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Dopamine, Phone Addiction, and Why You Can’t Stop Scrolling
You know the feeling. You’ve just checked your phone — but five minutes later, you’re back on it. You didn’t even wantto pick it up. You’re not bored, especially. You’re not expecting a message. You just… picked it up. Again. Maybe you tell yourself it’s no big deal. But the hours add up. And part of you knows — this isn’t just a habit anymore. It’s compulsive. It’s automatic. And worst of all, it’s pulling your attention, your energy, and your goals out from under you. This is what most people call “phone addiction.” But what’s really happening is deeper — and more disturbing. It’s not just about willpower. It’s not even…
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In Defense of Metaphors: Why Figurative Language is Essential in Self-Help
“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” Orson Scott Card Metaphors are everywhere. We talk about having a “full plate” when we’re busy, “breaking the ice” when starting conversations, “jumping through hoops” to describe bureaucratic challenges, “lighting a fire” to motivate someone, and “weathering the storm” when facing difficult times. In self-help, metaphors are particularly prevalent, shaping how we think about personal growth, relationships, and even our relationship with our own thoughts and emotions. But applied psychologists can face a difficulty when it comes to metaphorical language because our professional identity centres on being scientist practitioners. Everyday metaphors often seem like the very opposite of a…
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The Golden Mean: Balancing the Scale of Evidence-Based Practice
Virtues lie between two opposing excesses. So argued Aristotle in his Nicomachean ethics, over 2300 years ago. So, courage can be understood as the mean between recklessness and cowardice. Temperance falls between self-indulgence and insensibility. Pride is found between vanity and undue humility. One of the brilliant features of this analytic framework is that it breaks us out of our habitual way of seeing virtues as simply ‘more’ of something. Courage is good, and so one should surely be as brave as possible. But no, says Aristotle. Because if we push it too far courage becomes recklessness. In a conversation with Dr Shane McLoughlin, a good friend and colleague, this…
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Exploring the truth behind inspirational sayings
“Your attitude determines your reality.” “Fear is the only thing holding you back.” “Gratitude is the key to happiness.” Self-help is full of such pithy statements. I bet you’ve seen hundreds of them. They’re usually presented as great insights, key ideas, or even as fundamental principles of the universe. Almost all of these ideas can be shown to be false with just a little analysis. But before we dismiss them all, we need to delve into an arcane-sounding question: What do we really mean by ‘true’? This question is at the core of epistemology — a long-standing branch of philosophy. And though it may seem incredible, there are at least half…
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Finding meaning in life
What do humans need to be happy in life? The argument has sparked numerous debates for centuries. Some have argued that we can be happy so long as our basic needs for food and shelter and social connection are taken care of. Others have argued that we can be happy even in the face of indescribable suffering so long as we know how to control and guide our own minds. Over the last 70 years, more and more psychotherapists have come to the conclusion that human beings cannot be happy without a sense of meaning in life. I think this goes too far. Meaning is only one of the paths to happiness.…
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Arguing with the universe
Social media provide a strange playground for a psychologist. You get to watch people interacting, like a fly on the wall, much less intrusively than in real life. Each platform has its idiosyncrasies. Facebook ‘friendships’ mostly follow real-life ones, whilst Twitter and Reddit are dominated by relationships that exist only in cyberspace. Over the last couple of years, people have become more and more worried that these media may be causing or exacerbating a social divide. For example, in the political sphere, the centre-right and centre-left voices are being drowned out by the far-left and far-right. Numerous scholars and commentators have blamed social media. There might be some truth to…
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Enough information already
“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” — Derek Sivers Thinking about a problem can often feel the same as dealing with it. This can be a dangerous psychological effect, which threatens to undermine your attempts at self-improvement. Behavioural scientists have published dozens of studies on this over the last two decades. Let’s take a moment to see how it works. When we say we are ‘thinking’ we mean we’re dealing with the world symbolically. We might be doing it purely in our heads, we might have the support of a piece of paper or a computer screen, but the information in our…
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Opportunity cost
Our wonderful, complex, modern world provides myriad opportunities. And so, of course, it presents us with many thousands of choices to make, and just as many opportunity costs. Unlike 99% of everyone who ever lived on this planet, you can take a glowing rectangle out of your pocket, tap it a few times, and have food delivered to your home within a day or two. We should pause to notice just how astonishingly wonderful this is. But we should notice too the opportunity costs. For example, barring a zombie apocalypse, most of the people reading this post will never learn to hunt their own dinner. OK, maybe that’s not important…
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How to spend less money
There are many ways to get better at money management, though you wouldn’t know it from reading personal development blogs. They pretty much all recommend you plan out a budget and stick to it strictly, month in, month out. You set up a spreadsheet or pay for some shockingly expensive bespoke software and audit your expenditure at the end of every month. It works just fine, but it’s like counting calories. It’s tedious, and there’s a real risk you’ll one day break the diet in an alarming binge. Another approach is to change your mindset when it comes to money. Do this and frugal habits may become automatic. I think…
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Using social media to live a better life
We live in the age of the selfie, of Facebook, of Instagram, of self-generated content. This isn’t unprecedented narcisism, as some would have us believe. It’s the modern equivalent of boring your friends with four packets of photographs from you recent trip. In many ways, the modern approach is better. Tweaking an Instagram filter is fun. Re-taking a selfie until you get one without bags under your eyes might be desirable. Taking things further, learning about composition and the technology behind digital cameras, can be worthwhile. But if we’re not careful, we can end up as a sort of fifth-rate journalist. We can spend more time crafting the adjectives than…
