I think I jinxed my rabbit’s foot

Why do we knock on wood or carry around a rabbit’s foot? It certainly isn’t because these things will prevent us from experiencing a disaster. What they do, however, is make us feel as if they will.

“Don’t Jinx It,” my last column before my usual August break, dealt with superstitious behaviour. (For a real analysis of superstitious behaviour, check out Joe Rochford’s blog). It is the second time I addressed the issue in Métro. The first time was in the pre-blog era when I published Knock on Wood which appears below after Don’t Jinx It. (La version Française se trouve à la fin).

I don’t...

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Posted on 11 Aug 2010
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It gnaws at me!

“I’m like a fish out of water / a cat in a tree /I got a big chain around my neck / and I’m broken down like a train wreck / well it’s over, I know it but I can’t let go.”
- Lucinda Williams from the song “Can’t Let Go”

When you’re thinkin’ of things that you might have said…let it go / When you’re dreamin’ of your lips on the back of her neck…let it go / Should’a done…that’s the devil’s game, just ask anyone that’s been driven insane / Should’a done, could’a done…give it up and let it go.
- Tom Russell from the song “Let it Go”

Sounds like Lucinda could use some advice from Tom. Let it...

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Posted on 28 Jul 2010
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The fertile output of the anxious mind

Here’s a question? What’s scarier: reality or imagination? The crazy thing is that even though we know that imagination is not real, it can often cause more suffering than reality.

The reason for this is the human stress response. Stress is the body’s way of responding to and protecting itself from a threat. When I know what’s out there – a bear, a raging river, a pit of snakes – I can protect myself from the danger. When the danger isn’t known, I have no idea what I need to do. My stress response goes into hyper-alert mode as a means of protection. This is why the unknown is so stressful....

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Posted on 10 Jul 2010
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12

The hidden meaning behind the insignificant

One of my pet peeves is the tendency to read meaning into everything we do. It isn’t that there isn’t a reason behind our behaviours. It’s just that the reasons are either banal (basic instincts and human motivation) or are so prone to both misinterpretation and over-interpretation that most attempts to explain them will be way off base, at best, or so self-justified that they feed our biases and misattributions, at worst.

While the following column is very basic, it does have implications for the way we interpret more important issues. The desire to know and to understand is what drives...

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Posted on 22 Jun 2010
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Toilet paper wars

There are no two ways about it. Some people are able to let thinks go while others are obsessive nutcases. Actually those two types of people may reside inside the same individual. After all, don’t we all have have our own little obsessions. For example, I know lots of crazy wine lovers. They go on and on about tannins, long noses, round mouths and hints of roasted nuts or some such gibberish. Me? Well I pretty much care only that the alcohol in just a couple of glasses has the magical effect of making me and everyone around me far more interesting. On the other hand, I’m pretty crazy when...

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Posted on 16 Jun 2010
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6

Pavlov rears his ugly head

I once walked out of a restaurant with two colleagues just as the bell rang at the elementary school across the street. The three of us, all in their forties at the time, slumped our shoulders and said, “Damn! Recess is over.”

This little anecdote illustrates a simple psychological reality called classical conditioning. Any stimulus – a sight, a smell, a sound – can get attached to a memory and trigger an emotional response. These memories can be positive and fun while they last – like a song from our childhood triggering a wave of nostalgia – or simply odd and curious – such as the school...

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Posted on 31 May 2010
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5

What made me so happy?

What question teaches us more: “What went wrong?” or “What went right?”

“What the hell happened there?” is a question I often find myself asking when the golf ball I just hit goes sailing off into the forest. More often than not I just scratch my head and really have no idea. On the other hand I have noticed that when my drives fly down the middle of the fairways I am usually standing in a balanced position on my follow through. Hmm, I wonder if that means anything?

The reason I bring this up is because there is a trend in clinical psychology championed by Martin Seligman called Positive...

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Posted on 18 May 2010
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6

The judge, jury and witnesses were all paid off

Prejudice is easy to detect in others. It’s much harder to see in ourselves. This is because our attitudes just seem to fit our observations, or perhaps more accurately, our observations happen to fit our attitudes.

Of course, trying to figure out whether experience feeds attitudes or attitudes feed experience may be a chicken and egg argument but prejudices certainly feed themselves once they take hold. They may start innocently enough, fed perhaps by someone else’s attitude or by a single observation, but once they get a hold of us, selective attention and self-confirming attributional...

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Posted on 10 May 2010
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My mother thinks I’m not normal

So how much of a freak am I anyway? There is no question that there are tendencies I have which cause me problems from time to time. Of course I am not alone. We all have fears and worries, we all get down from time to time – sometimes quite seriously. Don’t we almost all have trouble concentrating? Don’t we all have bad habits that cause us grief? Do these issues make us mentally ill?

There was a great editorial a while back in the Los Angeles Times written by Allen Frances MD. In his article, Dr. Frances bemoans the tendency to medicalize relatively normal tendencies. While some of...

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Posted on 03 May 2010
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4

La colère

Salut à mes lecteurs Francophone. Voici une entrevue que j’ai donné en 2008 sur la colère.

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Posted on 19 Apr 2010
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