The Emotion Machine

A ritual is any meaningful or symbolic behavior that we believe helps us face a situation or overcome an obstacle.

Our daily lives are filled with small rituals that we believe benefit our lives. For example, putting on your “lucky shirt” before a big date, or giving yourself a pep talk in front of a mirror before a job interview, or visualizing yourself scoring before you shoot a basketball.

While these rituals can often seem irrational and superstitious, research suggests that they may actually serve a positive function.

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I’d rather lose 10lbs over the course of a year and keep it off, than lose 10lbs in a week and gain it right back. Think long-term about your habits and goals.

What makes one person different than another? Many may say it’s a combination of genes and environment, but recent neuroscience shows that it’s more than just that.

In an interesting study published in Science, neuroscientists studied the brains of 40 mice who were genetically identical and grew up in the same exact environment.

They found that despite these genetic and environmental similarities, the mice each culminated their own individual experiences which contributed to underlying changes in their brain’s wiring.

Due to these unique experiences, each mouse developed different brain and behavioral patterns while interacting with their environment, and over the course of 3 months these differences continued to increase in size over time.

Specifically, they noticed significant changes develop in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory.

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Motivation is a psychological process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behavior.

It begins with a particular goal in mind that we want to fulfill, then follows with the actions needed to make that goal into a tangible reality.

A goal can be anything we want to achieve: happiness, relationships, money, health, education, or whatever.

And whether we recognize it or not, we all have certain goals in life, even if they aren’t things we would normally consider “goals.”

This is because every action has an intention behind it. We feel a desire for something, then we take action to make it happen – even something as simple as feeling thirsty and grabbing a glass of water is a goal-oriented behavior.

This article gives you a mechanistic breakdown of how motivation works and things to keep in mind when pursuing long-term goals.

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We commonly hear about the fear of failure, but could there also be a fear of success?

Most of us say we want success, but when we actually think about success it can have some major consequences that many of us aren’t willing to face.

Often instead of reaching our full potential as individuals, we sell ourselves short and settle for less, because we don’t feel we’re truly ready to handle the success we’re actually capable of.

The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a lot about the concept of self-actualization – recognizing our full potential as individuals – and he shared compelling reasons many of us try to avoid this greatness in our lives.

This article will describe 4 key reasons why people tend to fear success. Simply becoming more aware of these reasons is a great starting point in accepting this fear and working to overcome it.

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Sometimes the best thing you can do to improve creativity or problem-solving is to just walk away. Let your unconscious do some work.

Sometimes you have to break yourself down before you can build yourself back up again.

A happy and successful life often requires a healthy sense of urgency to do the right things.

Don’t be too concerned about the exact path of your success. Just stay optimistic, work hard, and success will often find you in unexpected ways.

Many of us have a deep fear of failure.

We imagine it to be the worst thing possible in our lives: What happens if that person at the bar rejects me? What happens if my band does terrible during our first show? What happens if people say my new blog sucks?

We’re so afraid of what people may think about us that we end up never doing what we really want to do, because we’re scared that we are going to suck at it and embarrass ourselves in front of everyone.

If we want to reverse this pattern, we need to learn that not only is failure a necessary first step to success, it can also be kind of fun. That’s right, let me repeat that: failure isn’t so bad, it can actually be kind of fun.

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