I’m pleased to announce a free Psych Central webinar on the topic of relationships and ADHD.

Get psyched with Psych Central’s Zoë Kessler and author Melissa Orlov in a fun hour of sharing about the good stuff in an ADHD / Non-ADHD partnership!

We’ll talk about how we can bring out the best in you and your loved one.

During our webinar, we’ll:

• re-discover what each partner brings  to the relationship
• discover some new ways to bring out the best in you and your loved one!
• invite you to share your positive stories
• remind each other of opportunities and possibilities

…and more!

Creativity can bring a lot of joy into our lives — if we let it. As we get older, unfortunately, many of us leave our favorite activities behind, forget to play and instead go through the motions. Wake up. Go to work. Run errands. Come home. Have dinner. Watch T.V. Go to bed. Rinse. Repeat.

In The Book of Doing: Everyday Activities to Unlock Your Creativity and Joy, Allison Arden, publisher of Advertising Age, shares a slew of fun and playful ideas to reignite our creativity. More than that, her book shows us how to create and find joy in our everyday lives.

So what is “doing”? According to Arden, it’s anything and everything from creating, making, helping, experimenting, drawing, reading, playing, acting, cooking, tasting, celebrating and loving.

Here are 10 of my favorite ideas from her book. I hope you’ll try them!

This guest article from YourTango was written by Virginia Clark.

Your mindset is everything when it comes to helping you find love. I’m not just talking about romantic love. I’m talking about love, overall. Love is a state of mind that either is or isn’t something you cultivate.

Wikipedia defines mindset as:

A set of assumptions, methods or notations held by one or more people, that creates a powerful incentive within these people or groups to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, choices, or tools.

Your mindset is how you approach the world. If you let it run wild, it will compel you to make the same choices over and over again. No one is exempt from having a mindset. We all have one. It’s like a filter through which you perceive your reality.

Imagine that you’re 4 years old and that it’s 1968.

You’re brought into a small room, a “game room,” with a table, chair and three sugary snacks. You’re asked to pick one treat. You choose the marshmallow. Then you’re told that you can either have the marshmallow right away by ringing a bell, or wait a few minutes and get two marshmallows. Then you’re left alone for 15 minutes.

This seemingly simple experiment conducted by Austrian-born clinical psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University became known as “The Marshmallow Study.” But don’t let the silly name fool you. This study tested over 600 kids at the Bing Nursery School and has become one of the longest-running studies in psychology.

What Mischel actually wanted to explore had zero to do with kids’ desire for sweets, of course. The lead investigator wanted to test the concept of delayed gratification.

It has been said that some of the strongest individuals are the ones that have experienced tragedy, trauma or have struggled with physical or mental illness. And I can understand why.

Maybe you haven’t had it easy. But for that reason alone, you’ve had to build resilience, courage and persistence to find a way to bring hope, love and happiness into your life.

Not everyone has that type of determination. Not everyone has that kind of strength.

But while you spend your days working and striving to be better, it’s easy to feel discouraged. Sometimes it only takes talking with others or seeing a friend’s Facebook page to make you wish your life was easier.

When you spend time with your eyes forward, looking ahead at all the people who have more than you, you may forget to look back. Yes you have a long way to go. Yes, your life may not be as simple as your neighbor’s, but along the way in your own individual journeys, don’t forget to acknowledge and celebrate how far you’ve come.

This week you may even find your own gift(s) in difficulty. You will share a sense of community with those who have faced the same issues as you. You may discover tools to maneuver your life better. The good news is that you’re definitely not alone in your journey. In each of these posts there are threads of hope, and together we weave the most beautiful quilt, don’t we?

I’ve posted this quiz before, but because I think it’s such a very helpful thing to know about yourself, I’m posting it again. Recognizing this distinction has been one of the most important insights that I’ve had into my own nature — more helpful, say, than understanding that I’m an under-buyer, not an over-buyer.

A piece of advice I often see is, “Be moderate. Don’t have ice cream every night, but if you try to deny yourself altogether, you’ll fall off the wagon. Allow yourself to have the occasional treat, it will help you stick to your plan.”

I’ve come to believe that this is good advice for some people: the “moderators.” They do better when they try to make moderate changes, when they avoid absolutes and bright lines.

For a long time, I kept trying this strategy of moderation — and failing. Then I read a line from Samuel Johnson, who said, when someone offered him wine: “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”

Ah ha! Like Dr. Johnson, I’m an “abstainer.”

Life is hard for everyone. That’s why it helps to have an assortment of tools to navigate life’s inevitable lows.

And that’s exactly what you’ll find in Russ Harris’s book The Reality Slap: Finding Peace and Fulfillment When Life Hurts. Harris is a psychotherapist and renowned expert in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The book is based on ACT’s principles.

The reality slap is a term that Harris uses to refer to life’s various lows, which include everything from losing a loved one to experiencing failure or envy.

According to Harris, after a reality slap strikes, we face another problem: “the reality gap.” The reality gap consists of two sides. One side is the reality we have; the other side is the reality we want.

The bigger the gap between these realities, the more painful our emotions.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Danielle Dowling. 

You went on a first date with an amazing man. You thought you looked great in that dress. You’re pretty sure that he found the stories about your dog hilarious. You’re certain that he didn’t notice you got a little tipsy on all those cocktails.

The problem is that he doesn’t call. Or text. Or email. So, you decide to call your girlfriends to dissect every single thing he said and every single thing you did. Why didn’t he ask you out again?

According to the men in my life, here are the top ten reasons why your first date with him ended up being your last…

This guest article from YourTango was written by Tom King. 

Relationships are rarely smooth sailing. Like life itself, relationships provide us with a lot of shelter during the storm, but sometimes they are the storm.

My wife and I recently celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary. As I reflected on this, I decided to share my list of the top ten things I have learned in 36 years, in no particular order.

Click through to read these tips, and hopefully you’ll find some wisdom you can apply to your own relationship.

While researching the history of psychology, I come across a lot of interesting information. Every month I share five pieces, podcasts or videos that you might find fascinating, too.

Last month we talked about Alan Turing, Carl Jung and the famous Robbers Cave Experiment.

This month we’ve got quite the array of topics and in various mediums, including a podcast and a few videos. You’ll learn about the first sport psychologist, the infamous Wolf Man, the history of treating depression, mental asylums and a recent film featuring psychology’s masterminds.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance of small treats, small pleasures. They’re fun to experience, of course, and I think they also have a very important role to play in happiness.

When we feel depleted and drained, and when we have no time or energy devoted to the things that give us pleasure, we start to feel exhausted, resentful, and angry. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

But it can be surprisingly hard to think of what little treats you want to give yourself. So many pleasures come at a cost: cookies cost calories, movies and books take time and focus, a museum costs the price of a ticket. It’s good to have a list of treats and pleasures that have a very low cost in time, energy, or money.

I hated sixth grade.

It was my first year in middle school and I reeked of awkwardness in a very “Deb-from-Napoleon-Dynamite” sort of way. Side ponytail? Check. Fascination with weird homemade lanyards and keychains? Check.

All the older kids were wearing their grunge-inspired flannel shirts and Grateful Dead t-shirts. Most of my wardrobe came from either Kids R Us or a giant garbage bag of hand-me-down clothes that my mother had collected from her co-workers.

One day, while walking home from school, a eighth-grade boy started harassing me. He’d call me names, comment on my clothing, and taunt me nearly the entire ten-block walk. My entire repertoire of comebacks, unfortunately, came straight from Full House.