Skip to main content

Alan Alda: Build empathy. Monitor your relationships.


#Empathy #AlanAlda  #BigThinkEdge  #Communication 

Empathy is a superpower for connecting and communicating with others, but it can be surprisingly fragile. Even a bad mood or preoccupied mind can easily close us off to the people – even the ones we're closest to, let alone to colleagues or strangers on the daily commute.

Noticing this, Alan Alda wondered what exercises could help bulk up his "empathy muscle" regardless of shifting circumstances. An exercise he invented became the focus of a psychological study that discovered a way to significantly increase empathy.

Alan Alda teaches "The Art and Science of Relating: Build and Monitor Empathy" for Big Think Edge.

Empathy tends to evaporate when we don't practice it. At Big Think Edge, Alan Alda teaches an immediately actionable video lesson that will teach you exercises to significantly grow your capacity for empathy.

Greater empathy is an asset whether you're looking to boost your career, inspire and connect with a team you manage, or have more peaceful and thoughtful relationships in your personal life.

Subscribe to Big Think Edge and you'll access a diverse collection of lessons taught by the world's top thinkers and doers, like Alan Alda, Malcolm Gladwell, Bryan Cranston, Linda Hill, John Cleese and Navy SEAL Rob Roy.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are we really listening to what MLK had to say?

#MartinLutherKingJr #MLK #CivilRights #DrKing In 2020, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday falls in a national election year, one that reminds us of the importance of voting rights, citizenship and political activism to the health of our democracy. King imagined America as a "beloved community" capable of defeating what he characterized as the triple threats of racism, militarism and materialism. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, alongside the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision, represents the crown jewels of the civil rights movement's heroic period. Yet King quickly realized that policy transformations alone, including the right to vote, would be insufficient in realizing his goal of institutionalizing radical black citizenship toward the creation of the "beloved community." King argued that justice was what love looked like in public. 2020 also marks the 55th anniversary of the passage of the Voting...

Coping With Moods: The Challenge of the Turbulent Mind

#Mood #Impulses #selfregulate #selfsoothe  #Triple5LightTherapy #BlackMaleTherapist #Psychotherapy The power of moods and impulses can be overwhelming, but we can learn to self-regulate and self-soothe through awareness practices like meditation and mindfulness. By developing a healthy dialogue with our emotional nature, we can access deeper parts of ourselves and become more resilient in the face of stress and pressure. Rather than being swept away by our ever-shifting moods, we can learn to pause and reflect before acting. by Gillian McCann, Ph.D., and Gitte Bechsgaard, RP

A Single Dose of CBD Reset the Brains of People at High Risk of Psychosis

#CBD #Psychosis #MentalHealth #Medicine #Neuroscience #Psychology #Weed P sychosis, a severe mental disorder characterized by a loss of grip on reality,  can include unsettling hallucinations and delusions . As no one’s been able to pin down a single cause of psychosis, it’s been even harder to pin down a treatment. But researchers behind a new JAMA Psychiatry study seem to be on the right track. In the study, they report that they’ve found a way to reset the psychosis-afflicted brain using an unlikely plant: marijuana. Researchers are increasingly finding evidence that the  active components  of marijuana can help ease symptoms in people with  epileptic seizures ,  chronic pain , and  post-traumatic stress disorder , but there’s much to be learned about its relationship to psychosis. The most well-known  cannabinoid  Δ⁹-tetrahydrocannabinol — better known as THC — has  previously been linked  to the development of psychosis...

The Dangers of Being Nice

#Honesty  #Nice  #Niceness #JustSayNo #No You’ve met them, I’ve met them, or you may be one of them: nice people. They always give others the benefit of the doubt, are ready to give a hand, or volunteer for that task that no one wants. They’re sensitive to the feelings of others, easy to be around, and rarely if ever, argue. What’s not to like? Not much, you say. But if you’re always the nice guy, if it’s your 24/7 public persona, there are often psychological dangers lurking below that friendly surface, a downside that can take its toll. Here are the most common ones: Internalization You’re that good, that laid-back all the time, really? Unless you’re on some major and highly effective medications, probably not. What always-nice people tend to do is internalize — hold in negative emotions that naturally rise up in the course of everyday life. The byproduct of these emotional crunches are often depression, anxiety, and addiction. Periodic Acting Out And if depres...