PsycHacks

This is an old psychotherapy saw: "you've got to feel it to heal it." So what does it really mean? I'm not quite sure how it works, but unprocessed emotions don't really go away. They exist in a kind of frozen state somewhere beneath the threshold of awareness. To relieve oneself of their burden, it's necessary to experience their affective component with awareness. In fact, you can think of feeling as the subjective experience of an emotion leaving the body. I'll discuss more in this episode. #feeling #emotions #trauma

Explore the two types of dates: the good ones and those that serve as valuable practice. Embrace every date as a chance to hone your skills in conversation, flirtation, and seduction. Adopting a positive mindset helps prevent burnout and enhances your dating experience. Regular practice keeps you in top form, ensuring you’re ready when real opportunities arise. Treating all dating experiences as stepping stones to growth will transform your approach to relationships.

This is an episode specifically for the 20-somethings in the audience. Have you ever been the last person to leave a house party? Chance are is wasn't a great experience, as nothing good happens after a certain point in the evening. Well, the same is true to your 20s, in general. Over time, for better or for worse, your friends will come to prioritize other aspects of their lives above their social lives. By their early 30s, they will all have better things to do than getting wasted on the weekend -- and so should you. #friends #party #20s

A case can be made for the unconditionality of love from a spiritual perspective. However, even assuming that love is unconditional, the fact of the matter is that relationships are not. Relationships are -- and should be -- conditional. This is because people are people -- and placing people in situations where they are not accountable for their actions encourages corruption and cruelty. In this episode, I'll discuss the concept of "justifiability" with respect to love, promulgated by the creator of dialectical behavior therapy, Marsha Linehan. #love #relationships #unconditionallove

The ugly truth about commitment is that if you are committed up until the point that you aren't, you were never committed to begin with. And it's this "uncommitted commitment" that is one of the factors primarily responsible for the sorry state of dating today. Even our highest form of commitment -- the institution of marriage -- has become an at-will relationship that can be unilaterally terminated by one party at any time, at no fault of the other, and often to the benefit of the party breaching the agreement. And this is the outcome that occurs more than half of the time. Such a commitment is a liability, as it gives people the illusion of security that is not supported by the reality of the agreement. #commitment #marriage #relationships

The asymmetricality of pain and pleasure is one of the most infuriating aspects of being alive. Not only are there many more different flavors of pain than there are of pleasure, pain is generally experienced as being more painful than pleasure is pleasurable. This means, in order to have a non-miserable life, you need significantly more pleasure than pain. The same is true in your relationships. In this episode, I'll discuss John Gottman's "magic ratio" of positive-to-negative experiences required to make relationships flourish. #pleasure #relationships #love

It's important to be careful about asking for advice. Ask too many people and you're bound to get conflicting direction. Ask the wrong people and you'll receive bad counsel. In relaying a personal anecdote, I discuss some of the "do's" and "don't's" of asking for advice, including only asking help from folks who have what you want or who have a demonstrated ability to do what you want to do. I'll also share a much better question to ask your helpers to receive more practical advice. #advice #help #mentors

If you want to be great, then you must accept the inevitability of failure. The greatest athletes in any sport have lost more games than the average player ever wins, simply by virtue of their continued excellence over time. In fact, professional athletes offer a fantastic model for coping with failure: it's reality-based, non-defensive, and future-oriented. I'll discuss more in this episode. #failure #athletes #lebron

At their core, all vices are amnestic disorders. The reason they persist is that -- at the moment of decision -- people forget the pain and suffering that have consistently attended the behavior in the past and focus exclusively on the short-term pleasure. In the words of Sigmund Freud: "we can either remember, or we can repeat." The way out of this trap requires mindfulness, which is how we generally talk about the original Pali word that can also be translated as "remembering." I'll discuss more in this episode. #mindfulness #habits #selfimprovement

Research indicates that the majority of people believe that they are above average in most domains, and that most people believe that they deserve more recognition than they receive. Given the popularity of such beliefs, there is little extraordinary about them. On the other hand, humility -- the practice of finding peace with being extra ordinary -- is an extremely rare attribute. By unpacking the mystery of this word, we find a path toward extraordinariness that is open to everyone. #extraordinary #humility #peace