#positive-regression

#positive-regression

Many mistakes move us forward more than backward. Conscientious people often experience a springboard effect following mistakes, whereby fixing the mistakes accelerates growth faster than if they'd never made any missteps.

Lasting change begins with honest self-awareness and self-compassion. Every habit and coping pattern has served a purpose, meeting a need at some point in time.

Breakups can make you depressed and even damage your heart and immune system. Being the one who says 'it's over' can be torturous, especially if you're hurting someone you still care deeply about.

We tend to think of the five-day workweek as a law of nature, as certain as the rising of the sun. But it's nothing of the sort. The five-day workweek is a human invention that was introduced just over a century ago to solve the specific problems of the industrial age. By now it's so ingrained in our lives that we've forgotten we created it in the first place-but we did create it and we can also un-create it.

For my colleagues and me, whose task it is to improve population health, we architect specific health interventions because doing so gives us a measurement advantage. Through good intervention design, we (or the intervention's facilitators) can track attendance, program completion, vital signs, functional capacity, clinical labs, and downstream health utilization. Yet, despite our best design efforts, we still chronically face a fundamental challenge: program adherence.

Distress tolerance is the perception and ability to tolerate emotional discomfort without allowing it to derail your actions (or your relationships). When we believe we can make space for challenging emotions, our behavior isn't focused on getting rid of them. This then opens us up to responding in ways that align with our values.

Some of the most meaningful forms of growth an individual can experience happen beneath their conscious awareness. Typically, it registers first as discomfort, ambiguity, or even a sense of regression. When growth is happening at a person's core level, they're likely to underestimate it or misinterpret it entirely. As a psychologist, I often see individuals who assume they're "stuck" precisely when some of the most important internal shifts are underway. This is because the mind rarely announces these changes with clarity.

Rumination, perhaps more than any other mental habit, shapes our emotional and physical health. Early experiences help set the brain patterns that fuel recurring thought spirals. Rumination can be redirected once its messages are understood.

Henry Ford famously noted, "Whether you think you can do it or not, you are usually right." His point was that beliefs, especially about our talents, performance, and even luck, can be self-fulfilling. Irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, they will become true by influencing objective success outcomes. Ford was hardly alone. Along the same lines, decades of psychological research show that beliefs matter, often profoundly so.