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How Burnout Physically Changes Your Brain (It’s Not Pretty)
When you're a busy entrepreneur, it's easy to convince yourself you need to just push through burnout. With people relying on you and endless problems to solve, many business owners feel like they don't have the time or space to take a step back and deal with their mounting stress and exhaustion. Sure, a long vacation or a less intense schedule would be nice, but it will have to wait until some magically less stressful future time. If this sounds familiar, there's a bunch of brain research I want to show you. A portrait of the burned-out brain We tend to think of burnout as an emotional or mental condition, and it certainly does have emotional and mental effects.
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Interpreting 5 Ancient Constellations Across Cultures
Civilizations come and go, with some lasting mere decades while others endure for millennia. But what rarely changes, at least on human timescales, are the stars above us. Nonetheless, past cultures have often connected the dots of various stars in different ways — representing everything from the myths of creation to legendary figures and godlike animals, depending on the viewer. Some of these cultural references go back thousands of years, and are possibly even older. They represent early examples of humanity’s preoccupation with symbolism in the world around us, as well as how even vastly different cultures have sometimes interpreted the sky in similar ways.
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The Science of Why You Have Great Ideas in the Shower
If you’ve ever emerged from the shower or returned from walking your dog with a clever idea or a solution to a problem you’d been struggling with, it may not be a fluke. Rather than constantly grinding away at a problem or desperately seeking a flash of inspiration, research from the last 15 years suggests that people may be more likely to have creative breakthroughs or epiphanies when they’re doing a habitual task that doesn’t require much thought—an activity in which you’re basically on autopilot. This lets your mind wander or engage in spontaneous cognition or “stream of consciousness” thinking, which experts believe helps retrieve unusual memories and generate new ideas.
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Perfectionism Is a Pathology, Not a Character Strength
We all know perfectionism as a quality we’re meant to be proud of, especially in professional settings. Society frames the drive to be perfect as a sign of a competent and ambitious individual. The word is synonymous with excellence. But emerging research in psychological science suggests that we pay a high price for our pursuit of perfection. Here are three ways perfectionism leaves us and our minds susceptible to psychological damage. ...
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Underweight and Overexposed: How Women’s Perceptions of Thinness Are Distorted
Recent research suggests that women’s judgments about other women’s bodies can be biased by an overrepresentation of thinness. Sean Devine explains these findings and elaborates on their implications for policy.
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The August Collection: Attitude Changes, Cognition in Lemurs, and Much More
In this episode of Under the Cortex, APS’s Ludmila Nunes and Andy DeSoto discuss five recent articles that examined cognitive control in lemurs, ADHD, how attitudes and biases changed in the last decade, and much more.
