Creativity is my anti-drug.

It amazes me how much I psychoanalyze myself. Basically every person I meet who finds out I'm being trained as a therapist asks me if I'm psychoanalyzing them. I usually put on my best Freud impression and ask them, "So... how does that make you feel?" just to make them nervous. But in reality, I rarely psychoanalyze someone beyond what anybody would do naturally without their permission. I mean, I hate it when my professors start psychoanalyzing me and trying to give me therapy during a meeting or casual chat. I assume most other people would prefer I not do the same to them. Instead, I focus on myself and why I act/think/feel the way I do. I overanalyze, hypothesize, and soliloquize usually to the point of driving myself crazy. While there are hundreds and thousands of things I have not, and probably will not, figure out, I have come to some pretty solid conclusions about some dimensions of who I am and why I am that way.

For instance:
I thrive on creativity. If my opportunity to be creative is stifled in any way, I wither away into something resembling a zombie with a bad cold. Seriously. I lose motivation, energy, and immunity from infectious diseases. The year I stopped dancing was also the year I ended up with about 4 varieties of sinus infections and colds. It took 4 attempts at heavy antibiotics before I was back to normal. I blame this on the loss of a creative outlet.

So, all this to say that I have found I MUST always have a creative outlet to keep me happy and healthy. Within the past few years, my creative outlet of choice has been a mixture of dance, theatre, and music. But recently, all of my outlets have been smushed, so to speak. This summer proved my body is too old and crippled to endure much dancing; grad school has taken away anytime I might have been able to devote to theatre; and piano has taken a backseat to all of my other responsibilities. So, sadly, I have recently found myself outletless. And fighting off the early (yet still noncontagious, nonthreatening) symptoms of a cold.

However, these past few days have proved to be a silver lining on the dark cloud of my creativity-starved existence. Tonight, a friend and I will be checking out the local choral guild. I haven't been in a choir in probably 5 years. I haven't sung formally since summer. Actually, I haven't sung classically in probably 2 years... Wow.

Anyway, I have also begun attending more classical music recitals and concerts, like I used to. I hadn't realized how much I missed not only performing, but also being in the audience. There's something so rejuvenating and, well, therapeutic about a well-played sonata.

And... a few days ago, I learned how to play the trumpet (Task 44). As a French horn player, I had the basic skills already in my back pocket, but was surprised at how different the two instruments really are. A musician/grad student friend of mine offered to teach me how to play and, starved of creative outlets, I of course agreed. I'm no Maynard Ferguson, but now I can fairly confidently play elementary etudes and duets. I also was reminded that there is a trumpet back home, so maybe I'll keep it up. Maybe this will be a new outlet to add to my inventory.

No wonder people tell me I'm weird...

Last week, I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as part of my internship. It turns out that I have a personality type that is only found in 1% of people. This explains so much. Additionally, I am supposedly the same personality type as Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Meryl Streep, and the Olsen twins. Part of the explanation of my type says that those with this personality persuasion are "often nontraditional" and may be misunderstood, because our thinking patterns are very different. We thrive on creativity, originality, and logic (Somewhat contradictory, but I guess that is why we are so difficult to understand). As I was reading the summary, it seemed very accurate. It also seemed to made sense with regards to my drive to complete an annual to do list. Variety, new experiences, and learning new things that others see as pointless are all parts of who I am as well and, in turn, why I choose to attempt to complete these lists.

Isn't psychology fun?
Have you taken the MBTI? Did the results seem to be accurate?

Psychologist Humor

This post has absolutely nothing to do with the goal of this blog, so consider yourselves duely warned.

The last biopsychology class of the summer officially occurred today, bringing with it a bittersweet mixture of joy and sadness. Great class, lots o' stress. The study guide for the final consists of 46 questions/points to memorize. And they ain't "What is the organ in your skull called?" or "What color is the gray matter in the brain?"
Today, the lecture covered the neuroscience behind various psychological disorders, including ADHD. And whenever a professor talks about the biopsychology of ADHD, he/she must mention the famous Marshmallow Experiment. Bear with me for a brief explanation. I promise, it's worth it. A guy named Walter Mischel originally performed a study that presented children with a marshmallow and a set of directions that went something like, "Here is one marshmallow. you can eat it now, or you can wait til I come back, and then I will give you a second marshmallow." Basically, the study was longitudinal (followed the children for many decades) and found that the kids who waited for the second marshmallow had less likelihoods of developing ADHD, had higher GPA's, were more likely to go to college, less likely to go to jail, etc. etc. Today, our professor showed us a more recent version of this experiment.

And now for qhat might quite possibily be the cutest of all psychological experiments: THE MARSHMALLOW EXPERIMENT.