What To Do When It All Goes Wrong
The standard coping strategies, like positive self-talk, reframing, etc., work really well when you are teetering on the edge between striving and giving in, but once you’ve taken the step over the cliff, a new strategy needs to be implemented. You don’t need to cope, you need to be snapped out of it.
Instagram, My Daughter, And Me
What Instagram has allowed me to do is to employ a kind of digital physics, to warp my experience of space and time in my favor. In the offline world, I spend precious hours with her and then she disappears. But online, she is with me again when I post, and then again each time I receive a notification.
How Political Opinions Change
A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically like-minded networks.
How To Overcome Your Fear Of Failure
Behind many fears is worry about doing something wrong, looking foolish, or not meeting expectations — in other words, fear of failure. By framing a situation you’re dreading differently before you attempt it, you may be able to avoid some stress and anxiety.
Brain Man: The Boy With The Incredible Brain
An extraordinary documentary on the brainpower of Daniel T, the young Englishman who could be the world’s greatest mental athlete. Daniel is not just a calculating wizard, but also a memory champion and super linguist. He speaks nine languages.
Emotional Intelligence: The Social Skills You Weren’t Taught in School
How much of what you learned in school do you still remember? Even more importantly, how much of it do you actually use on a daily basis? Most of us aren’t taught how to identify or deal with our own emotions, or the emotions of others. These skills can be valuable, but you’ll never get them in a classroom.
Millennials Don’t Stand A Chance
Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession. They will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.
What Happened To American Childhood?
The percentage of 12-to-17-year-olds who had experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year shot up from 8 percent to 13 percent. Among girls, the rate was even higher; in 2017, one in five reported experiencing major depression. Here’s what we can do about it.
Love In The Time Of Low Expectations
“Never count on a man,” her father had told her. “They will always let you down.” So she didn’t, and they still did.
Why I Wanted To Finish My Father’s Life’s Work
My father was among the founders of ‘Decision Science’ in the 1960s and 70s…and spent the last 10 years of his life trying to write a popular book on decision-making for the masses, something that would cement his legacy. Karen Brown recalls the pain and joy of fulfilling a deathbed promise.
The Benefits Of Optimism Are Real
People who are resilient tend to be more positive and optimistic compared with less resilient folks; they are better able to regulate their emotions, and they are able to maintain their optimism through the most trying circumstances.
Learn Anything In Four Steps With The Feynman Technique
With the Feynman Technique, you learn by teaching someone else a topic in simple terms so you can quickly pinpoint the holes in your knowledge. After four steps, you’re able to understand concepts more deeply and better retain the information.
Revisiting An American Town Where Black People Weren’t Welcome After Dark
Anna is a city of a little more than 4,000 people located in the middle of Union County, where soybean fields and flatlands to the north give way to the forests and sandstone canyons of southern Illinois. Most people I met, wish the racist lore behind the city’s name would go away. So why hasn’t it?
The Real Reason The Sound Of Your Own Voice Makes You Cringe
A common explanation is that because we normally hear our own voice while talking, we receive both sound transferred to our ears externally by air conduction and sound transferred internally through our bones. This bone conduction of sound delivers rich low frequencies that are not included in air-conducted vocal sound.
Grieving With Google Street View
One Twitter user recently posted that her family never got to say goodbye to her grandpa when he died a few years ago, but when she visited her grandpa’s farm through Street View, there he was, sitting at the end of the road. Thousands of people responded with their own Google Street View stories.
Pay Attention: Practice Can Make Your Brain Better At Focusing
Practicing paying attention can boost performance on a new task, and change the way the brain processes information, a new study says. This might explain why learning a new skill can start out feeling grueling, but eventually becomes more natural.
The New Mind Control
The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do. Most of the vacuous thoughts and intense feelings our teenagers experience from morning till night are carefully orchestrated by highly skilled marketing professionals working in our fashion and entertainment industries.
In A Disaster, Humans Can Behave… Pretty Well, Actually
In his new book, Jon Mooallem tells the story of the Great Alaska Earthquake and Genie Chance, the woman whose voice on the radio held everyone together. It’s a beautiful exploration of how people tell stories on the radio, on stage, in books, and generally to each other.
Grandma’s Dementia Made Her Forget Her Homophobia
After watching how my family treated my lesbian mom, I assumed it would all repeat when I came out. But as my grandma’s memory faded, her disapproval of gay people vanished too. My grandma had lost a lot of her memory, and she’d apparently forgotten her disapproval of same-sex relationships too.
How A TV Sitcom Triggered The Downfall Of Western Civilization
‘Friends’ signals a harsh embrace of anti-intellectualism in America, where a gifted and intelligent man is persecuted by his idiot compatriots. And even if you see it from my point of view, it doesn’t matter. The constant barrage of laughter from the live studio audience will remind us that our own reactions are unnecessary, redundant.
Why Waking Up Earlier Isn’t Necessarily Better
The bias that people who rise early are morally superior to evening people doesn’t just loom large in scientific research. It’s at the very heart of the U.S.’s founding principles of industry and hard work.