Those mindful of our human need to belong are surely unsurprised by the emotional challenges of shelter-in-place life. As social animals, our ancestors—and we, too—have flourished when connected in close, supportive relationships. To be physically distanced from friends, deprived of our communal parties, sports, and worship, isolated from work-mates, and unable to break bread with close friends is to have our social identities thwarted.   Facebook, FaceTime, Zoom, Skype, Instagram, and messaging all help. Facebook’s mission—“To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”—has merit. Nevertheless, as psychologist Jean Twenge reminds us, screen-based relationships are but a partial substitute for how nature has designed us: for eyeball-to-eyeball relationships.   Moreover, those crowded in small apartments with others may experience their own added challenges of too much contact, albeit with too few. So it doesn’t astonish us, though it should concern us, that a Kaiser Family Foundation late March national survey found that, as the Washington Post headlined, “Coronavirus is harming the mental health of tens of millions of people in U.S.” And we’re likely also not shocked by an early-April Gallup survey that found people experiencing heightened worry and stress: But consider a less obvious question: Who do you suppose is feeling most stressed and lonely—those young or old? If you guessed those old—those often alone and with so much less virtual socializing than those young and connected through social media—guess again. Who, for example, has in the last seven days reported feeling “lonely or isolated”? An AEI survey provides a clear answer: Ages 18–29: 69 percent Ages 30–49: 59 percent Ages 50–64: 45 percent Ages 65+: 39 percent Gallup replicated the age difference, noting that “ the decline in the percentage who are thriving is substantially greater among adults aged 18–44 than for older age groups.” That accelerates a nearly decade-long decline in teen and young adult mental health.   Finally, a point to ponder from 18-year-old essayist Jamie Margolin : “The way the coronavirus disproportionately affects older people is the exact way the climate crisis disproportionately affects young people…. Older generations have the highest risk of dying from [the coronavirus]. When it comes to the climate crisis, most of the statistics are flipped: Young people will suffer the most.” Thus, a great question for our time: In our actions and voting, will we older folks (who feel grateful to younger folks who self-isolate to protect us from future harm) reciprocate with similar intergenerational altruism? ... View more

It’s the new year transition, the line between our last year’s self and our hoped-for healthier, happier, and more productive 2020 self. To become that new self, we know what to do. We know that a full night’s sleep boosts our alertness, energy, and mood. We know that exercise lessens depression and anxiety, sculpts our bodies, and strengthens our hearts and minds. We know that what we put into our bodies—junk food or balanced nutrition, addictive substances or clean air—affects our health and longevity.   Alas, as T. S. Eliot foresaw, “Between the idea and the reality . . . Falls the Shadow.” So how, this year, can we move from knowing the needed behaviors to doing them? Rocky89/iStock/Getty Images First, do make that New Year’s resolution. Research by Gary Latham, Edwin Locke, and others confirms that challenging goals motivate achievement. Specific, measurable, realistic goals—such as “finish the business plan by the month’s end”—direct attention, promote effort, motivate persistence, and stimulate creativity.   Second, announce the goal to friends or family. We’re more likely to follow through after making a public commitment.   Third, develop an implementation plan—an action strategy that specifies when, where, and how you will march toward achieving your goal. Research shows that people who flesh out goals with detailed plans become more focused in their work, and more likely to complete it on time.   Through the ups and downs of goal-striving, we best sustain our motivation when we focus on immediate subgoals. Better to have our nose to the grindstone than our eye on the ultimate prize. Better to attend to daily study than the course grade. Better to center on small steps—the day’s running target—than to fantasize the marathon.   Fourth, monitor and record progress, perhaps aided by a tracker such as a Fitbit. It’s all the better when that progress is displayed publicly rather than kept secret.   Fifth, create a supportive environment. When trying to eat healthy, keep junk food out of the cupboards. Use small plates and bowls. When focusing on a project, hole up in the library. When sleeping, stash the smartphone. Choose the right friends. Such “situational self-control strategies” prevent tempting impulses, Angela Duckworth and her colleagues have found.   Sixth, transform the hard-to-do behavior into a must-do habit. Habits form when we repeat behaviors in a given context—sleeping in the same comfy position, walking the same route to work, eating the same breakfast oatmeal. As our behavior becomes linked with the context, our next experience of that context evokes our habitual response. Studies find that when our willpower is depleted, as when we’re mentally fatigued, we fall back on our habits—good or bad. To increase our self-control, to connect our resolutions with positive outcomes, the key is forming “ beneficial habits .”   “If you would make anything a habit, do it,” said the stoic philosopher Epictetus . But how long does it take to form a beneficial habit? A University College London research team led by Phillippa Lally asked 96 university students to choose some healthy behavior, such as eating fruit with lunch or running before dinner, and to perform it daily for 84 days. The students also logged whether the behavior felt automatic (something they did without thinking and would find it hard not to do). When did the behaviors turn into habits? On average, after about 66 days.   Gwyneth Paltrow recalls that when she first started working with a personal trainer, “finding motivation was hard. She advised me to think of exercise as an automatic routine, no different from brushing your teeth, to avoid getting distracted. Now it is part of my life—I exercise Monday to Friday at 10 a.m. and always stick with it.”   Friskie.Cin Then do it every day for two months, or a bit longer for exercise. You likely will find yourself with a new habit, and perhaps a healthier, happier, and more productive life.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com, where this essay originally appeared— here .)   ... View more

If you have watched a 2019 Democratic Party debate, you perhaps have taken note: While Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker glide smoothly through their spoken words, Joe Biden sometimes hesitates, stammers, and stumbles. Is he just less mentally agile than his more lucid counterparts?   Perhaps we should cut him some slack, suggests John Hendrickson in an upcoming Atlantic essay . Biden experiences the lingering effects of childhood stuttering that made him a subject of mockery. An empathic Hendrickson, himself a stutterer, illustrates from Biden’s July debate:   “My plan makes a limit of co-pay to be One. Thousand. Dollars. Because we—” He stopped. He pinched his eyes closed. He lifted his hands and thrust them forward, as if trying to pull the missing sound from his mouth. “We f-f-f-f-further support—” He opened his eyes. “The uh-uh-uh-uh—” Hendrickson is not the only one who empathizes. As a childhood stutterer who received speech therapy in my Seattle public elementary school, and for whom such dysfluency has occasionally resurfaced in adulthood, I know the dismay of coming up to a word that gets stuck in the roof of the mouth, to everyone’s embarrassment, especially my own. For me, K has been a difficult consonant, and sometimes there seems no other way to call on “K-k-k-kathy.” But often, those who stutter have learned that they can fake normal fluency by backing up and detouring around the verbal roadblock, rendering the impediment invisible. As with Joe Biden’s debate responses, listeners may notice the pauses and mid-sentence changes of direction. They just don’t attribute the dysfluency to stuttering (which Biden also does not blame). And so it happens with the great invisible disability, hearing loss. “Can everyone hear me?” asks the person on stage. Given the inevitable answer from those hearing the question, the nodding heads lead the speaker to think, “I don’t need a mic.” And most in the audience likewise presume all’s well—oblivious to the unseen exclusion of so many of us (and hence my advocacy for user-friendly hearing accessibility technology in such settings—see here ). Like stutterers, those of us with hearing loss also finesse awkward situations. At a noisy party or in a restaurant, we fake hearing. As our conversational partner makes unheard social chatter, we smile and nod—not wanting to be a pain by asking people to repeat and repeat. Sometimes our response is inappropriate—smiling at someone’s sadness, or being unresponsive to a question. But mostly, after straining and failing to carve meaning out of sound, our pretending to hear hides our disability. There’s practical wisdom to socially finessing one’s speech or hearing challenges. But some go further to hide their hearing disability. They respond to ads for “invisible hearing aids” that can keep people from knowing that—shame, shame—you have hearing loss. (Shame instead on the hearing professionals whose ads imply that hearing loss is something to be deeply ashamed of, and to hide.) Actually, the more public I am about my hearing loss, the more comfortable I become at seeking people’s help in coping with it—by finding quieter tables in quieter restaurants, facing the wall, sitting with my good ear toward the person, having them speak into that ear, and using a wireless mic that transmits to my hearing aids.   We can extend the list of hidden disabilities to include some forms of vision loss, brain injury, chronic fatigue, pain, phobias, dyslexia, depression, dementia, and a host of others. Given the invisibility of such disabilities, we often don’t see the challenges that lie behind everything from a child’s misspellings to a Joe Biden stammer. If only we knew—and if only those of us with the invisible challenges would let others know—we all could be less judgmental, more understanding, and more genuinely helpful.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

Consider two facts: Worldwide, smartphones and easier social media access exploded starting in 2010. Consider U.S. smartphone-use (and its projected future): Simultaneously—and coincidentally?—teen girls’ rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide have mushroomed (for Canadian, American, and British sample data see here , here , and here ). So, is there a causal connection? If so, is it big enough to matter?   Should parents give (or deny) their middle schoolers smartphones with Instagram or Snapchat accounts? And does amount of daily screen time matter?   In quest of answers, my esteemed social psychologist colleague Jonathan Haidt is assembling the available evidence using (and illustrating) three psychological methods. His tentative conclusions: Correlational studies ask: Is social media use associated with teen mental health? Study outcomes vary, but overall, there is at least a small correlation between adolescents’ social media hours and their risk of depression, anxiety, and self-harm. The screen time–disorder association is stronger for social media use than for TV and gaming time, and the link is greater for females who are heavy social media users. Longitudinal studies ask: Does today’s social media use predict future mental health? In six of eight studies, the answer is yes. Experiments ask: Do volunteers randomly assigned to restricted social media use fare better than those not assigned on outcomes such as loneliness and depression? On balance, yes, says Haidt, but the few such studies have produced mixed results. Haidt’s provisional conclusion can be seen in his tweet: In a Time essay , researcher Jean Twenge (my Social Psychology co-author) offers kindred advice for parents concerned about their children’s social media use: “No phone or tablets in the bedroom at night.” “No using devices within an hour of bedtime.” “Limit device time to less than two hours of leisure time a day.” Haidt also provides us a much-needed model of intellectual humility. In his continuing search for answers, he posts his tentative conclusions and accumulating evidence online, and he welcomes other researchers’ evidence and criticism. He writes, I am not unbiased. I came to the conclusion that there is a link, and I said so in my book ( The Coddling of the American Mind , with Greg Lukianoff). . . . Like all people, I suffer from confirmation bias. [Thus] I need help from critics to improve my thinking and get closer to the truth. If you are a researcher and would like to notify me about other studies, or add comments or counterpoints to this document, please request edit access to the Google Doc, or contact me directly.   In our college and AP psychology texts, Nathan DeWall and I commend “a scientific attitude that combines curiosity, skepticism, and humility.” We note that, when combined with the scientific method, the result is a self-correcting road toward truth. By embracing this spirit, Haidt exemplifies psychological science at its best—exploring an important question by all available methods . . . drawing initial conclusions . . . yet holding them tentatively, while welcoming skeptical scrutiny and further evidence. As he mused (when I shared a draft of this essay), “It is amazing how much I have learned, and refined my views, just by asking people to make me smarter.”   How true for us all. The pack is greater than the wolf.   ( For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

In hindsight, almost any finding (or its opposite) can seem like plain old common sense—a phenomenon we know as hindsight bias (a.k.a. the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon). Likewise, the outcomes of most elections, wars, and sporting events seem, in hindsight, explainable and predictable. As Dr. Watson said to Sherlock, “Anything seems commonplace, once explained.”   It may therefore seem unsurprising that new studies—reported in a forthcoming article by Florida State psychologists Jessica Maxwell and James McNulty—reveal a “bidirectional relationship” between relationship satisfaction and sexual satisfaction. A loving relationship enhances sex. And good sex, with a lingering “afterglow,” enhances a loving relationship.   Even if the love-sex interplay does not, in hindsight, feel surprising, it does seem a lesson worth teaching in an age of sexual hook-ups and delayed marriage. As I explain in an upcoming essay for the Association for Psychological Science Observer, When a romantic relationship is sealed with a secure commitment—when there is minimal anxiety about performance, and when there is an experience-rooted sensitivity to one another’s desires and responses—intimacy can flourish. “Satisfying relationships [infuse] positive affect into sexual experiences,” say Maxwell and McNulty. And when confident of a partner’s acceptance, low body self-esteem is a diminished barrier to sexual frequency and satisfaction.   The researchers’ evidence comes from tracking relationships through time. Higher marital satisfaction today predicts increased sexual satisfaction seven months later. And higher sexual satisfaction today predicts increased marital satisfaction seven months later. Moreover, it’s true for both newlyweds and long-term couples, and for both men and women.   Earlier studies found that when sex begins after commitment, couples win twice—with greater relational stability and better sex (see here and here ). (In hindsight, we surely could rationalize an opposite finding: Perhaps test-driving sexual compatibility prior to commitment would make for better sex, and thus better relationships? But this does not seem to be the case.) And when sex happens in the context of a committed relationship, there is more pleasure and less morning-after regret (see here ).   The take-home lesson: Our romantic bonds both enable and feed off sexual intimacy. We humans have what today’s social psychologists call a “need to belong.” We are social creatures, made to connect in close relationships. We flourish when embracing and enjoying secure, enduring, intimate attachments.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

Climate change has arrived . Greenhouse gases are accumulating. The planet and its oceans are warming. Glaciers and Arctic ice are retreating. The seas are rising. Extreme weather is becoming ever costlier—in money and in lives. The warming Arctic and its wavier jet stream even help explain the recent polar vortex. If such threats came from a looming alien invasion, our response would be bipartisan and robust, notes Farhad Manjoo .   Even so, the U.S. government has pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, plans to lift CO 2 restrictions on coal-generated power, weakened auto fuel-economy and emissions standards, cut NASA climate monitoring, increased off-shore oil and gas drilling, and reduced clean-energy research and development. So why, given the accumulating science, is the Trump administration apparently unconcerned about climate change as a weapon of mass destruction?   Surely the availability heuristic—the coloring of our judgments by mentally available events and images—is partly to blame. Climate change is imperceptibly slow, without a just noticeable difference from one month to the next. What’s cognitively more available is our recent local weather. Thus, hot days increase people’s beliefs in global warming—as Australians understand after their recent scorching hot summer. And cold weather decreases concern—as vividly illustrated when U.S. Senator James Inhofe, during a 2015 cold spell, ridiculed global warming claims by bringing a snowball to the U.S. Senate. (Is it really so hard to grasp the distinction between local weather and global climate? We do manage, when feeling cold air on opening our refrigerator, not to misjudge our whole-house temperature.)    (C-Span [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.) President Trump has echoed Inhofe with dozens of tweets that similarly generalize from local weather:     Such wisdom brings to mind my favorite Stephen Colbert tweet:   The availability heuristic’s upside is that extreme weather experiences, as well as climate science, are driving growing public concern. Drought-caused wildfires, floods, and brutal heat waves have a silver lining. After surviving Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey residents expressed increased environmentalism. And today, 74 percent of Americans say that the last five years’ extreme weather has influenced their climate change opinions.   Ergo, Americans by a 5-to-1 margin now agree that global warming is happening. By a 3-to-1 margin they believe it is human-caused. Seven in 10 now say that they are at least “somewhat worried” about climate change. And globally, across 26 countries, two-thirds of people see it as a “major threat” to their country. “The evidence the climate is changing is becoming so overwhelming people are seeing it in their regions and in their lives,” says the Obama science advisor, John Holdren. “We are really to the point where we’re seeing bodies in the street from severe flooding and severe wildfires.”   With vivid and mentally available weather tragedies occurring more often, more folks are noticing and caring. Last month, 3300 economists—including 27 Nobel laureates and all former Federal Reserve Board chairs— signed a consensus statement supporting a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most effective climate change solution. Although the Green New Deal proposed by progressive Democrats may be more aspirational than achievable, its existence—together with the increasing climate concern of youth and young adults , and the growth in low-carbon energy sources—gives hope for a greener future.   (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

If you, dear reader, can indulge some slightly geeky calculations, I hope to show you that with daily exercise you can live a substantially longer and happier life. Indeed, per the time invested, exercise will benefit you more than smoking will harm you. Consider: An analysis of mortality data offers this memorable result: For the average person, life is lengthened by about 7 hours for every hour exercised. So (here comes the geek), the World Health Organization recommends exercising 150 minutes = 2.5 hours per week. Multiplied times 7, that equals 17.5 hours longer life for each week of exercise. Over 52 weeks, that sums to 910 hours = 38 days = 1/10 th of a year longer life for each year of faithful exercise . . . which, continued over 40 years would yield ~4 years longer life. (Though, more typically, say the researchers, runners live 3.2 years longer.) In another epidemiological study of over 650,000 American adults, those walking 150 minutes per week lived (voila!) 4 years longer than nonexercisers (Moore et al., 2012). How satisfying to have two independent estimates in the same ballpark!   This potential life-extending benefit brings to mind the mirror-image life-shortening costs of smoking, which the Centers for Disease Control reports diminishes life for the average smoker “by at least 10 years.” Thus (geek time again): A person  who takes up smoking at age 15, smokes 15 cigarettes per day for  50 years, and dies at 65 instead of 75, will lose roughly 1/5 th of a year (equals 73 days = 1752 hours = 105,000 minutes) for each year of smoking. If each cigarette  takes 10 minutes to smoke, the minutes spent smoking (54,750 each year) will account for half of those 105,000 lost minutes. Ergo, nature charges ~2 minutes of shorter life for each minute spent smoking. . . but generously gives a 7-to-1 return for each hour spent exercising. How benevolent! Massive new epidemiological studies and meta-analyses (statistical digests of all available research) confirm both physical and mental health benefits of exercise (see here , here , and here ). A good double goal for those wishing for a long life is: more fitness, less fatness. But evidence suggests that if forced to pick one, go for fitness.   As an earlier blog essay documented, exercise entails not only better health but a less depressed and anxious mood, more energy, and stronger relationships. Moreover, clinical trial experiments —with people assigned to exercise or to control conditions—confirm cause and effect: Exercise both treats and protects against depression and anxiety.   The evidence is as compelling as evidence gets: Go for a daily jog or swim and you can expect to live longer and live happier. Mens sana in corpore sano: A healthy mind in a healthy body.   K.C. Alfred/Moment/Getty Images ( For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit www.TalkPsych.com ) ... View more

“She [Professor Christine Blasey Ford] can’t tell us how she got home and how she got there,” scorned Senator Lindsey Graham during the lunch break of yesterday’s riveting U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding Ford’s memory of being assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Graham’s assumption, widely voiced by fellow skeptics of Ford’s testimony, is that her inability to remember simple peripheral details discounts the authenticity of her assault memory.   But Graham and the other skeptics fail to understand, first, how extreme emotions signal the brain to “save this!” for future reference. (Likely you, too, have enduring “flashbulb memories” for long-ago emotional experiences?) And second, they fail to understand that peripheral details typically fall into oblivion. In Psychology, 12 th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I explain:   Our emotions trigger stress hormones that influence memory formation. When we are excited or stressed, these hormones make more glucose energy available to fuel brain activity, signaling the brain that something important is happening. Moreover, stress hormones focus memory. Stress provokes the amygdala (two limbic system, emotion processing clusters) to initiate a memory trace that boosts activity in the brain’s memory-forming areas (Buchanan, 2007; Kensinger, 2007) (FIGURE 8.9). It’s as if the amygdala says, “Brain, encode this moment for future reference!” The result? Emotional arousal can sear certain events into the brain, while disrupting memory for irrelevant events (Brewin et al., 2007; McGaugh, 2015).   Significantly stressful events can form almost unforgettable memories. After a traumatic experience—a school shooting, a house fire, a rape—vivid recollections of the horrific event may intrude again and again. It is as if they were burned in: “Stronger emotional experiences make for stronger, more reliable memories,” noted James McGaugh (1994, 2003). Such experiences even strengthen recall for relevant, immediately preceding events [such as going up the stairway and into the bedroom, in Ford’s case] (Dunsmoor et al., 2015: Jobson & Cheraghi, 2016). This makes adaptive sense: Memory serves to predict the future and to alert us to potential dangers. Emotional events produce tunnel vision memory. They focus our attention and recall on high priority information, and reduce our recall of irrelevant details (Mather & Sutherland, 2012). Whatever rivets our attention gets well recalled, at the expense of the surrounding context.   And as I suggested in last week’s essay, Graham and others seem not to understand “state-dependent memory”—that what people experience in one state (such as when drunk) they may not remember in another state (sober). Nor are Kavanaugh’s supporters recognizing that heavy drinking disrupts memory formation, especially for an experience that would not have been traumatic for him. Thus, Kavanaugh could be sincerely honest in not recalling an assaultive behavior, but also, possibly, sincerely wrong.   (For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life visit www.TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

Here are three random scenes from University of New South Wales’ 19 th Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology, which recently assembled sixteen scholars from around the world to share their insights on “The Social Psychology of Living Well.”    Roy Baumeister (Florida State & Queensland) documented the overlap between a happy and a meaningful life, but then identified separate predictors of a) happiness and b) meaningfulness. Bill von Hippel (Queensland) explored what evolutionary theory can tell us about our basic human needs—how humans have flourished in the past and are disposed to a good life today. Barbara Fredrickson’s (University of North Carolina) research has turned to examining the biological underpinnings of positive well-being and purpose. Other contributors: Yair Amichai-Hamburger  (IDC Herzliya, Israel) reviewed the social consequences of today’s age of the Internet and social media. William Crano (Claremont) provided data from a large, longitudinal study of the associations of parenting with adolescent substance use. Elizabeth Dunn (University of British Columbia) presented her recent experiments on the social and mood consequences of people using vs. not using smart phones (while crossing campus, eating with friends, etc.). Klaus Fiedler (University of Heidelberg) offered an analysis of underlying adaptive principles pertinent to the good life. Joseph Forgas (University of New South Wales) was the conference host.   He also shared his continuing work on the benefits of negative affect for human flourishing. Shelly Gable (University of California, Santa Barbara) described her studies of satisfying and meaningful close relationships. Felicia Huppert (Australian Catholic University) emphasized the contribution of mindfulness and compassion to living well. Sonja Lyubomirsky (University of California, Riverside), author of excellent trade books on happiness, spoke on the benefits of happiness and what contributes to it. Constantine Sedikides (University of Southhampton) described his creative work on nostalgia, as a positive experience. James Shah (Duke University) spoke on the regulatory pleasure and purpose of a good life. Ken Sheldon (University of Missouri) critiqued the sometimes ill-defined concept of eudaimonic well-being”and called for agreed-upon measures that define subject well-being. Jeffry Simpson (University of Minnesota) presented the latest data from a long-term study of how preschoolers’attachment and parental care predicts their health 30 years later. And yours truly presented the“religious engagement paradox”-- the curious tendency, on measures of happiness, health, and altruism, for religious individuals to be flourishing, but for lesser flourishing in religious places (countries, states). ... View more

It’s the new year transition, the line between our last year’s self and our hoped-for healthier, happier, and more productive self. To become that new self, we know what to do. We know that a full night’s sleep boosts our alertness, energy, and mood. We know that exercise lessens depression and anxiety, sculpts our bodies, and strengthens our hearts and minds. We know that what we put into our bodies—junk food or balanced nutrition, addictive substances or clean air—affects our health and longevity.   Alas, as T. S. Eliot foresaw, “Between the idea and the reality . . . Falls the Shadow.” So how, this year, can we move from knowing the needed behaviors to doing them? Rocky89/iStock/Getty Images Psychological science offers six strategies. First, do make that New Year’s resolution. Research by Gary Latham, Edwin Locke, and others confirms that challenging goals motivate achievement. Specific, measurable, realistic goals—such as “finish the business plan by the month’s end”—direct attention, promote effort, motivate persistence, and stimulate creativity. Second, announce the goal to friends or family. We’re more likely to follow through after making a public commitment. Third, develop an implementation plan—an action strategy that specifies when, where, and how you will march toward achieving your goal. Research shows that people who flesh out goals with detailed plans become more focused in their work, and more likely to complete it on time. Through the ups and downs of goal-striving, we best sustain our motivation when we focus on immediate subgoals. Better to have our nose to the grindstone than our eye on the ultimate prize. Better to attend to daily study than the course grade. Better to center on small steps—the day’s running target—than to fantasize the marathon. Fourth, monitor and record progress, perhaps aided by a tracker such as a Fitbit. It’s all the better when that progress is displayed publicly rather than kept secret. Fifth, create a supportive environment. When trying to eat healthy, keep junk food out of the cupboards. Use small plates and bowls. When focusing on a project, hole up in the library. When sleeping, stash the smartphone. Choose the right friends. Such “situational self-control strategies” prevent tempting impulses, Angela Duckworth and her colleagues have found. Sixth, transform the hard-to-do behavior into a must-do habit. Habits form when we repeat behaviors in a given context—sleeping in the same comfy position, walking the same route to work, eating the same breakfast oatmeal. As our behavior becomes linked with the context, our next experience of that context evokes our habitual response. Studies find that when our willpower is depleted, as when we’re mentally fatigued, we fall back on our habits—good or bad. To increase our self-control, to connect our resolutions with positive outcomes, the key is forming “beneficial habits.” “If you would make anything a habit, do it,” said the stoic philosopher Epictetus. But how long does it take to form a beneficial habit? A University College London research team led by Phillippa Lally asked 96 university students to choose some healthy behavior, such as eating fruit with lunch or running before dinner, and to perform it daily for 84 days. The students also logged whether the behavior felt automatic (something they did without thinking and would find it hard not to do). When did the behaviors turn into habits? On average, after about 66 days. Gwyneth Paltrow recalls that when she first started working with a personal trainer, “finding motivation was hard. She advised me to think of exercise as an automatic routine, no different from brushing your teeth, to avoid getting distracted. Now it is part of my life—I exercise Monday to Friday at 10 a.m. and always stick with it.” So, is there something you’d like to make a routine or essential part of your life? Make it a New Year’s resolution. Announce it. Plan the needed specific steps. Then do it every day for two months, or a bit longer for exercise. You likely will find yourself with a new habit, and perhaps a healthier, happier, and more productive life. (For David Myers' other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit www.TalkPsych.com) ... View more

Doing science takes humility—an awareness of our vulnerability to error and an openness to new perspectives. If nature, in response to our questioning, doesn’t behave as our ideas predict, then so much the worse for our ideas. As we say in psychology, “The rat is always right.” Indeed, every once in a blue moon, a major new finding overturns what many of us have long believed and taught or read in our textbooks. And so it was when I read in the September Clinical Psychological Science the results of a huge new study of supposed seasonal variations in depression. Auburn University at Montgomery researchers Megan Traffanstedt, Sheila Mehta, and Steven LoBello harvested U.S. data from 34,294 participants in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention annual health behavior study. The researchers asked: Was depression, as reflected in people’s interview answers, more common in the days surrounding the December 21st winter solstice? Was wintertime depression greater for those living in higher latitudes? Was depression greater for those living in cloudy rather than sunny communities? For those not experiencing sunlight on the day of the interview? Photo credit:  inakilarrea/ RooM/Getty Images The stunning answers were no, no, no, and no. Moreover, they report, other research confirms that seasonal affective disorder, though “strongly rooted in folk psychology . . . is not supported by objective data.” In northern Norway, for example, the two-month-long “dark period” is accompanied by “no increase in depression.” Science is a self-correcting, ongoing process that often confirms what we have supposed. But occasionally our long-held ideas crash against a wall of fact. That is one reason why, despite the many lessons that have survived scrutiny, our textbooks are always in the process of revision. Doing, teaching, and writing science requires humility. That said, given a) the demonstrated effectiveness of light therapy, and b) the widespread acceptance of what DSM 5 calls depressive disorder “with seasonal pattern,” I suspect we have not heard the last word on this. ... View more

Originally posted on January 20, 2015. In the January Observer (here)​, Nathan digests—and suggests how to teach—David Creswell and Emily Lindsay’s explanations of how mindfulness improves health.  Mindfulness serves to recruit brain regions important for stress control and it inhibits the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary (SAM) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axes from going into overdrive. David (here) notes that marriage predicts happiness.  Does it also predict physical health?  A massive meta-analysis by Theodore Robles and his colleagues indicates that, in Robles’ words, the marriage-health relationship “is similar to that of associations between health behaviors (diet, physical activity) and health outcomes.” But why?  Does marriage influence health or are healthy people more likely to marry?  Longitudinal studies suggest that marriage influences future health—for reasons that Robles explains and that class discussion might identify. ... View more

Originally posted on April 7, 2015. The April APS Observer is out with an essay by Nathan, “The Truth About Trust.” Drawing from the work of Paul Van Lange, it identifies principles of trust—as learned, socially received, reasonable, and constructive. The essay also offers three easy classroom activities that engage students in thinking more deeply about trust. In the same issue, my essay on “How Close Relationships Foster Health and Heartaches” suggests how instructors might engage students’ thinking about everyday stress and social support.  It then summarizes, from the work of Karen Rook, the benefits and costs of social relationships, and how relationships impact our health and well-being, for better and for worse. ... View more