Do You Have a 90% Chance That Your Self-Help Technique Will Work?

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Spencer: Sometimes I'll notice someone tries to do self-help technique and they'll be way too excited about it because like a week later, they'll like things will be much better. And I'm always like, oh, no, like 90% chance that in a month is not going to be working. But every once in a while, I do think someone finds something life changing with diet changes or psychedelics. Spencer: There's some really basic things that by basic, it doesn't mean that they're easy to do, but it's like exercise, eating a bounce diet, getting enough sleep, managing the stress in your lives.

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Why should we not optimize some things in life? Should some things (e.g., interpersonal relationships) be "off-limits" for optimization? How much time spent being unproductive is good for us? What can we learn by paying attention to our moods? Does science make progress and produce knowledge too slowly? Why is research methodology applied so inconsistently, especially in the social sciences?

Christie Aschwanden is author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery, and co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast about the creative process. She's the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Smithsonian, Popular Science, New Scientist, Discover, Science, and NPR.org. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. She was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2011 and has received journalism fellowships from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Carter Center, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Greater Good Science Center. Learn more about her at christieaschwanden.com or follow her on Instagram at @cragcrest or on Mastodon at @cragscrest.

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