NeuroWellness Review

For twenty years, my dining-room table was the one item I had always said I'd never give up.

A singular piece. Hidden storage in the base. An orange leaf-shaped bowl that only came out at Thanksgiving. A carved platter I'd pull out for wine and cheese with guests. I'd eaten at it every day for two decades. If you'd asked me what I couldn't imagine parting with, the answer would have been the table.

Then I priced cross-border shipping to Canada.

Six thousand dollars to move my stuff. I sat with that for a minute. Was my stuff worth six thousand dollars? Not really. Not even close.

I texted my sister. Take the table. Take anything you want, actually. Her kids are getting ready to move out and she'd been collecting pieces for them. She came down for the weekend and took it. When I got back from Canada and realized the table was gone, I felt — this is the strange part — not much.

The thing I'd been sure I couldn't live without turned out to be a thing I'd only been storing.

My new piece for Tiny House Big Mind is on what a $6,000 quote did that a decade of practicing minimalism never could.

https://medium.com/tiny-house-big-mind/the-dining-room-table-didnt-make-the-cut-4b5d0c98780d

The Dining Room Table Didn’t Make The Cut A cross-border move does what a decade of minimalism didn’t

In 1959, three men met for the first time in a day room at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan. Each one was absolutely certain he was Jesus Christ.

A social psychologist named Milton Rokeach had pulled them together to test a simple, audacious hypothesis. If a man's most foundational belief about himself were placed in daily contact with two other men holding exactly the same belief, surely something would have to give. The competing claims couldn't all be true.

For two years he watched to see which of them would change his mind.

None of them did.

What gave instead was the scaffolding around the delusion. Clyde decided the other two were already dead. Joseph decided they were just learners on their way to becoming Christ themselves. Leon's framework was the most elaborate of all.

My new piece for NeuroWellness Review is about what the Three Christs of Ypsilanti reveal about how the brain protects its own self-image, why Rokeach later apologized in print for what he had done, and the much quieter version of the same defense most of us run every day.

https://medium.com/the-neurowellness-review/three-men-named-christ-3ac0cb7e6c66?sk=14d8db5d532aa49a68c394cec707b543

Three Men Named Christ On Delusion, the Mind’s Defense of Itself, and an Experiment We Never Should Have Run

A few mornings ago, I took my coffee out into the backyard of a house we don't own, on land I'd never seen before. Wicker chair, big white CANADA mug, acres of green field beyond a hedge of old mossy trees.

It felt recognizably like home.

We've been in this BC rental for a few weeks. Before that, a cabin. Before that, an apartment in Abbotsford. In two weeks, we move to Kelowna. The house keeps changing. The feeling of home doesn't.

I'm a psychologist, so I dug into what attachment theory actually says about home. The short answer: attachment theory wasn't written for nomads. In the original literature, the secure base is almost always a place where a person lives. The theory was written for a world where families generally stayed put.

A lot of us don't live in that world anymore.

My new piece for Tiny House Big Mind is about what home turns out to be when the address keeps changing. Books, a routine, a person, a dog. The stuff you carry in.

https://medium.com/tiny-house-big-mind/home-was-never-the-house-a2e6935d8c9f?sk=64231155dd1b2fb27905f2f8bb4daece

Home Was Never the House Attachment theory wasn’t written for nomads

In 1998, a man slid a note across my teller counter at the bank. It said he had a gun. He walked out with a few thousand dollars.

When the police came, they kept the other teller and me apart and made us each write down what we remembered before we said a word to each other. Smart move, as it turned out.

She thought he had a buzz cut. I would have sworn he was bald. We had been standing three feet apart.

My new piece for NeuroWellness Review is about why our brains do this. Why two honest people can walk away from the same event with two different versions. Why a research subject can be talked into remembering a hot air balloon ride that never happened to him. And how the same brain systems that help us remember (hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, amygdala) also help us reconstruct.

The piece lands on a softer note than I expected: hold your own memory firmly enough to act on it. Loosely enough to update it. Extend the same grace to the people whose memories don't match yours.

https://medium.com/the-neurowellness-review/the-psychology-of-false-memories-b1d29430b6b2?sk=b97e6c93f3ccbe7444a9a5dbd14f682c

The Psychology of False Memories How can we be so confidently wrong?

A while back I was driving home replaying a conversation that had upset me. Every mile or so I'd loop back through it — how unfair the other person had been, what I should have said, what they shouldn't have.

By the time I got home, I was more upset than when I'd started. The slow car in the left lane was a personal attack. The pickup that didn't signal was a moral failing. My nervous system had used up everything it had on the internal loop.

I'd always believed that "getting it off your chest" was healthy. It turns out the research has been pretty unkind to that idea for the last twenty years.

But here's the part I keep coming back to. A few months ago I told my husband about something small that had been bothering me for days. He listened. He didn't say anything especially brilliant. Somewhere in the saying, the loop broke.
So which one is right — the one the science says doesn't work, or the one that obviously did?

My new piece for NeuroWellness Review is on the difference between rehearsing a hurt and processing one — and how to tell which one you're actually doing.

I Replayed the Argument the Whole Drive Home Four decades of research on anger explain why that made everything worse

I was pulling my suitcase over the cobblestones of Antwerp, convinced the vacation was going badly. My hands were shaking. My neck was tic-ing. I'd just gotten married, sold my house, and was partway through a move to another country — good things, all of them. My body was refusing to treat them as good things.

On a narrow street near the train station, I happened to look up.

A brick building. A bright sky. A single white cloud. My chest loosened for the first time all day.

My new piece for NeuroWellness Review is about the kind of stress that shows up in the body, why "good" change still counts as stress, why anxiety sometimes arrives wearing the costume of something neurological, and the small trick of lifting your eyes when you can't quite think your way out of your own head.

Lift Your Eyes Anxiety in Antwerp

A weekend at an off-grid cabin was supposed to be my small-scale proof that we could go minimalist. One dog, one husband, one duffel each, a cooler, a book nobody opened. Pared down to essentials. Good enough for two nights, easy.

Then we went to pack up the car to drive home, and had to reshuffle it three times to make everything fit.

I've been writing from a rental in British Columbia about the tipping point between minimalism and misery — that quiet second failure mode of the "less is more" life, where the friction of not having starts costing more than the friction of having. The new piece is up in Tiny House Big Mind.

How Much is Enough The tipping point between minimalism and misery

A few months ago I completely fell apart over a schedule change. My husband was out walking the dog, running later than expected, and somehow that was enough to set my nervous system vibrating.

I knew it made no sense. That made it worse.

I work alongside a neuropsychologist. I understand brain data. I'd had EEG maps done before, and they always came back unremarkable. So when I had another one done recently, I wasn't looking for anything in particular.

Turns out something was there to find.

I wrote about what showed up — and what it finally explained about the last year — over on NeuroWellness Review. If you've been having your own version of those moments, it might be worth a read.

Can a qEEG Explain Mood Swings? What My Brain Map Showed Me About Perimenopause

Change is always possible because the brain is designed to adapt across the lifespan. Neuroplasticity allows us to update habits, emotional responses, and patterns shaped by past experiences—no matter how long they’ve been in place. While change isn’t instant or effortless, consistent practice creates measurable shifts in the brain that support healthier choices and a stronger sense of self. Becoming a better version of yourself isn’t about erasing the past; it’s about training the brain to respond differently going forward.

Beliefs matter, but behavior is where real change happens—because the brain rewires itself through action, not intention alone. Repeated behaviors strengthen neural circuits, shape habits, and ultimately influence character more than what we say we value. You can believe in kindness, growth, or integrity all day long, but it’s the choices you practice—especially when it’s uncomfortable—that train the brain to embody those values. Change isn’t proven by what we think; it’s reinforced by what we do.