Psychology

Daily stress is a good excuse to avoid other people's needs, but this choice is a double loss. The kindness we display to make other people's days better is a very strong antidote to the high level of stress we experience daily.

You really don't realize what your thoughts about God are until you have nothing left but the conviction expressed in the book of the prophet Jeremiah: My Father, my friend from my youth (Jeremiah 3:4).

A cold flash, like the strange, icy feeling after a burn, runs through his body with every breath. He feels his heart racing. It feels like it is counting down to the moment when it will explode—or, mercifully, to the moment when he will turn his pillow to the cooler side, and finally fall asleep.

One of the most overused metaphors for our human experience of life is that of the journey.

Although grief is a universal experience, we respond differently to its onslaught, so it's no wonder that words meant to comfort often add more suffering to an already heavy burden.

After a chance meeting of mutual friends, I was introduced to Tim and Sonia in a restaurant in central Toowoomba, Queensland, eight days before their home was washed away.

One of the mind’s most pleasant and, at the same time, most tormenting occupations is to dream of a better life. How many times have we tried to generate a change for the better by means of a new purchase, new friends, new house, new job, new relationship or other ideas for a fresh start?

For many people, the New Year is the catalyst for making changes they didn't have time or energy for in the previous year. On 1 January, the list of resolutions grows promisingly long, but keeping them can become a real ordeal in the tangle of daily problems and deadlines. Statistics show that even before the month of snowdrops, many of the commitments made...

Because life in developed societies follows a more or less regular pattern, sociologists have managed to identify the age at which conditions are most conducive to forming a friendship. It's not that people who are not of this age are unable to form meaningful connections with other people, but at other ages, life takes us on different paths, without asking for our permission.

When we are isolated with our family, problems that are sometimes easy to ignore become more acute, and the need to receive and offer forgiveness to those around us becomes increasingly evident.

An experimenter is like a hunter who, instead of waiting quietly for game, tries to make it rise, by beating up the locality where he assumes it is. – Francis Bacon, 17th-century English philosopher

Many families who feared that the new coronavirus would affect their health ended up dreading its effect on something seemingly even more difficult to protect: the well-being of their relationship.

Happiness is . . . ? How would you finish the sentence? What do you think happiness is? Positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, in The How of Happiness, says it is is “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive wellbeing, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”

Arguments must be convincing and, in order to convince, they must be valid—the minimum requirement of persuasion.

Psychologists recommend all sort of things you should have to develop a healthy and strong mind, like tenacity, ambition or optimism. To achieve this objective, however, there are also some things you should avoid.