TruthOrator's Blog

Senior man paying bills at kitchen counter Money allows us to meet our basic needs—to buy food and shelter and pay for healthcare. Meeting these needs is essential, and if we don’t have enough money to do so, our wellbeing suffers. Beyond that, as Tom Rath suggests in his book, Wellbeing, “money can increase our short-term happiness by giving us more control over how we spend our time.” For example, it can give us the option to live closer to work, work fewer hours, and spend more time on leisure activities with friends. Money can be used to make our lives easier. But the fact is that most of us don’t use money to buy more free time. Instead, we spend it on more expensive possessions. Sally's story Sally’s story is somewhat typical. She worked downtown as a buyer for a major retailer, and when she got a promotion and a large raise, she and her husband Drew bought a large home in an outer suburb. Sally soon found that the additional commuting time, on top of the increased deman

It's easy but expensive to pay someone else to solve your problems. Challenge yourself to take care of things on your own for a month. A few weeks ago, someone close to me was driving home from work when suddenly one of their tires blew out. At that point, this person had some options. They could try to change the tire themselves and drive on their spare tire for a while. They could call a friend. Or they could call a roadside repair service. (It was a reasonably cold day, but not so cold that one couldn’t stand outside for a while, so the weather wasn’t an issue.) In this situation, my friend ended up choosing to call a roadside repair service. The service ended up costing about $100 and the total wait time was about an hour or so. Even worse than that, the tow truck pulled into a tire shop that my friend didn’t normally do business with, where they were able to charge quite a bit for the tires. Now, let’s compare that to what would have happened if the person had simply trie

Almost everyone has an idealized picture of who they’d like to be. It’s a picture that they measure up to in some ways and fall short of in others, and thus it becomes part of a personal dream to find ways to measure up in those areas that are lacking. I have personal goals and entrepreneurial goals and hobby goals, all of which lead me to being the person I want to be. I want to change some aspects of who I am. I want to build a business or two. I want to become more involved in my hobbies. Those elements all contribute to that picture of who I want to be. The thing is, in each case, it looks very tempting to just spend money as a shortcut to get to that destination that I want. I can see where I am. I can see where I want to be. And spending money looks like a tempting shortcut across that chasm. It’s an illusion, though. The path from where I’m at now to where I want to be has a cost, but that cost is almost always time and effort, not money. You can’t buy who you want to be. He

See if this sounds familiar to you… You’re sitting there waiting for something to happen. Maybe you’re in a doctor’s office waiting room. Maybe you’re on the couch waiting for your wife to come home. Maybe you’re just feeling directionless at the moment. Whatever it is, you feel as if you don’t know what to do with yourself right now. You grab a magazine and flip through it but don’t really engage with any of the articles. You pick up your phone, browse through a few meaningless social media posts, put it down, then pick it up again a moment later and do the same thing. Maybe you play a really dumb smartphone game for a minute or two. You fidget. You look around. You feel like you need something to fill that empty space. Or how about this… You have this vague idea in the back of your head that you need to get into better shape physically and maybe mentally and emotionally and spiritually, too. It’s a nagging voice in the back of your head. Both of those things are what I like to

It’s a very joyful picture for me, but there’s one big problem with it. That daydream completely glosses over what I had to do to get there. It overlooks the many, many years of work and savings that it would take to achieve that goal. Without a ton of hard work, that wonderful vision is not a realistic outcome. It’s magical thinking. So what exactly is magical thinking? I like Wikipedia’s explanation: Magical thinking is the attribution of causal or synchronistic relationships between actions and events which seemingly cannot be justified by reason and observation. In religion, folk religion, and superstitious beliefs, the posited correlation is often between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking can cause a patient to experience fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities. Magical t

I grew up afraid of being different. I think we all did. Think about this for a second… Do you need an example? Ok – fine. Think back and remember someone popular in your high school. Didn’t you want to be just like him? Want her clothes? His personality? Her boyfriend? You might have even tried to mimic them a little bit. Don’t feel guilty though – not unless you still look at that person’s Facebook profile every day and study it for hours. For some reason, a very vivid image comes to mind… Being different One day, I went to pick up my sister at the bus stop and EVERY GIRL (but her) got off the bus with the EXACT SAME Abercrombie bag. Our children grow into adults that don’t know any better. But this comes with great reason. In our world, it is brutally uncomfortable to be different. Mass media, and the resulting social pressures, make it that way. For example, if a women is not a size 2, with a huge chest, then she is automatically seen as fat. Oh, and it’s really socially unaccept

Conquering fear and phobias  The heart of a lion       Once upon a time there was a lion living alone in the forest. He decided to leave the forest to find another interesting place because he was bored of his life. The lion kept moving until it found a small garden inside the city with many cats living in it. The lion lived among the cats and felt happy with its new life. One day a little kid started to run towards the cats fast and as a result all cats felt afraid and ran. The lion stood clueless not knowing what to do until one cat told him "run run". Because the lion was clueless about the right action it started running as well. Days passed and the lion started behaving more and more like cats until it forgot that it was a lion. This lion carried the heart of a lion but because it was subjected to a great pressure to act like the cats that lion heart was completely useless. How to have the heart of a lion What does this story has to do with having the heart of the

It’s surprisingly easy to ruin a perfectly good relationship. You may not be aware that you’re doing it. Hell, you may think that you’re doing everything right to help keep your relationship healthy and strong… so when your significant other sits down across from you at dinner with that look on his or her face – you know the one – it comes as a total surprise. The problem is that sometimes what helps a relationship survive – and what ends up killing it instead – can be completely counter-intuitive. Some behaviors, especially if you’ve been single for a while or just aren’t used to committed, long-term relationships, may feel absolutely natural to a single person… but they’re poison to relationships. If you want to keep your relationship running strong, you need to know what you may be doing that might be ruining it instead. 1. Letting Sex Just “Happen” One of the biggest lies that we tend to absorb is that we shouldn’t think too much about sex. Sex is best when it is utterly spont

As a psychotherapist who specializes in emotions, and as a woman with my own personal history of serial monogamy, I have come to realize that some men channel their need for love, intimacy, soothing, care, and comfort into sexual desire. Here are some examples: Dylan wants sex when he feels sad because he likes the comfort the physical holding provides. Dylan, like most people, wants to be held when he is sad. In fact, the need to be held when we feel sad is biologically programmed into our brains. Jonathan wants sex when he’s lonely. He believes it is weak to let someone know that he feels lonely and wants company. Alternatively, he thinks it is acceptable to find and ask for sex, which satisfies his need fo7r human connection. Sexual excitement is a core emotion. And, as we know from research on emotions, each core emotion has a “program” that has evolved over thousands of years for survival purposes. This “program” causes specific physical sensations and impulses to arise inside