Confidence Intervals

  In choosing to read this, you are expected to do the following: ·        Read this slowly. This is a story of my experience, but it is also educational for a lot of you. You are going to read some things that you will immediately disagree with, and that is okay. However, some of the things you will disagree with are a matter of perception or a misunderstanding of information. You will need to realize this, because you are not going to change my mind by arguing the point, and I’m not going to change yours (at least on the perception point – I dare you to consider the factual information). In order to go forward, we will need to have a mutual respect of our differences of perception, because this is my *reality* and the reality for many like me. Your disagreeing doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist for me, and your believing it “shouldn’t” doesn’t mean that it does not, and will not continue to, exist. ·        Realize that ...

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...

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 ...

This is the first post in a series that I am doing for the Psychological Services Center, located at Regent University, a department/school mental health clinic that serves the student population of Regent University and the surrounding community. With so much of the world in a constant state of unknown, and most of the world being confined to their houses for the last month, many are seeing their mental health affected. At times, people can get confused about why their mental health is affected. “I’m just stuck in my house, it’s not like anything is really happening to me.” And yet, there are a lot of reports of a lack of motivation, concentration, and energy. Declarations of newfound productivity are played out on the couch in front of Netflix and a bag of Cheetos. Marriages have been feeling tense, and the joys of parenting are starting to look more like struggles. Fears about being infected with a new strain of a disease we don’t know much about are fighting for attention ...