My family members are incredible gift-givers. Every birthday and holiday, they manage to select exactly what the recipient wanted or didn't know they wanted. I didn't inherit this gene. Inevitably, I wait until the last minute, panic and buy something totally random. My parents' closets (and, I assume, trash cans) are full of my misguided offerings: a Lego orchid, hair masks, a woodworking kit.
Leon Festinger, a young American psychologist at the University of Minnesota, read about these rumors in the early nineteen-fifties and was puzzled. Festinger didn't think people would voluntarily adopt anxiety-inducing ideas. Instead, he reasoned, the rumors could better be described as "anxiety justifying." Some had felt the earth shake and were overwhelmed with fear. When the outcome-they were spared-didn't match their emotions, they embraced predictions that affirmed their fright.
Partly that's because it's more satisfying to do something you want to do than to avoid something you don't want to do. For example, for decades I drank a ton of Diet Mountain Dew. When I finally decided I wanted to drink less soda, I set an approach goal: Instead of setting a goal like "Stop drinking Diet Mountain Dew in the morning," my goal was "Drink water with my protein bar and banana for breakfast.
It's not just the holiday season. We live with this tension every day. The pull toward solitude versus the longing to belong is not a simple dichotomy but something that requires constant reflection and recalibration. For me, it is one of the central challenges of being human. When I say "group," I mean more than casual socializing. I include much of our outer world: family, school, work, groups formed by hobbies or shared interests (bandmates, pickleball team, neighborhood boards, volunteer organization, and more).
Anyone traveling to outer space should be aware of the risks. Currently, staying alive means staying cocooned inside the spacecraft, spacesuit, or settlement. While planetary-scale engineering or genetic engineering may yet happen, Earth-like environments that are habitable for humans are a long way from either. Scientists investigate psychological responses to long-term experiences of lack of natural light, spatial confinement, ambient noise, living and working with the same small group of people, and mental adjustments to the physical and cognitive changes induced by spaceflight.
Over the past few years, there have been televised congressional hearings, repeated news segments across major networks, and a recent release of a mind blowing documentary called The Age of Disclosure that brings much of this information together, featuring on-the-record disclosures and sworn testimony from dozens of current and former high-level U.S. government, military, and intelligence officials describing secret classified government programs tasked with investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs).
This isn't holiday spirit. It's design and a great lesson in influence. If leaders learned how to design decisions the way December does, they would get clarity, alignment, and speed all year, and not just when the calendar runs out. The idea is simple. When options shrink, focus increases. When criteria are explicit, choices become easier. When time is clear, commitment accelerates. The research backs this up.
A better life means different things to different people. For one person, a better life might mean better relationships, better emotional well-being, or better physical health. For another, the same idea may instead conjure a desire for better finances or a better work-life balance. Despite these different visions, however, there is a unifying quality about a better life that most of us share: we all want one.
How many times have you heard one of your peers talk about impostor syndrome? This topic, describing the persistent belief that one's achievements are undeserved, is frequently heard in films, TV, and even among your friends. But while it's natural to second-guess yourself sometimes, experiencing impostor thoughts can have disruptive effects on your long-term goals. Science says it can erode your engagement, learning outcomes, and professional growth efforts-not to mention your well-being.
Our brain is constantly assessing risk and safety. Being judged, rejected, or demoted within a group can register as a threat to belonging, something that, for most of human history, meant a threat to survival. Thus, silence may merely be an intuitive default response while the brain assesses the safety of the social situation. When we sense danger, however subtle, say an unpredictable leader or a dismissive tone, the amygdala becomes alert, and the brain shifts into a state of heightened vigilance and self-protection mode.
Imagine you've set the goal of running a marathon that's 90 days away. You've hired a trainer who says this a less than optimal amount of time, but if you stick religiously to her fitness routine, nutrition plan, and sleep schedule, you'll be ready come race day. Cheat in any of those three areas, she warns, and you won't be able to run 26.2 miles on three month's notice.
A survey from People Insights found that only 56% of employees believe senior leaders genuinely make an effort to listen, which is down from 65% two years ago. We live in a world where algorithms reward noise. Visibility has become a proxy for value, and airtime is the metric that many use to measure leadership presence. But real influence doesn't come from speaking more. It actually comes from listening better. Influence grows through empathy, trust, and the ability to see and understand people.
Whether it is putting off doing the laundry, paying your bills, or getting your shopping done, we all procrastinate. As students, the urge to procrastinate is even stronger when you're surrounded by opportunities to have fun. But procrastination has been found to lead to poorer academic performance, higher levels of stress and anxiety, and academic burnout. Lee, Othman, & Ramlee (2025) were interested in determining if there were other treatment modalities besides Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that might help avoid procrastination.
These beliefs don't just shape how we see our own bodies; they also get projected onto other people's bodies. Without realizing it, many of us internalize cultural stories like "larger bodies are lazy," "thin people are more disciplined," or "some bodies are inherently better or more worthy than others." These narratives quietly dictate how we interpret health, morality, attractiveness, and even someone's character-all before we consciously notice what's happening.
Self-talk, the continuous internal dialogue we maintain, is an intrinsic aspect of being human that often occurs without our conscious awareness. This internal chatter can become so routine that we overlook it, or it may replay familiar messages repeatedly. By acknowledging that our self-talk is rooted in our shared history, we can better understand how our thoughts are shaped by the values and beliefs passed down through generations. This awareness empowers us to transform our self-talk, ultimately influencing our perspectives
Beth's capacity for empathy serves her well with her husband, James, as well as in other relationships. Others experience her as a good listener and often seek her out to share their stress. However, these conversations often leave Beth feeling anxious and distraught, even though she may not recognize the source of her discomfort. At other times, she is able to recognize and admit that her tension is related to feeling overwhelmed by others' suffering.
Yesterday I drove my son to work and, since we arrived early, we sat in the car and chatted. I'm not sure how we got onto the topic, but quite quickly, we began discussing the idea that the things people do are always the best they can do given who they are, what they know, and the circumstances they find themselves in.
Goals are standards that individuals use to evaluate how well they are doing now relative to where they want to end up. Goals basically guide our choices. Once you have a goal, the hard part is figuring out the steps that will get you from point A to point B. The following guide can help you make well-defined and achievable goals. It also provides clues about the various ways that goal achievement fails (Berkman, 2018; Matthews, 2015).
Snapchat gave you nine years to fill their servers with your memories. Now they're charging you to keep them. In September 2025, Snapchat announced it would end free storage for "Memories", the feature where users have saved more than one trillion photos and videos since 2016. Users who exceed 5GB now face a choice. Will you pay for storage plans, or watch your memories disappear after a 12-month grace period?
A recent study suggests that 65 percent of our daily behaviours are done on "autopilot," meaning that we do them without thinking. These automatic behaviours occur because they are the result of a habitual process. Habitual behaviours are formed through repetition. They can be helpful, like washing our hands, or unhelpful, like biting our nails. Since so many of our day-to-day actions are habitual, understanding how habits form and how we can change them is essential for improving health and productivity.
This can be hard for onlookers to understand, but for people who have lived through trauma, chronic emotional invalidation, or unsafe relationships, self-blame can become an organizing principle. It offers a painful kind of order. If suffering is my fault, then at least it makes sense. Over time, that belief does not stay confined to memory. It begins to shape behavior.
This was my great-grandfather Wilhelm's city, the place he'd left more than a century earlier to migrate to Mexico. I was presenting research on the very phenomenon his migration had set in motion. Wilhelm adapted quickly to San Luis Potosí. He learned Spanish, raising five children in a household that was neither fully German nor fully Mexican. He never taught his children German. The language was gone within a generation. But three generations later, my own children recovered it through deliberate immersion during my research fellowships in Germany,
The report, titled Explaining the Evolution of Gossip, clarifies how gossip has evolved to help social groups function, by disseminating useful information about their members and fostering cooperation. Gossip is a ubiquitous feature of human communication, explains psychologist and psychotherapist Barbara Zorrilla. From a social-psychological perspective, gossip helps reinforce social norms what's appropriate and what's not which is why gossip is often used to socially sanction people who don't comply with these norms, she details.
The holidays can come with a lot of expectations. Beyond finding the perfect gifts for the people on your list and digging out grandma's secret cookie recipe, there is also pressure to express seasonal joy in a particular way. We're supposed to want a full calendar of holiday parties, big family gatherings, and endless opportunities to mingle. We're expected to stay late, be chatty, participate in group games, and make small talk with distant relatives.
When in my 20s, I equated hope with "sunny-side-of-the-street" wishful thinking-what we now call " toxic positivity." I was wrong. I live, work, and lead these days with a new kind of grounded hope. Many thoughtful, intelligent people today are sliding toward cynicism. But recent research shows something surprising about the nature of hope in the face of cynicism. I want to share research conducted on cynical college students-and how that research shifted the outlook even of the chief researcher.
Partying the night before a big exam. Preparing last-minute for a work presentation. Running a 5K in a 10-pound Halloween costume. All are examples of what psychologists call "self-handicapping" - creating obstacles to success to order to bolster or protect one's own reputation. "It's actually very common," said Yang Xiang, a psychology Ph.D. candidate in the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. "There have been many decades of work documenting this behavior."
