Psychology

When I was four years old, my younger brother was born. My parents focused on my brother and spent less time with me. It was only 40 years later that I discovered how this had affected me.

Sunday afternoons were a sacrosanct time when I was growing up in Argentina. Everything seemed to quiet and slow down between 2:00 and 5:00 pm, during siesta. Even shops would shut. All you could hear was the sound of the cicadas as the whole neighbourhood took a nap. Young and old, rich and poor were unified by this wonderful tradition. At least, I...

Our reality isn’t always a calm place. Feelings of safety and peace that are so necessary for our well-being often elude us. What is happening today on a global level only goes to show how fragile our world is, and how easily we can lose control over the things we thought we had mastered.

They say self-esteem is a vital ingredient for success in life. But what if everything we were taught about self-esteem is wrong?

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.

“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.

Some people may feel particularly inhibited in social situations. Meetings cause them stomach-aches, conversations overwhelm them with shyness, and anxiety does not allow them to utter a single word.

Disagreements between husbands and wives happen no matter how much they love each other, and this isn’t necessarily bad. Conflict is normal in daily life, even for happily married couples. It happens when two very different people grow closer to each other and notice that they have different priorities, beliefs, habits and values.

“To be fearless may be a gift. However, the most precious one is, probably, the courage resulting from developing the habit of not allowing fear to dictate your actions”, says the renowned Nobel Peace Prize winner and democracy activist in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, in her essay titled “Free from fear”.

"Did you hear what he did?" "Guess what we found out about our new colleague!" In spite of their apparent enthusiasm, gossips—people who laugh loudly and try to capture the attention of others through the tantalising information they have to share—are often not as happy as they seem.

I guess my mid-life crisis kicked off when I turned 26. What is my purpose in life? What have I accomplished so far? Am I caught in a treadmill of mediocrity? Who am I? Am I basically a good person or a selfish person? Do I have a destiny? These kinds of questions have a way of recycling themselves—they turned up again around my 31st birthday,...

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.

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens" (Ecclesiastes 3:1).

On any given day, a typical person checks the clock several dozen times.

Too tired to even touch hands, my husband, Bernie, and I crawled into bed. It was the end of a day in which we’d hardly spoken to each other, except to ask where things were or say where we were going—or had been. Our house had been full of guests for several weeks. To make matters worse, we’d just moved in and there...