Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
Police Psychology | 12 Greatest Hits
by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP
My brother contacted me a few months back and said he was writing his “Greatest Hits.” I said, “Roy, the problem is you don’t have any major hits, in fact you stopped playing guitar in college.” Roy was a country crooner with a great style and a dream in high school, but he gave it up and entered the real world. So, Roy responded back, “Everyone has a ‘Greatest Hits’ in them, they just might not be songs on a record” (I didn’t bother to tell him that records were a thing of the past. After all, he is my older brother by three years). “I am writing the greatest things I ever did, the times I was spot on and just hit it.” So, I asked him if this was a Maslow self-actualization thing you do at the end of life. He said “nah, I just wanted to know I had done some things right. You should try it.”
Everything is Negative
Not that I want to admit that my retired drug salesman brother gave me a great psychological technique I use with people all the time, but we do live in a very negative world. I mean, I wake up in the mornings and read the news in New York and feel like Armageddon is upon us. Writing your “12 Greatest Hits” does lift your spirits and does make you think about the good you have done in the world, and you don’t have to be a psychologist to suggest it to someone. You can be a boss or a supervisor or even a spouse. Write about family, work, social life, something you’ve done for someone, just sort of spread the good cheer all around. It is great idea for the holidays, but even more for you personally to feel good for a change. Let me give you a couple of mine as example: (more…)
make a little stop in Hong Kong on the way home. I figured, this is the culture, I should try a bug. So, I summoned up the courage and bought one. Took the shell off as I was instructed and bit into it. It was crunchy on the outside, but boy the inside was where the treat was. It tasted like the inside of a large bug, sort of like a shrimp paste gone really bad. It was much worse than the tequila worm from college, but then I had drank a significant amount of the bottle and couldn’t feel anything. Here it was just me and the bug. No Tequila, no revelry, no people encouraging you with their “yechs” and “oh my god he’s eating the worm.” 
Let’s start with two systems in your body — the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PSNS). The sympathetic nervous system raises you up, pumps blood to your muscles, makes you heart rate go up, releases acid in your stomach to chew up the food, makes you breathe shallow and quick and all stuff so you can fight or flight. It throws your brain into the mode that causes tunnel vision, so it affect everything. Now you can’t just keep going up and up, so the parasympathetic nervous system calms you down. It releases the different hormones and stuff that calms all the body down so you can relax. They work in conjunction with each other to regulate your body and make it a mean fighting machine, or a run fast and get away from the Tyrannosaurs Rex running machine.