Doomscrolling: The Ultimate Negative Flow State and Four Ways to Counter It

First, A Little Psychology I’ve written before about social media use and how it can be both helpful and harmful. The article, Is Social Media Reflecting Our Pathology or Adding to It?, concluded that social media does both. The trick to making social media a positive experience is understanding how their algorithms work. The first…

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The Fading Affect Bias in Pursuit of the Pleasant Life

Fading Affect Bias (FAB) The Fading Affect Bias, or FAB for short, refers to the cognitive phenomenon supported by research showing that memories associated with negative emotions tend to fade faster than memories associated with positive emotions (Skowronski, 2014). This means we tend to forget the bad times at a faster rate than the good…

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Brief History of Positive Psychology (Part 2)

Continued From Part 1… But Wait, There is Good News Remember, Csikszentmihalyi found that teenagers can be unhappy and can see life through their suffering, but he also found an interesting exception. When teenagers focus their energies on tasks that are challenging, their mood is more upbeat. In other words, he found evidence of when…

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How Much of Life Is Spent Mind-Wandering?

The human mind is hard to pin down. It goes where it wants, not necessarily where it’s supposed to, and it’s averse to sitting still. But how much does the mind wander? How much of our time do we spend focused on something other than what’s in front of us? The most commonly cited answer…

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How to Cope With Waiting

Waiting isn’t known for being fun. It’s not generally fun when you’re waiting in line at the supermarket, and it’s really not fun when you’re waiting for a piece of life-altering news like a job offer. In fact, previous research has found that, on average, people consider waiting for uncertain news as unpleasant as receiving…

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