What’s happening when a client suffering from symptoms of depression is willing to follow the therapist’s voice with eyes closed? According to Zindel Segal—expert on mood disorders—that simple act is a commitment to choicefulness and a first step towards shifting the perceptions that make depression so hard to shake.

Our brains are very good at learning from the negative—that's what helped our distant ancestors learn what to avoid of they wanted to stay alive. But it interferes with our lives today when we react to stressful situations as if they were life and death. They're usually not.In this brief clip, Rick Hanson, author of Buddha's Brain and Hardwiring Happiness, walks us through surprisingly simple steps that can shift our memory systems to internalize positive experiences and states with equal efficiency.

Why is it so difficult to lose weight and keep it off? From the viewpoint of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), the reason isn’t hard to find: knowing what to do and knowing how to get yourself to do it are entirely separate skills. When it comes to changing behavior, especially long-term, habitual patterns, getting yourself to do something different, even when you know it’s good for you, depends largely on what you tell yourself: that is, on your thinking. Outlined here is a program I’ve developed for nonpsychiatric (and noneating-disordered) individuals that utilizes the basic principles of CBT to address overeating directly.

Within the older traditions originally inspired by psychoanalysis, self-knowledge had a place of honor in both treatment and training that it no longer occupies. The question our field faces at this point is whether this older tradition that revered clinical wisdom is still relevant. Here are some of the characteristics of wisdom identified by both researchers and therapists alike.

If you talk to mindfulness practitioners about the similarities between guided mindfulness meditation and hypnosis, they tend to react with various degrees of indignation, if not downright revulsion. But a closer look at the processes, goals, and outcomes of both mindfulness and hypnotism reveals that they share fundamental similarities of purpose and practical knowledge. Both mindfulness and clinical hypnosis use suggestive methods to elicit beneficial, nonvoluntary responses.

One day while in session, I felt not only overworked and undernourished, but potentially unhelpful, or even damaging, to the people I wanted to help. The dominant advice was simple: do more self-care. Unfortunately, the suggestions, which I’ve since come to call macro self-care, usually seem to require substantial commitments of time, effort, and often money. But micro self-care is available at all times, on demand. Here's an array of brief tools that are simple, free, and doable.

A growing body of research indicates that when we don’t feel effective in our work, burnout is likely to follow. But through a process called Focusing partnerships, a two-therapist encounter emphasizes the clinician's issues, especially those that are still fuzzy or half-formed, not yet able to be verbalized. It lets us dive beneath our cognitive brain into our embodied knowing and to find what's actually troubling us, and to use that knowledge to recover our zest for our work and our lives.

If we can bring awareness into our own pulsing bodies, we get a chance to explore the hidden well of physical discomfort caused by our memories and emotions and our crazy defenses against that discomfort. The body, you might argue, is the unconscious. No one welcomes discomfort, but the fear of becoming overwhelmed, the fear of unleashing strange forces, of "wallowing" in negativity, can funnel our energies away from tolerating even the mildest turbulence of our felt experience. In my therapy practice, I've learned that being present to the rich physical substrate of the body can be especially useful in couples work.

Clinicians often make a variety of mistakes while trying to introduce mindfulness, and in my 30 years of trying to figure it out, I’ve made all of them. So let me share some of my bloopers with you in the hopes that you can avoid them. After all, meditation teachers often say, “This practice is simple, but it isn’t easy.” Perhaps the best piece of advice for helping people stay with mindfulness is to have them find something enjoyable in the practice. And above all, do your best to make sure that the practice fits the patient.

We Americans believe profoundly not only in the pursuit of happiness, but in our unalienable right to obtain it. Despite roughly 5,000 years of written evidence to the contrary, we believe it isn’t normal to be unhappy. But according to Steven Hayes, the creator of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), it’s suffering and struggle that are normal---and not the reverse. Furthermore, dealing with our inevitable psychic struggles by trying to get rid of them doesn’t work and may actually make them worse. In this interview, he explains the origins of ACT and what he sees as its future.