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You Don’t Know Yourself as Well as You Think You Do
... It can also feel like a vital part of life, as though if you’re not seeking self-understanding, you’re missing out. (Our old pal Socrates also said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”) “If you haven’t noticed how pervasive this message is in society, just pay attention for the next few days,” Rebecca Schlegel, a Texas A&M University social psychologist, told me. “It’s so baked into our culture that we almost take it for granted.” But the dream of perfect self-knowledge is unattainable, and chasing it too doggedly can leave you more confused and stuck than when you started.
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How to Stop Being So Hard on Yourself
If a friend is struggling with a big challenge or feels defeated, it’s usually our first instinct to offer words of comfort and understanding. But often it’s not so easy to do this for ourselves. ... Finally, self-compassion is sometimes confused with self-care, but it’s not just about soothing, said Steven C. Hayes, a clinical psychologist and the creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which emphasizes the types of skills that are useful for building self-compassion, like living in the moment and focusing on values rather than imposed expectations.
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Real-Time Research: How the Experience Sampling Method Is Changing Psychology
Podcast: New research outlines ten key design and implementation considerations for ESM studies, helping researchers apply this method with clarity, rigor, and real-world relevance.
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The Beauty That Moral Courage Creates
... Such courage and self-sacrifice toward kin can certainly be inspiring, but moral beauty is most striking in acts of goodness toward others with whom one does not have obvious ties, exhibiting a degree of altruism that is clearly contrary to one’s individual interests. This occurs when a person helps another for no reason at all, forgives someone who truly does not deserve it, or—in the most extreme circumstances—gives up their life for a stranger. Witnessing this kind of moral beauty elicits what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “moral elevation,” which is experienced both psychologically and neurologically.
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The Healthier the Food, the Faster It Goes Bad. Or So People Think.
A healthy diet is a goal for many consumers, but a recent study found something that can deter people from eating more healthful food: They worry about it spoiling. ... “There are so many different types of labels food manufacturers use, and consumers are unclear about what they all mean,” says Brent McFerran, a marketing professor at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business and a co-author of the study. The dates on many unclear labels are interpreted by most consumers as the last day the food is safe to eat, he says, “which is usually wrong.”
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‘Baby Brain’ Is Real. 3 Things to Know About What’s Happening to Your Brain
... Cognitive neuroscientist Laura Pritschet, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by how female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone, affect the brain’s organization and functioning. “The reason I chose that field is because I was a budding neuroscientist as an undergrad, interested in brain networks and obsessing over how intricate everything was in the brain to simply allow us to have a personality or remember things,” Pritschet told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently, on his podcast Chasing Life.
