This blog post is worth reading: “Like a fly on an elephant’s back, your troubles should be”… and other blogs I like.

This blog post (which is like-fly-elephants-back or “like a fly on an elephant’s back”) is good to read if you need help with “framing” to get through your troubles today. “Framing” is a psychological technique for reducing the obsession we have with the things that are wrong right now.

The blog post explains that we are evolutionarily adapted to concentrate on and remember the things that are wrong, that is, the things we need to pay attention to and fix to get through and live another day (so we can have more children.) So, if we are depressed by thinking about the things that are wrong (that we can’t fix) we need to perform an exercise in framing.

Think hard about the positive things happening today. Fix them in your memory. The negative things will begin to recede. Remember what things were like a year ago– you may be able to think of the positive things, and if you can’t, think harder. The negative things about a year ago have mostly receded (I hope) already, and if they haven’t, think harder. If those negative things are too strong to forget, then you need to speak to a therapist.

Framing, in essence, is just thinking of the negative things as being like a fly on an elephant’s back. The positive things will (I hope) outnumber the negative things.

Here’s another blog I like: “Bits of DNA” and here is the latest post on that blog: “The lethal nonsense of Michael Levitt.” I myself have already contributed several comments to this post. If you have any doubts that trying to achieve “herd immunity” to the novel coronavirus before there is a vaccine is a bad idea, you should definitely read this post.

Finally, if you are really scientifically minded, you should follow “Retraction Watch”, which is a blog that keeps an eye on retractions of scientific papers. It has really blown up in the last several years, and some of its posts are fascinating. In fact, that is where I got the blog post that started this blog post– the one about the fly on the elephant’s back…