Some time ago somebody asked me about an emotional outburst and what to do about it. The person identified yearlong emotional coldness as the reason for the sudden state of being overwhelmed with sadness. I was asked for advice. Since emotional coldness is a very common problem in our Western world, I decided to share the basic outlines of my answer with you here. In my opinion there is no use dealing with emotional coldness, unless we try to find its origin first. Let me name some possibilities of what the origin could be: Due to a traumatic event, one shuts down emotionally and this is not a...

I catch myself often being angry at myself: »Oh, my god, how can I be so stupid. I have been repeating the same mistake over and over again for years!« Lately I have been inclined to interpret my mistakes in another way, not by using my stupidity as the basis for explanation. Let us think back. How did we learn as kids? Psychologists claim that a child learns mostly by imitating the grown-ups around him. And frankly speaking: How could a new born child learn by taking advice from the parents? The child does not understand words yet. Thus the method of imitating is the only way to learn how to walk,...

Pessimism is a very common thinking pattern nowadays. It is accompanied by a well-known reasoning: ‘I choose pessimism, because I hate to be disappointed.’ Thus pessimism seems to be the safe way through life. But is it really? What if it escalates to depression? And even if it does not – do we really want to be miserable for 70 or even 100 years, simply in order to avoid disappointment? I used to be a pessimist. The upper safety strategy was so deeply rooted in my ways of thinking that I was not even aware of it. In addition to that I had another belief: ‘If I expect the worst, I will...