Learn more about mentalhealth with this collection
How to practice self-compassion
How to identify and challenge negative self-talk
How to build self-confidence
There’s a simple reason for that: as expressed by researchers for the Review of General Psychology, “If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.”
In other words, feeling contented wasn’t good for the species.
Our ancestors worked harder and strove further because they evolved to be perpetually perturbed, and so we remain today.
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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
The lengths people will go to avoid boredom are shocking. Literally.
A 2014 study published in Science observed participants who were asked to sit in a room and think for fifteen minutes. The room was empty except for a device that allowed participants to ...
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If you’ve ever chewed on something that you did, or that someone did to you, over and over again, then you’ve experienced rumination, which is our tendency to keep thinking about bad experiences.
This “passive comparison of one’s current situation with some unachiev...
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Dissatisfaction is responsible for our species’ advancements, and if you never felt it, you’d be at a serious disadvantage. Discontent is not a reason to give up on success. Rather, it’s a reason to introduce the opportunity for frequent and meaningful victories into our lives.
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Hedonic adaptation is the tendency to quickly return to a baseline level of satisfaction no matter what happens to us in life and may be the cruelest of all 4 factors.
Hedonic adaptation is Mother Nature’s bait-and-switch. All sorts of life events we think...
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We can live out our values—very concretely—if we build our values into our calendar. That “simply” means scheduling time for what matters most. By turning our values into time, we make sure we have time for traction.
At the end of the day, we can look at ...
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Or, the 4 psychological factors that make satisfaction temporary.
Taken together, these 4 components ...
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It’s been defined as “a phenomenon in which negative events are more salient and demand attention more powerfully than neutral or positive events.”
Such pessimism begins very early in life. Babies begin to show signs of negativity bias starting at just 7 mo...
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CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
The 18th century poet Samuel Johnson said, “My life is one long escape from myself.” Sounds “‘mad, bad and sad”? The truth is, we’re not wired to feel content or satisfied. Ever. Here’s the surprising psychology of why dissatisfaction is hardwired and why that’s a good thing.
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