How can I know if these answers are really serving my best interests? What would happen if I did nothing?

Our internal voices are automatic, filled with emotional and urgent declarations often related to safety. They make use of stereotypes and group labels to categorize threats and opportunities and our relation to them. They are blind to the passage of time—everything happening now has always happened and will always happen, unless drastic measures a

The amount of anxiety we feel about a position impacts our impression of the person holding the view that caused it. In discussing highly polarizing issues, we will sometimes demonize people who claim to hold a view that we believe is truly unacceptable.

don’t arguments feel unavoidable in the moment? It’s true: in the moment, arguments perform a crucial—and underappreciated—job for us by waving a flag that something important to us is being endangered, whether it’s a personal preference, a hunch about the best strategy for meeting a shared goal, or a core value of ours. This endangerment sparks st

SECOND THING TO TRY Talk to your internal voices The voices of power, reason, avoidance, and possibility aren’t the same in each of our heads. It’s important that you take these skeletal descriptions and figure out how they actually sound to you. (Sometimes you can trace the voices back to people in your life; I often joke with friends that parenti

Expectations fall short of reality when: Someone says they hate a movie/book/song that you love. You put a ton of effort into something that ends up flopping. You learn that you’re the last person to find out about a shocking family secret. Some of your foundational beliefs are challenged in a way you aren’t prepared for. You get caught doing somet

Unfair caricatures are just one of the side effects of what psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1”—the fast, instinctive, emotional system of our brain that tries to make most of our decisions while requiring the least amount of energy. This system relies on habits of thought and quick, reliable shortcut strategies to get thing

Disagreements about information are by far the simplest conflicts to resolve, because there’s a source of truth out there, somewhere within reach.

This practice of “self-talk” isn’t a sign of mental health problems, despite some associations you might have with the idea of “voices in your head.” We all have these voices. Talking to ourselves is perfectly normal, and everyone does it without thinking twice about it. It’s when we stop thinking the voices are coming from parts of ourselves and i