Supritha S

This is the “fish in water” effect at work — because we are immersed in our emotions’ effects every moment of our lives, we tend to talk about them only when they’re exceptionally strong.

Like any other insight, it’s one thing to nod your head while you think about it and something else to turn it into a real advantage in your life. There are two tricks that I can see to doing it in real-time:

Often, this is replaced by the cognitive dissonance of sunk costs and luxury goods. People assert delight because they think they’re supposed to, because they don’t want to feel stupid–not because you’ve produced anything genuine.

Like Ahmed, she found that traits like curiosity were essential. But she found that they also needed high emotional resilience to pursue their interests in the face of external expectations. “Because we live in a society that tells us to specialise, and these are people who didn’t do that – they forged their own path.” Many people may lack the... See more

These stories are just a natural by-product of the human mind’s amazing ability to make connections between similar thoughts, but they reliably generate real stress. This free-association ability isn’t wholly a bad thing, and is in fact necessary for making plans and learning from our mistakes. But most of the time it is completely useless idle... See more

Again, it’s not that there’s no such thing as fault, or that solutions never require holding a particular party to account. Only that there’s something about the human mind that wants a given problem to be someone’s fault, simply because it would be easier if it were.

This is further anecdotal evidence in favour of the procrastination equation, because downhill work has a high expectancy for success.

the things that tempt you towards trouble become considerably less tempting, and that’s the vital point here—tracking your behavior, without striving to change it, gently reduces the amount of willpower and self-scolding required to do the right thing.

As my main man Steve Kamb says, “When you screw up, skip a workout, eat bad foods, or sleep in, it doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you human. Welcome to the club.”