Confidence Intervals

They say that the key to a good relationship is communication. I don’t know who “they” are supposed to be, but they’ve been saying it for years on end, so I’m inclined to believe them. Luckily, science agrees with them. There’s a lot you can do with a relationship if you’re able to communicate well with someone, and a lot of issues in a relationship can be traced back to miscommunications or misunderstandings. Knowing how to work through communication issues to be clear and gracious toward each other can go a long way to making life – even life after this pandemic – survivable. Here are some strategies for communicating better with your loved ones – whether they are your significant other or not! If you want a TL;DR of this, scroll to the end for a poster one of my fellow clinicians put together that lays it all out nice and pretty-like. Communication Rules You probably don’t realize it, but there are often unspoken rules to how your conversations go, and if these rules are b...

It’s no secret that what’s happening these days is tough on everyone. The limits of the human experience are being challenged in ways we never imagined would happen to us. In some instances, you hear whispers that we weren’t prepared for this. And yet... You hear stories of resilience. Videos on social media have gone viral, of people singing from their balconies , exercise instructors getting people to exercise from their balconies , people dancing with each other at a socially-respectable distance , and visiting loved ones through glass or the other side of a balcony to close the gap on the lack of social contact people have been getting these days. Then there are the virtual interactions, with the choirs and orchestras coming together to perform masterfully edited numbers that include hymns , Disney covers , and show tunes . There have also been the music artists who have done virtual concerts and the movie actors who have been collaborating to provide some measu...

Motivation. It’s not really the word you want to think about when you’re staring at your home/work assignment and longing for Animal Crossing, Halo, or Cookie Clicker (please not Cookie Clicker...the chocolatey chipey black hole of soo many misplaced hours!). You know you should do the thing, but even washing your house sounds more appealing than the thing you need to do. Another casualty of COVID-19...our motivation. It feels weird, because it’s not like we’re too busy to get the sleep we need, and really, the amount of assignments to complete hasn’t increased that much, if at all. So how does it make sense that every thirty seconds finds a new excuse for a distraction that will make us feel better than the effort of a job completed? Perhaps it’s because we feel helpless? This isn’t going to apply to everyone, but for some people, there can be a sense of helplessness in the middle of this pandemic. We’re told we can’t go to work unless we’re essential, and if ...