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The Benefits of Talking to Yourself
The New York Times: A stranger approached me at a grocery store. “Do you need help finding something?” he asked. At first, I wasn’t sure what he meant. Then the realization kicked in: I was talking out loud, to myself, in public. It was a habit I’d grown so comfortable with that I didn’t even realize I was doing it. The fairly common habit of talking aloud to yourself is what psychologists call external self-talk. And although self-talk is sometimes looked at as just an eccentric quirk, research has found that it can influence behavior and cognition. “Language provides us with this tool to gain distance from our own experiences when we’re reflecting on our lives.
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REMEMBERING THE MURDER YOU DIDN’T COMMIT
The New Yorker: When Ada JoAnn Taylor is tense, she thinks she can feel the fabric of a throw pillow in the pads of her fingers. Taylor has suffered from tactile flashbacks for three decades. She imagines herself in a small apartment in Beatrice, Nebraska. She is gripping the edges of a pillow, more tightly than she means to, and suffocating a sixty-eight-year-old widow. “I feel for her,” Taylor told me recently. “She was my grandmother’s age.” Taylor confessed to the woman’s murder in 1989 and for two decades believed that she was guilty. She served more than nineteen years for the crime before she was pardoned.
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Popular People Live Longer
The New York Times: I often hear from teenagers that one of their greatest goals is to obtain more Instagram followers than anyone they know. Even some adults appear obsessed with social media, tracking the number of retweets on their Twitter profiles or likes on Facebook. This type of status-seeking might be easily dismissed as juvenile or superficial, but there’s more to it. Recent evidence suggests that being unpopular can be hazardous to our health. In fact, it might even kill us. Yet most don’t realize that there’s more than one type of popularity, and social media may not supply the one that makes us feel good.
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IMAGINATION CAN RESTRAIN IMPULSIVENESS
Pacific Standard: As Washington watchers are well aware, bad decisions are often the product of impulsiveness. Whether it's our choice of what to eat for lunch or our nation's policy on climate change, we too often make choices that produce immediate gratification, but ultimately produce harm. Psychological research suggests this is, to some degree, innate. Experiments have shown that small kids who can't resist reaching for a marshmallow have less successful adult lives, due to that inability to resist temptation in favor of pursing long-term goals. But according to a new study, there may be a simple way to focus our minds on the bigger picture.
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Death becomes you
The Boston Globe: An analysis of the blog postings of terminally ill people and the last words of Texas death-row inmates revealed that they were more positive and less negative than what the general public wrote when asked to imagine themselves in the same positions. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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The things dying people care about reveal a lot about how to live
Quartz: Ask people to imagine what they’d say if they knew they were dying and most would have words of sadness, fear, and regret. But new psychological research bolsters what chaplains, hospice workers, and others who spend a lot of time in the company of those approaching the end of life have long known: the process of dying is a complicated one, with room for moments of profundity and light alongside fear and darkness. In a series of experiments documented in the journal Psychological Science, researchers compared the blog posts of terminally ill people and the last words of death row inmates to the words of healthy people asked to imagine themselves writing near their death.
