Tag: Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky

Do patients have a “happiness set point?”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 5 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥    @HeartSisters

How happy are you? Dr. Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote this in a Fast Company essay:

“People seem to have a happiness set point.(1)  Generally speaking, in the weeks and months after a significant positive or negative life event, you tend to return to roughly the level of happiness you had before that event – that’s the set point. It doesn’t mean that events can’t have a long-term influence on how happy you are – just that the best predictor of how happy you will be several months after either a major positive or negative event is how happy you were before it happened.”
 Continue reading “Do patients have a “happiness set point?”” →

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. . .”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 23 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

“You must go on.   I can’t go on.   I’ll go on!”   These words are from Irish author Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel, The Unnamable”. The late Nobel Prize winner was describing a reaction that many patients may find familiar, especially when facing the shock of a new medical diagnosis on top of your existing condition.

I wrote here about how overwhelmed I felt as a heart patient (“I can’t go on!”)  with distressing new joint pain, and a diagnosis of osteoarthritis. It was too much! I simply couldn’t bear yet another painful diagnosis piled onto my already debilitating daily symptoms of a coronary microvascular disease diagnosis!

But an amazing thing happened. Continue reading ““You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. . .”” →

Some book excerpts to tease you…

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 12 Comments

 

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters 

It’s been quite the ride since my book was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2017! When it was launched, “A Woman’s Guide to Living with Heart Disease” became Amazon’s #1 New Release in the Medicine/Public Health category. The book is now in its second printing, and reviews have been truly wonderful – with one notable exception: an Australian reader named Robert who complained in his review that there was “a bit too much emphasis on how women are neglected when it comes to heart disease” – and then added: “Happily for me, my doctors, nurses and physios did everything by the book.”

Thank you Robert, for helping to illustrate the cardiology gender gap so perfectly!

Here are some random excerpts from my book, gathered from each of the 10 chapters.
Continue reading “Some book excerpts to tease you…” →

Oscillating narrative: the learned art of re-creating ourselves

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 13 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

“We all re-create ourselves; it’s just that some of us use more imagination than others.”  ~ Madonna

Whether we want to or not, we often end up re-creating ourselves after a significant medical diagnosis. Researcher Dr. Kathy Charmaz calls this phenomenon “the loss of self“ after such a diagnosis, a loss experienced while we’re learning to adapt and adjust to this strange new life as a patient. When we try to talk about this painful loss to others who haven’t ever experienced it, most have trouble taking us seriously, or they may want to jolly us out of our current reality.

Yet how we talk about this matters to how we get through it. Continue reading “Oscillating narrative: the learned art of re-creating ourselves” →