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Mondays Really Are More Stressful on the Brain and Body
For decades the term “Monday blues” has been shorthand for the collective groan that greets the start of each workweek. It’s also well documented in medical statistics. Mondays come with higher rates of anxiety, stress and even suicide compared with other days. Studies on the phenomenon across whole countries have found a 19 percent increase in the odds of sudden cardiac death from confirmed heart attacks and other cardiovascular events on Mondays, affecting men and women across age groups. It now turns out that the effect of Mondays can extend well beyond fleeting fluctuations in mood.
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8 Phrases to Help Your Relationship Thrive
Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast, pointed to research from John and Julie Gottman, the renowned marriage researchers, that suggests happy couples are good at “repair attempts” — any statement or action that prevents negativity from escalating. “My favorite is, ‘Let me try that again,’” Dr. Santos said. “I use it whenever I say something not right, or when something came out harsher than I wanted.”
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Pro-Climate Sentiments Are More Common Than You Think
A new study highlights how people around the world often overestimate climate skepticism and presents ways to push back on this misperception.
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How to Rekindle Your Love of Reading
The staff at my local library are usually a convivial bunch, but when I asked them about a recent report that fewer people were reading for fun, they grew subdued. ... Elizabeth A.L. Stine-Morrow, a professor emerita of educational psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said she used to be reluctant to reread books — “because I wasn’t ‘making progress,’ whatever that was.” But that was a mistake, she said; it’s often on the second reading that you can really see the big picture of what the book is about.
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The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A
... At the same time, professors were coming under more pressure to tend to their students’ emotional well-being, Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, told me. They received near-constant reminders that Harvard was admitting more students with disabilities, who’d matriculated from under-resourced schools, or who had mental-health issues. Instructors took the message as an exhortation to lower expectations and raise grades. Resisting the trend was hard. Few professors want to be known as harsh graders, with the accompanying poor evaluations and low course enrollments.
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Small, Easy Acts of Joy Mean Big Gains in Happiness
... Our research began as a spin-off from a film called Mission: Joy—Finding Happiness in Troubled Times, in which the 14th Dalai Lama and the late archbishop Desmond Tutu talked about their friendship and offered lessons on creating joy for oneself and others regardless of circumstances. The film’s producer and co-director Peggy Callahan and impact producer Jolene Smith teamed up with psychologists Elissa Epel and one of us (Simon-Thomas) to develop a meaningful way for people to act on the film’s messages.
