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The statistics are bleak: On average, only nine percent of us ultimately accomplish our goals for the new year. What can you do to become one of those people? Maintaining our motivation over the span of an entire year requires preserving a belief in our ability to succeed and sustaining positive emotional experiences . Unfortunately, high standards can make us feel bad when we don’t meet them. Depending on our mindset, minor setbacks may make us abandon our goals altogether. For example,...

Here are six strategies to help you manage empathy more effectively and stay centered without absorbing negative energies. Move away. When possible, distance yourself by at least twenty feet from the suspected source. See if you feel relief. Don’t err on the side of not wanting to offend anyone. At the gathering try not to sit next to the identified energy vampire. Physical closeness increases empathy. Breathe. If you suspect you are picking up someone else’s energies, concentrate on your...

Benchmarks will be hosting the Partnering for Excellence Conference for the third time this year. The conference is instrumental in bringing together professionals and those with lived experience. Through a combination of experiential activities, panels, and keynote speakers, the audience learns about the impact the Partnering for Excellence initiative can have as well as being encouraged to go out and be changemakers. This year promises to be even better than those in the past as the...

The searing abdominal pain came on suddenly while Dr. Rana Awdish was having dinner with a friend. Soon she was lying in the back seat of the car racing to Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, where Awdish was completing a fellowship in critical care. On that night nearly a decade ago, a benign tumor in Awdish’s liver burst, causing a cascade of medical catastrophes that nearly killed her. She nearly bled to death. She was seven months pregnant at the time, and the baby did not survive. She had a...

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics just released some sobering news: Life expectancy in the United States dropped for the second year in a row due in large part to the 21 percent rise in drug overdose deaths to a whopping 63,600. That’s a staggering number that equates to 174 deaths everyday, just short of the number of casualties on 9/11 every two weeks. With fatal overdoses now surpassing death rates from guns, automobile accidents, and peak HIV death rates it’s no wonder that...

Driven by outrage and a resolve to correct a power imbalance that seemed intractable just months ago, 300 prominent actresses and female agents, writers, directors, producers and entertainment executives have formed an ambitious, sprawling initiative to fight systemic sexual harassment in Hollywood and in bluecollar workplaces nationwide. The initiative includes: — A legal defense fund, backed by $13 million in donations, to help less privileged women — like janitors, nurses and workers at...

A lot of people who write about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) focus on the damage -- the impact on mental health, the medical problems, the permanent changes to DNA, the behavioral challenges... But in my experience? There's a whole lot of wiggle room in this wonderful life, driven not by our childhood experiences, but by how we approach today. I'm not just being philosophical here. These are my very practical, time tested actions you can take right now to start changing your state of...

Happy New Year! I'm very excited to share that I have launched Ambivalent Goddesses, a year long project devoted to recovery from sexual abuse. You can read the first post here . A little bit about the project: Ambivalent Goddesses is written for those who experienced sexual abuse and are struggling with its affects on their psychological and physical well-being, identity formation, relationships, sexuality, and personal empowerment. It is also for anyone who works with women who have...

I am lying here on a slab in the Beacon Hospital about to meet my maker. Oh, I don’t mean I’m going to die – it is much more significant than that: I’m going to see my brain for the first time. I’m having a brain scan. Nothing prepared me for the emotional side of this. I’m going to see the organ I have carried inside my skull for half a century. This is the repository of the good and darkest thoughts, shaped by happy days and long dark nights of the soul. This is the innermost director I...

My favorite medical diagnosis is “failure to thrive.” Not because patients are failing to thrive — that part makes me sad. But because of the diagnosis’s bold proposition: Humans, in their natural state, are meant to thrive. My patient, however, was not in his natural state. Cancer had claimed nearly every organ in his body. He’d lost a quarter of his body mass. I worried his ribs would crack under the weight of my stethoscope. [For more on this story by Dhruv Khullar, go to...

Telemedicine isn't just for rural areas without a lot of doctors anymore. In the last few years, urban areas all over the country have been exploring how they can connect to patients virtually to improve access to primary care and keep people from calling 911 for non-urgent problems. In Washington, D.C., Mary's Center, a community health center, is piloting a program to provide primary care virtually to Medicaid patients who can't make it in to any of their clinics. Sometimes there are...

Throughout high school and college, Alicia slept in cars, tents, friends’ couches, benches, on the bus, on the train and in group homes. Almost anywhere but a shelter. “My experience with shelters is that you’d go when it was raining. You’d go to San Francisco, wait in line and sleep on the floor, if you slept at all,” the serious, soft-spoken Oakland woman, who’s now 22, said last week. “It’s scary enough to be a young person there. But if you’re queer you just feel a lot more vulnerable.