Learn about the various types of patience and how to cultivate them

'The Father of Positive Psychology' gives tips on building resilience

People differ in how they respond to setbacks. Famed psychologist Martin Seligman outlines three key pillars for resilience: developing mental toughness by interpreting failures as external and temporary, recognizing and using one’s signature strengths, and cultivating strong relationships that offer support and meaning.

How we frame stress—as good or bad—seems to alter how it affects us

This podcast discusses research that indicates stress perception may drastically affect how we respond to it. In research exploring if our stress is presented as diminishing our health versus if we're told it enhances our performance, it will lead to differences in how successful participants are at performing tasks—with the enhancers doing better.

Grit: passion combined with perseverance over an extended time

Roughly defined as a balance of perseverance and passion, Angela Duckworth defines this combination as an essential component of reaching long-term goals. Not merely about talent or luck, Duckworth argues the personality trait enables individuals to maintain their commitment to significant objectives over extended periods, despite facing challenges and setbacks.

Explore the biology of pain and why the experience of pain may differ widely from one person to another.

How to build curiosity

Change and uncertainty induce stress, but reframing the unknown into an opportunity for discovery has tangible benefits. Approaching change with curiosity enhances activity in the hippocampus and promotes neuroplasticity, promoting learning and serving as a barrier against anxiety. A neuroscientist explains how embracing the unknown, trying small experiments, and other techniques build curiosity.

The traits that make a strong and resilient leader

Developing psychological flexibility, or an ability to adapt during change and stressful situations, can help leaders manage pressure while maintaining their wellbeing. A leader who can embrace discomfort and navigate hard times can earn greater respect, increase team satisfaction, manage distress effectively, and stay focused on priorities. Read this article for a further understanding on how to develop and sharpen this skill.

Learn about the point of the physical and emotional experience of pain, which has three broad categories that help determine treatment approaches.

The positives of feeling stressed

Worrying about past events and upcoming challenges is not a pleasant experience, but a reasonable amount of stress can bring a lot of good into our lives. In this episode of "The Happiness Lab" with Dr. Laurie Santos, two psychology experts offer tips for resetting one's relationship with stress. Listen and learn how to make stress a positive tool rather than a debilitating emotion.

Why kids are picky eaters

Parents who are stressed about their child repeatedly refusing vegetables: It may not be your fault. Rather than being a result of nurture, it appears that nature decides whether a kid is more adventurous with their appetite. Researchers tracked more than 2,400 sets of twins and found how genetics may actually be a major contributor to children's finicky eating habits.

Listen to BlackRock's head of behavioral finance, Emily Haisley, explain the psychology of investing—including controlling biases, managing ego, and being prepared for volatility.

Eliminating distractions is essential to improving one's attention span

Setting a baseline, removing distractions, establishing focus rituals, taking breaks, and finding purpose in your task are five science-backed practices that can help address a short attention span. Bestselling author Daniel Pink breaks down how to approach each part of the plan and introduce these habits to your life today.

Easy resets for stress reduction

Individual solutions for burnout, often called “self-care,” can be helpful for managing stress. Harvard researcher Aditi Nerurkar’s 2024 book The Five Resets details a road map for burnout recovery. In this interview she suggests, among other tactics, gaining focus on what matters the most in one’s life, taking breaks from both work and the internet, and making time for practices that strengthen the mind-body connection.

How do anxiety and stress differ?

This article explains that though “stress” and “anxiety” are often used interchangeably, there are distinct differences between the two. Stress is defined as the body's response to an external trigger and can be classified as acute or chronic. Anxiety, however, tends to be triggered internally by excessive thoughts and judgement. Whereas stress disappears when the trigger is gone, anxiety tends to stick around. If left unchecked, both can escalate into more severe mental health conditions.

A licensed therapist shares advice for kindly addressing feelings of irritation in your relationship

All couples are bound to annoy each other, and it's often not caused by ill will. Reflecting on how and when to express pet peeves is important for ultimately building a connection and helping partners not feel attacked. While differences may not always be fully resolved, it can be helpful to discuss paths forward toward a compromise.

Stress can be contagious—and scientists want to learn more about it

Researchers have shown that being around someone who is stressed can trigger a stress response in your body, such as elevated cortisol levels and elevated heart rate. One way this was recently studied was by having people watch stressful activities, like a recorded job interview or solving challenging math problems, and then sampling hormones in observers' spit.

The biology of stress in your body

Stress is a normal human response that has evolved over millions of years to handle changes or threats in our environment. This article is a helpful overview of the biological basics of this response. While it is not harmful to our physiology in the acute setting, chronic stress can lead to damaging changes in the human body over many years.

The best predictor of success.

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit."

Developing adaptable brain-body systems lets athletes thrive beyond 30

Success in high-level sports after age 30 relies on physical fitness and building brain resilience through deliberate training, recovery, and stress regulation. This creates a feedback loop where body and mind reinforce each other.

The 10 top tips a psychotherapist offers her patients with anxiety include "you will not die from anxiety" and "anxiety is just trying to protect you."

Four psychological tools for a happier, calmer life

The perennial debate on how to be happy involves various aspects of life, and one of the most essential is our psychological attitudes toward experiences. This piece lists and explains four basic tools to strengthen your "psychological immune...

'Slow productivity' as a humane approach to work

Work is increasingly encroaching on every part of our lives, while digital technologies enable supervisors to micromanage every part of an employee’s day. “Slow productivity” is a movement to alter the pace and quality of one’s work to avoid burnout and provide a more humane approach to work.

Too little stress can also harm our health because mild or moderate stress—followed by recovery—helps make us resilient.

Fearology, or the study of fear, explores the difference between stress and fear

Our brains involuntarily respond to our environment and signal alarm when that isn't always needed, triggering responses that include goose bumps. But understanding fear and how to talk our brains into calming down can improve daily life.

How endurance athletes can build resilience

Long-distance runners and other endurance athletes can improve their performances using tips explored in this article. Findings from two recent studies show that strength training, high-altitude training, and intense interval sessions are all potential methods for ameliorating long-term athletic capabilities.

Top strategies on how to deal with other people's big feelings

This podcast offers insights on how to effectively talk to others when they're experiencing powerful emotions, and how to simultaneously protect yourself in those situations.

What is psychology? An overview

What is psychology and why should we study it? This short video from Macat explains how the subject has developed over the years and introduces some of the key thinkers and ideas.

Fruit fly experiments show personality emerges, in part, from genetic factors

A 2025 study revealed that fruit flies exhibit unique behavioral preferences, akin to personalities, which could be artificially selected for when breeding to modify behavioral variability. This variability can be adaptive in unpredictable environments.

Watch a Yale University psychologist explain his new supportive parenting anxiety therapy.

Could all mental health disorders have a unifying 'p-factor'?

Some researchers have argued in the past couple decades that all mental health disorders may have a unifying dimension—a theoretical "p-factor" that is common across mental illness, but life experiences and behaviors influence if and how illness manifests. Proponents point to similarities across different disorders, while detractors argue that such connections are largely exaggerated.

What pupils can reveal about a person’s thoughts and feelings

Eyes have long been said to be the window to the soul. In this article, a psychologist and pupillometrist explores research demonstrating pupils as a window into the mind. Pupils tell us how intensely someone is exerting mental effort, or even reveal what a person is imagining. Read this article for insight into the field of pupillometry and how it can offer insights into our psyches.

What's with the teen brain, anyway

In this video NIDA explores the intriguing similarities between the processes of brain development and computer programming. This analogy helps us understand why toxic environmental factors like drugs, bullying, or lack of sleep strongly affect a teenager's life The information provided by this video can empower your children or students with information they need make better decisions.

Can humans delay or reverse old age?

We're not sure yet. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco are studying why some conditions and behaviors, such as low-oxygen environments and exercise, benefit the aging process, hoping to reveal potential health applications. Some of this research focuses on klotho, a naturally occurring age-regulating hormone named after the Greek Fate Clotho. Animal studies on klotho brain injections found subjects had improved memory recall and age-related degeneration resistance.

A psychiatrist warns that chasing happiness can lead to misery

Rafa Euba, a retired consultant psychiatrist, argues that happiness is a vague and abstract concept that is hard to quantify. He suggests accepting that suffering and pain are a normal part of life. An attainable goal for one's life is to attempt to minimize pain, and pursue balance and contentment rather than a false ideal of permanent bliss.

Burnout became a serious area of study in the 1970s

Psychology professor Christina Maslach developed the first tool to assess the presence of burnout, focusing on six contributing factors within workplaces: an overwhelming workload, a lack of control over one’s work, insufficient reward for one’s efforts, interpersonal conflict, a sense of unfairness, and a mismatch between individual and organizational values.

How burnout alters your brain

Stress is a normal part of everyday life, and it’s not necessarily all bad. But chronic stress—the kind that leads to burnout—can change the size and functioning of parts of your brain. It can alter the ability to make new brain cells and memories and even potentially modify your DNA.

A Harvard professor argues that impostor syndrome can be a good sign

Specifically, Arthur C. Brooks has argued that self-doubt is usually evidence of healthy humility—not incompetence—and a clear contrast to the overconfidence of people who actually are impostors in their careers.

Prolonged stress impairs the prefrontal cortex

Burnout isn't just a feeling—it physically affects the brain. Prolonged stress impairs regions of the brain responsible for decision-making, emotional control, memory, and more. It can also lead to chemical imbalances, like reduced dopamine and norepinephrine levels, that worsen these effects.

The career risk of being a people-pleaser

While people-pleasers tend to be kind and thoughtful, researchers say they are at risk of burnout at work because they are unable to set boundaries and disregard their own feelings when asked to complete a task. Read this brief, helpful article on the signs of people-pleasing and how to overcome the tendency.

Anxiety can arise at any stage of life and make someone feel unsafe in their mind and body.

Emotional crying is an important and cathartic process

Though babies don't initially produce tears when they cry, this podcast discusses how humans are hardwired to cry throughout life. Most crying research relies on self-reporting of crying and emotions. This podcast notes that there aren't neuroimaging studies of crying—they're quite expensive to complete. As a result, the brain precursors and processes during a bout of crying remain understudied.

The lack of diversity in clinical trials is undermining the future of precision medicine

Medicine works better when the treatments are tailored to fit each individual person’s biology and history. Homogeneous patient selection in clinical trials means treatments and care are being refined based on only a small range of variables, some of which may not apply to you. This 40-minute podcast episode discusses the historical and current reasons for the lack of clinical trial diversity and what this means for the future of personalized medicine.

An intense fear must persist for at least six months to be diagnosed as a phobia.

Parents and romantic partners naturally touch at speeds optimizing nerve activation

A small observational research study shows that when parents are asked to caress their infants and volunteers are asked to caress their partners, both groups spontaneously stroke their loved ones at velocities that, on average, fell within the optimal range to stimulate the C-tactile afferent nerve receptors. This wasn't the case when volunteers were asked to do the same with an artificial arm, which they stroked much faster.

Ten writers and thinkers on what growing older actually requires of us

The Marginalian's Maria Popova curates a collection arguing our culture has learned to dread aging while forgetting it is a privilege, and that the antidote is sustaining passions strong enough to keep us from turning inward. Voices include Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, Pablo Casals, and Kahlil Gibran.

Ranking life's biggest decisions

Psychological research presents some unsurprising wisdom about how to make big decisions without regret: focus on people, don’t miss opportunities, and stay true to yourself.

Nature versus nurture: Are you the result of your genes or your environment?

Dr. Nancy Segal breaks down how research on twins has revealed just how much our genes influence our behavior and traits—but insists they aren't everything. Catch up on the latest in the nature versus nurture debate.

Scientists are studying dying patients' brain activity in the final moments of life

In the final moments of life there are distinctive bursts of coordinated neural activity. Researchers are interested in parsing that data to better understand the dying process and also exploring how this data relates to our understanding of consciousness.

Like fingerprints, brain anatomy is unique too

Researchers have discovered that a combination of experiences and genetic factors shape the anatomy of the human brain. They found even quick experiences affect the brain’s genetic makeup, which—over time—means every person develops a completely unique brain anatomy. While brain imaging could be used to identify individuals, it remains much more expensive than fingerprinting for now. Read to found out more about this study from the University of Zurich.

Learn more about Ray Dalio's formula for progress

Across interviews and in his books, Dalio often emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible to avoid making bad decisions. However, Dalio also often speaks about failure being a great teacher. One of his core principles is "Pain + Reflection \= Progress."

Why one runner believes Stoic philosophy is important for marathoners

There's plenty of time for thinking while training for a marathon, and Matt Fitzgerald suggests it'd be wise to study the Stoic philosophers to navigate the many frustrations that come with that training. Fitzgerald may be talking about running, but his advice can apply to any seemingly impossible goal.