Psychology

I must admit, I was a shy child. Shame is a lesson well learned. However, I don’t know if it is always correctly learned.

There is a saying that describes one’s life partner as being most appreciated during two life stages: before marriage and after the funeral. Unfortunately, proverbs and sayings hint at a reality which is also faithfully rendered by statistics showing that love wears off pretty soon in many marriages. But maybe this is part of the problem—the fact that we overburden love, treating it...

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful"—Samuel Johnson.

I sat slouched on the edge of my bed, blue light illuminating my face in the dark. It was the tenth time I’d checked my phone in the space of five minutes. I grimaced. Was something wrong with me?

"It was dark inside the wolf." Like a chef who reinterprets a traditional dish for an expensive urban restaurant, writer Margaret Atwood proposed to the students of her masterclass a reinterpretation of the story "Little Red Riding Hood", in line with the most current tastes and attention skills: a Little Red Riding Hood that lives in the present moment.

Procrastination is self-harm, psychologist Piers Steel says. A kind of self-harm that we can become addicted to if we do not detect the reasons behind it and especially the effective strategies to counter it.

If shame were personified, its main characteristic would be its ability to creep into the darkest depths, avoiding any trace of light and any discussion of itself.

I spoke very little in my early years and my mother says that my silence scared her. She never knew what was going through my mind. She was afraid I was hiding something.

Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive. – C.S. Lewis

“Mister Watson, come here, I want to see you.” With this message, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, launched the telephone. The door had opened to distant, personal and instant contact.

Elspeth Muir’s brother, Alexander, died from drowning. It was 2009, and he had just turned 21. He died from drowning, but his death “was not foreshadowed by his love of water except that it explains why he was near a river, alone, with a blood-alcohol content of almost 0.25. My brother died because he was drunk, and because the drink made him stupid.”

It has been more than ten years since my first job interview ended with the classic: You did a great job, but we have chosen someone else. Since this memorable moment, other closed doors have followed: employers rejecting my application, people not sharing my interests, groups giving me the feeling of not being accepted.

Detecting an introvert is not as easy as we may think, because sometimes introverts are not shy or silent at all, they take responsibility, work extraordinarily in teams, and can even be skilled public speakers. Yet several traits can unveil the introverted character of an individual.

Responsible, achievement-oriented and highly principled – this is what a brief portrait of a perfectionist child looks like, explaining why, up to a certain point, this is the kind of child most parents dream of.

The number of single individuals has skyrocketed in the past few decades in nearly 40% of the world’s countries. While some complain about the economic discrimination they face, many who have chosen this lifestyle believe they hold a winning ticket in other areas of their lives.