The holidays bring the year’s highest rates of despair, and Armand DiMele and Dr. Kent Robert Short dig into why: family expectations, economic inequality, and the grief of absences. Dr. Michael B. Schachter, MD, Author, joins by phone to explain how reduced sunlight depletes vitamin D and disrupts melatonin, and what actually helps.
Most people are not emotionally ill, just emotionally out of shape. Armand DiMele and Dr. Vivian Wolsk, Executive Director of the Gestalt Center for Psychotherapy and Training, explore emotional fitness, the body’s role in identifying feelings, the empty chair technique, and why negative programming feels so compelling.
Every human defense strategy has a counterpart in nature. Armand DiMele maps four types of animal mimicry onto everyday human behavior, from gang colors to tomboyism to con artists, then takes a caller whose obsessive cleaning turns out to mask a deeper, unnamed fear.
Worry lives in the future, regret lives in the past, and neither leaves room for now. Armand DiMele argues that most suffering comes from one of these two mental habits, and that being present is not passivity but a kind of willful surrender. Callers share their own struggles to simply stop and arrive.
Almost all erratic, confusing, or harmful human behavior traces back to fear. Armand DiMele and co-host Roberta Maria Atti walk through the evolutionary roots of fear, its biochemistry, and how recognizing that someone is frightened rather than attacking changes everything about how we respond to them.
Social psychologist Dr. Katherine Good joins Armand and co-hosts Ben Starr and Giullian Gioiello to unpack how stereotypes shape behavior in ways people rarely notice. The conversation moves from implicit bias and stereotype threat to Ferguson, policing, and the fear that drives prejudice.
Neural activity, not psychology, drives the stories we construct about our lives. Armand DiMele argues that the brain manufactures narratives, jealousy, ambition, grief, romantic obsession, to exhaust excess electrical energy and restore equilibrium. Co-host Giullian Gioiello joins as callers test the theory against real losses and life patterns.
Why are so many people medicating their own physical and emotional pain, and what are the risks? Armand DiMele and Dr. Kent Robertshaw, MD, psychiatrist, trace the shift from doctor-dependent care to self-treatment, covering everything from nutrition to Vicodin abuse among teens, and explore when self-care empowers and when it becomes a dangerous substitute for professional help.
The brain is not fixed machinery but a living structure that rewires itself through thought, learning, and practice. Dr. Norman Doidge, author of “The Brain That Changes Itself,” joins Armand DiMele to discuss how neuroplasticity challenges Cartesian mind-body dualism, what brain training can do for age-related cognitive decline, and why mental rehearsal reshapes the brain as powerfully as physical practice.
Seven million Americans live with OCD, yet most go undiagnosed for nearly a decade. Armand DiMele traces the disorder to its neurochemical roots in the amygdala and cingulate gyrus, explains why evolution wired us toward obsessive vigilance, and surveys its many overlooked forms from hoarding to contamination fear.
