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The Science Behind Why Everyone is Suddenly Baking Bread
If you’ve seen an influx of sourdough starters on your Instagram stories, you’re not alone. Over the past three weeks, Google Trend searches for “bread” have hit all-time highs, #breadmaking has garnered nearly half a million posts on social media and grocery stores are facing flour shortages. “We’ve seen close to a 700-per-cent increase in flour sales from our shop. The demand picked up shortly after panicked shoppers started emptying grocery shelves,” says Matthew Faust, general manager of Brodflour, an urban mill and bakery in Toronto. ...
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‘People Want to Help You. Let Them’: How to Be Compassionate in a Crisis
APS Member/Author: Paul Gilbert In times of tragedy and trauma, we need compassion to get us through. But what do we mean by compassion? It is different from kindness and empathy, although these are ways of being compassionate. Our clinical work has led us to define compassion as the motivation to engage with distress and suffering and work to find ways to alleviate and prevent it. So, to build a more compassionate mind, we need first to build enough courage to engage with pain and suffering and, second, commit to learning how best to help ourselves deal with this, and then do it.
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Op-Ed: How to Help Others During a Pandemic When They’re Too Embarrassed to Ask
APS Member/Author: George Loewenstein As the coronavirus tightens its grip on this country, your retired neighbor, an exhausted healthcare worker, or a friend recently laid off from work probably needs help now more than ever. Yet people who need help, often desperately, don’t ask. Why? Although we’re all familiar with the saying, “It can’t hurt to ask,” our research, and that of many others, shows that it does hurt people to ask. Asking for help can be scary and uncomfortable, and people will often avoid doing it, even if they really need assistance. There are lots of reasons for this.
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How to Thrive During The Pandemic: 10 Strategies For Resilience Based on Brain Science
After all these days in quarantine and through unprecedented and challenging times, you’re likely feeling stressed, anxious or socially isolated—but it is possible to enhance your wellbeing and develop resilience. Insights from brain science can help you not just survive, but thrive. Resilience is the capacity to recover, respond and bounce back from challenging times. Even if you don’t know the “back” to which you would “bounce” because the world may never return to the way it was, you still need the capabilities to adapt in uncertain or negative conditions.
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The Fear of Coronavirus is Changing Our Psychology
Rarely has the threat of disease occupied so much of our thinking. For weeks, almost every newspaper has stories about the coronavirus pandemic on its front page; radio and TV programmes have back-to-back coverage on the latest death tolls; and depending on who you follow, social media platforms are filled with frightening statistics, practical advice or gallows humour. As others have already reported, this constant bombardment can result in heightened anxiety, with immediate effects on our mental health. But the constant feeling of threat may have other, more insidious, effects on our psychology.
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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on aging and prosocial behaviors, using context to explain the success of interventions for behavioral change, and supports for managing work and family.
