Hidden Brain

Blowing Up Your Life

Most people, when they feel the itch to blow up their lives, assume the discomfort is a signal that something is deeply wrong — that they need radical change. But sometimes the urge to flee is not a sign that your life needs to change; it's a sign that you need to change how you're living your life.

Hidden Brain

Blowing Up Your Life

We think that making a big change will make us happy, but what we're really doing is escaping the discomfort of our current situation. And the new situation will eventually have its own discomforts, which we'll want to escape from as well.

TED Radio Hour

Less guilt, more joy: A new chapter for climate action

Happiness is kind of nature's reinforcer. So if we can change our behavior in a way that actually makes us feel better, we are gonna be much more likely to stick with it.

Hidden Brain

Blowing Up Your Life

Psychologist Anthony Klotz studies the "jolts" that shake us out of our routines, and how these moments can help us make more intentional decisions about the people we want to become.

Daily Stoic

I Ran 50 Kilometers Through Rome's Stoic Sites

Trophies are not for you. You do hard things because doing hard things is good for you. The benefit is baked in in having done them.

TED

How Doodling Unlocks Your Imagination | Joe Whale | TED

Imagination is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. But if you don't use it, it gets weaker and your body will rely on something else to do it for you.

It's Been a Minute

Books can teach you to love yourself. If you let them.

In one book, everybody can change. In 300 pages, every character that you've met has become a new character by the end. And so, what might you do in 30 days, let alone 30 years? This is incredible. You get a snapshot of your potential every time you read a novel.

Hidden Brain

How to Be A Better Partner

Most of us think the key to a better relationship is finding the right partner. But Eli Finkel says the more important question is how to be the right partner — how to bring more of yourself to your relationship, and to cultivate the conditions that allow love to flourish.

Daily Stoic

What’s Actually Stopping You From Doing Your Best Work

I find if I'm not at the desk working in the morning, the every hour I'm waiting to get started is substantially decreasing the quality of what I bring to the table.

Hidden Brain

How to Be A Better Partner

Most people think the key to a good relationship is finding the right person. But research suggests that what matters more is being the right person — that the skills and habits we bring to our relationships matter enormously.

Hidden Brain

How to Be A Better Partner

Most people think the key to a better relationship is finding the right partner. But research suggests the more important question is whether you are the right partner — whether you have developed the skills and habits that help relationships thrive.

TED

How Play Boosts Your Creativity and Resilience | Katina Bajaj | TED

We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is. The spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder, from all parts of adult life and replaced it with efficiency and achievement. And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills that we need the most right now.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think we know how to learn from our mistakes. We tell ourselves we'll do better next time, or we replay the failure in our minds, hoping the sting of embarrassment will motivate us to change. But research suggests these common responses are often the least effective ways to grow from our errors — and in some cases, they can actually make things worse.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

People who have high standards for themselves can be especially hard on themselves when they make mistakes. And they spiral into self-criticism, which doesn't help them improve. What helps people improve is thinking of themselves compassionately — the way you might think of a good friend who has made a mistake.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people think of mistakes as unfortunate detours on the path to success. But researcher Karen Sokal-Gutierrez has found that the relationship between error and learning is more intimate than that — that mistakes aren't just inevitable, they're essential. Without them, we don't just learn more slowly; in some ways, we don't learn at all.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people, when they make a mistake, either beat themselves up or rationalize why the mistake wasn't really their fault. Both responses are understandable, but neither helps you do better in the future.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think we know how to learn from our mistakes. We feel bad about them, we try to understand what went wrong, and we vow to do better. But researchers who study the science of errors say that what we think helps us learn from our mistakes often doesn't work — and some of the things we think are unhelpful actually do work.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think we learn from our mistakes, but researchers have found that people often fail to extract useful lessons from their failures. Instead, we focus on the pain of the mistake itself, and quickly move on — which means we're doomed to repeat it.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people, when they make a mistake, either beat themselves up or try to forget about it as quickly as possible. But research suggests there's a third option that's far more effective: approaching your errors with curiosity rather than judgment.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think about mistakes the way we think about embarrassing moments — we want to put them behind us as quickly as possible. But researchers who study learning say this is precisely the wrong approach. The moments just after making a mistake, it turns out, are among the most powerful opportunities for the brain to encode new information.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think of failure as something to move past as quickly as possible — something to hide or explain away. But researchers have found that the people who benefit most from their mistakes are those who do the opposite: they slow down, sit with the discomfort, and try to understand exactly what went wrong and why.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people think the best response to a mistake is to move on quickly — to put it behind them and not dwell on it. But research suggests that this instinct can actually prevent us from learning. The most effective way to learn from failure isn't to forget it — it's to engage with it carefully and deliberately.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people, when they make a mistake, do one of two things: They beat themselves up, or they rationalize away the mistake and blame other people. Neither approach actually helps you learn and do better in the future.

TED

How I Built a Machine That Feeds Millions | Felix Brooks-church | TED

If you want to get nutrients into people, the most efficient way isn't to change the food that they eat, but instead to improve the daily food that they already rely on.

Daily Stoic

You Don't Want Autonomy With David Epstein

You think your brain's made for thinking, but it's not. It's made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is like energetically costly. And so left to your own devices, your brain goes for convenience, like doing things you've done before, not working too hard, all these things. So it's only if you block that proclivity for convenience that you can actually do hard things.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people, when they make a mistake, either beat themselves up excessively or they dismiss it entirely. Neither of these responses is actually useful. The sweet spot is to be like a good mentor to yourself — to acknowledge that you made a mistake, to understand why, and then to move forward.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people, when they make a mistake, either beat themselves up or they get defensive and they deny that they made a mistake at all. Both of those responses are understandable — but both make it harder to actually learn from what went wrong.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us have had the experience of being in a new place and noticing things we'd never seen before — a gorgeous mural on the side of a building, a family of ducks in a pond, the way light filters through leaves. But over time, as a place becomes familiar, we stop seeing it. We go on autopilot. The same thing can happen with people.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us have been taught to think about luck as something fleeting — a good parking spot, or finding a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. But psychologists who study this topic say that some people are consistently luckier than others, and that luck is less about chance than it is about how you move through the world.

It's Been a Minute

Feeling stuck? Take a side quest.

Adults spend so much time in environments where they're trying to control the outcome that play as a practice becomes about not knowing, not having an attachment to what the outcome is. Side quests release us from worrying about the outcome. Learning begins with inquiry. In fact, the word quest comes from the root question or inquiry.

Radiolab

Return of Alpha Gal

It made no sense: why couldn't she eat something that she had routinely enjoyed for decades?

Daily Stoic

9 Stoic Habits To Change Your Life

The truth is that virtue is not different than any other skill. You don't have it or not have it. You do it or you don't do it. And you get better at it the more you do it. This is the fundamental insight of Aristotle, that excellence is not innate. It is a habit.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

Most of us recognize that we don't always act in our own best interests. We procrastinate. We reach for the candy bar instead of the apple. We say things we later regret. Psychologists have long recognized that our behavior is shaped by mental maps — internal representations of the world that guide our actions, often without our awareness.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

our brains actually navigate the world by coming up with mental maps. These maps act like an autopilot system, allowing us to navigate our lives more efficiently. But sometimes, they can lead us astray, leaving us stuck on a path of negativity and unhappiness.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

When we think about making changes in our lives, we typically focus on behaviors. But often, the more powerful lever is the mental map we're using to navigate the world. If the map is wrong, no amount of effort will get us to our destination.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we kind of learn how to check back in with our bodies, right? And we don't have to rely on external cues to do that, right, that behavior is much more likely to stick.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

These maps act like an autopilot system, allowing us to navigate our lives more efficiently. But sometimes, they can lead us astray, leaving us stuck on a path of negativity and unhappiness.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decide that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

Most of us think of spirituality as something that happens when we have extraordinary experiences — when we see something beautiful, hear a piece of music that moves us to tears, or find ourselves confronted with the vastness of the universe. But Andrew says the research suggests something different: that spiritual experiences are available to all of us, and that we can cultivate them through intentional practice.

Daily Stoic

How The Stoics Sparked The American Revolution

Stoicism is not something you are, it's something you do, right? It's a practice. John Adams would say that Washington had a great self-command, but that required a great amount of work.

TED

Why I Love My Bad Days | Alexi Pappas | TED

The rule of thirds is that when you're chasing a dream or doing anything hard, you're supposed to feel good a third of the time, OK a third of the time and crappy a third of the time. If you're within this ratio, then the bad days aren't bad. They just mean you're chasing a dream.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of rituals as ceremonies attached to special occasions. But researchers have found that everyday rituals — the small, patterned behaviors we engage in regularly — can be a source of profound connection. Unlike habits, which we perform mindlessly, rituals are imbued with meaning. They signal to others and ourselves that something matters.

Throughline

Captain America and the nation's conscience | Throughline

You are never going to be Superman unless you suddenly find a lot of money from somewhere. You are never going to be Batman. But, there's always that chance, isn't there, that you could one day be Captain America.

Daily Stoic

Ways To Looksmaxx Like A Stoic

If your choices are beautiful, then you will be beautiful. We are the product of our choices. Beauty can't be separated from the process, from the regiment that creates it.

TED

How to Build a Career You Actually Love | Bill Gurley | TED

Obsessive and continuous learning is not an input -- it's an output. It's not the cause, it's the effect.

TED

Can Play Change the World? | Play@TED Full Event | TED, the LEGO Group and the LEGO Foundation

We are living through a play deprivation crisis. We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is — the spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder — from all parts of adult life and replaced it with efficiency and achievement. And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills that we need the most right now.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people assume that creativity is a fixed trait — you either have it or you don't. But research suggests that creativity is less like a gift and more like a muscle: it can be developed, strengthened, and yes, sometimes exhausted.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people think about creativity as a gift — something you either have or you don't. But research suggests that creativity is less like a trait and more like a muscle: it can atrophy if you don't use it, and it can grow stronger with practice.