Cutting Through TMI

For a long time, consumer educators believed that people make the best choices when they have plenty of information. Consumer education programs taught us how to locate information so we had enough to make good decisions.

That was before the Internet.

These days, the challenge is not in finding information. It’s in learning how to manage an over-abundance of it. There are two issues here:

  1. Discerning what has integrity in a medium without gatekeepers, one in which anyone can say and publish whatever they want to.
  2. Coping with the volume so that we don’t shut down from information overload.

A previous post featured Dr. Barry Schwartz speaking about the paradox of choice. His research discovered that people actually make worse decisions when overloaded with information and choices. Continue reading

Does energy psychology really work?

Energy can be felt and experienced, but not seen. That is both its power and its Achilles heel.

Energy medicine has been practised in ancient cultures for thousands of years. The philosophy is that when energy is blocked or unbalanced, the body will develop symptoms of dis-ease. Since the condition originates in the energy system, that’s what is treated. Acupuncture is one of the more familiar examples of this approach.

In Western culture, we are schooled to discount the energetic aspects of our existence. This leaves many people playing the game of life with a poor hand, the best cards still left in the box.

Playing with a poor hand

Continue reading