Have you ever fallen in love? Then you know what the poets, songwriters, gurus, playwrights, …

Psychologists are increasingly integrating alternative and complementary treatments into their work with clients, according to a recent article in Monitor on Psychology.

So what is alternative treatment? You may already have some experience with the most popular, according to the Monitor on Psychology. Meditation, biofeedback, hypnosis and progressive muscle relaxation are all popular complementary or alternative psychological treatments. 

Although you may be familiar with the most popular, there are dozens of alternative and complementary treatments, which typically fall into four categories:  mind-body medicine, biologically-based practices, manipulative and body-based practices and energy medicine.

Sir Winston Churchill, who battled plenty of demons, once said, “When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.”

Unfortunately that advice wouldn’t have been able to stop me from praying rosary after rosary when I was in fourth grade to avert going to hell, nor does it quiet the annoying noise and chatter inside my brain today in any given hour. But the fact that a great leader battled the worry war does provide me some consolation.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a chronic worrier without an official diagnosis or battling severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a neurobehavioral disorder that involves repetitive unwanted thoughts and rituals. The steps to overcome faulty beliefs and develop healthy patterns of thinking are the same.

In this age of advanced modern medicine, it is a depressing fact that not all people suffering with a depressive illness respond to antidepressants.

The mental health charity Mind UK recently highlighted their concern that there is a serious need for a range of therapies to be made available to depression sufferers.

According to the best psychological working practices, medication is now considered to be only one option for effectively treating the illness.

Talk therapies — otherwise known as psychotherapy — such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) have proven effective at alleviating melancholic symptoms in hundreds of research studies conducted around the world. In Australia, the Australian Psychological Society has identified a serious need for psychotherapeutic interventions in the lives of people with depression.

Malcolm Gladwell capitalized on research conducted by Roger Barnsley (et al., 1985) by suggesting in his 2008 book, Outliers, that there is an “Iron Law of Canadian Hockey.” This theory is also known as the relative age effect in psychological research and it suggests that the older a player is when they begin training for a sport, the more likely they are to achieve success in that sport.

In fact, in a talk posted on YouTube, Gladwell goes even further, saying, “In absolutely every system in which hockey is played, a hugely disproportionate number of hockey players are born in the first half of the year.” He says this in the context of a talk about society not taking advantage of opportunities to improve human potential.

“Logic tells us there should be as many great hockey players born in the second half of the year,” suggests Gladwell, “as born in the first half. But what we can see here, there’s almost no one born it the end of the year, everyone’s from the beginning.”

But is this actually true — are more elite hockey players born in the first half versus the second half of the year?

Sometimes I worry that society is becoming immune to infidelity and cheating in a romantic relationship. We hear things like, “Half of all marriages end in divorce” and “Half of people in a relationship admit to cheating.” We become desensitized and perhaps a bit pessimistic by hearing these disheartening statistics repeated over and over again.

It’s become so bad that some people are even making up statistics to either sell their infidelity-helping or infidelity-fighting services. For instance, one common statistic I hear thrown out there is that 50 percent of relationships involve infidelity.

Sadly, that statistic is not based upon any scientific research. It’s something marketing companies just made up and use to scare (or motivate) people into buying into their service.

So how common is cheating, really?

Why do people play video games?

While researchers and psychologists have found many answers — to socialize with others (e.g., form relationships, provide and receive social support, and build collaborations), to gain a sense of achievement (e.g., acquire status, power, or domination over others), or to immerse themselves into a world outside the ordinary — there’s not a lot of consistency in how motives are measured in gaming research.

This means it’s really hard for researchers to compare their data with other scientists’ data in the same field, making broad generalizations about video games and gaming difficult to come by.

Enter a new exploratory study by Graham & Gosling (2013) to help shed some light on the problem.

Do you want to improve your health and decrease your stress level?

If you’re experiencing some of the common symptoms of stress, such as irritability or anger, fatigue, feeling overwhelmed and changes in sleeping habits, then the physical and mental consequences of stress are all too clear.

And if you have made efforts to improve your stress levels, you’re not alone.  According to a new survey, Stress in America: Missing the Health Care Connection, which was conducted online by Harris Interactive, Americans think it’s important to improve their health and levels of stress.

Over the past five years, 60 percent of adults have tried to reduce their stress and more than half are still trying to meet this goal, according to the survey.

In fact, according to the survey’s findings, Americans are struggling to keep their stress at levels that they believe are healthy.  But how well do we do that?

Positive psychology often is passed off as pop psychology or New Age-y by those who haven’t actually looked into it.

The actual theory behind positive psychology was defined in 1998 by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [1] and looks at all aspects of a person’s psychology. It does not discount traditional psychology, nor supersede it. Rather than viewing psychology purely as a treatment for the malign, however, it looks at the positive. Positive psychology is a recognized form of therapy and is offered by some counselors and psychologists.

Psychology has always been interested in where people’s lives have gone wrong, and what has resulted because of it [2]. Illnesses such as depression are well-documented and patterns of depressive behavior well-known. However, until recently, what makes people happy and how they achieve inner happiness and well-being has been a mystery.

Practitioners of positive psychology study people whose lives are positive and try to learn from them, in order to help others achieve this state of happiness [3]. It is a scientific study and not remotely hippie-ish, despite its connotations.

Low salaries, lack of opportunity for advancement and heavy workloads have more than one-third of Americans reporting feeling chronic work stress.

And women are feeling it more acutely than ever.  After decades of making progress in the work force, many women are feeling less valued than men, according to a recent APA survey on Stress in the Workplace.  They’re feeling they don’t receive adequate monetary compensation for their work and feel that employers offer them fewer opportunities for internal career advancement than men.

Why are women feeling less appreciated than men, when it comes to compensation and why are they stressed by lack of opportunity?

Possibly because they are.

Have you tried to lose weight? 

More than one third of U.S. adults currently are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Physicians and other health care professionals urge us to lose weight or risk becoming vulnerable to a host of diseases, including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. Weight loss has become a national conversation.

On an individual basis, most of us either have tried to lose weight or are actively engaged in maintaining a healthy weight.  Why we struggle with weight and how best to lose weight are hotly debated topics.  The nation’s current weight struggles have been attributed to a range of biological, societal and personal problems such as unhealthy school lunches, media advertising, too much corn and corn syrup in our diets, sugar substitutes, lack of willpower, overreliance on fast and prepackaged foods and many more.

But what gets in the way of your ability to lose weight?

Last year, a friend of mine purchased a new car. She was excited, because not only did it have that new-car smell (what’s up with that?), but because it’s something she had wanted for years — and could finally get it.

But that new car excitement plummeted when she opened her mail the other day. She received a survey that “will be used to help create the next generation of products the automotive industry produces.” Really? They survey came from Maritz Research, is 9 pages long and optimistically claims it contains only 77 questions.

But in my opinion, that’s simply a lie. Because many of the questions on the survey are actually multi-part questions that require multiple answers. Not exactly a way to endear you to a potential survey taker — deception by your survey’s numbering scheme.

What do you get for filling out such a lengthy and arduous survey? In the ultimate insult to a consumer’s time, Maritz Research will give you exactly nothing for sharing your opinions with them. Instead, you will be entered into a sweepstakes that — by law — anyone can enter, regardless of whether you fill out the survey. (Sweepstake instructions are listed at the end of this entry.)

If you want to get the most biased and un-representative sample of new car owners possible, this is certainly one way of doing it.