Willpower: Ego Depletion and the Appeal to a Future Self
The feeling of being drained of energy while still having things to do is a feeling I regularly have. The tendency to procrastinate becomes practically inevitable. I hazard to guess…
Blocked Thoughts: What Is the Difference Between Suppression and Repression?
Any discussion of emotion often quickly starts attributing value to some emotions or thoughts without realizing it. We are constantly monitoring our emotional states and our progress towards goals, and…
Self and Long-Term Goal Commitment
Many things come to mind when we think of self, all tend to be difficult to define. These things, categorized under “self,” play a role in our motivation, how we…
Using Mindfulness to Break Habits Before They Begin
Designing our lives intentionally requires a lot of understanding and cannot be reduced to one or two areas, but developing habits and breaking old ones has to be one of…
Unconscious Habit: Assuming and Meeting Expectations
When it comes to understanding our psychology, we have an inherent ambivalence towards the unconscious that operate under the hood. It is the unknown, what we cannot grasp, and seemingly,…
How to Apply Operant Conditioning to Your Complex Life
One of the most foundational and well-studied parts of understanding human psychology is the study of experience’s effects on current behavior and cognition. The subdiscipline of psychology known as “associationism,”…
Understanding Universal Goods from Instinct
What is at the core level of our motivation that we can learn to grasp and adjust and work to improve our lives with? Far too often, we set ideals…
Navigating the Two Phases of Loss and Grief
When looking at the primary affect programs, we see what may be at the root of some of our emotions. But rarely does it tell us exactly how we define…
Fear-Anxiety and Its Emergence from Seeking Behavior
We know fear quite well. It is always one of the first to come to mind if we are asked to name emotions. Fear is an emotion we encounter to…
RAGE and Its Relationship to Goal Striving
There are a few different kinds of aggression circuits in the brain and body. One of them, rather than being merely anger operates under the SEEKING or the reward system…