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Time Is Fleeting. Here’s How to Stay on Track With New Year’s Goals
Time is a thief, as my Uncle Dan loves to say, and if you want to achieve your most cherished life goals, you have to learn to manage it. As we all dive into the new year with fresh resolutions, psychologists say managing our time is the place to start. "Time management is essential to the smart goal approach," says Keisha Moore-Medina, a therapist at the Menninger Clinic in Houston, who helps clients navigate goal-setting, using a well-known strategy that was developed in the 1980s known by the acronym SMART. It's a formula that helps you organize your time around your goals. And this may require you to say 'no' to activities that don't align.
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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on racism and historical context, prosocial behavior in the face of a disaster, studying mental health as systems, exceptional abilities in autism, LGBTQ+ parents, and much more.
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The Best New Year’s Resolution Might Be to Just Let Go of an Unfulfilled Life Goal
Since the 19th century, when motivational science had its start, scientists have focused on what makes us persist through difficulties and achieve what we want. Only recently have they zeroed in on how we can relinquish our cherished aspirations—and why we should. They term this process “goal disengagement,” and New York University research psychologist Gabriele Oettingen says it has been treated as the “black sheep” of the field. Why is that so? Western cultural bias celebrates persistence and achievement, so abandoning goals is seen as “failure,” says psychologist Cathleen Kappes of the University of Hildesheim in Germany.
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What’s That Smell? It Might Just Be the Next Big Thing in Travel.
A dozen travelers gather around Martin Schaffner’s 16th-century painting “Christ in Limbo,” and take a deep breath. Thanks to hand-held scent diffusers these tourists are getting a whiff of smoke and sulfur to evoke the fiery gates of hell depicted in the Renaissance artwork. It’s all part of a “Follow Your Nose” tour at Museum Ulm, in Germany. By pairing artworks depicting odorous things—flower gardens, a perfume ball, or a table full of food—with reconstructed scents, the cultural center hopes to further immerse patrons in its collection.
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I Love My Clutter, Thank You Very Much
A confession, first: I love clutter. The horizontal surfaces in my family room are covered with newspapers, magazines, books I’ve started, books I intend to read, books I want to read but never will, erasable pens, a sweatshirt or two, a soccer ball, a bucket of toy cars, and wayward Legos that gouge my stockinged feet.
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The Emotional Benefits of Wandering
One of my greatest pleasures is to be what the French call a “flâneur”—someone who wanders randomly through a big city, stumbling on new scenes. The flâneur has a long and honored literary history. The surrealists used to choose a Paris streetcar at random, ride to the end of the line and then walk around. And think of Mrs. Dalloway in London, Leopold Bloom in Dublin or Holden Caulfield in New York. But is there any scientific evidence for the benefit of “street-haunting,” as Virginia Woolf called it? Two new studies led by Catherine Hartley of New York University and colleagues suggest that being a flâneur is good for you. In both, they cleverly combined GPS data with happiness ratings.
