Psychology tips

Separating Your Psychology Career from your Personal Life

In a typical 9-5 job, at the end of the day you go home and don’t have to think about your work until the next morning. For those in the medical field, however, especially who have a position in any psychology career, it’s difficult to refrain from bringing work home. A psychologist’s day is spent meeting with patients, but it doesn’t end before rush hour traffic. At home, there are new patients’ histories that need to be read over again, diagnoses to be double checked, medication doses to be changed and more research to be studied. More than just a heavy workload is the amount of stress that goes along with this high pressure position. You try to help your patients, but if they don’t progress, it’s easy to feel as though the fault is yours. Getting overwhelmed and having a mental breakdown, though, is not part of the psychologist job description. It’s more important than ever to take time for yourself. You’re listening to sad stories every day, watching people mentally and emotionally struggle with themselves. Take days to yourself where you absolutely do no work at all. Take longer vacations and go away somewhere; make sure you’re unavailable to take calls but have another trusted psychologist there for your patients in an emergency. Have outside activities. Don’t talk about work too much with family. You won’t be able to help anyone if your own mind is not at peace.

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A Useful Way To Change Your Mental State

In the evolution of human behavior, psychology has made progress into the workings of the human mind. Yet, many people seem predisposed towards negative thinking and pessimistic mindsets.

Here's a little "trick" or technique that anyone can use to instantly change into a more positive state. It involves using one's own view of the past and future.

It involves using the "crystallization" effect. That's when we tend to view past negative events in a different way, forgetting the negative memories while accentuating the positive points of an experience. Sometimes the mind uses this tactic as a protection mechanism, shielding us from negative emotions. The drawback is that we tend to forget whatever useful lessons we could have gained from the experience.

That same principle can be used in the present, and in a much more powerful way. It involves pretending, the way children do it.

Here's how. Whenever a person find themselves in a negative situation in life, they can pretend that they are suddenly in the future looking back at that situation. One could pretend that the experience was actually very positive, in the same we are predisposed to do with the crystallization effect. And the best part is, that person would still be in the present, and still able to deal with whatever negative parts of the situation occur.

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