Students and life-long learners alike: at what time of day do you usually study?

When I was in college, I worked a few days per week as a campus computer lab monitor. (In other words, I got paid a few bucks to sit in a room with 30 computers and make sure that the printer didn’t jam up.)

I usually worked the closing (read: midnight) shift, and thanks to an incredibly competent cohort of classmates, I never had much work to do. If the printer jammed, the student who’d jammed the machine would usually walk right over, pull out the offending accordion-shaped piece of computer paper, and print their work again.

Call this job a study hall for the college set.

And study I did.

Joseph Burgo, one of our bloggers here at Psych Central, has recently inaugurated a new series of videos about psychodynamic psychotherapy, aimed at people who …

I remember the first time I held (and shot) a gun that didn’t shoot water.

I was a teenager. Fourteen? Fifteen, maybe? I was young.

My dad spent an hour one afternoon playing with his new BB gun. I found him in our backyard on a warm summer day taking shots at an empty cardboard shipping box. He was aiming at the “F” in “FRAGILE”.

I stood on our back deck and listened to the obligatory stories about how he and the neighborhood kids used to shoot birds and squirrels with BB guns when he was a teenager.

A teenager? Hmm. I was a teenager. I’d never shot a gun before.

I asked if I could try shooting it. If he used to play with a BB gun at his age, why couldn’t I?

Somewhat reluctantly, he let me try it.

“Aim for the G,” he said, “because it’s right in the middle. And be careful.”

Despite my best aim, my first shot went straight into the dirt. My second shot hit the top edge of the box and my third hit the wall of the garage. (I don’t remember my dad being too happy about that last one.)

We all know that having resilience in life is tied directly to one’s happiness. In general, the more resilient a person is — that is, the more easily they can bounce back from life’s downs — the happier a life they will lead.

So the question then becomes, How does one build resilience? Can we nurture it like we nurture our creativity or intimacy?

In this video, Psych Central’s Ask the Therapists Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D. & Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. discuss the issue of how does a person make their relationship work. What goes into making a relationship successful? Find out by watching the segment below:

If you’re feeling suicidal, don’t rely on Siri.

Today, I decided to play around with my fiance’s new iPhone. Siri, the iPhone’s “digital assistant” is capable of handling all sorts of tasks: sending text messages, scheduling reminders, determining directions, searching Google for answers to questions, and using Wolfram Alpha to compute math problems.

She’s clever, though. Ask her if she’s male or female and she’ll answer frankly: none. Ask her about the meaning of life and she cracks a snarky joke about writing a “very long play in which nothing happens.” Ask her about which religion is correct and she’ll mention something about being a “Siliconist.”

But try to ask her about suicide, and you might as well consult a freshly-mined chunk of elemental silicon instead.

I sat down with Siri for twenty minutes and pretended to be suicidal. Here’s what she had to say:

Transcript follows.

Good relationships look easy to the outside world. But even the most successful relationship requires upkeep and compromise. A relationship can never just go on “automatic pilot” and continue to work well for each partner.

There are no secrets to making a relationship work. It requires that both partners in the relationship tend to one another’s needs consistently, with respect, empathy, and passion. Doing it consistently, however, years into the relationship can be challenging.

In this video, Psych Central’s Ask the Therapists Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D. & Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. discuss the issue of how does a person make their relationship work. What goes into making a relationship successful? Find out by watching the segment below:

Gratitude is an important part of increasing your well-being and happiness in your life. Psychological research has demonstrated — time and time again — the positive mood effects increasing gratitude in your life has.

But sometimes you need to visit the past in order to move forward in your future.

This video from Psych Central’s Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D. discusses how to do a “virtual gratitude visit,” a simple exercise anyone can learn to do that may help in healing past hurts and increase your well-being when you can’t do an ordinary gratitude visit.

Can you do a simple, daily exercise that will improve your happiness?

You bet you can.

This video from Psych Central’s Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D. discusses …

Last week, Drs. Marie and Dan covered the general aspects of cheating in relationships. It’s a common enough problem that as many as 1 in 5 relationships will face a cheating partner.

So how does a relationship recover from cheating? How do you make amends with it personally?

I’m pleased to introduce the second in a series of interviews and conversations with two of our resident therapists about a wealth of mental health topics. In this installment, Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. and Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D., TEP, MFA answer the question of how to recover from cheating in this latest video from Psych Central.

I live in a college town.

In fact, I live in the college town in which I used to attend college.

I moved back here a few months ago and I pass my (er, the college’s) library daily. It brings back plenty of academic memories — and, surprisingly, they’re not the stressful ones. In the six years that have passed since my graduation, the memories of stress and panic and due dates and overwhelming projects has faded.

But the positive stuff remains: the nights spent in a library study nook with my Intro to Communication textbook and a highlighter. (I loved that class.)

The satisfaction of applying a concept I learned in my 9 a.m. Intro to Logic class to my 2 p.m. Composition class. (I could point out all the major logical fallacies in our assigned reading.)

The scent of the pages of a brand-new textbook. (Am I the only one who thinks that new books sort of smell like cucumbers on the inside?)

I hit the peak of wistful sentimentality last week and found a way to re-create a portion of the academic college experience (without the stress!): watching actual college lectures on Academic Earth.

Cheating in relationships. It’s a problem that some studies have suggested as many as 1 in 5 relationships in the U.S. will face.

But what do you do when you face cheating in your relationship?

I’m pleased to introduce the first of a series of interviews and conversations with two of our resident therapists about a wealth of mental health topics. In this installment, Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. and Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D., TEP, MFA answer the question about cheating and explore the various aspects of cheating — including how different people define cheating differently — in this latest video from Psych Central.

It may help to read this article about cheating from Dr. Marie as well.