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Stanford psychologist tells us how to fight workplace burnout
Chicago Tribune: At the end of a work day, do you feel spent, burned out, fit for nothing more strenuous than a glass of wine and a couch-based communion with your favorite TV show? Join the club. While working hard is admirable, our tendency to stay in a state of high alert can deplete us, both mentally and physically, according to Emma Seppala, the science director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, and author of the new book "The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success." "There's a better way to manage our energy," Seppala says. Read the whole story: Chicago Tribune
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Even Astronauts Get The Blues: Or Why Boredom Drives Us Nuts
NPR: The poet John Berryman once wrote, "My mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner resources.' I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored." We've all been there: bored in class, bored at work, bored in stand still traffic. But why do we find boredom so unbearable? And, if we hate boredom so much, why do we still take boring jobs? This week on Hidden Brain, we try to answer these questions and more – hopefully, without boring you. ... The researcher Peter Ubel and his colleague, David Comerford, were curious about why people elect to do boring work.
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The Superior Social Skills of Bilinguals
The New York Times: BEING bilingual has some obvious advantages. Learning more than one language enables new conversations and new experiences. But in recent years, psychology researchers have demonstrated some less obvious advantages of bilingualism, too. For instance, bilingual children may enjoy certain cognitive benefits, such as improved executive function — which is critical for problem solving and other mentally demanding activities. // g?c=a+f+c:(g+=f.length,f=a.indexOf("&",g),c=0
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How False Memory Changes What Happened Yesterday
Scientific American: Sometimes our memories are just made up. Our brains play tricks on us all the time, and these tricks can mislead us into believing we can accurately reconstruct our personal past. In reality, false memories are everywhere. False memories are recollections of things that you never actually experienced. These can be small memory errors, such as thinking you saw a yield sign when you actually saw a stop sign, or big errors like thinking you took a hot air balloon ride that never actually happened. If you want to know more about how we can come to remember complex autobiographical events, here is a recipe and here is a video with footage from my own research.
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The surprising reasons why we tickle one another
The Washington Post: When filmmaker David Farrier came across an ad from Jane O’Brien Mediacalling for young male fitness models to be restrained and tickled on camera, he felt compelled to find out what on Earth was behind that casting call. Pushing past the production company’s vitriolic resistance to “association with a homosexual journalist,” he created and recently premiered the Sundance documentary "Tickled," which sheds light on the sport of “competitive endurance tickling.” ... The dominant image of tickling in many of our minds involves children teasing their friends or extorting their siblings.
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Why daylight saving time can be bad for your health
Fox News: Daylight saving time is Sunday, and losing sleep after clocks "spring forward" an hour could be more than just an annoyance. This small time shift can significantly raise the risk of health-related issues. ... The Monday and Tuesday after daylight saving time in the spring have also been associated with a 10 percent increase in heart attacks, according to a 2012 study at the University of Alabama Birmingham. "When we change the time by one hour, it throws a monkey wrench into our circadian process," said Christopher Barnes, an associate professor of management at the University of Washington who researches the impact of sleep deprivation, especially in the workplace.
