Let’s pretend for a moment you’re giving a presentation in a room full of very important people. You want their…
Capitalism captures the mindfulness industry
By negating and downplaying actual social and political contexts and focusing on the individual, or more so, the individual’s brain,…
How we think affects everything from our ability to solve problems to how we understand meaning, value, and purpose
Late historians Will and Ariel Durant spent four decades of their lives studying, compiling, and writing the history of Western…
Loneliness is silent, invisible and as deadly as a smoking habit.
We prize space, privacy and independence, and the richer we get the more of these we can afford, yet their…
Putting Down Your Phone May Help You Live Longer
If you’re like many people, you may have decided that you want to spend less time staring at your phone.…
Introverts Aren’t Antisocial, They’re Selectively Social
Sometimes it’s easy to tell when someone is an introvert. In large groups, we “quiet ones” can usually be found just…
Five Lies Our Culture Tells – the cultural roots of our political problems
I can make myself happy. This is the lie of self-sufficiency. This is the lie that happiness is an individual accomplishment.…
Ego & Fame
The well-known phenomenon of “name dropping,” the casual mention of who you know, is part of the ego’s strategy of…
Flow – The key to unlocking meaning, creativity, peak performance, and true happiness
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s investigations of “optimal experience” have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness…
12 stages of burnout according to psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North
We often don’t realize that we’re suffering from burnout until it’s too late. When we push our creativity and productivity…
Pride pumps up our superiority, dignity contains gratitude – three vital differences between pride and dignity
Pride is often colored by a self-view of being better than others. In particular in the art and music scene…
The two kinds of stories we tell about ourselves
We are all storytellers — all engaged, as the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson puts it, in an “act of creation” of…
The Politics of Conspicuous Displays of Self-Care
There are 1.6 million images tagged with #selfcare on Instagram and a few million more on Twitter and Tumblr, most…
The science behind the rise of narcissism
The rise of individualism (with its focus on the self and inner feelings) and decline in social norms that accompanied…
The Benefits of Emotional Awareness
The key to having a choice about your emotional behavior is to be aware of the fact that you are…
Florence Jimenez Otto 