Stressing over checking your email — or texts, which have become even more common — has only increased since I first wrote about how to deal with email stress five years ago. We have become an always-on society, with the expectation for many employees to be available 24/7… Even when most people’s jobs aren’t so important that a person’s life will hang in the balance if we were unavailable.

It’s a shame, really. Technology was supposed to help us have more leisure time and free us up to be able to spend more of our lives with things that really matter — like family, friends, and experiences. Instead, it’s tying us down to our devices in ways their inventors never imagined.

So if you’re feeling stressed out being always connected to your device to check email and texts, here are three more tips for helping to cope.

It would be hard to open a popular magazine or psychology journal these days without finding some reference to a new advance in positive psychology. 

The research is pouring in from all over the globe indicating that sustainable ways to shift our thinking and perception toward a more optimistic perspective of life has amazing health and well-being benefits — not the least of which include a longer, healthier, and more productive life.

Here are six questions about some of the findings that may intrigue you and test your knowledge. The good news?  You can’t fail a positive psychology quiz!  Use this as a guide to learn more about the developing field. Or, if you got them all right, you know how good it is to be kind — so get out there and help someone!

I have long been a fan of Dr. Elisha Goldstein’s work. His blog here on Psych Central is one of my favorites sources of mental help tools and advice.

A few months ago, he published The Now Effect, (our book of the month here for April) and I had the pleasure of interviewing him about it.

Therese: What is The Now Effect?

Elisha: The Now Effect is that “aha” moment of clarity and choice that we’ve all experienced. It’s the moment you notice your mind running around the same old bad neighborhoods and come in touch with the choice to refocus on what matters. It’s the moment you’re on your smartphone and your kids are clamoring around you and you realize they are what matter in the moment. It’s the moment a friend of a friend passes away and you reconnect to the ones you love.

Unfortunately, these moments are becoming rarer than ever as our lives are speeding up and life itself is becoming routine.

Sometimes, it can feel like your emotions are doing all the talking. Like a particularly powerful emotion is the driver and you’re sitting bewildered in the backseat.

But you can learn to cope with your emotions in a healthy way. In fact, there are many methods to effectively manage your emotions.

Journaling is one of them.

“Journals are like a checkpoint between your emotions and the world,” writes clinical psychologist Beth Jacobs, Ph.D, in her valuable workbook Writing for Emotional Balance: A Guided Journal to Help You Manage Overwhelming Emotions.

Journaling helps you make sense of your emotions, pinpoint patterns and gain relief. Research has shown that it also helps you reduce stress, solve problems more effectively and even improve your health.

In Writing for Emotional Balance, Jacobs lays out seven skills of emotion management: distancing yourself from your emotions; defining what emotions mean for you; releasing stuck emotions; learning to focus while experiencing overwhelming emotions; using organization to clarify emotions; regrouping after you’ve had an emotional setback; and maintaining your new skills.

Today, I’d like to share her tips for distancing yourself from your emotions and defining them.

I just finished re-reading Paco Underhill’s fascinating book, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. (Note: the book has been updated, but I read the first edition, so that’s what I’m discussing here.) Underhill invented the “science of shopping,” and he details many ways that retailers can create environments that encourage people to buy.

As I read, I realized that much of his advice could be flipped on its head, to help people resist buying. So often, we operate on habit and impulse; by recognizing the subtle factors that promote shopping, we can turn that information to our advantage, if we’re trying to shop wisely.

We’d like to extend a warm welcome to the nearly 25,000 members of This Emotional Life, the three-part television series that originally aired in early 2010. The series, a co-production of Vulcan Productions and the NOVA/WGBH Science Unit, explored ways people can improve their social relationships (Family, Friends & Lovers), cope with negative emotions such as depression and anxiety (Facing Our Fears) and become more positive, resilient individuals (Rethinking Happiness).

Each episode weaved together the compelling personal stories of ordinary people and the latest scientific research, along with revealing comments from celebrities such as Chevy Chase, Larry David, Elizabeth Gilbert, Alanis Morissette, Katie Couric and Richard Gere.

Two years later, This Emotional Life’s online community remains strong — and growing. So when the folks responsible for keeping the online community going approached us to help keep it alive and curate it moving forward, we were both happy and honored to do so.

Everyone feels frustrated and frazzled with their jobs from time to time. But burnout goes beyond the occasional bad day — or bad week.

“Burnout is a ‘silent condition’ induced by chronic stress that is characterized by emotional [or] physical exhaustion, cynicism and a lack of professional efficacy,” according to Christine Louise Hohlbaum, author of The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World.

Psychoanalyst Herbert J. Freudenberger coined the term “burnout” in 1974.¹ He defined burnout as ”the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.”

In his book, Freudenberger compared job burnout to a burned-out building.

1. He also coauthored, with Geraldine Richelson, the first book on burnout, called Burn-Out: The High Cost of High Achievement. [↩]

This past Easter Sunday I was heading back from the grocery store, enjoying a song on the radio and looking forward to the day. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dog and a cat bolted into the street in front of me, the dog chasing the cat. I ended up hitting and killing the cat.

At first I wasn’t sure if I had hit both animals… I stopped the car in the middle of the street, got out and realized the cat was not going to survive.

It was devastating. I am fortunate because the dog’s owner came running out after the dog and acknowledged this was all his fault, although it sounds like it was all just an accident and no negligence on his or my behalf.

Attachment styles form the basis for a psychology theory about how people interact with others in their life, and the world around them. While it can be traced back all the way to some of Freud’s writings, it was John Bowlby who devoted significant effort and research into expanding upon and demonstrating attachment theory.

“Attachment” refers to the emotional relationships we share with others in exchange for the things we most need out of life — comfort, care, and pleasure. Our attachment style is primarily formed in early childhood, according to this theory.

Bowlby identified four characteristics of attachment…

This guest article from YourTango was written by Susan Dutton Freund.

The Centers for Disease Control recently released a study (PDF) that examines data from first marriages for men and women ages 15 to 44. The data was collected from 2006 to 2010 by the National Survey of Family Growth with 22,682 respondents. The Associated Press promptly released a story with the headline, “Move In Before Marriage No Longer Predicts Divorce.”

But, that’s not exactly what the study shows.

Instead, the study underlined what previous studies have also shown — that moving in together before marriage might or might not predict divorce. The differentiating factor is whether or not you moved in with an expectation of a long-term commitment similar to marriage.

People who are either formally or informally engaged and those who plan to spend the rest of their lives together do not have an increased risk of divorce.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) defended the actions of its agents yesterday, saying they were only following procedure when they insisted on doing a patdown on a traumatized 4-year old girl. I hope the family finds a way to sue the TSA for all of the psychological counseling this little girl is going to need in the future.

The girl, Isabella Brademeyer, had already successfully passed through the security checkpoint at the Wichita, Kansas airport. But then she went over to hug her grandmother — her grandmother — who was still being processed by the TSA. The TSA pulled the grandmother, Lori Croft, out for a pat-down because she apparently set off the metal detector.

But c’mon… the little girl? She’s 4. She didn’t know any better.

That set off a flurry of activity among the TSA agents, who then insisted that the 4-year old also needed to undergo a patdown. Again… because she hugged her grandmother.

A year can’t go by now without some pundit, writer, or researcher weighing in on how the more technology infiltrates our lives, the lonelier we’ve become.

Stephen Marche, a novelist writing in the May 2012 Atlantic, weaves together a bunch of anecdotes to suggest that Facebook is making us lonelier.

Renowned MIT researcher Sherry Turkle, who bases her conclusions on an endless stream of in-vitro interviews with teens and young adults, suggested over the weekend in the New York Times that technology is certainly making us more connected… but those connections are more shallow and less rich that traditional face-to-face connections.

These are interesting observations, but are they offering us a false dichotomy? Or suggesting a causal relationship where none has yet been established?