Most of us know the pain and isolation that occurs when we feel judged unfairly by others. We can move through the discomfort of judgment by understanding the reasons why others judge. By focusing on forgiveness and learning the lessons of our situation, we can adopt a healthy mindset. We all make mistakes. Sitting in the discomfort that judgment creates can deepen our connection to humanity.
Money mistakes happen. We've all had that moment of overspending, taking on debt or making an investment that didn't work out. Financial mistakes are part of being human, but for many, these mistakes come with the heavy burden of shame. Unlike guilt, which can motivate us to change our behavior, shame can leave us stuck. Understanding how shame shows up and learning how to work through it can create a path toward a healthier relationship with money.
Few traits are celebrated today as much as sheer persistence. We demand it of ourselves as we grind toward the mythical 10,000 hours of mastery. We demand it of our children as they sit through years of standardized schooling that promise career paths their neighbors will envy. We praise athletes for "toughing it out" and entrepreneurs for "grinding harder than others" while we pat ourselves on the back when we "stick with the plan."
For a lot of adults on the autism spectrum, navigating everyday life can feel like stepping into a movie where everyone else got the script ahead of time and you didn't. People seem to know how to move, what to say, and how to react. There are rules, cues, gestures, and tones, most of them unspoken, and yet somehow understood by everyone else. If you're autistic, it can feel like everyone's fluent in a social language you were never taught.
On the surface, the following seems ironic in the Information Age. So many people these days grasp simplistic beliefs about complex issues and then double down on those beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. This isn't surprising at all from a psychological perspective. Rather, it's a result of too much information and too little time. Under stress, we typically adopt more rigid perspectives.
Both times, bungee jumping had presented itself neatly packaged, properly regulated and entirely safe, and I declined with little-to-no hesitation. Zambia, on the other hand, met me differently. On a warm, windless day over the Zambezi River, standing in front of a rickety platform with little to suggest international safety compliance, I found myself ready to jump. Not metaphorically-genuinely, wholeheartedly ready. I would have done it too, if not for the people with me urging otherwise-and that says something.
"If at first you don't succeed, try again." "Winners never quit and quitters never win." Our culture has a lot of sayings against quitting, making it seem like a failure. But sometimes, abandoning a goal means opening up space for something better. Cognitive psychologist Annie Duke, author of Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away; career educator Colin Rocker; and psychologist and professor
Intrinsic motivation involves how you feel about the actions involved in goal completion themselves. If you resolve to exercise more often, how do you feel about the time you spend exercising? Extrinsic motivation is the value of completing the goal. Exercising more often in order to stay healthy is an extrinsic motivation, because it is about the outcome rather than the joy or pain of the activity itself.
For children in foster care, safety is only part of healing. Many carry an invisible burden of shame that comes from being separated from their families of origin. Unlike guilt, which says "I did something bad," shame whispers " I am bad." Over time, this whisper weaves into identity, so that making a mistake feels like proof of worthlessness rather than an opportunity to learn.
"Historically, small talk has been a ritualized form of diplomacy," said Alison Blackler, a mind coach, author, and TEDx speaker. "It allows people to signal civility, gauge each other's intentions, and maintain harmony in social groups."
One morning, playwright Vivienne Franzmann was queueing for a coffee when an argument broke out. A customer absolutely lost it, says Franzmann. She was demanding her drink, shouting and swearing, and the rest of us stood there not knowing what to do. When Franzmann got to the rehearsal studio, she shared the story with Frauke Requardt, a choreographer she had just started working with.
But some clinicians noticed something peculiar: certain patients could remember words quite well but couldn't string them together properly while speaking. In the 1870s, German physician Adolf Kussmaul was among the first to systematically study these sentence-level problems. He identified patients who spoke in halting, telegraphic fragments lacking many connecting words, termed "agrammatism," and others who produced flashes of complex syntax but with a tangled organization, so-called "confused sentence monsters," today's "paragrammatism."
We've all heard it before: "You are the way you are because of your genes." And yes, biology does shape us. But it's not the entire story and definitely not the final one. Our genes don't hand us a fixed script. They just give us a rough draft, an opening scene, a few characters, and some possibilities. Then life shows up, changes the plot, adds new chapters, and helps us write something completely different.
The common storyline is compelling: Bilingual children are "smarter," more adaptable, and very likely to succeed in life. Cognitive scientists have even coined the term "bilingual advantage," claiming that constant language switching strengthens the brain's executive functions, a set of skills we use for planning, self-control, and problem-solving. There is truth here. Many studies show that bilingual children outperform their monolingual peers in certain tasks-specifically in task-switching, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility.
We tend to think that we experience the world as it is. We see and hear things, store them away as knowledge, and then take new facts into account. But that's not how our brains actually work. In reality, we filter out most of what we experience, so that we can focus on particular points of interest. In effect, we forget most things so we can zero in on what seems to be most important.
Memory isn't just a mechanism for storing all of the information you encounter. Instead, it helps you to hold onto information that is likely to be useful for reducing effort in the future. That is why, for example, when you work hard on something, you're more likely to remember it later. Memory encoding mechanisms use that effort as a signal that learning something about the situation will probably make it easier to deal with a similar situation in the future.
But it is beginning to appear that, like Elliot Rodger and others--including serial killer Ted Bundy, who in 1978 brutally attacked four college girls, killing two, at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida--Kohberger had a big problem with women. He reportedly had been bullied or teased by peers, especially popular females, in middle school for being morbidly obese, and, as a consequence, may have harbored intense feelings of resentment, anger or rage toward those whom he felt tortured him so cruelly.
Impaired auditory gating is seen in a variety of neurological conditions, including schizophrenia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD), dementia, and others. These disruptions are precognitiveandcan predispose to behavioral traits such as distractibility, anxiety, avoidance, or irritability. This is because the hierarchy of salience collapses when sensory gating is impaired. Every input, no matter how trivial, forces its way into awareness; everything is urgent, everything is foreground, everything is loud.
The birds like to return to familiar nesting spots, but inclement weather can jeopardise their efforts to reach those preferred destinations. If they fly into a storm, they risk exhaustion or disorientation. Instead, they may have to alter their course, forcing them to spend the winter in less familiar settings. When it comes to prospering through the winter, doggedly sticking to a particular route or rigidly fixating on a particular location can be counterproductive for migrating birds; flexibility is key.
The problem is that if there is only a focus on celebrating this life-or an entry into a next life-we deny and disenfranchise the legitimate grief that mourners experience. Someone loved has died. Whatever comfort is offered by the nature of the life and legacies of the deceased-or the beliefs of an afterlife, however defined-does not change that in funerals mourners gather to say goodbye to someone they loved.
A lot has been written about the mental health effects on those who are victims of hate. (For example, see the APA publication: "Hate crimes are on the rise in the U.S. What are the psychological effects?") There's also a lot of published material on why some people hate. But you'll find precious little on the mental health effects of hate on those who hate.
We've all had rough days when nothing goes right, and we think, "Why does this always happen to me?" That thought feels awful, but oddly comforting. Self-pity is an emotional state we love to hate. We know that it stalls growth and recognize that it doesn't make us more likable, and yet many of us find ourselves stuck in its grip. Here are six reasons that help explain why it develops and why it's so hard to overcome.
Much has been written about the relationship between social media use and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It requires no citations to state that social media use has increased over the last 20 years, as have diagnoses of ADHD. The question is whether there is any kind of meaningful relationship between the two. Correlations between events can sometimes mean nothing other than both events are related to something else, but not to each other.
I've often written on this blog about the complicated connection between money, purpose, and happiness. Some studies suggest that income relates to happiness up to a point, but the most enduring research tells a different story. The Harvard Adult Development Study, which has tracked participants for over 80 years, concludes that personal connections-not money-are the true key to fulfillment. Still, the question remains: Can we spend our way to happiness?
If you've been contemplating shaving your stubble, experts say it's time to put the razor down. From Brad Pitt to Prince William and Boris Johnson, many men look a lot better with a beard. However, scientific evidence shows that this isn't just a matter of personal taste. According to scientists, there is an evolutionary explanation for the 'beard glow up'.
"resilience originates from the Latin verb resilire 'to leap back' or 'rebound' and is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of English in the following manner: resilience, where one is "'able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions'." Added to this Young (2014, p. 11), writes that "resilience refers to strengths under stress, in response to crisis, and forged through dealing with adversity".
I must admit, dear reader, that I wasn't always a fan of change -not even a little. I wouldn't say I entered this world naturally inclined toward new or unfamiliar things. Like many children, I found comfort in routine-the joy that comes from ordinary moments repeating themselves. Whether we realize it or not, repetition builds a mental framework that quietly defines our comfort zones.
Despite how visibly common or acceptable tattoos may have become, they are still a target for quick judgment by others. People often make quick assumptions based on a single image or style, or about what someone's tattoo may say about their personality. It's not just the presence of a tattoo that prompts assumptions, but also the kind of tattoo. From the design and size to the placement or style, people often form quick opinions about someone based on the body art they've chosen.
Despite conventional wisdom that associates great inventions with lone geniuses, breakthrough inventions are team efforts. Incandescent light bulbs existed before Edison was born. His patent built on prior versions of the light bulb, aiming to make it practical and affordable. Even then, it wasn't a solo achievement-Edison collaborated with a team of skilled collaborators, known as the "Muckers," whose contributions have largely faded from memory. Yet it was Edison's name on the patent, and that's the version of history that stuck.
Humans are social animals, and psychological studies repeatedly show that people are, on average, happier when they engage in a shared activity with another person compared to doing it alone. However, most of these studies focused on only one or a few activities. Thus, it is unclear whether all daily activities are better when conducted with another person or whether there might be specific activities that people enjoy more when being alone than when being with another person.
You feel like you've been on a roller coaster, constantly applying for jobs and searching for the perfect one. You've sent an updated resume and cover letter. You answered all the questions. You were asked to submit video answers to questions. And now you wait. Will you be called for an interview? After the tenth time of checking your email, the uncertainty in your head starts to take over, leading you to question yourself: "Why did I even try? I'm not as good as the other applicants. What makes me think they'd want me?"
Holland's (1985) hexagonal model is the most widely used system for vocational counseling in the world. But its use transcends vocational counseling. In previous PT posts, I have described how Holland's model can be used to understand personality type theories in general, different ways of serving other people, gender norming on personality tests, and core values that underlie life goals. After describing the Holland hexagon, I will then explain how the hexagon can be used to understand the psychology of journalism.
Add to the mix that we're encouraging people to "have a voice," "speak up and be heard," "bring your whole self to work," and "be vulnerable." These are all incredible things and fantastic for growth in our workplaces. However, the more "voices" and "whole selves" we have present, the more differences in values, beliefs, and neural pathways, which leads to potential conflict.
