Category Psychology

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Should you overshare more?

We may cringe at influencers and friends who let it all hang out, but research shows that keeping quiet might be worse

Do you recoil at oversharers on social media, or joke among your friends about “TMI”? I know I do. But while mocking public confession comes easy, it’s harder to appreciate the risks of normalising silence: withheld anxieties, unspoken family histories, and the little omissions that make workplaces and relationships brittle. The instinct to pour scorn on “attention seekers” may be masking a deeper public-health problem: chronic concealment.

For much of my career as an academic I made a living scolding people about privacy. I lectured on digital hygiene, warned audiences about the ways social media amplifies folly, and played the role of the wary scientist: don’t put your passwords in a document, don’t take quizzes that leak your intimate preferences, don’t broadcast things you can’t take back. I was a walking contradiction, though. Privately, I did online quizzes for fun. I kept a notepad of passwords on my desktop. I knew the rules and, like many of us, I broke them.

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‘I’m the psychedelic confessor’: the man who turned a generation on to hallucinogens returns with a head-spinning book about consciousness

With the Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan transformed our understanding of food and drugs. Can he do the same for our sense of self?

Several years ago, Michael Pollan had a disturbing encounter. The relentlessly curious journalist and author was at a conference on plant behaviour in Vancouver. There, he’d learned that when plants are damaged, they produce an anaesthetising chemical, ethylene. Was this a form of self-soothing, like the release of endorphins after an injury in humans? He asked František Baluška, a cell biologist, if it meant that plants might feel pain. Baluška paused, before answering: “Yes, they should feel pain. If you don’t feel pain, you ignore danger and you don’t survive.”

I imagine that Pollan gulped at that point. I certainly did when I read his account of the meeting in his latest book, A World Appears. Where does it leave our efforts at ethical consumption, if literally everybody hurts – including vegetables?

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Why you should embrace rejection

From building resilience to boosting artistic creativity, there are unexpected benefits to being rebuffed

Rejection hurts. Whether in a professional, social or romantic setting, there is a particularly painful sting to the discovery that one has been judged undesirable in some way. If you have ever experienced proper rejection – and that would be most of us – it may stand out in your mind for a long time, like a boulder lodged in the landscape of memory.

And it can hurt literally. The late anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studied human behaviour in the context of romantic love, showed that rejection and physical injury have much in common. In 2010 she led a study of people who had been recently rejected romantically. Functional MRI scans of their brains revealed that areas associated with distress and physical pain were more active. The passage of time did seem to reduce the pain response for Fisher’s participants, but for some people rejection can resonate for months or years. This overlap in the brain’s response to what we think of as physical and mental pain isn’t limited to romance. Social psychologist Naomi Eisenberger scanned the brains of people who were socially excluded from a ballgame in an experiment. Her results showed that “social pain is analogous in its neurocognitive function to physical pain, alerting us when we have sustained injury to our social connections”.

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Wise by Frank Tallis review – how to turn your midlife crisis into a hero’s journey

A psychologist’s gripping guide to surviving dark nights of the soul offers both comfort and insight

I’m proud of how mild-mannered my midlife crisis is. While the cliche involves the purchase of a Porsche or a frantic fling with a colleague, I’ve mainly fallen back into the geeky preoccupations of my youth, such as founding poetry clubs and playing niche racket sports. Nevertheless, on the cusp of turning 50, and having just been beaten by my 11-year-old at Scrabble, I’m thrilled to have found a book that addresses my small struggle: an elegant discourse on the deep wisdom that I’m hoping will characterise my remaining years.

First, the author, a clinical psychologist named Frank Tallis, diagnoses the problem. Following some of the arguments in Ernest Becker’s 1973 study The Denial of Death, he proposes that such crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality. In Britain, we eschew open coffins, for instance. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. We can hardly even bring ourselves to say “die”, preferring euphemisms such as “pass away”. In this Instagram age, our lives are dominated by filters and distractions. The crisis strikes when reality can’t be held at bay any longer. We lose our parents. Then we notice, inevitably, that we are now at the front of the queue.

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How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of ‘human fracking’?

Big tech treats our attention like a resource to be mercilessly extracted. The fightback begins here

In the last 15 years, a linked series of unprecedented technologies have changed the experience of personhood across most of the world. It is estimated that nearly 70% of the human population of the Earth currently possesses a smartphone, and these devices constitute about 95% of internet access-points on the planet. Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.

History teaches that new technologies always make possible new forms of exploitation, and this basic fact has been spectacularly exemplified by the rise of society-scale digital platforms. It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.

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Why pleasure is the key to self-improvement

Forget puritanical self-discipline – the way to really make a new habit stick is to lace it with instant gratification

Like many people, I spent New Year’s Eve making a list of the goals I want to achieve in the year ahead – a habit that never fails to arouse the ire of my boyfriend. “Why do you always have to put yourself under pressure?” he’ll ask, rolling his eyes. “It’s so puritanical!”

And he has a point. When most of us turn our minds to self-improvement, we assume that we need to put pleasure on pause until we’ve reached our goal. This is evident in the motivational mantras that get bandied about – “no pain, no gain”, “the harder the battle, the sweeter the victory”. If we fail, we tend to think it’s our own fault for lacking the willpower needed to put in the hours and stick at it, probably because we’ve given in to some kind of short-term temptation at the expense of long-term gain.

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Does ‘laziness’ start in the brain?

Understanding the surprising mechanism behind apathy can help unlock scientific ways to boost your motivation

We all know people with very different levels of motivation. Some will go the extra mile in any endeavour. Others just can’t be bothered to put the effort in. We might think of them as lazy – happiest on the sofa, rather than planning their latest project. What’s behind this variation? Most of us would probably attribute it to a mixture of temperament, circumstances, upbringing or even values.

But research in neuroscience and in patients with brain disorders is challenging these assumptions by revealing the brain mechanisms that underlie motivation. When these systems become dysfunctional, people who were once highly motivated can become pathologically apathetic. Whereas previously they might have been curious, highly engaged and productive – at work, in their social lives and in their creative thinking – they can suddenly seem like the opposite.

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Is there a dark side to gratitude?

Feeling thankful is increasingly touted as a cure-all, but sometimes there are reasons not to be grateful

The word “gratitude” is everywhere these days. On mental health leaflets and in magazine columns, emblazoned on mugs and motivational posters. All this is the result of more than two decades’ research in positive psychology which has found that having a “gratitude practice” (usually jotting down three to five things you are thankful for most days) brings a host of psychological and physical benefits.

I don’t want to seem, well, ungrateful. I’m a sceptical historian, but even I was persuaded to take up the gratitude habit, and when I remember to do it, I feel better: more cheerful and connected, inclined to see the good already in my life. Counting your blessings, whether that’s noticing a beautiful sunset or remembering how your neighbour went out of their way to help you earlier, is free and attractively simple. But there’s the problem. In our eagerness to embrace gratitude as a cure-all, have we lost sight of its complexity and its edge?

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So you want to try psychotherapy. But what does it actually do?

From psychoanalysis to existential therapy, there’s a bewildering variety of approaches – with one thing in common

Sam came into psychotherapy during a difficult period at work. He had started to feel as if he was stagnating in his role and it was getting him down. As he approached midlife he had reached a level of seniority that he had sought for years, but now he was starting to wonder whether this was it. He wasn’t sure exactly what the matter was: he didn’t feel especially depressed, just somehow stuck. It had taken him a long time to consider speaking to someone – what could they really do, in the absence of an obvious psychological disorder?

Psychotherapy occupies an increasingly central place in our culture. Just as we have become inclined to understand our struggles and our sadness under the heading of “mental health”, so too we have placed ever greater authority on psychotherapists to help us understand how we should deal with the problems life throws up. Even those without diagnoses of depression, anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder increasingly seek therapeutic support, with a recent survey finding that around a third of the population have done so.

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Humanish by Justin Gregg review – how much of a person is your pet?

From prosthetic testicles for dogs to sociable reptiles, a behavioural scientist explains what we get wrong – and right – about animal minds

In the 1970s a former Soviet naval officer named Igor Charkovsky popularised a concept which came to be known as dolphin-assisted birth. Likely inspired by New Age theories, he urged expectant mothers to dip in the ice-cold water of the Black Sea, commune with dolphins, and give birth underwater. In the “very near future,” he claimed, “a newborn child would be able to live in the ocean with a pod of dolphins and feed on dolphin milk”.

The oddest thing about Charkovsky was not so much his theory, but its remarkable resilience within both Soviet and western culture, as Justin Gregg sets out in his illuminating and lively new book. Gregg’s work is both a dissection and an ode to the irresistible allure of anthropomorphism, our tendency to apply human characteristics to non-humans, whether animals, objects, AI, or God. An expert on animal cognition who also teaches improv, Gregg deftly guides us through our alternately charming, destructive and wrong-headed fantasies about everything from marine mammals to our iPhones.

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