Archive for the ‘Personal Development’ Category

Can we develop psychological resilience through physical activity?

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Psychological ‘resilience’ refers to the differences between people in how they respond to and cope with difficult or stressful experiences. People who are highly resilient would be less affected, recover more quickly, and/or might actually find such events to be growth experiences. For people low in resilience, the opposite would be true.
Now here’s [...]

Positive affirmations don’t work!

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

…all of the time. Forgive the title, I’m experimenting with controversial post titles. More on that another day.
Today the topic is self-help again, and if you’ve read this blog regularly, you’ll know that I take a skeptical attitude towards the self-help industry. A quick inspection of the self-help section of a bookstore [...]

Why 88% of New Years’ resolutions fail

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Jonah Lehrer wrote an excellent article for the Wall Street Journal on why New Year’s resolutions fail.
Quick overview of reasons:

The more overloaded our brain is with ’stuff’ (including resolutions we need to keep track of), the weaker its willpower is. We need to spread our resolutions across the year.
Just like a muscle, our will-power [...]

How to manage your weaknesses

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

There’s a big focus on weaknesses in the world these days. It seems like people want to balance themselves out by developing their weaknesses – to become rounded. Previously, I’ve argued that it’s best not to be rounded, that we’re better off focusing on our strengths. But if we do this, we [...]

Mental time travel for happiness

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

A recent experiment has just discovered that time travel can make you happy. Great Scott! I’m not talking about actual time travel, of course, but mental time travel; using your brain to do something that, at the moment, only us humans can do – simulate and predict future events.
Mental Time Travel (MTT) can be [...]

Do you hate the sound of your voice?

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Have you ever heard a recording of your voice, and thought “Holy crap!  Is that what I sound like?”  Everyone else’s voice sounds fine when recorded, but yours sounds strange, different.  I remember hearing once that our voices echoes in our skulls, and therefore they sound different to us than they do to others.  So [...]

Six Success-Enhancing Behaviours that Good Moods Bring You

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Just like Santa Clause, happiness brings gifts with it too – and you don’t have to be good all year to get them!  In the last three articles, I’ve discussed a paper arguing that happiness leads to success, through a better career, better relationships and better health.  This works in part through behaviour – positive [...]

Practical Priming

Monday, June 15th, 2009

I recently described the concept of priming, along with some research that has been done to demonstrate this effect.  This article follows directly from that one, so if I mention something that I ‘discussed earlier’, it’s in there. The priming studies are all very interesting, but the question now becomes, how are we going [...]

Positive Priming

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Practically nothing you can measure about a person is completely fixed.  Some days you don’t concentrate as well, some days your more sociable, some days you have more energy.  Even your height varies subtly throughout the day.  If we’re interested in positive psychology and self-improvement, a constructive line of inquiry would be working out what [...]

Where to find good information online

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Are you sick of looking for information on a topic, but only finding the standard “Four Secrets Of….”, or “The Ten Best Ways To….” articles?  You know what I mean, they usually have about 3 sentences for each point, no depth, no meaningful commentary, just a few of the author’s unsubstantiated opinions puked onto a [...]