Posts by Neil Petersen

We’ve all heard about biking to work. But here’s a slightly more radical concept: biking at work. Along with standing desks and treadmill desks, pedal desks are a way furniture designers have tried to address the health consequences of sitting too much. There are a lot of different reasons you might choose to use a…

Why do people engage in emotional eating? Well, because they’re emotional, of course! It turns out, though, that not all emotions are necessarily equal when it comes to emotional eating. In particular, feelings of shame may be especially likely to lead to emotional eating and binge eating. A recent study of 250 women found that…

Our lives are full of habits, healthy and unhealthy, big and small. Sometimes we don’t even realize how deeply ingrained some of our regular behaviors are until we try to break them. According to a new study from researchers at University of Regensburg, some habits might be harder to reverse than others. Some of the…

Maybe you’re bright and full of optimism when the sun has just come up, but you’re falling apart by the time you get home in the evening. Or maybe you can barely crawl out of bed in the morning, but you start to perk up as the sun is going down. Whatever your individual time-of-day…

Here’s an interesting study … about boredom. Lack of excitement might not seem like the most exciting research topic at first glance, but we all have a slightly different experience of boredom. Maybe you’re always fighting boredom. Maybe you aren’t generally susceptible to boredom but still have a few activities in your life that invariably…

“What’s the right amount of eye contact?” is probably one of those questions where it’s best not too think too much about the answer. Kind of like “what muscles do you move when you walk?” or “how do you keep from falling off your bicycle?” If you do think about it, though, you might notice…

When we see a natural disaster in the news, we might see pictures of houses destroyed and estimates of how many people are dead or injured. For survivors, though, there’s a less tangible kind of damage natural disasters inflict that isn’t talked about as much: damage to people’s mental health. The mental health effects of…

Here are two things you might not think to put together: basketball and contemplating the human condition. But put them together is exactly what researchers from University of Arizona did in a paper called He Dies, He Shoots: Evidence That Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball. In a series of studies, the psychologists…

You might have noticed that it’s really easy to tell when someone is being ironic online. That’s because nonverbal clues, lacking in written communication, are partly what distinguish saying something ironic from saying something absurd and meaning it. A good example of how people always understand written irony is the guy who shares an article…