Research has shown that creating or tending things by hand enhances mental health and makes us happy.  Dr. Kelly Lambert (www.kellylambertlab.com) explored the relationship between hand use, current cultural habits, and mood.  She found that hands-on work satisfies our primal need to make things and could also be an antidote for our cultural malaise. Too much time on technological devices and the fact that we buy almost all of what

If you’ve ever been stuck with a crying baby you know that yelling back at it does not make matters better. It only makes them worse. There are two skillful ways of working with a crying baby: 1) Hold it, rock it, cradle it, and show it love. 2) Let the baby cry it out; stop trying to intervene; and create a safe space for the baby to exhaust itself.

A few people have written me recently about falling off their good habits: a relapse after months of healthy eating, or getting derailed from good habits they’ve been forming like exercise or writing. It’s discouraging to fall off your diet or good habits, and you an get to a point where you don’t even want to think about it. So what to do? How do you deal with a relapse?