psychology

A helpful exercise is to describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who isn’t aware of any of the specifics—much like Holmes talks his theories through out loud to Watson. When Holmes states his observations in this way, gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before come to the surface.

as we’ve just seen, the memories and experiences stored in an individual attic vary greatly from person to person, the general patterns of activation and retrieval remain remarkably similar, coloring our thought process in a predictable, characteristic fashion. And if these habitual patterns point to one thing, it’s this: our minds love nothing

University of North Carolina’s Barbara Fredrickson discovered “the positivity ratio,” or the fact that it takes three positive thoughts to counter a single negative thought. “Three-to-one,” she wrote in a recent journal article, “is the ratio we’ve found to be the tipping point beyond which the full impact of positive emotions becomes unleashed.”

Creative individuals frame their experiences. Such people are highly ambitious, and they do not always succeed, by any means. But when they fail, they do not waste much time lamenting; blaming; or, at the extreme, quitting. Instead, regarding the failure as a learning experience, they try to build upon its lessons in their future endeavors.

Endorphins and anandamide, our final two pleasure chemicals, are pain-killing bliss producers. They’re both heavy-duty stress relievers, replacing the weight of the everyday with a euphoric sense of relaxed happiness.

We can’t be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects of each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven’t the time, energy, or capacity for it. Instead, we must often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then respond without thinking when one or another of

Yet negative thinking leads to heightened stress. This crushes optimism and squelches creativity. When tuned toward the negative, we miss the novel. Novelty is the foundation for pattern recognition and, by extension, the basis of creativity.24 No creativity, no innovation; no innovation, no impossible. Positive self-talk is one solution to this

That is actually what we are trying to do by mapping the pressures. By understanding the rain and my pushing down and your pushing up and gravity and all the rest, we are laying the groundwork for creating the interventions that effectively change that behavior to get us to the world we want. We can’t start adding or removing pressures until we

Visits to Buddhist temples surged by over 300 percent last year, suggesting that more people are turning to superstitions for good luck to secure their futures. Increasingly, many Chinese seem to place more faith in temple offerings or amulets than in the party’s assurances of common prosperity.