It's one of the members of my holy trinity of good mental health (along with a good diet and regular exercise).
Over the ages, sleep and depression have proved to have a dysfunctional, angry relationship.
In his classic rule for monastic living, Benedict recommends that the community recite the Lord's Prayer together several times a day to help uproot the thorns of contention that spring up in community life. I believe that corporate confession on Sunday mornings can work in much the same way.
Of course, anyone can sleep walk through confession. You may begin to pray with good intentions, and may even be painfully conscious of having done something regrettable, when suddenly you are preoccupied with whether or not you took out the dinner rolls to thaw.
I'm sure that by now you've all heard the story about the wealthy white teenager who killed four people while drunk driving. As we mentioned in yesterday's Non-Sequiturs, 16-year-old Ethan Couch got off — sentenced to therapy — because the judge agreed that the kid was a victim of "affluenza": his parents gave him everything he wanted, and he believed that being rich meant that he wouldn't have to face consequences for his actions.
The kid's not wrong; the fact that he's not facing incarceration for killing four people kind of proves the point. A poor white kid would be in jail right now. A rich black kid would be in jail right now. A poor black kid would be picking out items for his last supper right now. Anybody who thinks that this kind of lenience would be given to anybody other than a wealthy white dauphin is wrong and stupid (and probably racist). The rich kid isn't in jail because rich people don't suffer the full force of consequences for their actions.
Nothing I have shared on Twitter has been retweeted and favorited as much as this diagram on lawyer profiles by Matt Homann (@matthomann).
If there's such a thing as a viral tweet in the legal arena, my tweet today of Homman's diagram qualified. People favorited the tweet all day long. Countless people retweeted it. Some said Homman's diagram was going straight to the marketing department at their firm.
Why? Because Homman is spot on. Clients could generally care less where we went to school and what law firm we worked at 17 years ago.
The public is not looking for a profile that reads like Martindale-Hubbell. People want to know how accessible you are, how they can connect to you on social media, and where they can read non-legalese items authored by you that demonstrate your passion and care.
Video gaming causes increases in the brain regions responsible for spatial orientation, memory formation and strategic planning as well as fine motor skills. This has been shown in a new study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Charite University Medicine St. Hedwig-Krankenhaus. The positive effects of video gaming may also prove relevant in therapeutic interventions targeting psychiatric disorders.
In order to investigate how video games affect the brain, scientists in Berlin have asked adults to play the video game "Super Mario 64" over a period of two months for 30 minutes a day. A control group did not play video games. Brain volume was quantified using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In comparison to the control group the video gaming group showed increases of grey matter, in which the cell bodies of the nerve cells of the brain are situated.Choosing life instead of death demands an act of will that often contradicts our impulses. Our impulses want to take revenge, while our wills want to offer forgiveness. Our impulses push us to an immediate response: When someone hits us in the face, we impulsively want to hit back.
How then can we let our wills dominate our impulses? The key word is wait. Whatever happens, we must put some space between the hostile act directed toward us and our response. We must distance ourselves, take time to think, talk it over with friends, and wait until we are ready to respond in a life-giving way. Impulsive responses allow evil to master us, something we always will regret. But a well thought-through response will help us to "master evil with good" (Romans 12.21).-
A small number of Christian missionaries live in slums too. They are there by choice.
About 100 of them, mostly from the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, met near Bangkok this past April. They gathered under the banner of "New Friars."
The New Friars don't seem to merit high-profile attention. Their efforts to alleviate poverty are small next to the work of many missionary and nonprofit groups and the problems they address.
Yet we do well to listen to the New Friars, because of the way they themselves are listening to God and neighbor, to suffering and hope on the crowded margins of society. They address vital questions about missions today, and about how all Christians might practice our vocations with sacrifice, devotion, and hope.
Euan Semple (@euan), author and social media consultant to organizations, including the The World Bank, wondered Sunday if folks holding this belief are missing out on the wider changes in attitude to work and business that the social web is enabling.
The web is all about people. It's about connections, relationships and energy. So is doing business. Energy and connections are what help you do your work. Facebook, for all its faults, is good at increasing both. Linkedin in, in contrast, is full of people in suits being "professional".
As a lawyer, you should no doubt use LinkedIn. Have a great profile, connect with those you meet on and off-line, share items you read, and possibly start a niche focused group. I have.
So what is happening during those precious hours when we're asleep? Is it really a time of restoration for our brains? And is it possible that it's more than that?
What happens in our brains while we're asleep is a question neuroscientist Penelope Lewis is trying to answer.
Lewis directs the Sleep and Memory Lab at the University of Manchester in England. In her new book, The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest, she discusses how sleep makes memory stronger, provides what she terms "spring cleaning" for the brain, and plays a role in depression.
However, depression is a real illness that affects both adults and kids. In fact, kids as young as 3 years old can have depression.
Depression can even affect babies, who tend to exhibit symptoms such as unresponsiveness, lethargy, inconsolable crying and feeding problems, writes Deborah Serani, PsyD, a clinical psychologist who specializes in mood disorders, in her new book Depression and Your Child: A Guide for Parents and Caregivers.
Below, she revealed what pediatric depression looks like, along with what you can do if you spot these signs.
For years, CEOs protected themselves from the public and left most of the talking to their PR agencies. Regularly communicating in a public forum was simply not part of a CEO's job description. Today, the massive onslaught of businesses adopting social media has provided a unique opportunity for finally personalizing the voice – and influence – of these company leaders. However, with a few high-profile exceptions (Richard Branson), CEOs have largely remained out of the mix, often too busy to take the time to participate in the incessant roar of the social channels. Executives, particularly the CEO, can provide a perspective that no one else in your business can, and social media offers a great platform to disseminate that message.
Here's Carvella's five focused on acting, stepping backing, and rebooting with a little tailoring to the law from me.
What's wrong with the world? As the story goes, Chesterton responded with just two words: "I am."
His answer is unlikely to be popular with a generation schooled to cultivate self-esteem, to pursue its passions and chase self-fulfillment first and foremost. After all, we say, there are reasons for our failures and foibles. It's not our fault that we didn't win the genetic lottery, or that our parents fell short in their parenting, or that our third-grade teacher made us so ashamed of our arithmetic errors that we gave up pursuing a career in science. Besides, we weren't any worse than our friends, and going along with the gang made life a lot more comfortable. We have lots of excuses for why things go wrong, and—as with any lie worth its salt—most of them contain some truth.
As I've said numerous times, including in yesterday's roundup, it is Supreme Court season both in Washington, DC and on LexBlog Network as our members have been on a tear when it comes to providing detailed analysis of major decisions. It's impossible for me to accurately describe, so do go visit LXBN's Supreme Court section for the full view. In the meantime, here's two of the most interesting cases covered—ones we've been tracking all the way up through the circuit courts—and another trending topic on our network.
At one time in my life, this used to bug me. I would look at the clock and think, "oh no, I must get back to sleep or I'll be so tired in the morning." And then I'd spend the next hour or two willing myself to go back to sleep: tossing and turning, demanding that I slip back into unconsciousness; huffing and puffing that I wasn't sleeping. I'd even check the clock every 10 minutes to see if I'd slept.
But the reality was, and still is, the more that I demand something of myself, the less likely I am to achieve that goal — and that really is the principle of living an unhappy life.
Sure I want to go back to sleep. I would even really, really, really, prefer to be sleeping right now, but I'm not. So, instead of lying there, beating myself up for waking when I "absolutely shouldn't have," I get up. I grab a drink, get something to eat and power up my laptop.
Criminological theory is admittedly weak in this area. There are things that are criminally wrong, deliberately wrong, accidentally wrong, wrong for all the right reasons, wrong for all the wrong reasons, and just plain annoying. Legal systems everywhere are busy studying ways of passing new laws dealing with Internet misbehavior, so the arena has become a sort of "test-bed" or "mini-society" where all sorts of moral deconstruction and decoding goes on. This ethereal realm we call CYBERSPACE is intriguing but full of potential dangers. Barney (2000), for one, hopes that it will eventually be used to perfect democracy. Others see it as offering little more than an underground economy and tempting addictions. It is both a blessing and curse. Nobody has any good idea about how to regulate or police it.
