The Herd Mentality

It was a pleasant surprise that greeted me when i arrived in my usual weekend hideaway.

IMG_3352.JPGAfter discussions with the GM, Ms Maggie Garcia for the past few months, Pico de Loro has now come out with their Breathe Fresh Campaign that prohibits smoking in public open spaces!! Especially the beach!

Non smokers are now freed from being held hostage of having to stay indoors.

OPEN AREA does NOT MEAN SMOKING AREA!

I noticed that people would follow as long as ONE starts to follow. So even if there were no prominent no smoking signs around the beach area, because of the HERD mentality,  smokers tend to cluster together as a herd and smoke far far away from the general public.

Herd Mentality is the description of how one would tend to conform and follow the social norms and behaviors of one’s peers or group and the tendency of people to act in certain behaviors that they see would make them “fit in”.   In this case, it is definitely a win not just for the environment but most importantly to the health of everyone!

Congrats to the Pico Sands GM and to the whole Pico Team!

The One That Got Away

I read somewhere that by the time a woman reaches 30, she should have a name of a person who she can say let her get away.

But what if, she was the one that has “the one that got away?”  What if she wakes up one day, 40 years old and realizes that the best of what she has was already given away? — to the one that got away?

In my opinion, the on

e who got away, should have gotten away, and should stay away.  Sometimes, we are so caught in romanticizing past loves that all the hurts fade away, all the little annoyances that bothered are blurred.  What is left behind are the nice memories.

In Psychology, this is called the Fading Affect Bias (FAB ).  It is the psychological phenomenon wherein negative emotions tend to be forgotten more quickly that pleasant ones.  This helps humans become resilient and happy and healthy.

There is a clinical psychologist in in Cambridge that went a step further and studied how pleasant memories can help depressed people.  Using a technique called the method of loci wherein you imagine a visual image of a happy occasion that you can recall whenever the depressive episode strikes.

Going back to “the one that got away” , well, he wouldn’t have gotten away if he was the right one in the first place right?  So stop beating yourself up over it and think of it as just a FAB! 🙂