Profile

Many biases make people happy. Fooling yourself into thinking you’re better than you are may actually be necessary for self-esteem, but it does often lead to some irrational thinking and sometimes even dangerous behavior. While getting my PhD here in Vienna, I’m trying to research ways that people can think rationally, but still be happy. Self-compassion, or the tendency to unconditionally and mindfully treat yourself kindly with understanding, seems to be one of the keys to promoting happiness and rational thinking, so I’m studying that as thoroughly as I can. I also run a youtube channel about psychology that I started just a couple months ago. You can get to know a lot more about me by seeing what kinds of things I talk about.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuaAi8tuoJ-YXHMyhlq_U7A?view_as=subscriber

I have had two major mental health jobs.

Mental Health Rehabilitation Technician – There are many group homes in the US where people live who have suffered from mental illness for many years and haven’t gained basic life skills because they’ve spent important years of their life in mental hospitals. These houses have people like me working there who supervise them, help them regain some independence skills, give them medication, and just talk to them.

Applied Behavior Analysis Direct Service Provider – Applied Behavioral Analysis, or ABA, is a form of therapy developed primarily to treat symptoms of autism and children with behavioral problems. Usually, a team of professions gets together to identify what the child’s key problems are and they make a plan for how to help it. They’ll advise the parents on things they can do, and one member of the team (this is what I did) will go to the child’s house usually two or three times a week to work on those skills. This might be practicing recognizing when somebody is no longer interested in the subject you’re talking about, it might be distinguishing between big and small problems, making eye contact, refraining from interrupting people in conversation, and things like that. Usually we’re very careful to distinguish between skills that the child wants to have and would benefit them and everyone around them, and ‘normal’ behavior. Normalization is never the goal. Helping gain skills is.

I usually wake up at 8am lately and let myself waste time before getting productive. Recently, that means playing chess online, which I’m not particularly good at. I also talk to my partner, eat, play with my cats, and scroll aimlessly through facebook or twitter. I only follow social media accounts I feel like I can learn from, so often twitter starts the productive part of my day where I read research articles. Ideally, they’re related to my dissertation, but I often get way off topic. I’m should read studies about self-compassion, biases, death anxiety, or art therapy, but sometimes I’ll find an interesting article about how aggression relates to monogamy, or how bees reproduce. Getting off topic is a good way to come up with new ideas. I babysit a lot, and usually help kids learn English, since I’m living in Vienna and most kids speak German, or come from Russia or Slovakia where English is their third or fourth language. Going on long walks with my partner or a friend of mine helps me organize my ideas, and is just something I like to try to do almost every night.