Law of attraction. 60 Popular Pieces of False Knowledge. 30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself. Eight (harsh) Truths That Will Improve Your Life... They say life is what we make of it. By the end of this post, I hope to have helped you decide whether that statement is true or not. There is no doubt that life has its ups and downs. However, how we deal with them can sometimes make all the difference. Today I want to share eight harsh truths that I've come to learn from life. There's also a message in each that I think we can all learn from, and when applied, will improve our lives infinitely. Some of these lessons may be old-hat for you. 1. Friends will always come and go in your life; even though I'm back in the UK now, all my friends are in university around the country and not exactly in meeting distance.
Important Lesson: There are an abundance of amazing people out there for you to meet and build relationships with. You won't always get what you want in life: people are going to be late, people will let you down, items you want won't always be available. 4. 5. As the saying goes - "Only those who are asleep make no mistakes". 6. Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought. Humans The human mind is a wonderful thing. Cognition, the act or process of thinking, enables us to process vast amounts of information quickly. For example, every time your eyes are open, you brain is constantly being bombarded with stimuli. You may be consciously thinking about one specific thing, but you brain is processing thousands of subconscious ideas.
The Gambler’s fallacy is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality, they are not. Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed. Pareidolia is when random images or sounds are perceived as significant. Interesting Fact: the Rorschach Inkblot test was developed to use pareidolia to tap into people’s mental states. Self-fulfilling Prophecy Self-fulfilling prophecy is engaging in behaviors that obtain results that confirm existing attitudes. Interesting Fact: Economic Recessions are self-fulfilling prophecies. Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed. Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions.
Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. The Anchoring Trap: Over-Relying on First Thoughts “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? What’s your best estimate?” Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. Consider the status quo as just another alternative. 3. 4. 5. Emotions Are A Resource, Not A Crutch. Ever since Darwin, and perhaps long before him, it has been theorized that our emotions play a crucial role in adapting to our environment.
This means that emotions are not just an inconvenient byproduct of consciousness, but a form of higher cognition – an ability for living beings to experience their world in deeper and more complex ways. Humans are a species that thrive on social relations, and our emotions become a gauge on morality and justice. They help facilitate our interactions by giving us clues on how to connect with others in meaningful and productive ways. When someone makes us feel bad our emotions tell us to ignore them, while when someone makes us feel good our emotions tell us to appreciate them. Emotions however come in many different qualities, degrees, and intensities. Perhaps more important than how researchers conceptualize different emotions is how we experience them. Sources [1] LAROS, F., & STEENKAMP, J. (2005) . [2] McNAIR, D. 7 Stupid Thinking Errors You Probably Make. The brain isn’t a flawless piece of machinery.
Although it is powerful and comes in an easy to carry container, it has it’s weaknesses. A field in psychology which studies these errors, known as biases. Although you can’t upgrade your mental hardware, noticing these biases can clue you into possible mistakes.How Bias Hurts You If you were in a canoe, you’d probably want to know about any holes in the boat before you start paddling. Biases can be holes in your reasoning abilities and they can impair your decision making.
Simply noticing these holes isn’t enough; a canoe will fill with water whether you are aware of a hole or not. Biases hurt you in a number of areas: Decision making. Here are some common thinking errors:1) Confirmation Bias The confirmation bias is a tendency to seek information to prove, rather than disprove our theories. Consider a study conducted by Peter Cathcart Wason.
This is the tendency to see patterns where none actually exist. How to Stop Worrying: Self-Help for Anxiety Relief. Why is it so hard to stop worrying? Constant worrying takes a heavy toll. It keeps you up at night and makes you tense and edgy during the day. You hate feeling like a nervous wreck. So why is it so difficult to stop worrying? For most chronic worriers, the anxious thoughts are fueled by the beliefs—both negative and positive—they hold about worrying. On the negative side, you may believe that your constant worrying is harmful, that it’s going to drive you crazy or affect your physical health. On the positive side, you may believe that your worrying helps you avoid bad things, prevents problems, prepares you for the worst, or leads to solutions. Negative beliefs, or worrying about worrying, add to your anxiety and keep worry going. Why you keep worrying You have mixed feelings about your worries. Maybe I'll find a solution. You have a hard time giving up on your worries because, in a sense, your worries have been working for you.
Worry and anxiety self-help tip #1: Create a worry period. 8 Easy Bodily Actions That Transform Mental Performance. Jump for joy, confuse for creativity, relax for better decisions, open up for pain tolerance and more… People tend to assume that body language just expresses how we feel inside. But it also works the other way: how we hold our bodies affects how we feel and think in all sorts of fascinating ways. One of the early studies found that people who put pens in their mouths in such a way that it activates the muscles responsible for smiling, actually experienced more pleasure. In the past few years the study of how bodily posture affects the mind has exploded. Here are 8 of the latest psychological studies on what psychologists call ‘embodied cognition’, or the intimate ways in which body feeds back to mind. 1.
Feeling powerful can be useful but too much power can have a weird effect on decision-making. If you just want your decisions confirmed, then a feeling of power is good. 2. There’s little doubt that people tend to associated lower voices with more power. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. . → Want more? 8 Easy Bodily Actions That Transform Mental Performance.