible for me to listen to more than two or three of these shows without coming away with a book I want to read. I referenced one of these shows in my article on Evidence Based Treatment.

Those who provide behavioral health care services are unlikely to find the bulk of their work taken over by technology. There will be technologies that facilitate treatment and technologies that become treatments, but the bulk of human services will still be provided by humans. Assuring that we are good scientists, or at least can judge when a study is good science, is a worthwhile goal for behavioral health providers of every stripe.

How do you rate our science literacy? Are you interested in or bored to tears by science? Do you see science as relevant to your life…as a human being or as a provider of services?

Please enter your comments by clicking on the title of this article and typing in the box at the bottom of the page.

The cold temperatures across the nation this week have had some individuals scoffing at the notion of global warming. On the other hand, most scientists explain that extremes of weather are part of the whole pattern of global warming; these freezing temperatures are the other side of the extreme heat we experienced this summer and fall.

The American Psychological Association’s (APA) report on global climate change is a thorough examination of our current understanding of human attitudes, emotions and behavior relevant to climate change. Whether or not you have seen the movie “An Inconvenient Truth“, you might benefit from reading the introductory section (pages 24-30) of the APA report which does an excellent job of reviewing the background of the intersection of human systems and earth systems, and how human behavior impacts earth systems.

Section 1 of the report explores how people understand the risks presented by climate change. One of the primary challenges in changing behavior is to understand the perspective of the person whose behavior we are trying to change. Any psychotherapist worth his or her salt will tell you that a good assessment of the individual with whom one is proposing to work is essential to effective therapy. The nature of the assessment is less important than its outcome…an understanding of the experiences and motivations of the potential consumer of services, along with a sense of their strengths and limitations.  The beliefs and points of view of that person, about their problems and about their power to impact those problems, is crucial in designing a treatment plan.

So before we design a climate behavior treatment plan for our families, our neighbors and our communities, we must understand how they perceive the potential risks of global climate change. Psychological research leads us to believe that the impacts of distant or rare events tend to be underestimated. From pages 6 and 7 of the APA report, we learn that

…small probability events tend to be underestimated in decisions based on personal experience, unless they have recently occurred, in which case they are vastly overestimated. Many think of climate change risks (and thus of the benefits of mitigating them) as both considerably uncertain and also as being mostly in the future and geographically distant, all factors that lead people to discount them. The costs of mitigation, on the other hand, will be incurred with certainty in the present or near future…. Yet, emotional reactions to climate change risks are likely to be conflicted and muted because climate change can be seen as a natural process and global environmental systems perceived as beyond the control of individuals, communities, and quite possibly, science and technology.

Accordingly, when we communicate about the potential risks to humans of global climate change, we must recognize that different human responses will result based upon the individual’s perception of the risk to them and theirs posed by climate change. If the risk is seen as low and completely outside their control, no change to current behavior will occur. Even if the danger is seen as high, if it is seen as outside the ability of the individual to have an impact, there will still be no change in behavior.

Based on this understanding of how people behave in the face of risk, we must assure that our interventions allow people to experience a sense of efficacy and empowerment. We need to believe that the things we are doing to affect climate change can possibly have the effect we seek. Without such a belief, we will not likely take action.

For most of us, the source of information about climate change has been media reports of the observations of climate scientists. Few of us have personally seen melting glaciers or arctic ice. Psychological research on risk communication is important in this regard. What is the most effective way to communicate about climate change to inform individuals and communities and to empower them to take action? Just how should we be communicating the reports and projections of climate scientists to maximize change in human behavior? Will we be successful in enlisting the media as educators rather than as sensationalists or naysayers?

The summary of section 1 of the APA report (p 48-49) clearly states these issues.

Feeling (or not feeling) vulnerable and at risk in the face of climate change seems to be instrumental in moving (or not moving) people to action (see section 4), and thus the sources of these feelings are in need of further study. Research in cognitive psychology suggests that certain perceived characteristics of climate change (e.g., that it is “natural,” not new, and in principle controllable) may lead citizens as well as policy makers to underestimate the magnitude of the risks. Other psychological research provides additional hypotheses related to emotional reactions to climate change such that the absence of feeling at risk may be a psychodynamic reaction (see section 3), the result of psychic numbing or denial in the face of overwhelming and uncontrollable risk (see section 4 and 5). These explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, though sometimes contradictory in elements of their hypotheses (e.g., is climate change seen as a controllable or uncontrollable risk?). Such contradictions need to be resolved by empirical investigations.

The ability of different educational interventions in shaping perceptions, attitudes, and action related to climate change should also be a topic of empirical research (see section 6). Existing knowledge about the relative impact of direct personal experience vs. more abstract statistical information on the perceptions of risk in domains like financial decisions or with the relative effectiveness of emotional vs. analytic processes in prompting protective action can guide the design of different educational interventions about likely climate change scenarios and their repercussions and about the pros and cons of different courses of adaptation to climate change and/or mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

If you have not yet taken a look at the APA report, you should do so. Set aside some time to focus on the issues facing us as behavioral and psychological experts, then share your perspectives here. To enter your comments, just click on the title of this article and type in the box at the bottom of the post.

I do have a history with APA; I have been a member for 30 years. I joined as soon as I was eligible after completing my Ph.D. In the early 1990′s I served on two different committees within APA—the Public Information Committee and the Committee for the Advancement of Professional Practice. I have read more than my share of scholarly papers and APA organizational documents. Since retiring from the practice of psychology in 1993 and moving to full-time involvement in the business of psychology billing and clinical record software, I have become more removed from scholarly work and more involved in the action orientation of the business world.

Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing a Multi-faceted Phenomenon and Set of Challenges, while perhaps intended to be a call to action, is actually a carefully written and documented organizational treatise on the psychological phenomena involved in this crisis, the psychological research and knowledge which are applicable to these events, and recommendations for the role APA as an organization and psychologists as professionals and individuals can and should play as this crisis unfolds. It is what I should have expected, but not what I hoped it would be.

In order to make this document useful, I believe it needs to be broken down into parts and digested in that fashion. Accordingly, over the next few months, I am going to take each section of the report and tell you about what is in that section. I hope this will have the result of helping us glean the recommendations of the APA and determining what constructive actions individual mental health professionals and behavioral health community organizations can take.

The APA Climate Change Task Force considered six questions:

1. How do people understand the risks imposed by climate change?
2. What are the human behavioral contributions to climate change and the psychological and contextual drivers of these contributions?
3. What are the psychosocial impacts of climate change?
4. How do people adapt to and cope with the perceived threat and unfolding impacts of climate change?
5. Which psychological barriers limit climate change action?
6. How can psychologists assist in limiting climate change?

In examining these questions, they reviewed the psychological literature to focus areas in which additional research might be useful and in which current data might enhance the work of climate scientists.  By way of this report, the task force attempted to create bridges between the climate science community and the psychological community.

It is also clear from these questions that the authors were considerably concerned about what the psychosocial effects of climate change might be. Since those of us who work with individuals, families and communities about various emotional and behavioral health concerns will undoubtedly need to address these impacts, it behooves us to be prepared…at least with knowledge.

Finally, the task force recommended that specialists in behavioral and psychological research adopt the following principles in an attempt to maximize the value and use of psychological principles in climate change work:

1. Use the shared language and concepts of the climate research community where possible and explain differences in use of language between psychology and this community.
2. Make connections to research and concepts from other social, engineering, and natural science fields.
3. Present psychological insights in terms of missing pieces in climate change analysis.
4. Present the contributions of psychology in relation [to] important challenges to climate change and climate response.
5. Prioritize issues and behaviors recognized as important climate changes causes, consequences, or responses. 
6. Be cognizant of the possibility that psychological phenomena are context dependent.
7. Be explicit about whether psychological principles and best practices have been established in climate-relevant contexts.
8. Be mindful of social disparities and ethical and justice issues that interface with climate change.

If climate change continues and has even some of the potential impacts that are predicted, mental health and behavioral specialists will be deluged with people caught in and reacting to those impacts. What can you and your organization do to prepare for addressing the fallout of some of these impacts? What would be the result of a Katrina-equivalent in your community? What knowledge and expertise do you need to gain?

Please share you comments by clicking on the title of this article and entering your comment in the box at the bottom of the page.

This morning, as I was doing one of the lowest-tech tasks I do, I realized how it fits in to this ongoing discussion.

You see, two months ago, I started raising worms. I can hear the muttered “you did what?”s and see the disgusted expressions on some of your faces. I have seen and heard these often in my face-to-face conversations about vermiculture. Last month, we saw friends at a tandem bicycle rally with whom we had not visited for the last five years. Within three minutes she and I had gotten to our separately-arrived-at but shared new endeavor. Not surprisingly, we both got there by approximately the same route.

If I were retired, I would be an avid gardener. Since I co-run a small business full time, share our residence with my 89-year-old mother, and ride a tandem bicycle for recreation on the weekends, time is at a premium. Traditional gardening will have to wait.

About 18 months ago, I purchased a single recirculating hydroponic garden from a nearby company that specializes in vertical agriculture. One of my neighbors started a hydroponic strawberry farm as his retirement business several years ago and he told me about Vertigro. The unit I purchased (the VG-1) sits on my patio, has a 10.5 gallon nutrient-water tank and is run by a small electric pump controlled by an electric timer. At last, I had the possibility of growing vegetables without killing everything for lack of care!

I was so enthralled by the crop of lettuce and spinach and how easy it was to grow that, six months later in late December, I went for the big time…I purchased a four-tower unit that holds 16 pots in which up to four plants can be grown. I am now beginning to harvest from my third round of planting. Because of how the units are set up, I can easily plant crops that have different starting and best harvest times. Right now, I am still harvesting the last of the late summer basil, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants and starting to pick sugar snap peas and green beans while we wait for the broccoli. In a small in-ground garden, I have carrots, onions, cabbages and Brussels sprouts.

I have tried to grow vegetables since we first moved to our current location in Central Florida. I have had varying degrees of success. Now that we are eating vegetarian, and since I am becoming more aware about how far produce is shipped on average within the U.S. (1500 miles), I decided that it is important that we diminish some of the fossil fuel we use by producing at least some of our own food.

My in-ground garden is fertilized mostly by composted food and plant waste, but my towers are still using manufactured nutrients. Organic is my destination…thus the worms.

Apparently, using organic fertilizer requires assuring that the correct ingredients are present. Without the right starting ingredients, the fertilizer is lacking necessary amino acids for the plants and for the people who eat the plants. Worms do an excellent job of composting food scraps and paper, lots of things that usually go to a landfill or incinerator. Annnnnd, when their feed is supplemented with certain minerals, they produce extremely high nutrient “castings”…the polite and technical word for worm poop.

I raise my worms in a unit called The Worm Factory. It is a vertical stack of cleverly designed bins into which I put food scraps, coffee grounds, egg shells, shredded paper, and the secret ingredient supplement minerals. The pound of worms I bought to start my farm has been busily munching through the first of the bins for the last three months. Today I harvested my first batch of worm poop…I mean worm castings…from the bottom bin. I now have almost two gallons of highly nutritious worm waste that will soon be added to my plantings. I am hopeful that this process will allow me to move away from using mined and manufactured fertilizer to grow my veggies.

Why, you wonder, would I consider going to such trouble to grow my own vegetables when I have my choice of supermarkets, and even a local farmers market. What could possibly make it worth the additional effort, and probably additional cost, just to get a few veggies on the table?

My answer is that getting veggies on the table is only part of the goal. The goal is to find reasonable ways to balance out how much carbon dioxide my household and business dump into the environment. I do not expect that I will be able to diminish our input to zero any time soon, if ever. As a software company, we use lots of electricity to run the computers that allow us to do our work. Our local utility utilizes coal-powered and atomic-powered electricity generation facilities. Not a spec of solar power is generated by this company in the Sunshine State…yet. While we are waiting for that to change, I am working to minimize the number of food miles (the distance food travels from farm to table) expended by my family.

Yes, this is a small change…both in my lifestyle and in contribution to diminishing the production of carbon dioxide by human activities. I will need to do a lot more to make a significant contribution. The electric company energy audit is later this week. I drive a Prius and I vote for leaders who share my goals. I hope other responsible activities will follow, but this is what I can do now given my circumstances.  I can only try in small steps to do less harm to the earth by how I tread upon it. Balancing what I take and what I replace is the current goal.

What are you doing in your daily life to diminish your personal effect upon the environment? What is your organization doing to “go green” and serve as a role model? Please share the ideas you have considered or adopted to walk more gently upon the earth. We would love to know your ideas and experiences.

I did some of that clean up physically on Saturday. Pressure cleaning the deck in my screened porch is a task that has waited long to be done. Getting the cat and dog hair out from under the deck and cleaning the algae off the boards was a large project and a satisfying one to complete. As I ate my breakfast on that porch this morning and watched the cats enjoy their critter searches, I had the satisfaction of the newly freshened environment.

Some of the free time in the last two weekends has been devoted to planting my fall vegetable garden. Living in Central Florida gives me benefit of three distinct planting seasons and I was extremely pleased to get the final tomato and pepper, broccoli and cabbage, lettuce and spinach starts into the ground and hydroponic towers. Our usually mild Fall weather should give us another harvest before needing to protect tender plants.

I have begun a few new projects at work, as well. I had delayed creating demo and training videos for our products until I could obtain a good microphone and create a “mini sound studio” to improve the quality of the recordings. Now that I have that equipment, I am excited about diving into the project. Now I just need to figure a way to sweep the cob webs from the brain and get moving on writing the scripts. Any of our customers who have ideas about which topics they would like to see covered first are welcome to give their input. Inspiration from outside is always helpful in getting the thought processes moving.

In fact, I will be doing a survey of our customers on electronic prescribing in the next couple of weeks. Getting input from our customers will guide our decisions about how to proceed. And I just gave our web programmer some tasks to do for a few changes on our web site. That too will provide us with some needed information.

Now I think I just need a couple of clean notebooks and a new pen so I can get started….

How do you motivate yourself to begin new projects? Is there a time of year or are there other external factors that move you in that direction? Talking about changes and input, what topics would you like to see us cover here in SOS-at-large? It has been one year since I started writing this blog and your thoughts and comments would be very welcome!

First, let me warn you that I am a cynic. I have great wishes for but expect little of other people and am rarely disappointed. I am pleasantly surprised when others take seriously the same things that I do. Fortunately for me, Friedman and others are optimists who believe we are capable of rising to the occasion, creating a clean energy industry, gradually diminishing our use of dirty fuels, and continuing to grow our economy and the global economy all at the same time. His book is a very readable exposition of the issues and what we need to do to get past them.

My primary reaction to Friedman’s book was a major sense of urgency. I am not sure why I spend so much time thinking about and writing about health care reform and electronic medical records (EMRs) when we have so much more important challenges on our doorstep. 

If you do not believe that climate change (and our part in it) is an issue that we must address and take action about sooner rather than later but you are open to learning more, please read this book. If you already accept this premise, you might want to read the book to understand some of the complex issues that make it difficult for us as a country to take action on climate change…and to help determine what our personal next step needs to be. If you do not believe that climate change is happening and that we play a part in it and can do something to solve the problem and you know that your opinion is not going to change, that’s fine…but please just get out of our way while we try to take the difficult steps needed to save the planet, our society and our quality of life.

Friedman quoted from the speech of a twelve-year-old girl to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Severn Suzuki is probably the most articulate child advocate of anything I have ever heard. If you have 6:42 to invest, take a look at her speech on YouTube. I have strong emotional reactions to speeches…after I finished crying, I started to think about what I wanted to write and what I want to do. One of the decisions I made is that I will write about this subject regularly…you can expect reports a I become more informed and as we take steps to diminish our personal and business CO2 production.

When I got up this morning to write this article, I first checked my email, then I glanced through the N.Y. Times Today’s Headlines to which I subscribe. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman decided to write about this same subject for today’s paper. His Op-Ed piece Cassandras of Climate expresses succinctly what Friedman’s book does in detail…the time for us to take major action is NOW.

Small, incremental, easy actions are not likely to be enough to keep our children and grandchildren from experiencing significant discomfort and disruption of their lives…but we must start somewhere. Those of us who accept the scientific opinions of virtually all the climate scientists in the world need to get off our duffs and do something…… NOW.  We must find ways to mobilize all the talents of all our citizens to accomplish the difficult tasks before us.

What are you doing about climate change? Many of you are so much farther along than the rest of us. Please share your experience, ideas and the information you have gleaned to help the rest of us move along.

1. Monday mornings consistently go wrong.
          I count on Monday mornings to take care of a variety of tasks that direct me back to the week of work, and even to get a head start on some of those tasks. It is not unknown for me to get up an hour or two before usual to take care of those things. I will read a few blog articles, settle on an idea for my own blog and maybe even start into it, put out Mom’s medications and vitamins for the week, and make sure I have everything I need for dinner if it is my week to cook. (In our house, we alternate that responsibility a week at a time.)

          Soooo….when an unexpected telephone call at an unholy hour ties me up for an hour, or when the soup I so carefully started with a Sunday night soak of the beans boils over as I sit down to begin my blog, I start to think it is time to shake up this routine and all the others.

2. Every new idea I come up with seems ridiculous….and often is.
          Sometimes I am a really good idea generator. Part of having been a psychotherapist is having good skills at brainstorming and then teaching how to evaluate the options generated and how to implement them. The closer I get to vacation, the fewer my ideas become and the more outlandish they are. I mean, even I know that calling all of our customers this summer to see if there is anything they need is not feasible. But it sure seemed like a good idea….before I squashed it!

3. The idea of delegating tasks, even small tasks, seems wonderful!
          We are blessed with wonderful co-workers. When I ask someone to do something, it is rare to get even a moment’s hesitation before I get questions about the details of the task…no matter how small or how large. Egalitarian / Feminist that I am, I have always been convinced that I should take care of small tasks myself rather than interrupt the work flow of someone else to do something for me. Grabbing something from a file, looking up a piece of information about a customer, making a photocopy… these are all things I usually don’t hesitate to do myself.
          But when I am ready for a vacation…I would have someone else breathe for me….oh no, I can’t do that, that would mean they need to go to my yoga class for me and I really need that yoga class today!

4. It is hard to get serious about anything at work.
          When the talk of our Power Ball pool starts and we need to decide what to do with the $15 we won, I am glad to sit and talk about our winnings and about every subject that spins off from there….

5. It is hard not to be serious about everything at work.
          It is most clear that I need a vacation when I begin to see doom and gloom everywhere. I already have strong tendencies toward the negative. I need to work to maintain a positive focus…and I am most often successful at doing so.
          When it is time for a vacation, the quicksand of my cynicism gets especially dangerous, sucking me in when I least expect it. My inclination to say “no” to each request or idea gets almost impossible to resist. You can see…what I had hoped would be a relatively light blog article has become a much more serious one. Yep, it is time for a vacation!

How do you know when you need time off to restore, recharge and renew your energy and creativity?

Oh, BTW, I will be on vacation next week. If I get this week’s work and next week’s work done before I go, there will be a post next Monday. If I don’t get it all in place in time…talk to you in two weeks.

Not surprisingly, one of the most crucial responsibilities of the Executive is to decide not to behave, that is, to withhold or inhibit action. When I decide not to emit an expletive, even though I am angry, to avoid further inflaming a confrontation, I have utilized that part of the brain which makes me human…the one that keeps me from behaving purely on the basis of my emotions. The prefrontal cortex allows me to inhibit behaviors that might be destructive to me and to others.

On the other hand, when I am in a situation where it is perfectly safe to respond in a purely emotional fashion, that same Executive sometimes keeps me from doing so. Rather than taking a deep breath and enjoying a sensory experience, such as a bicycle ride, to its fullest, my prefrontal cortex questions how much pollen is in the air today and complains of the humidity that makes the air seem so heavy. Sometimes, we cannot do even the simplest of things without analyzing every aspect of, and all the implications for, that behavior.

It sometimes seems to me that our country is filled with people who have not learned how to moderate or inhibit behaviors. They see or hear the statement of some other person and cannot help but react. Their Executive does not kick in until they have already done their knee-jerk reaction. Then they either regret their comment or spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing or defending it so they can feel justified.

I used to think it was just pundits, bloggers, news analysts and elected officials who reacted without benefit of the Executive, but as I read the newspaper and see the comments of my neighbors to events in our community, I become more and more convinced that we have not effectively learned when it is best to behave on the basis of our emotions and when some logic would be more useful. We may have evolved the brain structures and capacities that allow us to behave in balanced fashion, but we seem as a nation to do a poor job of educating ourselves on how to utilize those abilities toward the general good. I usually don’t even read rants any more…and I’m doing my best to avoid reading pieces written by the Chicken Littles of the world. My own tendency toward negative emotions and thinking needs lots of logical balance plus the input of other folks who always see the glass as half full.

In the world of behavioral health services and practice, I sometimes see my colleagues and customers fail to utilize the executive functions of the brain to best advantage. Some impulsively rush to action taking a bit of information provided and implementing suggestions therein immediately. “The stimulus bill says we need to buy CCHIT certified EMRs, so we are doing so now! No, the ones we see are not designed for behavioral health. No, they are not particularly easy to use. But we will have a certified EMR.” Some behave in just the opposite fashion. They do not like the message they hear, so they avoid information about it. They withhold response to the extent that they do not inform themselves about the choices they will have to make in the future. “It will be ten years before anything actually happens. I’ll retire before that goes into effect. None of this pertains to me.” Somewhere in between lies a moderated response that may include ‘wait and see’, but informs itself in the time spend waiting and seeing. 

How We Decide is a good read. It might remind you of some of your own decision making strengths and weaknesses.

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