From the category archives:

Psychology

Beware of Pseudo Self-Esteem

by Stephen Mills January 29, 2012

Over the past few decades there has been a vast wave of pseudo self-esteem washing over our culture.  Pseudo self-esteem has displaced true self-esteem and created a nation of the entitled and narcissistic, especially in the less than 45 age group. True self-esteem is based upon an a self-appraisal of one’s own competence and worthiness.  [...]

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Three Unconscious Influences on Our Behavior

by Stephen Mills January 1, 2012

Note from Stephen:  This is a guest article from Dr. Sean Sullivan.  Dr. Sullivan has a book and online course available called “The Mind Masters Silent Journey” which I am currently evaluating.  I will be writing a review of them when I’m finished.  The last part of this article is an excerpt from his material. [...]

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Does Money Buy Happiness After All?

by Stephen Mills December 19, 2011

Interestingly income in the U.S. affects daily emotional well-being (enjoyment, happiness, sadness, anger, worry, stress) up to about $75,000 of household income. That’s not exactly a subsistence level of income and is significant in that 2/3 of U.S. households are below that level. This indicates an increase in stable income would positively impact 2/3 of U.S. households in their day-to-day happiness levels.

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Rethinking Positive Thinking

by Stephen Mills November 24, 2011

I now believe that much of the current propaganda about positive thinking is at minimum misguided and likely counter-productive for many people. It amounts to self-help snake oil. This represents a change in my own beliefs brought about by my own experience, my observations of others, and a lot of reading and thinking about it.

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How To Make Decisions When You Can’t Decide

by Stephen Mills October 18, 2011

This article describes several methods of making quick decisions when you have a difficult time deciding or when you are dealing with a complex decision. Our working memory can handle only a few bits of information at a time and many choices or many factors for each choice overwhelm it. The four methods described here are:

Flip a Coin With a Twist
Compare Down a List
Conduct a Tournament
Let Your Unconscious Decide

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Situations Matter – Review

by Stephen Mills October 11, 2011

In Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World, Sam Sommers argues persuasively that everyday situations matter much more for how we behave than we generally like to believe. According to the author, we tend to believe character (inborn or acquired) is much more important than it really is.

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The Modern Decline in Independent Thinking

by Stephen Mills March 12, 2011

The Internet was supposed to expose us to many new viewpoints, broaden our horizons, generate new ideas, and so on. To some degree it has but there is a very serious hidden danger in the fact that we are always connected to others. It’s not just that we are connected to others, it’s who and how we are connecting. We participate in groups through the Internet or other media technologies to a degree unimaginable just a couple of decades ago. So even though the impact of groups on individual thinking has always existed, its impact is much greater today. We are losing our ability and opportunity to think independently and in my view this has serious consequences.

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Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Thinking– Part II–Your Health

by Stephen Mills February 16, 2011

If you haven’t read  Part I please do so before reading Part II. I’m going to use health as an example to illustrate some principles I think are important in balancing short and long term thinking.  With slight changes these same principles can be applied to almost anything. I really didn’t even begin to cover [...]

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Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Thinking–Part I

by Stephen Mills February 13, 2011

Should you save your money for retirement or spend it now? Should you enjoy those sugary deserts today or should you forgo them so you will be healthier in your old age? Should you work in a secure high-paying job you don’t like or be a starving artist at something you love? These kinds of questions have no simple answer; they are different for everyone. But even beyond that I submit it is next to impossible to even know the best answers for yourself. The reason is that the time spans involved are simply too long, life is too unpredictable, and the the world is changing at a rapidly accelerating pace.

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Unconscious Influences On Our Behavior

by Stephen Mills January 28, 2011

One of the most fascinating, and to me unnerving, results to come out of a lot of recent psychological research is just how much of our behavior is subject to unconscious influence. I for one and I think most people like to believe we are acting deliberately when in fact we often are not. This article will focus on a phenomenon referred to in research as priming.

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