-
Five Ways to Train Your Brain for Another Covid Season
So much for the big post-pandemic reopening we expected this fall. Instead, a season of caution and delay is here: Office-return plans have been postponed. Schools are back in session, but with worries of exposure to the more-contagious Delta variant. Meanwhile, divisions over masks and safety protocols are sharpening, and Covid-19 cases keep climbing. It’s a long way from earlier this summer, when the initial rollout of vaccines promised a return to worry-free social gatherings, travel and other elements of pre-virus life. If you are searching for new ways to steel yourself through this next phase of uncertainty, you’re not alone.
-
How to Deal With Stress in Your Life: Embrace It
My Uncle Sidney, a retired U.S. Navy physician and Vietnam veteran, has a military phrase he uses as advice for what to do when life is lousy: Embrace the Suck. He’s dispensed this colorful guidance to me in several stressful situations—when I’ve been anxious on deadline, dealing with a difficult family member, and, most recently, struggling through the pandemic. “The point is, when you’re stuck, surrounded or suffering, you need to assess where you are, learn to live with it, and try to advance,’’ Uncle Sidney says. Pretty good advice for our times. We’re still dealing with the whiplash of uncertainty and the emotions it provokes: frustration, anxiety, anger and fear.
-
Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show
About a year ago, teenager Anastasia Vlasova started seeing a therapist. She had developed an eating disorder, and had a clear idea of what led to it: her time on Instagram. She joined the platform at 13, and eventually was spending three hours a day entranced by the seemingly perfect lives and bodies of the fitness influencers who posted on the app. “When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies, perfect abs and women doing 100 burpees in 10 minutes,” said Ms. Vlasova, now 18, who lives in Reston, Va.
-
Understanding ‘Scientific Consensus’ May Correct Misperceptions About GMOs, but Not Climate Change
Explaining the meaning of “scientific consensus” may counter false beliefs about the safety of genetically modified foods. This same approach, however, is less effective in convincing skeptics that climate change is real and caused by humans.
-
Is Self-Awareness a Mirage?
One of the most unsettling findings of modern psychology is that we often don’t know why we do what we do. You can ask somebody: Why’d you choose that house? Or why’d you marry that person? Or why’d you go to graduate school? People will concoct some plausible story, but often they really have no idea why they chose what they did. We have a conscious self, of course, the voice in our head, but this conscious self has little access to the parts of the brain that are the actual sources of judgment, problem-solving and emotion. We know what we’re feeling, just not how and why we got there. ...
-
Small Changes May Help Exhausted Health Care Workers Combat Burnout
The pandemic has been a challenge to the mental health of many doctors and nurses. Researchers who study the condition of burnout say it's a workplace issue with often simple workplace solutions. ...
