What Does It Mean to Languish?

The three types of ADHD are inattentive, hyperactive, and combined. Inattentive is most likely to be overlooked or misdiagnosed. Although ADHD medications are controversial, they can benefit some children, allowing them to focus and complete work. Kids with ADHD can hyperfocus when they're engaged in a topic or activity, giving...

Anger is a common automatic reaction to an unpleasant event or circumstance. Powerlessness might be hiding beneath a self-protective shield of anger. Anger can be resolved through a process of awareness, grounding, and compassion. When was the last time you were angry? Ten minutes ago, two days ago? As you...

The language people use can be a means to bring about social transformation. "The 1619 Project," released on Hulu, explores how racist language divides working-class people who would otherwise share a common cause. On the cusp of global integration, a new story of wholeness is needed to frame this interconnectedness,...

Traditionally, people specialize in one skillset or field and remain in it for their entire careers. The last few years have seen people not only change jobs, but move into entirely new fields. Access to online education means people have the power to reinvent themselves at any age. The pandemic...

Social media plays a major role in today’s cancel culture. We can think of a public cancellation as a large-scale form of estrangement. Research on the evolutionary psychology of estrangements shows that these experiences have many painful outcomes. The list of celebrities and other public figures who have fallen...

Human moods and behaviors are complex because they interplay our biology, psychology, and day-to-day interactions. AI is proving adept at understanding natural language, picking up on patterns and sentiment in text and large bodies of data. Applied to psychiatry, AI may provide tools to measure and detect patterns and associations...

Social inclusion is a basic human need and, therefore, a precondition to learning. Teachers have the power to create an inclusive or an exclusionary classroom learning environment. We need to adopt teaching strategies that are reflective of students' dynamic natures and diverse abilities. Does the social and structural system reward...

Often leaders are chosen based on their socially aggressive charismatics, regardless of their decision-making abilities. Talent management can overcome biases by selecting leaders who value fairness, equity, and merit, creating cultures of competence. Organizations must also use predictive insights to decide who should lead and leverage technology to talent plan...

Being able to read your partner's emotions is vital to having a satisfying relationship, and part of this is learning from your mistakes. People have a tendency in hindsight to over-estimate how well they read emotions, creating problems when they're wrong. Overcoming the hindsight bias will help you develop your...

Self-sabotage is when someone consciously or unconsciously acts against their own best interests and blocks their way to success. A person's struggle with self-sabotage can be framed as an inner battle between parts of themselves. Holistic therapeutic approaches to the self include Jung's "active imagination" technique, Gestalt, and the internal...

Escapism, a way of avoiding an unpleasant or boring life, can be adaptive or maladaptive. Adaptive escapism is motivated by self-expansion; maladaptive escapism is driven by self-suppression. Runners motivated by a self-expansion mindset tend to have higher subjective well-being scores. Escapism is marked by "a habitual diversion of the mind."...

Every new decision you make, big or small, adds to the cognitive load on your brain. The more we delay a decision, the less likely we are to ever make it. One must work on resilience, integrity, and self-awareness to become a better decision-maker. Many people come to therapy when...

Managing emotions means managing the situations we enter, our orientations to them, and our interpretations of what occurs. The most engaging situations are those where our personal qualities match well with the challenges presented there. Emotions register contrasts between our judgments of what is occurring and what we feel should...

Mixing opioids with benzos ups the risk of an overdose. Many people take benzos while in treatment to handle withdrawal from opioids, which is also a dangerous combination. Doctors ideally work with patients to taper down the benzos. Benzos, anti-anxiety drugs including Klonopin and Xanax, are widely prescribed. But they...

Many people believe that they drink alcohol because they like the taste, yet their initial experience with alcohol tells a different story. This inconsistency may be explained by our need to resolve cognitive dissonance, an internal conflict between one's attitude and behaviors. We may trick ourselves into changing our opinion...

Some are prone to self-blame on their fertility journeys, confusing their behavior with their character. Studies find that optimism has a “protective impact” against anxiety and self-blame during fertility treatment. Permit yourself to act less than perfect, especially while taking hormones, waiting for results, or being deluged with...

Approximately two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. Walking away from a marriage brings a mix of positive and challenging feelings. The "left-behind" partner in a divorce or long-term breakup may experience and express a wide range of emotions, so plan accordingly. Women who make the decision to leave their...

Parents play a significant role in mediating the disappointment of losing, of not being number one. Given the right tools, children can learn to bounce back from setbacks and failure. Parents can foster a growth mindset in which kids are made aware that the ability to learn is not fixed...

Some clinics emphasize ketamine as a purely chemical antidepressant. Other clinics specialize in combining talk therapy with ketamine. Still others emphasize working with the psychedelic properties of ketamine. Generic ketamine is not yet FDA approved to treat mental health conditions, and is used off label in treating resistant depression, bipolar...

Many people have depression symptoms at some point in their life, but that does not mean they are experiencing a major depressive episode. Not all people who experience depression have major depressive disorder. Depression is often the tip of the iceberg; the specific contributing factors of illness can help to...