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.

What is positivity, positive psychology and the Positivity Ratio?

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson discovered that experiencing positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative ones leads people to a tipping point beyond which they naturally become more resilient to adversity and effortlessly achieve what they once could only imagine.

In this video, Psych Central’s Ask the Therapists Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D. & Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. discuss the benefits of positivity and understanding how the positivity ratio might help you in your own life.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Virginia Clark. 

Choosing your life partner is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. When you find the man who’ll be beside you every day, it impacts every aspect of your life. So, when I see women who approach finding their “soulmate” with so little concern about it’s true importance, I feel overwhelming frustration.

They meet and date perfectly good men, men who want to be in a committed relationship; but then they treat these men as if they were nothing special, as if there were plenty more where they came from. They make the same mistakes with men over and over again, get the same results, and are in complete denial about their own behavior. This tells me they don’t take themselves or dating seriously enough.

I’ve also seen women transform into adolescent girls when they date; they have no regard for consequences. When they do this they diminish themselves and of course get less than spectacular results with men. How can you stop sabotaging your dates and give looking for love the importance it needs?

Here are the three most common mistakes you may be making…

All romantic relationships have challenges and require some work. Being in a relationship with someone who has Asperger’s syndrome (AS) can create an additional challenge, according to psychologist Cindy Ariel, Ph.D, in her valuable book, Loving Someone with Asperger’s Syndrome.

That’s because you and your partner think and feel very differently, she says. And that leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding and miscommunication.

In her book, Ariel provides wise advice and practical exercises to help you improve your relationship and overcome common obstacles. (She suggests keeping a journal to record your responses.) Here are five ideas you might find helpful.

Each summer I pick a project. A few years ago mine was to develop my self-esteem. According to David Burns, that should only take ten days. But nine months later, I’m still not there.

From June to August last year, this was the routine: load up the double stroller with any floatable object in our house (wings, inner-tubes, noodles, life vests), drag them (and two sinkable kids) to the pool, score some beach towels from the lost and found, and plant ourselves under one of the few coveted umbrellas.

As soon as we hit the snack bar and caught up on the daily gossip from Mr. Snow Cone, I pulled out Burns’ book, Ten Days to Self-Esteem, which is about the size of a floating raft, the word “self-esteem” taller than a fruit freeze pop. But the woman under the next umbrella was reading ADD and ADHD for Dummies, so I didn’t feel so bad.

My mind wandered back to my first session with my therapist, almost two years ago. “Why are you here?” my therapist asked me.

“Because I feel like a Krispy Kreme doughnut,” I replied. “I have no center.”

You may not be aware, but our own Dr. Marie Hartwell-Walker has an e-book entitled Tending the Family Heart that highlights the importance of creating and nurturing the “heart part” of our families — that almost magical bond that interconnects every family member with all the others.

According to Dr. Marie’s philosophy, it is the heart that provides safety and warmth to all within its embrace. It is what transforms the very ordinary and repetitious tasks of daily life into expressions of mutual support and care. It is what celebrates the dailyness of love and belonging and helps everyone cope in times of challenges, separations, and even tragedies. When the “heart part” is strong, it provides both children and adults with what they need emotionally and psychologically to become their best versions of themselves in spite of whatever stresses come their way.

Psych Central’s Ask the Therapists Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D. & Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. discuss Dr. Marie’s bestselling parenting book in this video.

In the late 1990s and continuing on into the past decade, bipolar disorder started being diagnosed more and more in children. This became a problem only because the criteria for bipolar disorder in children have never been firmly established. Researchers developed their own set of criteria which contradicted the official diagnostic criteria for the disorder. The research criteria basically did away with the need for a manic or hypomanic episode, and instead replaced it with irritability and anger.

Coincidentally, a few pharmaceutical companies also released a set of medications — called atypical antipsychotics — which can be used to treat certain symptoms of bipolar disorder.

Doctors started diagnosing bipolar disorder in children with a looser set of criteria, and felt more at ease prescribing a treatment for it because these new medications had become available.

This set of circumstances led to a reported 40-fold increase in the past decade of bipolar disorder diagnoses in children. This suggests a pretty obvious problem in the diagnostic criteria, since nothing has changed so much in the past decade to offer a reasonable explanation for this sort of increase.

Courage is plentiful. In fact, it’s all around us, writes Robert Biswas-Diener, Ph.D, a positive psychology researcher and founder of Positive Acorn, in his latest book The Courage Quotient: How Science Can Make You Braver.

And it doesn’t just happen on the battlefield: It also happens in the boardroom, on a bike ride and at the grocery store, he says. Courage lives in the everyday and helps us lead more fulfilling lives.

According to Biswas-Diener, courage “allows you to pursue the life you want, to overcome obstacles that hold you back from living a full life, and to put your core values into action, and it also helps and elevates others along the way.” It also helps you have better relationships and do better at work, he says.

In his book Biswas-Diener defines courage as “the willingness to act toward a moral or worthwhile goal despite the presence of risk, uncertainty and fear.”

This guest article from YourTango was written by Nicole Burley. 

Well, it’s official. There is now absolutely zero reason to be eating fast food whatsoever! For those of you who always knew that fast food wasn’t healthy but ate it anyway because it made you feel happy, I have some unfortunate news.

A recently published study in the Journal Of Public Health Nutrition showed that people who ate hot dogs, hamburgers, and pizza were 51% more likely to suffer from depression than those who rarely or never ate the stuff. Yikes!

Do you get what that means? It means that your Happy Meal might not be making you very happy. In fact, the food that you may have been turning to when you were feeling sad, lonely, or depressed is actually contributing to those feelings.

How can this be?