Posts by Neil Petersen

Rock climbing is a sport that pushes both the body and the mind to their limits. You don’t know what focus is until you’ve tried to scale a vertical slab of granite! (Or so I’m told – personally, I’m not a big fan of heights.) Because rock climbing is as much about the mental as…

Intuition can be a valuable resource for making decisions. Don’t ask me how I know that, I just know it. In science, though, intuition only goes so far. In fact, it’s only really useful as long as it leads to evidence. So what happens when science and intuition get together? Researchers have tried a few…

Social media has created new ways for people to connect with each other, but it has also created new ways for people to demean and harass each other. Over the last several years, cyberbullying has led to several high-profile suicides that have made national news, but the problem is much more widespread than the few…

Tourette Syndrome is a disorder that involves physical and vocal tics. It appears to affect about 0.5 percent of all children and often improves in adulthood. People with Tourette Syndrome frequently have other conditions like OCD, ADHD and depression. Despite being fairly common, Tourette Syndrome still isn’t well understood by the general public. Many people…

Every society has rituals to guide people through life stages like reaching adulthood, marriage and death. People also have personal rituals and habits that they stick to without always knowing why. Many researchers have looked at the psychology of rituals, and they’ve found that even the most basic rituals can enhance people’s lives. Take personal…

If I ask you to name a place you wish you were right now, work wouldn’t necessarily be the first thing to come to mind. But for some people, work can be a welcome distraction from the stresses of their day-to-day lives outside the workplace. A 2012 study from the NIH called TGI Monday?: Drug-Dependent…

Ever feel like you’re a fraud? Like you don’t deserve your accomplishments? Like you just got lucky, or maybe fooled people into thinking you’re better than you really are? Like you could be discovered at any minute, because people could catch on to you, and then the game will really be up? If so, you’re…

Although everyone feels nervous at times, for some people anxiety spreads through their lives and starts causing them real problems. According to one study with over nine thousand participants, about 18 percent of people in the United States will struggle with an anxiety disorder in a given year. Anxiety disorders can range from social phobia…

That might sound like a silly question. Of course having a mental illness is going to lower life satisfaction. But how much? Does having a mental illness doom you to never enjoying life? In a study published earlier this month, researchers from University of Toronto asked exactly that, although they phrased it in slightly more…

It’s Monday. Of course it’s Monday. In a study published this month in Anxiety, Stress & Coping, researchers from Macquarie University in Australia looked at how workplace incivility fluctuates over the course of the workweek. Participants of both genders reported experiencing the most incivility at work on Monday and the least on Friday. For each…