#psychology (78 links)
- The Imperfectionist: Acting because you don't have to ckarchive.com
I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.
- Game design is simple, actually raphkoster.com
The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of satisfaction when fulfilled. But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been Through It.The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.
Via Popular.
- Why Some People See Collapse Earlier Than Others adrianlambert.substack.com
Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing. They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.
- Don’t like joining in? Why it could be your superpower theguardian.com
- BICEPS palomamedina.com
There are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives). Each of us have a personal hierarchy for the six however: You might find that equity and belonging are most important to you, but choice and status are most important to your employee, your partner, your child. Getting to know them is a shortcut to better communication, as well as greater inclusivity at work.
- The Spoon Theory written by Christine Miserandino butyoudontlooksick.com
Basically: be a nice human.
- TBM 315: The Self-Sealing Argument Trap cutlefish.substack.com
The punchline: We frequently get pulled into Catch-22 arguments and discussions. No matter what we do—at least the normal gut options—we lose. But awareness is a gift.
Do people understand the impressions they make on others or do their anxieties lead them to assume the worst? Across nearly 10 years of research and tens of thousands of observations, the authors have come to this answer: people underestimate how much others like them, and this bias has important implications for how people work together.
- Compelled to Blurt... - compulsion embarrassment | Ask MetaFilter ask.metafilter.com
As far as I am aware, I am a mentally healthy, well-adjusted, and sane person with no disorders. But I have a strange, fairly innocuous quirk which seems beyond my control and I'm curious about it...
Er, yeah, it me too.
Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why? One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.
- The Psychology Behind TikTok's Addictive Feed growth.design
- Beware of Being "Right" | Psychology Today UK psychologytoday.com
Much of the emotional suffering in the world comes from the substitution of power for value. The curse of our times is that so many people have developed the habit of seeking to feel temporarily more powerful when they feel devalued. This leads almost inevitably to power struggles and some degree of abuse of others, if acted out, or if held in, to some level of depression.
- The Church of Interruption | Sam Bleckley sambleckley.com
Via Popular.
If procrastination isn’t about laziness, then what is it about? Erik Winkowski If you’ve ever put off an important task to, say, alphabetize your spice drawer,…
Carrot catastrophe … a scene from the Eat Them to Defeat Them TV advertisement.Photograph: YouTube V egetables aren’t healthy, tasty, fun or even very colourful…
- Why Kids Want Things theatlantic.com
Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters When Marsha Richins started researching materialism in the early 1990s, it was a subject that had mostly been left to philosophers…
- The Veil of Ignorance - Marvel Blog blog.marvelapp.com
Imagine You are in your mid-twenties and your vision is 20/20 or better. You are not color blind and all the devices you own have a ‘retina’ screen. You are…
- The Case for the "Self-Driven Child" scientificamerican.com
We are raising the anxious generation, and the conversation about the causes, and the potential cures, has just begun. In The Self-Driven Child , authors…
Sick Systems How to Keep Someone With You Forever So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could…
- The Problem With Facts timharford.com
1. Just before Christmas 1953, the bosses of America’s leading tobacco companies met John Hill, the founder and chief executive of one of America’s leading…
Brian Chippendale THEY learn to read at age 2, play Bach at 4, breeze through calculus at 6, and speak foreign languages fluently by 8. Their classmates shudder…
- Social Intelligence Test socialintelligence.labinthewild.org
Test your social intelligence Tell your friends about this test! Test how well you can read emotions of others just by looking at their eyes. The ability to…
- Many parents will say kids made them happier. They’re probably lying. washingtonpost.com
iStock Ask the vast majority of American parents, and they will tell you that having kids has made them happier. The problem with this claim, as common as it…
- “I saw things children shouldn’t see” – surviving a troubled childhood mosaicscience.com · Archived on
The landscape of the Hawaiian islands is as idyllic as a postcard: long, sandy beaches, hibiscus flowers, clear waters of tropical fish and coral reefs. When…
- Do you overfunction or underfunction in a relationship? theguardian.com
Whenever someone claims there are “two kinds of people in the world” – extroverts and introverts, realists and idealists, optimists and pessimists – you can be…
- Motivational interviewing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
MI is a goal-oriented, client-centered counseling style for eliciting behavior change by helping clients to explore and resolve ambivalence. Compared with non-directive counseling, it's more focused and goal-directed. It departs from traditional Rogerian client-centered therapy through this use of direction, in which therapists attempt to influence clients to consider making changes, rather than non-directively explore themselves
Even if we don’t remember early events, they leave an imprint on the way we understand and feel about ourselves, other people, and the greater world, for better or worse. We have elaborate concepts about birds, dogs, lakes and mountains, for example, even if we can’t recall the experiences that created those concepts. ‘You can’t remember going ice-skating with Uncle Henry, but you understand that skating and visiting relatives are fun,’ Bauer explained. ‘You have a feeling for how nice people are, how reliable they are. You might never be able to pinpoint how you learnt that, but it’s just something you know.’
The triangle of happiness is a simplification of the main factors that tend to drive most people in their jobs. Put simply, if you're not satisfied with at least 2 of the 3 points of the triangle, your overall job satisfaction is in real question.
- This column will change your life: just sit down and think theguardian.com
To sit comfortably with your thoughts first requires seeing that there's a sense in which they're not real. A less new agey way of putting it is simply that you don't need to believe your thoughts. Whereupon they become fun to watch, and the need for distraction subsides. To quote the title of a book by Sylvia Boorstein, a meditation teacher: don't just do something, sit there.
- Rozsika Parker, a psychotherapist and parent, speaks out about the flipside of maternity theguardian.com
A mother needs to know herself, to own up to the diverse, contradictory, often overwhelming feelings evoked by motherhood. It doesn't matter whether she stays at home, goes out to work, is partnered or single. Only a mother who can face her own inner turbulence can make sense of her child's. It's only by accepting that at times you are a bad mother, that you can ever be a good mother.
- The Morality of Manipulation nirandfar.com
Creating a product that the designer does not believe improves the user’s life and which the maker would not use is exploitation.
Yuck. Dark patterns.
- This column will change your life: join the management theguardian.com
The internet makes it absurdly easy for marketers to harness the tiniest twinges of boredom or loneliness or desire, channelling them into sales via "variable rewards" – so much more addictive, as Skinner discovered, than predictable ones. A fascinating new book, Hooked, by Nir Eyal, presents itself as a guidebook for companies who want to create "habit-forming products". But it's also a cautionary manual for resisting them. Eyal urges businesses to think ethically. (Creating addictive products you wouldn't use yourself, he says, "is called exploitation".)
"Absurdly easy" may be overstating things. I like the "wouldn't use it yourself" part. Not a bad general guideline.
- The man who destroyed America’s ego - Matter medium.com
Self-esteem fits perfectly over the top of the traditional ideal of the free and noble individual, striving to achieve the American dream. The movement’s sin was making it sound easy. It removed the part about striving, replacing it with an unearned assumption of exceptionalism. The lesson became that simply wanting it is enough. You’re special. You deserve it.
The first part of this (at least) is really quite good.
There's one view of psychology according to which everything we do to make ourselves miserable – every dysfunctional behaviour, from minor to destructive – begins as an approach that once worked well, often in childhood, then passed its sell-by date. We're not idiots who choose unhappiness; rather, we develop coping mechanisms that make sense at the time.
- Psychiatrists: the drug pushers theguardian.com
One of my oldest friends is a consultant psychiatrist who I've actually seen practising in just this way, with preternatural flair and compassion.
In both their cases, however, I feel about them rather the way I do about the last archbishop of Canterbury: I consider Rowan Williams to be a wise and spiritual man mostly despite rather than because of his Christianity; and I think many psychiatrists are good healers mostly despite rather than because of the medical ideology of mental illness to which they subscribe.
- America the Anxious - NYTimes.com opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
While the British way can be drainingly negative, The American approach to happiness can spur a debilitating anxiety. The initial sense of promise and hope is seductive, but it soon gives way to a nagging slow-burn feeling of inadequacy. Am I happy? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could I be doing more about it? Even basic contentment feels like failure when pitched against capital-H Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been achieved — a recipe for neurosis.
- Trickle-Down Distress: How America's Broken Meritocracy Drives Our National Anxiety Epidemic - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
To the question of anxiety: Should we be thinking about ways to make America more of meritocracy in the hopes of quelling our stress? Says McNamee: "A pure meritocracy is not possible and may not even be desirable." (Just ask Harrison Bergeron.) Far more important, he argues, is debunking the myth of meritocracy, harmful "because it provides an incomplete explanation for success and failure, often mistakenly exalting the rich and condemning the poor."
- Semantic satiation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
Tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato tomato.
- The Perfected Self - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
Via blech.
- Impostor syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org