Can thinking about death lead to a good life?
minutes in to his famous Stanford commencement speech Steve Jobs discusses the importance he placed on thinking about death during life: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life." Scientists now agree he was on to something. Via Science Daily: Thinking about death can actually be a good thing. An awareness of mortality can improve physical health and help us re-prioritize our goals and…
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How can you best savor good feelings and dismiss bad ones?
r positive emotional experiences, don't try to explain them. For negative emotional experience, definitely explain them. Analyzing feelings reduces emotion. Via Science Daily: Moore researches how word-of-mouth stories affect our feelings about our experiences, and she has found that our feelings change when we share them. She says that when the storyteller analyzes or thinks about an emotional experience like a family vacation, it reduces the emotions, positive or negative, about the event. However, she notes that for practical experiences,…
1 min read
The Fast Way To Make Better Decisions, Backed By Research
ke the perspective of someone else. Think about what your smartest friend might do in that situation. We investigated how perspective-taking might be used to overcome bias and improve advice-based judgments. Decision makers often tend to underweight the opinions of others relative to their own, and thus fail to exploit the wisdom of others. We tested the idea that decision makers taking the perspective of another person engage a less egocentric mode of processing of advisory opinions and thereby improve their…
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How To Stay Motivated With Difficult Goals, Backed By Research
u can measure progress by how much you've completed or how much you have left to do. Research says you'll be more motivated if you focus on whichever of those two is smaller: Via Eurekalert: "We predict that individuals will express greater motivation to pursue actions when they focus on whichever is smaller in size—the area of their completed actions or of their remaining actions—because motivation increases with the perceived impact of each new step, and each new step will…
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The Most Effective Way To Change Your Behavior And Improve Your Life
anging your environment is the easiest and most powerful way to change your behavior. Altering the things in your home and your office and carefully picking the people you spend time with will bring you greater and more effortless results than anything else. But you're an objective, self-determined, independent, unique snowflake, you say? No, you're not. Those around you affect more of your behavior than you think. Poor fitness, car purchases, lateness, having children, charitable contributions, divorce and stupidity are…
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How can you seize the day and enjoy life more?
grateful for good events and focus on the fact that they will soon end. This has been shown to increase happiness and to make you more likely to take advantage of opportunities. Via PsyBlog: As Dr Kurtz predicted it was those in the second group who were happier after the intervention; the other two groups showed no significant improvement. It seemed that just being encouraged to think grateful thoughts was not enough to increase happiness. What made the grateful…
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Nice Guys Make Less Money
ce guys don't make the big bucks: Sex and agreeableness were hypothesized to affect income, such that women and agreeable individuals were hypothesized to earn less than men and less agreeable individuals. Because agreeable men disconfirm (and disagreeable men confirm) conventional gender roles, agreeableness was expected to be more negatively related to income for men (i.e., the pay gap between agreeable men and agreeable women would be smaller than the gap between disagreeable men and disagreeable women). The hypotheses were…
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How Being Yourself Can Make You Happier, Backed By Research
d revise it to "be your best self." People who deliberately exercised their signature strengths -- those qualities they were uniquely best at, the talents that set them apart from others -- on a daily basis became significantly happier for months. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: When 577 volunteers were encouraged to pick one of their signature strengths and use it in a new way each day for…
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