For Sonja, researching happiness means being asked over and over again, “What is the secret to happiness?” Sonja has always dreaded that question. It’s ridiculous, it’s reductive, and it’s restrictive. But mostly she has dreaded it because she has never had a solid, science-based answer that she could offer with any confidence.

There is no secret to happiness. But there are huge contributors to happiness, and some of them are more powerful than others. Sonja resists being pinned down to just one. But if she were pressed to give an answer, she now has one.

She found it when she met Harry, who studies the science of relationships. She mentioned the dreaded question, and he replied, “I don’t know the secret to happiness either, but I do know people who are happy, and I know people who are unhappy, and I can tell you the main difference between them: Happy people feel loved.” 

The secret to happiness is feeling loved. 

Harry also said, “Isn’t it odd that happiness researchers and relationship researchers don’t talk with each other?” 

* * *

For the next seven years, we decided to talk to each other. Together, we explored the science of happiness and relationships, the advice we give about both, and how we can all feel more loved. 

When we asked a representative sample of nearly two thousand American adults what they do to feel more loved, we were struck by how many seemed to find the question difficult to answer. Some weren’t sure what steps to take, while others felt that love was something that either happened or didn’t—something beyond their control. 

Why does feeling loved feel elusive for so many people? 

We’ve found that the challenge often isn’t a lack of love or inability to love but rather the beliefs we hold about how love works. 

Many of us instinctively follow certain ideas about what will make us feel valued, cherished, and secure in our relationships. We tell ourselves “if only” stories about love that seem entirely reasonable at first—stories that fit with what we’ve learned over the years, and that resonate with our hopes, fears, and intuitions. But when we examine these stories more closely, we sometimes find that they don’t hold up.

Here are five of the most common misconceptions about feeling loved:

• If only I were more attractive, powerful, or successful, I would feel more loved.
• If only I could make sure others knew my positive qualities and successes, I would feel more loved.
• If only I could hide my shortcomings, I would feel more loved.
• If only my partner would speak my love language, I would feel more loved.
• If only I could get my partner to love me more, I would feel more loved.

You’ll likely recognize some of these from your own experiences. Our goal isn’t to dismiss these beliefs outright but rather to explore what the science says about them and whether they’re truly helping you feel as loved as you want to be. If not, we’ll consider what you might do differently. 

One common thread running through many of these if-only beliefs is that, when we adopt them, we end up emphasizing our superficial selves—our image, career, and possessions—at the expense of our deeper selves—our values, personality, and quirks. But it’s our deeper selves for which we want to be loved. This raises a question we’ll encounter again and again as we interrogate these beliefs: How can we feel loved if we aren’t known?

If-only belief #1: If only I were more attractive, powerful, or successful, I would feel more loved

Many of us have felt, at one point or another, that success, beauty, and status would make us feel more loved. It’s understandable—our culture constantly reinforces the idea that being admired will translate into feeling cherished. If you were wealthier, sexier, or had more renown, wouldn’t the people in your life appreciate you more? Wouldn’t you feel happier and more loved? Yet research—and the lived experiences of many—suggests that this belief doesn’t always hold up.

Through media, social norms, and the stories people tell each other, Western culture incessantly teaches that the secret to feeling loved is having more—more money, more beauty, more power, more success. The modern dating landscape reflects this: Take a quick scroll through dating-app profiles or social media and you’ll see references to LMS (looks-money-status) as prized qualities. Many people, including us, at some point, have chased after things like A-list status, beauty, or success, hoping they would bring the best possible life. People strive to be influencers or to make as much money as possible to buy the latest tech, luxury vacations, or the hottest DJs for their parties. Others seek these qualities in their mates—one acquaintance of ours insisted on only dating men with the “four sixes”—six figures (salary), six-pack (abs), six feet (height), and six inches (for sex). She’s still looking.

This instinct to optimize themselves—or seek the most “desirable” partner—is completely natural. But does achieving wealth, power, fame, or physical perfection actually lead to feeling loved? Research suggests that while these things may bring attention and celebration, they don’t necessarily translate into feelings of being truly valued and known. Why, then, do people chase these goals? Although many tell themselves that they’re doing it purely for their own fulfillment, deep down, they likely pursue them in hope of being seen as more appealing—more worthy of love. Indeed, “Significance-Quest Theory,” published in 2022, states that humans have a drive or “quest” for significance, sometimes manifested in good works or humanitarian endeavors, but at other times reflected in efforts to bolster their sense of worth by attracting socially desirable “trophy” partners.

Consider Madame Bovary, the iconic character from Gustave Flaubert’s nineteenth-century novel. She hopes that having a child will bring the fulfillment she craves, only to realize that no external source—whether a child, a lover, or social status—can fill that void. While her story is fictional, it reflects a timeless human experience: Looking outside oneself for validation often leaves people feeling empty.

How can you feel truly loved if the version of you being loved isn’t you?

One reason that striving for extrinsic goals doesn’t usually lead to feeling loved is that people want to be loved for who they are rather than what they have—for their compassion, integrity, willingness to work hard, sense of humor, and so on, and not for “surface” characteristics, such as money, popularity, fame, and beauty. Emphasizing your extrinsic virtues creates what social psychologists call attributional ambiguity—the unsettling doubt about whether others love you for the “right” reasons. For example, a beautiful person who has always received compliments on their looks might secretly fear that their desirability is the only reason people are drawn to them, rather than their kindness or character.

A classic experiment conducted at the University at Buffalo illustrated this phenomenon. Highly attractive women wrote an essay and then received praise from a hidden male evaluator. When the women believed that the evaluator couldn’t see them, they took the praise to heart. But when they thought that the evaluator had seen them, they were more likely to dismiss the praise—believing it was based on their looks rather than their writing skills. The same pattern emerged for highly attractive men.

A similar dynamic plays out in relationships. Someone who is admired for their wealth or beauty may quietly wonder, Do they love me for who I am—or for what I have? And would they still love me if I lost my money or my looks as I grew older? This uncertainty can undermine trust, making it harder to feel truly loved. Perhaps this helps explain why celebrities and the ultrawealthy are often skeptical when they receive love and admiration from others. When you’re unsure whether others appreciate you for who you are rather than what you bring to the table, that attributional ambiguity can erode relationship trust.

Another reason chasing extrinsic goals can be unfulfilling is known as the “hedonic treadmill”—the tendency for achievements to bring only a temporary spell of satisfaction before again feeling the pressure to accumulate more. Instead, such striving seems to never satiate, thus rendering a person ever more dissatisfied and lonelier. To paraphrase an oft-quoted commencement speech by the American writer George Saunders, the problem with succeeding is that the need to do so constantly renews itself—like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you climb it.

Research shows that pursuing extrinsic goals—such as wealth and status—undermines, rather than bolsters, feelings of happiness and connection. In one longitudinal study of 12,894 U.S. undergraduates, those who, during college, rated being very well off financially as “essential” or “very important” were less satisfied with their lives two decades later compared to those who had placed less importance on wealth. (Notably, only respondents who ultimately achieved very high annual incomes—more than half a million in 2020s dollars—didn’t show this effect.) Similarly, anecdotal evidence from megalottery winners suggests that sudden wealth doesn’t always lead to greater happiness; in some cases, it creates distance and disconnection, as newfound riches make it harder to trust the intentions of friends and loved ones. 

So what does lead to feeling loved? If external markers of success won’t secure your feeling loved, what will? Research suggests an alternative approach—to focus on intrinsic goals rather than extrinsic ones. Intrinsic goals center on:

• Personal growth—learning a new language, exploring a creative passion, spending time in nature or in spiritual reflection
• Connecting to close others and community—reaching out to friends; being a joiner, not a watcher
• Contributing your time, energy, and money—caring for a sick friend, mentoring someone, volunteering for a cause

These activities are ones in which, as Arthur Brooks has said, you “cultivate your roots rather than shine your leaves.” Not only will they improve happiness, belonging, and self-worth, they will make you a psychologically “richer” person—more well-rounded, more interesting, and with almost infinite fuel and fodder for conversation and connection.

If-only belief #2: If only I could make sure others knew my positive qualities and successes, I would feel more loved

Many people have worked hard to achieve success—whether in their careers, social lives, or personal growth. And it’s true that success can contribute to happiness, at least for a while. For example, happier people earn more and are better liked. But when it comes to feeling loved, there’s a common instinct that can lead people astray. It’s the belief that feeling loved comes from making sure other people recognize your strengths, talents, or successes: If only they knew. This belief may seem logical, but research suggests it doesn’t quite work that way.

We live in a culture that celebrates visibility. Society lionizes confident, charismatic individuals who openly showcase their accomplishments—CEOs, influencers, entertainers, and top athletes. Social media has amplified this tendency, encouraging people to highlight their best moments and craft an image of success. Given this cultural backdrop, it makes sense that many people feel the need to broadcast their strengths—whether through direct boasting or carefully curated social-media updates. But, as you already know from if-only belief #1, there’s a catch: While people may admire you for your achievements, admiration doesn’t lead to feeling loved.

Let’s consider the costs of digital self-presentation. Digital tools can sustain long-distance relationships, introduce you to communities you might never have found otherwise, and give you opportunities to express your positive qualities and achievements. But at the same time, they can also subtly reshape the way people interact—sometimes in ways that leave them feeling less, rather than more, connected.

One of the most profound shifts in social life over the past two decades is the emphasis on accumulating “followers” on screens rather than deepening friendships in real life. It’s easier than ever to present a curated version of yourself—one that highlights your best moments, your most flattering angles, your biggest wins. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to put your best foot forward, the unintended consequence is that many people find themselves performing connection rather than experiencing it.

Consider a moment from Sonja’s travels: One day, she found herself waiting an hour for a delayed flight in a crowded airport-gate area. Sitting next to her was a striking young woman with long black hair, and Sonja couldn’t help but watch with fascination as the woman spent the entire hour meticulously taking selfies, carefully editing and retouching each one before taking more, and finally posting the best results on Instagram. Was she hoping for a certain number of likes, to get attention from someone special, or did she believe that a particular beautiful photo would win her love?

The impulse to showcase one’s life online is often driven by a natural desire to be seen, appreciated, and valued. But being noticed isn’t the same as being known. A carefully crafted showreel might impress others, but it doesn’t foster the kind of deep, reciprocal understanding that makes people feel truly loved. Furthermore, research suggests that focusing too much on how you’re perceived—on making a good impression—can actually make you feel less connected.

The impulse to showcase one’s life online is often driven by a natural desire to be seen, appreciated, and valued. But being noticed isn’t the same as being known.

At first glance, the ability to craft and control how one appears to others seems like a good thing. After all, why wouldn’t you want to present the most polished version of yourself? For example, when it comes to people outside your inner circle, displaying your strengths, triumphs, and best qualities can certainly make an impression—it may open doors, attract dates, or even command respect. And in some ways, that’s completely natural—first impressions matter, and everyone wants to highlight their best qualities. But when self-presentation takes priority over expressing what lies beneath the surface, one loses opportunities to truly know and be known to others.

Consider several familiar rituals of modern life:

• Carefully tweaking a dating profile to appear more appealing (perhaps even stretching the truth)
• Exchanging quick, surface-level text messages or engaging in small talk instead of meaningful conversations
• Collecting likes that momentarily boost confidence but rarely lead to deeper connection
• Humblebragging, or boasting masked by a complaint or false humility—e.g., “It’s exhausting being the only person my boss trusts with our big client.” (Studies show that this more subtle approach renders people less likable, not more.)

Each of these behaviors is understandable, even instinctive in a world where visibility feels like social currency. But when people focus too much on how they appear to others, they risk missing out on the richness of real, unfiltered connection and end up feeling unseen. Also, at the same time that broadcasting strengths may inspire admiration, they may breed comparison, envy, and even resentment—pushing people away rather than drawing them in. Once again: You cannot feel loved if you’re not known. Indeed, you cannot even feel fully satisfied with your accomplishments—there’s always someone more beautiful, wealthy, or successful.

Recently, Sonja was hiking with a group of friends when one couple pushed back on this idea. “What’s wrong with being proud of our accomplishments? People prefer winners to losers, stars over nobodies! Our friends and partners and acquaintances should be happy for us!” In some ways, they’re right. Your successes—and the hard journey to achieve them—deserve recognition. The people who care about you want to see you thrive. They may even bask in your reflected glory, celebrating alongside you. But when it comes to sharing those accomplishments, the key is balance.

Talking about your successes in the right context—with the right people, at the right time—can deepen connections. When successes are related naturally—without an agenda to impress or obtain approval—others share in your joy, and your connection with them is deepened. But when success becomes something you broadcast rather than something you share, it can have the opposite effect. If the goal is to feel loved, then simply announcing achievements—especially as a way to seek validation—rarely brings what you’re hoping for.

The good news? The people who truly care about you will notice your wins, whether or not you announce them. And when you share them in a way that invites connection rather than admiration, you’re far more likely to experience the sense of being valued—not just for what you’ve accomplished, but for who you are.

If-only belief #3: If only I could hide my shortcomings, I would feel more loved

So far, we’ve explored how chasing success or carefully curating an image doesn’t necessarily lead to feeling more loved. But what about the parts of yourself you don’t want to showcase—your imperfections, struggles, and vulnerabilities. Everyone has flaws, faces setbacks, and experiences moments of self-doubt. Everyone is a work in progress. Yet a common belief persists: To be loved, you must keep your weaknesses well-hidden and present only your best self. If-only belief #3 suggests that revealing anything “less than perfect” will push people away.

At first glance, this belief makes sense. After all, who doesn’t want to be seen in the best possible light? But research—and real-life experience—suggests that molding yourself into someone you’re not can create distance instead of bringing them closer.

The instinct to manage impressions is natural. As highlighted by if-only belief #2, many people shape their self-presentations in ways that invite interest—and will be attractive and compelling to others. But studies show that people don’t always know what will actually make them more appealing in relationships. Sometimes, the very traits you downplay—your quirks, challenges, or even past failures—are what draw people in. And even when you do manage to “get it right,” molding yourself into what someone else wants (e.g., dressing like a rock star because your romantic partner prefers that look) can leave you feeling uncomfortable, inauthentic, or even like an impostor.

Consider the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, the seventeenth-century nobleman who ghostwrote poetic love letters on behalf of his inarticulate friend, Christian, helping him win his beloved Roxane’s heart. The words that Christian sent were beautiful, but he didn’t write them—so no matter how much those words moved Roxane, he couldn’t feel truly known, valued, and loved. In the twenty-first century, many people do something similar—hiding who they are, carefully curating what they reveal, and hoping that others will love them for the version that others presumably want. But, as we’ve repeated before, how can you feel truly loved if the version of you being loved isn’t you?

Furthermore, if you believe your flaws will push people away, you may instinctively reveal only “safe” imperfections—for example, that you never make your bed—or keep parts of yourself completely out of sight. But secret-keeping makes it hard to feel understood. Imagine someone who reveals little of importance to their close friends. They feel misunderstood, but at the same time, they share almost nothing of what truly matters to them. How could their friends possibly understand them if they never get to see the full picture? This same dynamic plays out with family members, partners, and colleagues—when you don’t let others in, you deprive them of the chance to truly know you.

Of course, being open doesn’t mean oversharing. Some people, recognizing the value of honesty and vulnerability, swing too far in the other direction—disclosing too much too quickly, emotionally unloading or “trauma dumping” before the other person is ready to receive it. The key isn’t to lay everything bare all at once—it’s to share in a way that invites interest, receptivity, and concern. Instead of testing relationships with a flood of unfiltered disclosures, think of vulnerability as an invitation, one that allows space for your conversation partner to reciprocate, listen, and support.

When you give other people the chance to observe both your strengths and your struggles, something powerful happens: They don’t just admire you—they grow to know and understand you. And being known is an absolute prerequisite to feeling loved.

If-only belief #4: If only my partner could speak my love language, I would feel more loved

The next if-only belief is especially easy to embrace—and just as critical to examine. You’ll recognize it instantly—the idea that you’ll only feel loved if the other person speaks your love language. Introduced by pastoral counselor Gary Chapman in 2015, the idea that everyone has a preferred love language has become wildly popular, popping up everywhere you look, from song lyrics (SZA’s “Help me understand how you speak your love language”) to marketing taglines (Venmo’s “Security is our love language”). Even present-day dating apps prompt users to declare their top-rated love language from Chapman’s list of five—gifts, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, or verbal affirmation—in hope of finding a match that enhances their chances of relationship success.

There’s a reason this idea resonates so deeply with people—it’s a relatable and intuitive metaphor that offers a simple, straightforward framework for finding appropriate partners and improving relationships. It also suggests an easy complaint when you’re unhappy with your romantic partner—“They’re not speaking my love language!” Indeed, Sonja confesses that she mentions love languages in conversation at least once a week.

However, while the love-languages concept has captured the public imagination, recent research shows that it’s not as scientifically sound as many believe. Yet rather than viewing this as disappointing news, think of it as an opportunity—because what the research actually reveals is that love can be expressed and received in far more varied and flexible ways than a choice from a simple five-category system implies.

What the research reveals is that love can be expressed and received in far more varied and flexible ways than the “love language” categories imply.

Consider these three key findings from recent studies that serve as nails in the coffin of the love-languages hypothesis.

First, most people report appreciating all five languages, not just their single primary one. Indeed, in three studies of more than two hundred thousand participants, between 39 percent and 54 percent did not identify a single dominant love language.

Second, the idea of five distinct love languages doesn’t hold up statistically. A type of statistical analysis called factor analysis has failed to identify five separate categories, suggesting that these “languages” overlap and mush together. And love can be expressed in countless other ways—such as through humor, intellectual chemistry, spiritual connection, creativity, supporting a partner’s family and friends, sending flowers, or simply giving your partner space when they need it.

Finally, having a partner who expresses love in your unique identified love language doesn’t actually predict whether your relationship will be relatively more satisfying or long-lasting. Not surprisingly, research shows that couples tend to be happiest when love is expressed and received in multiple ways, not just one. In a study of 696 individuals in committed relationships, those whose partners used their “top” love language didn’t feel any more loved than those whose partners used their four lower-ranked love languages. This finding even held true for people who reported strongly preferring a particular love language, such as quality time or touch, and it even held true for people in distressed relationships.

Rather than limiting yourself to one “right” way to embrace love, these findings suggest that expanding your perspective can open up even more opportunities to feel loved. Instead of waiting for someone to speak your preferred love language, what if you became fluent in recognizing and appreciating all the ways love is already being expressed in your life? Indeed, focusing too much on just one love language might actually mean missing out on important love experiences.

Our overarching recommendation is the same as one first offered by researchers at the University of Toronto: Rather than focus on a single love language, think of them as ingredients in a well-balanced diet of connection. Different times and circumstances call for emphasizing one love language over another—affectionate touch during a stressful situation, words of affirmation when feeling insecure, or simply quality time when life feels chaotic. Most humans need to express and feel love in multiple ways. Instead of seeing love languages as rigid categories, our view instead emphasizes viewing them as tools for building the feeling that your authentic, true self is known and embraced by the other. A well-titrated balance of different love experiences, which enables you and your partner to express your love for each other more often, and to express it more naturally, is more likely to help both of you to feel more loved.

But we’re also learning more through new research. Three recent studies revealed that two particular love languages—no matter whether people rank them highly them or not—are the strongest predictors of happy relationships and feeling loved by one’s romantic partner (something that took even us by surprise). The strongest predictors—for everyone—of happy relationships and feeling loved are quality time and words of affirmation.

Our suggestion then is to practice these two “languages” more often in daily life. Prioritize quality time by putting away distractions during conversations, sharing activities you both enjoy, and scheduling intentional check-ins to reconnect. And don’t underestimate the power of words—voice to your partner the qualities you love about them, offer encouraging messages, and express gratitude for little things.

If-only belief #5: If only I could get my partner to love me more, I would feel more loved

An often-overlooked truth about feeling loved: You can be loved and still not feel loved. Even if your partner expresses love consistently and generously—offering compliments, warmth, and reassurance—feeling loved isn’t guaranteed. The same goes for love from a parent, sibling, friend, colleague, or even a child. This brings us to the final, and perhaps most important, misconception about feeling loved: the belief that the key to feeling loved is getting the other person to change—specifically, getting them to love you more. 

But is that really the answer?

Before we go any further, an important reality check: If you’ve made genuine, consistent efforts—sharing vulnerably, listening with curiosity, showing compassion—and the love you’re offering is still not requited, then it may be time to shift your focus. Sometimes, no amount of effort and patience can change how someone feels, and in those cases, the healthiest choice is to redirect your energy toward relationships that can truly nourish you. Or as the incomparable Bonnie Raitt famously sang in her moving hit song “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” you can’t make someone feel love if it’s not in their heart.

That said, if your love is reciprocated, but you still don’t often feel loved, there’s cause for hope. 

Yet if-only belief #5 is particularly tricky—because, in some ways, it contains a grain of truth. If your partner suddenly started expressing their love in a dramatically different way tomorrow, you’d probably notice. You’d likely feel more loved—at least for a little while. But here’s why this belief can mislead: That initial boost doesn’t last. Just like a salary raise feels exciting at first but soon becomes the new normal, an increase in your partner’s expressions of love, without a shift in your own approach, is unlikely to lead to a lasting change in how loved you feel.

There are other reasons this if-only belief doesn’t hold up:

• If you struggle with anxious or avoidant attachment, no amount of “additional” love will fully sink in or penetrate inside your heart—until you shift how you process and receive it. The love is there, but it may not feel like enough.
• Trying to get your partner to love you more by focusing solely on their needs tends to backfire. Overfocusing on the other person while neglecting your own needs and boundaries often leads to resentment, not deeper connection.
• If a relationship already feels empty or unfulfilling, more words of affirmation won’t fix what’s missing. Even if your partner repeatedly tells you they love you, it won’t feel satisfying if the relationship itself lacks meaning or emotional depth.

If your person loves you on some level but you still yearn to feel more loved, the shift that needs to happen is not in trying to get them to change—but in the mindsets that you engage with them. These mindsets, which we explore in full in our book How to Feel Loved, include sharing vulnerably and listening deeply, with curiosity, warmth, and acceptance. 

* * *

Many of us hold beliefs about how love works that get in the way of feeling loved. Just as with nutrition, where some foods nourish you while others leave you unsatisfied, some approaches to feeling loved sustain you while others fall short. The good news? Once you recognize what isn’t working, you can make space for the mindsets and skills that do bring happiness and connection into your life.

Excerpted from How to Feel Loved by Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis, published by Harper. Copyright © 2026 by Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

The post How Can We Feel Loved If We Don’t Feel Known? appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

As an introvert and an only child, I was fortunate to learn one skill early on in my life: how to be alone. I didn't even realize it was a skill until people would tell me, offhandedly, that they “hated to be alone” or even that they “couldn’t be alone.”

For many years, the line between lonely and alone was blurry. Some days, I craved connection, and wished for a sibling. Other days, I relished my own company, writing detailed stories about the squirrels living in my backyard, etching charcoal “self-portraits,” and choreographing elaborate dances to the soundtrack of Hercules. My surplus of solitude forced me to find solace in it, and so I did.

As I became an adult, I continued to prioritize finding time for reading and reflection, which remained essential ways for me to recharge and process my experiences. 

And then, I had my son. Becoming a mother changed my relationship to time—alone time in particular. It made my once plentiful solitude more scarce, sacred, and complicated. It has also made me wonder: How do I make the most of this now much rarer resource?

Becoming a mother . . . made my once plentiful solitude more scarce, sacred, and complicated. It has also made me wonder: How do I make the most of this now much rarer resource?

Trying to answer this question led me to the work of Virginia Thomas, an assistant professor of psychology at Middlebury College who studies social and emotional development across our lives.

Like me, Thomas treasured her alone time growing up, using it to read, and to write short stories, poems, and plays. Unlike me, she was one of four siblings, which meant “physical solitude was almost impossible to get.” Instead, she learned to “create a psychological bubble of solitude for myself even when people were around me…. I was always full of ideas and those ideas really germinated when I was able to be in my own world, thinking and dreaming.”

As she grew up and began a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, she found something surprising. While there was a lot of research about the importance of relationships to our developmental well-being, she found hardly anything about the benefits of being alone. Distinct from loneliness—which is alone time we don't want—solitude is chosen, and meant to be rejuvenating and generative, a state she and I had both found throughout our lives.

Since then, Thomas has focused her career on asking and answering two fundamental questions: What are the benefits of solitude, and how do people use solitude well?

Before we get to that, let's clarify a common misunderstanding: Solitude doesn't encompass just any alone time. The time Thomas studies is mindful and intentional. It is not watching a show on Netflix, although that can be part of the overall experience, especially if you're entering into solitude in a depleted or emotionally dysregulated state (hello, caregivers!). 

Distinct from loneliness—which is alone time we don't want—solitude is chosen, and meant to be rejuvenating and generative.

In that case, Thomas says, “sometimes what you need is just to chill for an hour and watch something to [reduce the activity in] your nervous system. Once you do whatever that mindless activity is and get back to your baseline, then you can start to think, feel, and do something that's generative and meaningful to you. But you can't do that right away if you're exhausted.”

The key is continuing to pay attention to your internal state so you know when you're ready for the more generative part of the practice. “It takes discernment to know when you're being mindless with your solitude,” Thomas says, like if all of the sudden watching one episode turns into seven, or if you find yourself scrolling endlessly on Instagram. Social media can be especially harmful, and can obstruct the positive aspects of solitude, Thomas warns.

The benefits of solitude

Cultivating solitude offers an opportunity and a gift, one that philosophers (Stoics in particular), poets, and artists have long recognized: the ability to create a revitalizing refuge that you can return to wherever and whenever. 

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains,” wrote the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, which historians believe was sometime between 170-180 AD. “But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul…. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself.”

Solitude offers more than a recharge. In his Notes on the Melody of Things, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke reflects that “the more solitary a person is, the more solemn, moving and powerful their community.” The solitary part is only half of the story. Rilke’s words, backed by Thomas’s work, suggest that connecting more deeply with ourselves when we're alone allows for deeper relationships with others.

When we’re tired of being social, solitude can replenish our energy “so that we can go back out into the world of relationships and connect from a place where we can actually give something back,” Thomas says. “So many of my [research] participants have said that if they are deprived of the alone time they need, they’re irritable, aggressive, moody, they snap at people, and it harms their relationships. They’ve learned, If I can just go away for a while, I'll come back a better person and be able to relate with you without feeling resentful, drained, or irritable. All of the things we're experiencing in the social world, we bring it into our solitude to digest, reflect on and grow from. It’s a dance between both worlds.”

We all need different amounts of social time and alone time. Depending on our temperament, being social or being solitary may come more naturally to us. If the solitary life is less natural to you—if you avoid it at all costs and loathe the experience of being alone—what do you do then?

Developing solitude skills 

Through her research Thomas has identified skills to help people learn how to enjoy their time alone, and developed a program to teach people those skills. In a current working paper, she found that her program successfully developed those skills. Her solitude skills are organized into three groups—connecting with self, protecting time, and finding a balance between solitude and social connection. 

Connecting with self

To enjoy your time alone, you first need to figure out what you like to do when you’re on your own. Maybe it’s journaling, taking long walks, cooking, or drawing. Perhaps you don’t know yet, and you’re living the question of: What do I like to do when I’m alone? (If so, might I recommend starting a questions practice?)

As anyone who has spent time alone knows, it doesn't always feel peaceful and relaxed—in part because of the emotions and thoughts that can emerge. The ability to face, accept, and listen to your own emotions when you’re alone “might be the most difficult skill,” Thomas told me. 

“In our culture, where we’re very productive, active, and busy, we often put our emotions—and the dilemmas, questions, and conflicts that we have about our lives and relationships—on the back burner,” she said. “By the time we find ourselves with alone time, those emotions come back up in full force. This can be really uncomfortable and distressing.” All of which can make people want to run away from solitude. “The skill here,” she said, “is learning how to sit with those emotions, allowing them to take their turn and their time … to listen to them as messengers of valuable information.”

Better emotional regulation can emerge from learning how to introspect, or the ability to enjoy and be curious about your inner workings. It can mean asking questions like: What do I believe? Who am I? What do I want? “The more we can become comfortable with that self-dialogue, the more rich solitude will be for us,” she says.

Protecting time

“When I first started solitude research I was newly married and I had no children yet, so solitude was easy [to find] back then,” Thomas told me.  

With two children now, finding solitude has become a challenge and requires that she put into practice additional skills to make sure she’s protecting that time (this sounded familiar). These include carving out the time in the first place (think calendar blocks), “negotiating for that time, and validating to myself this is okay, it’s not selfish, I shouldn’t feel guilty for taking this time.” Claiming this time can be especially hard for those embedded in cultures that prize sociability, or when your family or community demands a lot of your time and attention.

Connecting more deeply with ourselves when we're alone allows for deeper relationships with others.

Part of protecting time means using it mindfully. It’s about having the self-awareness to consider what you really need and want so that you don’t regret those choices later. It also means knowing when a few minutes spent Instagram shopping is helpful as a tool to recharge (like in the Netflix example earlier), or if it’s just an avoidance tactic. 

For instance, I used to feel guilty about using my small shard of free time in the evening to watch some TV. At the same time, I was too exhausted after putting my son to bed to immediately start reading and journaling, activities I enjoy, but that require some cognitive and emotional space. I’ve found that watching a show helps me decompress enough to be able to enter into a more nourishing solitude space. (And to accept that some nights, journaling is only a sentence or two.)

Finding balance

Keep an eye out for physical signals that you need solitude. This might be feeling depleted or overstimulated. Or, if you’ve had enough alone time, you might feel lonely or bored. 

These signals can be confusing. For instance, if we feel bored at the beginning of our time alone, that may indicate not that we need to call a friend, but rather that we haven’t identified the activities that will prove most meaningful for us in solitude. It could be a sign that we haven’t yet identified what we need from being alone.

“The function of boredom is not to make us bored, it is a call to action,” writes neuroscience professor James Danckert. “It is telling us that what we are doing now is failing to satisfy us in some important way. But its purpose is not to just push us into any action. Boredom encourages us to choose actions that give expression to who we are.”

Knowing when to stay in solitude or return to social life requires discernment and inner knowing. Are you choosing actions that give expression to who you really are?  

This points to what Thomas thinks is the best part of cultivating solitude: It brings you closer to yourself so you’re better able to pick up on the little signals of what you need and want—not just when you’re alone, but all the time. “When I don’t have time to be alone, I miss myself, I long to reconnect,” she says. “That's the real treasure of solitude.”

The post Solitude Is a Skill appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

He was finally, blessedly, alone. No crying baby or clingy mistress to interrupt the whirling of his brilliant mind or sap his creative juices.

And yet, the artist still wasn’t satisfied. In January 1920, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke recounted one of our most enduring human tensions. “In addition to my voice which points beyond me, there is still the sound of that small longing which originates in my solitude and which I have not entirely mastered,” he writes. “It is a whistling-woeful tone that blows through a crack in this leaky solitude—it calls out, alas, and summons others to me!”

That whistling-woeful tone is one I’ve heard before too. As an introvert and a writer, I crave time to be alone with my thoughts, to better understand what I’m thinking and feeling. Less romantically, I find myself pulled toward work in the evenings after putting my kid to bed rather than socializing with friends, even when I know that human connection is likely a healthier way to spend my time than logging more hours at my laptop. Checking items off my to-do list is a short-term, ephemeral pleasure, but not a long-term recipe for satisfaction and happiness.  

Here is the conundrum: Without enough alone time, I feel disconnected from myself. But too much alone time makes me feel like I’m losing part of myself, too—the part of me that comes alive when I’m with other people. When weeks go by without seeing friends or with only superficial experiences of connection, I feel a different kind of yearning to be seen, heard, and understood. I’ve often wondered: How do I find a balance? And is that even the right question to ask?  

An irresolvable tension

In 1791, physician Johann Georg Zimmermann published a book that, despite its downer title, became a smash hit. Titled Solitude Considered With Respect to Its Dangerous Influence Upon the Mind and Heart, it pointed to an enduring question about the human condition. In his own book, the History of Solitude, David Vincent writes, “Zimmermann’s treatise was a way station in a debate about social engagement and disengagement that stretches back to classical times and has acquired new urgency in our own era. Current anxieties about the ‘loneliness epidemic’ and the fate of interpersonal relations in digital culture are reformulations of dilemmas that have surfaced in prose and verse for more than two millennia.”

Perhaps we continue to return to this question because there is no real permanent sense of “balance” to be found. Andy Merolla, a professor of communications at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that it “seems to be one of the most fundamental and irresolvable tensions.”

Without enough alone time, I feel disconnected from myself. But too much alone time makes me feel like I’m losing part of myself, too—the part of me that comes alive when I’m with other people.

At an individual level, consider how we develop our identities in the first place. According to attachment theory, children need to feel a sense of safety and security with their caregivers so they’re able to venture out into the world to explore and build independent identities. Interdependence begets independence. Later, as we develop relationships with our romantic partners, we must continue to find the boundaries between others and self by “creating the sense of a ‘we’ identity without losing ‘me’ and ‘you,’” says Merolla.   

And there is another dimension of this ancient dilemma that causes it to endure—perhaps in an irresolvable way.

Solitude masking a desire for control

At its core, the struggle to find balance is also a struggle to wrest control and certainty from an unpredictable world. Solitude, Merolla points out, gives us a kind of illusion of control that isn’t present in our social relationships, which can be variable and messy. 

When you choose to spend your night watching Netflix or journaling, you know what to expect. When you go to a party, it’s less predictable. It can be hard, then, to ever know: How much does our desire to be alone come from a genuine desire to be with ourselves and how much is about avoiding the unknown? Further complicating this tension is the idea that self-care and compassion are important components of well-being. But when does staying home become an excuse to maintain control? 

Alone time becomes even more seductive if we use it not only to recharge but to work toward professional or personal goals. Then, it can lead to the “direct acquisition of rewards, unlike social interaction which is more variable and can lead to disappointment,” Merolla explains.

The art of choosing the unpredictable

While we may be able to achieve more on our own these days—supercharged by technological advancements and remote work—we also know that a myopic focus on goal achievement does not typically result in what philosophers and scientists would call the good life. Indeed, in the longest running scientific study designed to understand the factors that make for a good life, researchers found that the most significant factor in happiness and longevity is the strength of our relationships to others.

The question, then, is not only how do we integrate social connection into our lives but how do we integrate unpredictability into it? 

The key might be broadening the scope for what counts as social connection, letting go of our search for the perfect relationship or ideal social experience, and reminding ourselves of the positives of unpredictability. 

How much does our desire to be alone come from a genuine desire to be with ourselves and how much is about avoiding the unknown?

Let’s start with something more basic. What do we mean by social connection? According to Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who also helped lead the long-running study mentioned above, our relationships can constitute just about anyone who you regularly interact or socialize with. It could be a romantic partner, friend, or coworker, or it could be your barista, neighbor, or the acquaintance you see on your morning commute. Any of these connections can contribute to greater well-being. Indeed, research suggests that relational diversity, or cultivating connections across our lives—including with strong ties, like a romantic partner, and weak ties, like a stranger—is a significant contributor to well-being. 

In a commencement address, the writer Kurt Vonnegut once pointed out that many of the interpersonal conflicts we have in our marriages stem from wanting one person to be an entire community. To paraphrase him: We cannot be “whole societies” to each other. Instead, he advises, “everybody here [should] join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.”

Vonnegut’s larger point is not that we should all surround ourselves with morons, but that we’d be well-served to choose the messiness and imperfections of connection when we can.  

A simple place to start

“A lot of us have very high expectations for ourselves and other people, which is a really good thing, but that can also raise expectations in a way that is unrealistic,” Merolla told me. That can make us unwilling to engage in a social situation unless we’re confident of meeting those expectations.

To counter this, we can ask ourselves questions to “come to terms with the challenges of connection” and the patience required to realize the benefits of relationships. These are questions like: What do I need and want out of my relationships? How can I come to terms with the imperfections of others and my own—and the notion of a perfect relationship or interaction? Am I okay with the fact that I may pursue these aspects of relationships and fail, and that doesn’t mean I’ve done something wrong? 

Exploring these questions can help us find value not only in certain types of relationships—for instance, the ease and warmth you might feel with your closest friend—but with other more complicated ones too.

The question, then, is not only how do we integrate social connection into our lives but how do we integrate unpredictability into it? 

Another question: How might relationships be unpredictably positive? Unpredictability tends to have a negative valence, making it feel threatening or stressful. But social interaction can also surprise us with how good it makes us feel: lifting us from a bad mood, helping us discover a new side of ourselves, or simply allowing us to process a challenging experience. Positive relationships, even if they’re sometimes unpredictable, are important ways that we manage stress, Waldinger said.

Indeed, this seemed to be part of Rilke’s mental health strategy; throughout his life, he wrote thousands of letters, using them to find the balance between connection and solitude, to allow vulnerability and messiness to puncture the illusion of control. 

Just like there are many valuable kinds of relationships, there are also many ways to connect. If a three-hour dinner feels too ambitious (or impossible with other obligations), even smaller gestures of connection count. Merolla suggests one simple, though not always easy, step: Reach out to someone you’ve been wanting to connect with, and let them know you were thinking about them. 

“Sometimes we think people don’t want to connect with us as much as they do, and we can feel like the time for certain relationships has passed,” he says. “But there's something wonderful about knowing someone was thinking about you. Even if the person doesn't respond, it doesn't mean you did something incorrect. It’s just the messiness of interdependence.”

The post The Art of Balancing Solitude and Connection appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Questions flow from curiosity. If we want to live and love the questions of our lives—How to live a life of purpose? Who am I in the aftermath of a big change or transition? What kind of person do I want to become as I grow older?—we must first ask them into conscious existence.

Many people have written entire books defining and redefining curiosity. But for me, the most helpful definition comes from a philosophy professor, Perry Zurn, and a systems neuroscientist, Dani Bassett: “For too long—and still too often—curiosity has been oversimplified,” they write, typically “reduced to the simple act of raising a hand or voicing a question, especially from behind a desk or a podium. . . . Scholars generally boil it down to ‘information-seeking’ behavior or a ‘desire to know.’ But curiosity is more than a feeling and certainly more than an act. And curiosity is always more than a single move or a single question.”

Curiosity works, they write, by “linking ideas, facts, perceptions, sensations and data points together.” It is complex, mutating, unpredictable, and transformational. It is, fundamentally, an act of connection, an act of creating relationships between ideas and people. Asking questions then, becoming curious, is not just about wanting to find the answer—it is also about our need to connect, with ourselves, with others, with the world.

And this, perhaps, is why our deeper questions are hardly ever satisfied by Google or by fast, easy answers from the people I refer to as the Charlatans of Certainty—the gurus, influencers, and “experts” peddling simple solutions to all the complex problems you face. This is also the reason there is no one-size-fits-all formula for cultivating curiosity—particularly the kind that allows us to live and love our questions, especially the questions that are hard to love, like “How can I live with chronic pain?” or “How do I extricate myself from a challenging relationship?” This kind of curiosity is a special flavor.

Asking questions is not just about wanting to find the answer—it is also about our need to connect, with ourselves, with others, with the world.

It’s easy to get curious about queries separate from ourselves (“Why do only some leaves turn colors in the fall?”) or even about exciting unknowns in our lives (“What’s the surprise my family is planning for my birthday?”). It’s harder to access a sense of curiosity about the parts of our lives that are scary or painful. In the moment, it feels easier to distract ourselves from that pain. Or we may let it hijack us: Our fears and anxieties take the wheel, driving us to places we’d rather not be.

In other words, curiosity can disappear just when we need it most.

In fact, some research suggests questions can serve as an antidote to the anxiety that can arise in times of great uncertainty.

One study, conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Pennsylvania State University, analyzed surveys from 6,750 adults that were done approximately once a year for 10 years to investigate whether there was a connection between something called “need for cognition” and their symptoms of anxiety and depression.

The “need for cognition” scale measures how much someone is drawn to the act of thinking—whether they relish deep thought or seek to avoid it at all costs. Though need for cognition is not the same as curiosity, there are some associations: Generally speaking, the lower your need for cognition score, the less curious you are likely to be, and the less tolerance you have for uncertainty and ambiguity. After analyzing survey results across 10 years, the researchers found that, indeed, higher need for cognition scores were associated with fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression.

One takeaway from the research is that the more you can anchor yourself in questions, letting them fuel your curiosity and deepen your understanding of who you are and what you want, the less anxious you’ll be.

When people feel anxious or depressed, they’re often wedded to a particular thought or an idea of how they think the future will turn out. This means they’re closing themselves off to opportunities, explains Nur Hani Zainal, previously a postdoctoral research associate at Harvard Medical School and a coauthor of the research. “Asking questions opens up different possibilities. If someone can be curious, they are less likely to narrow in on one idea that could be generating that feeling of stuckness, or apprehension about the future.”

How, I wondered, could I start to approach uncertainty with curiosity? What would it mean to cultivate a unique kind of curiosity—one that’s accessible even in the most challenging moments?

The more you can anchor yourself in questions, letting them fuel your curiosity and deepen your understanding of who you are and what you want, the less anxious you’ll be.

Once I started digging, I found all sorts of tools and ideas—ranging from simple (personal prompts) to more complex (psychedelic therapy).

One of the simpler practices that can help is called “temporal distancing,” which is a fancy way of saying mental time travel. The idea is that by imagining how a past or future version of ourselves would handle a particular challenge, we can gain more perspective on our big questions today.

For instance, imagine you’re uncertain about your career after a layoff or decision to pivot to a new industry. What’s been helpful to me has been imagining two conversations. One with my younger self as she was heading into another difficult and uncertain time. What guidance would my present self share with her? And then, a conversation with my sage, future self. How would she guide me in this moment?

Embedded in these conversations are two questions that you can ask yourself to help you get unstuck from painful uncertainty: Who do I want to become a year from now, and what choices could I make now to put me on that path? And, if I could talk to myself five years ago, what would I say to prepare that self for what’s to come?

Asking questions like these can get our curiosity, and thereby ourselves, moving in the direction we want to go.

Excerpted from How to Fall in Love with Questions. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Weingarten.

The post In Uncertain Times, Get Curious appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

It wasn’t a particularly memorable fall Saturday morning, except for the fact that my younger daughter, Dani, was out of sorts. My family and I were about to pile into the car for her soccer game, normally one of the highlights of the week, but Dani was just not feeling it. All morning I had tried to figure out what was bothering her, and my usual motivational tricks to shift her into a different headspace were failing miserably. When we finally made it into the car and I glanced in the rearview mirror, I saw her head flopped back on the headrest, her expression downcast.

Serendipitously, just a few minutes later one of my favorite Journey songs came on the radio. It wasn’t long before I was pounding the steering wheel and belting out the chorus, admittedly with excessive enthusiasm: Don’t stop believing . . . hold on to that feeeeeeeling! (No judgment, please.) In part, I was trying to shake the grump out of the back seat, but mostly I just really love that song. After a minute or so I looked back to see Dani bopping her head, smiling, and singing along. By the time we pulled up to the soccer field, she was ready. Opening her door, she tore out of the car, barely remembering to grab her cleats. A cheesy power ballad from the 1980s was able to do what no parental pep talk from me could—shift my daughter into an altogether different emotional gear.

As my wife and I hauled lawn chairs toward the soccer field, I thought about what a difference those four minutes and eleven seconds of Journey might have made for her that day. It was such a small thing: a song on the car radio. But it had completely reshaped her emotional state, perhaps the type of game she was about to have, and even, in the future, her memories of this day.

I’ve been teaching about emotions for more than twenty years now. I know that calming sounds are effective at temporarily lowering blood pressure, that hearing birds twitter and chirp is linked with reductions in anxiety and paranoia, and that rats who have their sense of smell surgically removed show classic signs of depression. I’ve leveraged sensory experiences in my research time and again to alter the way people feel (which we need to do before we can learn how to help people manage their emotions). And yet, despite this knowledge and experience, if you had asked me as recently as a few years ago whether I purposely activate my senses to manage my emotions when I hit a slump, the answer would have been a resounding no.

It turns out there is plenty of research about how the senses affect our emotions, but very little on how to strategically use our senses to modulate our feelings. The more you look, the more you find a gap between what we know intuitively and what we put into practice. And this is where the opportunity lies.

While countless sensations a day don’t activate strong emotional responses, many do. There is an evolutionary reason for this: Emotions supercharge the meaning behind certain sensations we perceive to drive our behavior. In other words, when sensation activates an emotional response (fear of the tree limb hanging over your head), the sensory experience (the rattling of branches in the wind) is far more impactful. If the fear didn’t arise, you’d be much less likely to avoid walking directly under that perilous branch.

Emotion is like the glue that holds the sensory information and the lesson learned together, so when that same sensory input floods our system next time, we know what to do. This is why the memories we form are stronger and reverberate in our awareness longer when they have an emotional tinge, often due to sensory experience. For instance, the smell of Marlboro cigarettes will forever conjure memories of car rides with my dad, while a whiff of potato pancakes reminds me of holidays at my bubby’s house no matter what time of year it is.

Sensory experiences don’t have to be haphazard moments that randomly affect our emotions; they can be harnessed to proactively shift our emotional landscape.

Sensory experiences are such a foundational part of our everyday lives, and have been for so long, that it’s easy to forget what an effect they have on us—I certainly did. And they don’t have to be haphazard moments that randomly affect our emotions; they can be harnessed to proactively shift our emotional landscape. I didn’t have to wait for Journey to come on that day. I could have seen my daughter’s mood sliding precipitously downhill and queued up a playlist on my own.

The irony is that while I was fully aware of how powerful our senses are for shifting our emotions, I still didn’t use that information in the moments with my daughter before we got in the car, nor in countless moments before that in my life when I was the one who needed help regulating my emotions.

Knowing which senses, and what triggers for those senses work for you, is the first step. And that’s as easy as experimenting with the five sensory channels and figuring out which ones give you the biggest, most immediate benefits without excessive cost. So, before we go on, take a moment to consider the following questions:

1. Which one or two of the five senses pack the biggest punch?

2. And which comes with the lowest cost?

For me, the answer to question 1 would be taste and sound—food and music are both powerful shifters for me—but question 2 helps me hone my go-to shifter, because for me leaning too far into taste does come with a cost. 

The sensory delight of dessert, I admit, has a potent effect on my emotional state: My worries and cares melt away as soon as the chocolate peanut butter cup hits my lips. But if I used this tool every time I felt stressed, my health would suffer, undermining the whole point of the tool. Taste (and chocolate peanut butter cups) are one of the great pleasures of being alive, so I’d never deny myself completely, but as my sensory shifter go-to music is the one. It’s immediate, it’s effective, it’s zero cost. I have a playlist on my phone for different moods I want to shift into, and I use them multiple times a week. And the key is that they’re already there on my phone, just a button tap away.

In the midst of big emotions, we’re often blind to where these doors are, or even that they exist. So I’d suggest identifying a few sensory shifters right now that you’d like to try using intentionally and give them a test drive.

The real tool here is often just noticing these opportunities and focusing on the sensory experience of that task, instead of letting it slip by unnoticed. And look for those “sensory bundles,” such as cooking or immersion in nature; experiences that braid more than one sensory channel together activate multiple sensory pathways in the brain, generating a multipronged experience. 

From Shift: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don't Manage You by Ethan Kross, published by Crown. Copyright © 2025 by Ethan Kross. All rights reserved.

Disclosure: Evan Nesterak of the Behavioral Scientist worked as an editorial consultant on Shift.

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The post What a 1980s Power Ballad Taught Me About Emotion appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Meditations for Mortals is about how the world opens up once you realize you’re never going to sort your life out. It’s about how marvelously productive you become when you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive; and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely need to do any of them at all).

It’s about how absorbing, even magical, life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is; how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others; and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never be fully resolved.

In short: it’s about what changes once you grasp that life as a limited human being—in an era of infinite tasks and opportunities, facing an unknowable future, alongside other humans who stubbornly insist on having their own personalities—isn’t a problem you’ve got to try to solve.

The 28 chapters in the book are intended as a guide to a different way of taking action in the world, which I call “imperfectionism”—a freeing and energizing outlook based on the conviction that your limitations aren’t obstacles to a meaningful existence, which you must spend your days struggling to overcome, en route to some imaginary point when you’ll finally get to feel fulfilled. On the contrary, accepting them, stepping more fully into them, is precisely how you build a saner, freer, more accomplished, socially connected and enchantment-filled life—and never more so than at this volatile and anxiety-inducing moment in history.

The day is never coming when all the other stuff will be "out of the way," so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now.

If you decide to read the book at the suggested pace of one chapter per day or thereabouts, my hope is that it will function as a four-week "retreat of the mind" in the midst of daily life—a way of actually living this philosophy here and now, and doing more of what matters to you as a result, instead of mentally filing it away as yet another system you might try to implement one day, should you ever get a moment to spare. After all, as we’ll see, one main tenet of imperfectionism is that the day is never coming when all the other stuff will be "out of the way," so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now.

So I sincerely hope you find this book useful. To be completely honest with you, though, I wrote it for myself.

In my late twenties, I started working as a general feature writer at the Guardian newspaper in London, where my job, upon arriving at the office in the morning, was to be assigned some topic currently in the news—the fate of refugees fleeing an unfolding geopolitical crisis, say, or why green smoothies were suddenly so popular—and then to turn in a big-picture, intelligent-seeming 2,000-word article on it by 5 p.m. the same day.

An hour or two before deadline, my editor would begin pacing the floor near my desk, clicking his fingers to expel nervous energy, and wondering aloud why I wasn’t closer to finishing. The answer (as I doubtless told him on several occasions) is that writing an intelligent-seeming 2,000-word article in seven hours flat, on a topic about which you previously knew nothing, is a fundamentally preposterous undertaking. Still, it had to be done—and so my days at the Guardian were shot through with the feeling of being on the back foot, fighting against time, and needing to buckle down immediately, if I were to stand any chance of closing the gap.

Not that I can really blame my editor for any of this. By that point in my life, I was already on intimate terms with the feeling of playing catch-up; indeed, few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than the vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to a minimum standard of output, if I’m to stave off an ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head.

Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than the vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back . . . if I’m to stave off an ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head.

Sometimes, it felt like all I needed was a bit more discipline; at other times, I was sure the answer lay in a new system for managing my tasks and goals, which I’d track down just as soon as I got this article on smoothies out of the way. I devoured self-help books, tried meditation, and explored Stoicism, growing slightly more anxious each time another new technique proved not to be the silver bullet. Always over the horizon, meanwhile, hovered the fantasy of one day "getting on top of things"—where "things" could mean anything from emptying my inbox to figuring out how romantic relationships were supposed to work—so that the truly meaningful part of life, the really real part, could finally begin.

I know now, though I didn’t back then, that I’m not alone in feeling this way. Frankly, I could hardly be less alone. Hundreds of conversations and email exchanges I’ve had since 2021, when I published a book about the challenge of using time well, have convinced me that this sense of not having life nailed down just yet—and needing to exert oneself harder and harder, if only to avoid slipping further back—is close to universal these days.

The younger people I encountered seemed utterly daunted by the task of getting life into working order, while many older ones were dismayed that by forty or fifty they apparently still hadn’t managed it, and were starting to wonder if they ever would. Certainly, it was clear that achieving wealth or status didn’t cause the problem to go away—which makes sense, since in the modern world, external success is often the result of being even more enmeshed in the desperate game of catch-up than everyone else. "Most successful people," as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, "are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity."

The most common form of the anxious feeling I’m trying to pinpoint here is sheer, overwhelming busyness, the sense of having far too much to do in the time available for doing it.

But it takes other forms as well. For some it manifests as imposter syndrome, the belief that there’s a basic level of expertise that pretty much everyone else has attained, but that you haven’t, and that you won’t be able to stop second-guessing yourself until you get there. It also arises, for many of us, in the feeling of not yet having cracked the code of intimate relationships, so that for all our outward accomplishments we feel thwarted on a daily basis by the bewildering complexities of dating, marriage, or parenting. For still others, the falling-behind feeling is mainly a matter of believing they ought to be doing more to address the national and global crises unfolding around them, but having no idea what they could do, as individuals, that could possibly make any difference.

The thread that runs through all these, though, is the idea that there exists some way of being in the world, some way of mastering the situation of being a human in the twenty-first century, that you have yet to discover. And that you won’t be able to relax into your life until you do.

Our ceaseless efforts to get into the driver’s seat of life seem to sap it of the very sense of aliveness that makes it worth living in the first place.

Yet the worst of it is that our efforts to address the problem seem only to exacerbate it. In my book Four Thousand Weeks I labeled one version of this "the efficiency trap," to describe the way that when you get better and faster at dealing with an incoming supply of anything, you often end up busier and more stressed. Email is the classic example: vowing to address the deluge, you start replying more promptly, triggering more replies, many of which you’ll need to reply to; plus, you acquire a reputation for being unusually responsive on email, so more people consider it worthwhile to email you in the first place. Moreover, as you struggle to handle everything, your days begin to fill with less important tasks—because your belief that there must be a way to do it all means you flinch from making difficult decisions about what’s truly worth your limited time.

But my conversations helped me recognize a deeper issue, too, which is the way our ceaseless efforts to get into the driver’s seat of life seem to sap it of the very sense of aliveness that makes it worth living in the first place. The days lose what the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa evocatively calls their "resonance." The world feels dead; and for all our efforts to get more done, we find ourselves somehow less able to bring about the results we were seeking.

It happens even when our attempts to get in control of things do work. You manage to make yourself meditate daily, and suddenly it feels soul-crushingly boring to do so; or you get around to organizing a date night with your spouse—because everyone says that’s how to keep the spark alive—but the whole thing makes the two of you so self-conscious that it’s fated to descend into bickering, and you end the evening feeling like failures.

In my days as a "productivity geek," I was always embracing some new system for designing my life, and as I downloaded the relevant app, or purchased the required stationery, I’d feel excited, even intoxicated: I was on the verge of great things! Then, within a day or two, my new schedule would seem dismal and lifeless, another list of chores I had to slog through, and I’d find myself angrily resenting the jerk who had the temerity to dictate how I spent my time in this manner—even though the jerk in question was me.

Meditations for Mortals is my attempt to begin where the sort-your-life-out, get-on-top-of-everything school of thinking fails, and instead go somewhere more meaningful and productive, and importantly also more fun.

These are admittedly minor examples. But this loss of aliveness also helps explain the epidemic of burnout, which isn’t merely a matter of exhaustion, but of the emptiness that comes from years of pushing oneself, machine-like, to do more and more, without it ever feeling like enough. The increasingly rage-filled and conspiratorial character of modern political life might even be seen as a desperate attempt, by people starved of resonance, to try to feel anything at all.

The essential trouble, as Rosa tells it, is that the driving force of modern life is the fatally misguided idea that reality can and should be made ever more controllable—and that peace of mind and prosperity lie in bringing it ever more fully under our control.

Meditations for Mortals is my attempt to begin where the sort-your-life-out, get-on-top-of-everything school of thinking fails, and instead go somewhere more meaningful and productive, and importantly also more fun. (The chapters draw heavily on my email newsletter The Imperfectionist, and on many generous responses from its readers.)

Rather than fueling the fantasy of one day bringing everything under control, this book takes it as a given that you'll never get on top of everything. It starts from the position that you'll never feel fully confident about the future, or fully understand what makes other people tick—and that there will always be too much to do. This isn't one of those books promising that if you implement its contents flawlessly, you'll have the ideal system for running your life. Human finitude ensures that's never coming. Which is exactly the reason to dive wholeheartedly into this life, now.

Excerpted from Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by Oliver Burkeman. All rights reserved.

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The post The Imperfect Life appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

It’s that time of year again when everything becomes possible. You’re going to run that marathon, master that second language, or start playing the piano. In fact, you’ll do all three. There’s an energy this time of year, a renewed sense of momentum and hope.

Unless there’s not. 

It’s also that time of year when the expectation of reinvention and dramatic jumps can feel more like a shackle than a springboard. Forget personal development, you might be wondering how the heck you’re going to make it through the next 365 days.

Some years, I find myself making those big plans. All of a sudden, as if possessed by the Spirit of New Year’s Resolutions, I start researching things to sign up for. I make a calendar; I color code it. I arrange travel six months in advance. 

Other years, I lie awake at three in the morning, my mind a muddle, family, friends, finances, and work twisting in my mind. By 3:30 a.m., I’ve worked them into a tangle. And because it’s winter, I’ve got another four and a half hours in the dark to worry the knot.

Surprisingly, English has a word for this feeling. Uhtceare means “lying awake before dawn and worrying.” Uht (oot) is Old English for “the restless hour before dawn,” while ceare (key are-a) signifies “care and sorrow.” (I learned the word from Mark Forsyth, author of several charming books about the English language, including The Horologicon, where my predawn anxiety found its label, as well as The Etymologicon. Both are a balm for uhtceare.) 

However you’re starting the year—with uhtceare, a renewed sense of momentum and hope, or something in between—your aim is the same: make this year intentional and meaningful.

To help you get going, I’ve compiled a set of articles from the Behavioral Scientist archive. Each offers a different way to navigate what lies in front of you. I’ve selected pieces that go beyond goal-setting or willpower. The selections aren’t recipes. Instead, they offer richer, more diverse ways to think about making progress on the things you care about. The insights are straightforward enough to put into practice right away, yet deep enough to carry you beyond the start and through the hiccups and bobbles along the way. 

I hope that the ideas increase your chances of success. If uhtceare is characterized by repetitive stasis, its antidote may be found in movement; success has its origin in the Latin succedere, a combination of sub meaning next to/after and cedere meaning go/move. 

So let’s get moving.

— Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief

Overcome the discomfort that comes with trying something new

Get Comfortable with Feeling Uncomfortable
By Ayelet Fishbach

Self-growth isn’t always easy, or comfortable. Reclaiming discomfort as progress can help you learn more and stay more motivated.

How to Channel Your Mind’s Inner Chatter
By Ethan Kross

Our inner voice functions well much of the time, but it can also lead to chatter—the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn introspection into a curse. Here are strategies for breaking that cycle, both in yourself and when supporting others.

Chart the paths progress could take

What Shape Does Progress Take? Don’t Assume It’s a Straight Line
By Lee Anne Fennell

As we determine where to allocate effort and money, when to keep going and when to give up, different production functions call for different strategies. Yet, we rarely consider what production functions can tell us about our progress.

To Achieve Your Goals, Lump and Slice
By Lee Anne Fennell

Humans are remarkably sensitive to how we bundle and divide tasks and choices. We can use that quirk to help realize our aspirations.

Do less, better

A New Philosophy of Productivity
By Cal Newport

The problem is not with productivity in a general sense, but instead with a specific faulty definition that has taken hold in recent decades. Here’s what should replace it.

Doing Less Is Hard, Especially When We’re Overwhelmed
By Yael Schonbrun and Leidy Klotz

The more we have on our minds the harder it becomes to do less. But there’s hope.

To Change a Habit, Get Extreme. Progressively.
By Nir Eyal

Starting a new habit is very different from breaking an existing one. If you want to give something up, try this advice.

Get others involved

To Solve Problems Before They Happen, You Need to Unite the Right People
By Dan Heath

When everyone was telling teenagers to “just say no” to drugs and alcohol, a forward-thinking team in Iceland was figuring out what teenagers could say yes to. The results are nothing short of revolutionary.

The Power of the Stora Rör Swimming Association and Other Local Institutions
By Erik Angner

Economist Elinor Ostrom believed in the power of economics to “bring out the best in humans.” The way to do it, she thought, was to help them build community.

Take a deeper look at how we change (and how we change our behavior)

Speaking with Katy Milkman about “How to Change”
By Elizabeth Weingarten

"The key lesson of my career studying behavior change was that the flashy shots, the big shiny goal, or one-size-fits-all thing we reach for—that’s not how you achieve it. It’s the smart, strategic . . . let’s tailor the strategy approach that really works."

To Kickstart a New Behavior, Copy and Paste
By Katy Milkman

We have a tendency to think other people know the same things we do, which means we often miss out on a great strategy for behavior change.

Free up your thinking

“Your Ideas Are Not Your Identity”: Adam Grant on How to Get Better at Changing Your Mind
By Evan Nesterak

"I do not want to have both-sides conversations anymore. Whenever somebody says, here’s the other side, my first question is, Can you tell me what the third angle and the fourth look like?"

Remembering Daniel Kahneman: A Mosaic of Memories and Lessons
By Evan Nesterak

Identifying errors in judgment and choice wasn’t just the focus of his research; it was something Kahneman seemed called to do, particularly as it applied to his own thinking. “I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking,” he said.

Get clear-eyed on when to quit

Mental Models to Help You Cut Your Losses
By Annie Duke

When should you hold ’em and when should you fold ’em? Use this set of decision-making tools to help you identify when it’s time to move on and find the courage to do so.

Think smarter about your future self

The Time Traveling Mistake We Make When We Procrastinate
By Hal Hershfield

In thinking about the future in a merely surface level way, we end up traveling to a different future than the one we meant to go to.

The post Inspiration for Your Intentions (and Warding Off Your Anxieties) in the New Year appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

In June 2012, North Waziristan’s Taliban leader issued a fatwa banning polio vaccination campaigns. Other Pakistani Taliban leaders in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and South Waziristan quickly followed suit. Pamphlets dispersed throughout these regions made it known that anyone involved in the vaccination campaign moving forward would be subject to great loss and harm.

That harm came swiftly.

In Karachi, a doctor working for the polio program was shot while traveling through a resistant part of the city. One by one, polio vaccinators—predominantly women working for just a few dollars a day—were being targeted and killed. Police officers assigned to protect them would soon meet the same fate. By 2015, an estimated 70 polio vaccine workers had been assassinated.

It wasn’t because the Taliban was against vaccination. In fact, militant groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan had been facilitating access and guaranteeing vaccine coverage in their territories for years. But in these particular conflict-affected areas, polio eradication was a powerful leverage point. The communities stifling polio campaigns backed by the United States and Western nations were the same communities being brought to their knees by U.S. drone strikes. In this political minefield, anti-Western narratives easily took root. The Taliban’s 2012 directive was firm: stop the drone strikes and we’ll allow vaccination.

The Taliban’s directive was firm: stop the drone strikes and we’ll allow vaccination.

The unexpected recipient of that message was the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the only public health program that sends vaccinators door-to-door in remote, underserved communities throughout the world. They aim to reach every child under-five with polio drops, multiple times, until virus transmission is interrupted.

Equipped with vaccine coolers, vaccination teams set off in the earliest hours of the morning. They often walk for miles to reach communities left behind by health systems and basic infrastructure. Outside of every home they visit, they leave a small mark. Sometimes these markings look like fractions, denoting the number of children vaccinated out of the total number of children living there. Other times they are big X’s, signifying a household that refused the vaccine altogether. In areas that lack centralized and accurate data on their residents, these symbols scrawled across doorways, gates, and makeshift entryways ensure that every child is counted and, ideally, protected.

For nearly a decade, we worked as behavior change specialists for UNICEF’s polio eradication team, one of the core member-organizations of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. We were just two out of hundreds of national and international civil servants, alongside tens of thousands of frontline workers striving toward the same, singular objective—eliminate polio from the Earth, so that no child has to suffer from a lifetime of preventable paralysis. In the 1980s and 90s, polio was paralyzing over 350,000 kids each year. Because of efforts like this one, by 2011 that number was down to several hundred cases a year.

The global strategy to build demand for the polio vaccine was to increase knowledge and awareness of the dangers of polio among parents with young children. Before each campaign, radio and TV spots would air, and thousands of health workers and community mobilizers would take to the streets, often with megaphones in hand, to announce campaign dates and to remind parents to make sure that their children were home when the vaccinators came knocking. By 2011, that approach had successfully eradicated wild poliovirus in all but three countries in the world: Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

One by one, polio vaccinators—predominantly women working for just a few dollars a day—were being targeted and killed . . . By 2015, an estimated 70 polio vaccine workers had been assassinated.

In northern Nigeria and other countries, there had been incidents of rock throwing, knife wielding, and even cases of vaccinators getting kidnapped by aggressive resistors to the vaccine. It was not uncommon for communities to furnish a list of demands in exchange for vaccinating their children. These would often include paved roads or reliable electricity: things that were vital, if difficult, to deliver. The program was no stranger to resistance, but the violence erupting in Pakistan was unlike anything the public health world had ever witnessed.

At first, we saw the bans in the same way we saw the rocks, blades, and lists brandished at vaccinators: reckless, instead of relatable. How could they use their children as a bargaining chip? How could they not want to protect their children?

We began to realize that we were asking the wrong questions.

Behind the polio bans were some of the poorest, most marginalized communities in the world. Like all parents, they wanted the best for their kids. For us, that meant vaccines. For them, it meant safe roads, school buildings, and health clinics. It meant clear and harmless skies. Doorways free of fractions that might turn their homes into targets. Taliban leaders may not have been fully representing community views, but everyone was trying to protect their children in the way that made the most sense for their context—a context we didn’t fully understand.

Complicating matters further was the recent news that the CIA used a door-to-door vaccine campaign in 2011 to confirm Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Their fraudulent campaign was for hepatitis B, but it didn’t matter. The process was stained. The national polio eradication effort, known by every Pakistani as the dose brought to your door, was now inextricably linked to U.S. surveillance.

The violence in Pakistan was our first encounter with the notion that the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s singular approach to disease eradication could fail or, worse, do harm. The model that relied on a consistent supply of vaccines conveniently delivered to households was not fit for purpose in these conflict-affected, deeply polarized communities. This epidemiological approach didn’t sufficiently consider the cultural, social, and political webs that these children and their parents were tangled within.

Like all parents, they wanted the best for their kids. For us, that meant vaccines. For them, it meant . . . clear and harmless skies.

Until this point, our role had been to design strategies to motivate parents to vaccinate their children, not militant leaders taking the reins of underserved, war-torn communities. We felt monumentally ill-equipped to design behavioral strategies that could motivate the Taliban, or the communities they represented, to welcome vaccination given all that it represented. Suddenly, the long-established model felt too small. Yet we felt we had to do something. Every month under the Taliban’s decree left 200,000 children under the age of five unvaccinated.

We decided to break the model wide open. We got in touch with people who could offer a view from the outside of the program. We phoned political scientists and writers, behavioral researchers and pollsters, social marketers, security experts, filmmakers, musicians, and artists. We sought the people who understood the heartbeat of Pakistan, the patterns of the Taliban, and the ways of Pashtun tribes. We gathered those fluent in the dynamics of conflict, politics, and negotiation.

We brought these individuals together with our Pakistani colleagues in a Dutch conference room off the North Sea. We wanted everyone to use the neutral ground to share their distinct perspectives. With the help of these fresh eyes, we could see the harm of sending unfamiliar vaccinators into the homes of families who had become much too familiar with danger and its countless shapes. We could recognize the irony of a free health service delivered by foreign and domestic governments who filled their skies with smoke and left their streets abandoned. By the end of the week, people who had never thought about polio eradication were working alongside those who had dedicated their lives to it, cocreating solutions to a crisis that had long been mistaken as purely biomedical.

If we wanted a chance at restoring the vaccination campaign and eliminating polio, the program would need to change its face. There needed to be a public handoff to local Pakistani, Islamic, and Pashtun leaders. Vaccine coolers reading END POLIO NOW in English would need to be revised, recolored, and delivered in Urdu or, ideally, Pashto. The call to vaccinate needed to come more publicly from Muslim and Pashtun organizations and individuals that people could trust. The program would need to engage with communities to ensure that vaccination, and health care in general, was respectfully delivered and presented to meet their needs, not ours.

To understand the fabric of communities is just as important as biomedical science to design equitable and effective public health policies.

These ideas didn’t change the program overnight. It would take much more than a conference room full of hopefuls to change a 25-year-old global eradication effort. But these discussions planted seeds of possibility among us and others in the program. It was clear that public health could and should be collaborative, interdisciplinary, creative, and designed for those at the center of it. We left our jobs and founded Common Thread to focus full-time on building a new approach to public health guided by these principles.

In our work today, we try to ask the questions we didn’t know to ask back in 2012. How can we incorporate local culture, social norms, and politics into every public health strategy? How can the lived experiences of those we aim to serve change the way we design health services? How do we create solutions that respond to the needs, desires, and behavior of people living under pressures we can never fully comprehend? How do we cater to the beliefs of the resistant and those with radically opposite views?

We now know that to disparage those who oppose public health measures only deepens the divide. We now know, too, that to understand the fabric of communities is just as important as biomedical science to design equitable and effective public health policies. But most of all, we know that these lessons, and these questions, are only the beginning—and that by seeking to understand communities and honor their priorities as our own, we can find a path to better health for everyone.

This article first appeared in Behavioral Scientist’s award-winning print edition, Brain Meets World.

The post Vaccinating in Taliban Country appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Changing entrenched work culture is hard. I had a front-row seat to a project that tried. In 2018, the behavioral design firm ideas42 kicked off a project to better understand what drives people to overwork and to test interventions that would improve individual work-life conflict and well-being.

My colleagues at ideas42 set out to talk to employees at nonprofit organizations who wanted to reduce work-life conflict. Nonprofits are often classic overwork and burnout cultures. People work “hero hours” because they’re passionate about the issues and see the work as mission-driven. Nonprofits also tend to be woefully understaffed and underresourced, so people aren’t paid much and don’t have a lot of support, which intensifies the workload. And if the work, barring radical change, likely won’t be done in a lifetime, it’s difficult to know when to call it a day.

One thing struck me immediately. In conversation after conversation, workers said they spent their days being super busy, rushing from one meeting to the next, jumping on and off the phone, and plowing through their email. It was only at what should have been the end of the paid workday that they realized they hadn’t gotten to the one big thing they really needed to do. Their work hours were constantly interrupted and filled with busywork.

Researchers have found that desk workers in an office setting tend to be interrupted about every three minutes. And after that colleague has dropped by or we’ve switched screens to check email, texts, social media, or a pinging notification, it can take, on average, twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds to get back to where we were. Over and over and over throughout the day.

Then there are the meetings. One survey found that executives spend, on average, twenty-five hours a week in meetings, half of which could disappear without any negative impact. Those lower down the corporate ladder spend about ten hours a week in meetings and say 43 percent are a waste of time. But they go because they have to, or they fear they’ll miss out, or they want to show their managers how busy and committed they are. This means huge swaths of the workweek are a huge waste of time and money. One Bain and Company study found that after accounting for meetings, excessive emails, office chitchat, or unproductive conversations and low-value administrative tasks—all unproductive busywork—the typical middle manager has only six and a half uninterrupted hours a week to do their actual work.

I have come to think of work in three ways. There’s the “real” work—the tasks and outcomes that create value for the organization and give employees a sense of meaning and pride. There’s the “work around the work”—all the emails and meetings, some necessary, many not, that can consume entire days. And then there’s what I call the “performance of work”: sending late-night emails or Slack messages, showing up at the office or online early and staying late, shaming those who take lunch breaks, giving the appearance of super productive busyness when you’re really wrapped up in low-value tasks or focusing on email rather than making progress on a big project. Authors Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel call the phenomenon “live-action-role-playing the job.” In overwork work cultures, those who appear to perform well are often the ones who are rewarded.

It was only at what should have been the end of the paid workday that they realized they hadn’t gotten to the one big thing they really needed to do.

Yet when we’re busy and have that high-octane, panicked feeling that time is scarce—what one participant called the “sustained moment of hecticness” through the workday—our attention and ability to focus narrow. Behavioral science researchers call this phenomenon “tunneling.” And like being in a tunnel, in that heightened state of time scarcity and busyness, we’re only able to concentrate on the most immediate and often low-value tasks right in front of us. (Research has found we lose about 13 IQ points in this situation.)

“If you’re in this firefighting state of time pressure and tunneling, you’re not making time to meet long-term goals. You’re not dealing with any of the root causes that led to the firefighting in the first place,” said Matthew Darling, then ideas42 vice president and project lead. “The tendency is to do the stuff that’s easy to check off. That’s all you have the bandwidth for.” So the high-value work spills into what should be time off.”

After hearing from workers about being caught up in busyness culture, my ideas42 colleagues started thinking about a new “mental model” of an ideal worker with work-life balance. To paint this new picture, ideas42 designers at the time Dan Connolly and Uyhun Ung worked with participants to imagine a workplace that valued work-life balance and how that would change the social signals people sent. At work, all people see are others working. When they see late-night emails or texts, they often assume that their coworker or boss has been working all day and night without interruption, when in fact they might have been walking the dog or having dinner with their families. That life outside work doesn’t register because they don’t see it. (Often people don’t want to share their lives outside work with coworkers and bosses to preserve the busyness myth that they’re always working.)

“You end up miscalibrating,” Darling explained, thinking that people are working more than they actually are, so you automatically think you have to do the same to keep up. For an ideal work-life balance workplace, designers imagined leaders who were open about taking lunch breaks, working flexibly, going on vacation, and sharing more about their lives and families outside of work.

Having envisaged this new type of leader, my colleagues then designed, implemented, and tested practical interventions focused on four key pain points: long hours, endless and often pointless meetings, the guilt people felt about vacations (which they often didn’t take), and email. The goal of the project was to help organizations take a more thoughtful and proactive approach and to pilot different types of interventions that could help their employees find better work-life balance.

Humans already have a tough time estimating how much time and effort are needed to accomplish things. The busyness imperative only exacerbates the tendency to underestimate and overpromise. So one intervention asked workers to schedule big blocks in their calendars for their most important uninterrupted work, rather than, as many of us do, expecting it to just happen at some point during the workweek. Then the designers encouraged workers to create open space or slack in their calendars every week so that, instead of getting to the end of the day or week without having done that big project, they had a built-in cushion in case they had underestimated the time or an unanticipated emergency cropped up. “You almost always need a lot more slack than you think you will,” Darling explained, “and it is actually markedly important for doing good work.”

My colleagues designed interventions focused on four key pain points: long hours, endless meetings, the guilt people felt about vacations, and email.

Intentional scheduling that you share with coworkers makes it much more apparent that calling a meeting involves a trade-off. What are you not doing because you’re being asked to go to a meeting? And is the meeting the better use of time? The intervention also called for organizations to design and enforce better “meeting hygiene.” Meetings account for about 15 percent of an organization’s time, a share that has increased steadily in recent years. Many are not run well and are a waste of productive time that adds to the busy overwork culture. In the intervention, an agenda would be circulated before every meeting listing clear goals to keep things short and focused on discussion, debate, and decisions. Those calling the meeting were encouraged to be judicious about who needed to be in the room or on the call rather than putting out a blanket invitation, which can wind up being a time suck and an impediment to getting the most important work done. One study, for instance, found that one organization’s routine weekly executive meeting cost a total of three hundred thousand hours a year.

To encourage time for rest and vacation, some organizations experimented with nudging workers to put their summer breaks on their calendars as early as January or February, when the summer months were likely to be clear, rather than a few weeks beforehand, when calendars are cluttered with meetings and obligations. Planning early would force teams to map out how to meet deadlines and delegate tasks so people would no longer feel compelled to work on vacation. My colleagues helped design vacation prep checklists, an activity that recognizes the work involved in planning time off and gives team members the tools to prepare so that they can all successfully unplug. They encouraged organizations to experiment with allocating two vacation “transition days”—one before vacation and the other the first day back in the office, with the only expectation being that they use the time to disconnect and reconnect with work.

One organization adopted a “vacation roulette” intervention. The HR team found every person who hadn’t used their vacation days over a 90-day period and sent them a note reminding them of their vacation balance and copying their manager. They then sent them an invitation to take a random Monday or Friday off and signed the note, “From your vacation fairy godmother.” Often, the managers would encourage workers to take a break. Another organization experimented with closing down between Christmas and New Year’s. That changed the conversation, one participant told me, from the usual snarky, “Going on vacation? Must be nice for some,” to a more welcoming, “Tell me about your break and I’ll tell you about mine.” Research in Sweden found that when everyone takes vacation at the same time like that, there’s less guilt, a big boost to mental health, and the entire organization—or in Sweden’s case, the entire country—benefits from “collective restoration.”

My ideas42 colleagues also designed a tool to enable workers to pause their email inboxes in an “It Can Wait” campaign. They sent reminders to people at the end of each workday asking whether they had paused their inboxes. They sought to amplify the effort with a campaign to affirm people’s identities outside of work, sharing postcards showing happy people running, cooking, painting, reading a book to a child, and so on.

Some of these interventions showed promise. Vacation-taking interventions in particular led to encouraging results. For instance, during the “vacation roulette” intervention—where managers were copied on an email encouraging employees with high vacation balances to take a day off—participating organizations saw a boost in days off for over 20 employees, and the highest rate of vacation taking for India-based employees in 5 years. Some employees used the day to treat themselves to an experience they didn’t commonly make time for, like a visit to the spa. Others simply used the time to relax at home. “Having that day with family and coming back fresh helped me put things into perspective for the workshop I’ve been preparing,” one employee said.

The interventions that didn’t work were those aimed at individuals taking individual action to improve their personal work-life balance. Those that were more successful involved a change to the entire system.

Interventions to ease the pain of email were, perhaps not surprisingly, among the least successful. My then-ideas42-colleague Antonia Violante reflected on why some interventions had caught hold and others had not. The ones that didn’t work were those aimed at individuals taking individual action to improve their personal work-life balance. Those that were more successful involved a change to the entire system. “You can’t design a work-redesign intervention aimed at one person,” Violante concluded. “For it to stick, people have to have the assurance that it’s aimed at the whole culture.”

Leaders at many of the organizations had the best of intentions. They expressed a desire for better work- life balance, if not for themselves then at least for their staff. But they, too, were caught up in the prevailing busyness culture. Some were among the worst offenders, texting at 9:00 p.m., emailing over the weekend, even in the middle of the night, and rarely taking vacation. Many leaders knew they weren’t walking the talk: “We do a poor job modeling” work-life balance, they would say. Yet they appeared powerless to change themselves or their busyness cultures.

“One of the things I found odd is that people were acutely aware of how bad they are with work-life balance and they wanted to be better, but they’ve almost accepted it, almost like, ‘It is what it is,’” Violante told me. While many workers we spoke to were clearly frustrated by how work encroached on their lives, they were also conflicted by the strong norm to brag about their overwork as a sign of their dedication, like wearing a badge of honor. Some reported that though they saw the benefit of work-life balance, they routinely overworked to the point of exhaustion. “If we all hated our jobs," one participant told us, “it would be much easier to create work-life balance.”

Adapted from Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind into a Quest for a Better Life by Brigid Schulte. Published by Henry Holt and Co. Copyright © 2024 by Brigid Schulte. All rights reserved.

Disclosure: ideas42 provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

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The post The Quest to Imagine a Workplace that (Actually) Values Work-Life Balance appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Mozart, the great and enduring musical genius, doesn’t conform to our stereotypical notion of a musical prodigy.

Did he practice for hours per day? Nope. Was he well intentioned with his plans? Also no.

More of a partier than a conscientious adult, Mozart, as biographers have described him, was someone who was “much addicted to trifling amusement.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that he also wasn’t known for finishing compositions promptly. In fact, in late October of 1787, after having all but wrapped up the score for Don Giovanni, he decided to go out for a night of drinking with buddies. Toward the end of the evening, one friend nervously turned to Mozart and remarked that with the opera due to be performed for the first time the next day, he couldn’t believe that the overture hadn’t been written yet!

Mozart hurriedly returned home to start—and hopefully finish—this missing piece. But, because he kept nodding off due to the alcohol and the late hour, he asked his wife, Constanze, to help him stay awake by telling him stories.

Amazingly, just three hours later, the overture was complete. Without the benefit of photocopiers, copyists had to then transcribe the orchestra’s parts by hand, and, as legend has it, the final pages made it to the theater only minutes before the curtain went up. The ink, in fact, was still wet when the orchestra members performed it for the first time. The opera was a success, and almost 250 years after that stressful debut, it’s still performed regularly at opera houses worldwide.

Leaving things to the last minute is a bad habit that resonates with many of us. Take the story of Tim Urban, the creator of the popular blog Wait But Why. A self proclaimed “master procrastinator,” he has relayed the story of how, during his final year of college, he kept putting off writing his honors thesis.

Given that the thesis was meant to be a yearlong endeavor, the plan was to start in the fall months and slowly ramp up in January, maintaining a challenging pace of work until May, when it was due. Except that’s not what happened. Finding excuse after excuse to not get started, he finally sat down to write it two nights before the due date. Pulling not one but two all nighters in a row, he was able to dash all 90 pages off and get it in just in time.

As he relates on his blog and in a TED talk, he received a call from one of the college administrators about a week later.

“Mr. Urban, we need to talk about your thesis,” the administrator said.

“Okay …,” Tim responded nervously.

The administrator continued. “Well … it’s the best one we’ve ever seen.”

In Urban’s telling of the story, you can quickly see how stunned he was to get this news.

But then, after a pause, he says, “Actually, that didn’t happen at all.” It was, in fact, “a very, very bad thesis.”

If only putting things off resulted in the sort of positive critical reception that Don Giovanni received. Most of us, however, have had experiences more like Urban’s than Mozart’s: procrastination doesn’t typically garner awards.

Even though you may never have procrastinated like Mozart, I’m going to guess that you’re intimately familiar with this behavior. Across the globe, about 20 percent of people are chronic procrastinators. And, while estimates of exactly how many people procrastinate to some extent are a little hard to nail down, one informal survey found that 85 percent do so in a way that bothers them.

In putting something off until a later point in time, we’re failing to consider how much our future self will want to avoid the same negative emotions that we’re trying to avoid right now.

Make no mistake: the tendency to put things off isn’t just bad for college students trying to complete long papers. As psychologist Fuschia Sirois has documented, there may be far more severe consequences: chronic procrastination is associated with a litany of undesirable outcomes, including poor mental health, anxiety, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. And this type of procrastination becomes a vicious cycle: procrastinators put off and fail to schedule the very doctor’s appointments that could help lessen some of their health care woes.

Consider for a moment what procrastination actually is. The word is derived from the Latin procrastinaire, which means “put off until tomorrow.” Okay, sure, you know that. Here’s what’s more interesting: procrastination is also conceptually related to the Greek word akrasia, which means doing something despite knowing that it’s against your better judgment.

So, procrastination isn’t just about putting something off until tomorrow that you could just as easily take care of today. It’s also about knowing that even as you delay, you’re harming yourself.

Think about this definition in light of our present and future selves.

When we’re faced with an unpleasant task—say, folding the laundry or finally making that appointment with the cardiologist—and we decide not to do it, we prioritize our present self’s desire to avoid negative emotions. We get anchored on our feelings in the present. But procrastination presents an additional wrinkle: in putting something off until a later point in time, we’re also failing to consider how much our future self will want to avoid the same negative emotions that we’re trying to avoid right now.

Note that it’s not as if we’re simply failing to consider our future selves. When we procrastinate, we do think about the future and our future selves but not in a particularly deep or meaningful manner.

When we procrastinate, we do think about the future and our future selves but not in a particularly deep or meaningful manner.

In this way, procrastination represents a time traveling mistake we make when thinking about our future self: poorly planning our trips. It’s as if you’re about to go on a weeklong Boston vacation and have in mind some ideas of what you want to do once you’re there. You’d probably like to try some Boston specific foods and maybe take in some of the rich cultural history. But only once you’ve boarded the plane do you realize that, outside of booking a hotel room, you’ve made very few plans. Maybe you’ll still be able to get some clam chowder, but if you were hoping for a tour of Fenway Park or a visit to Paul Revere’s house—attractions that could sell out quickly—your future self might end up disappointed.

You’ll still be taking a trip to Boston, but one that differs significantly from the trip you intended to take.

So, too, is it the case with time travel: in thinking about the future in a merely surface level way, we end up traveling to a different future than the one we meant to go to. It’s as if we want to arrive at one particular version of the future—where we are happy, healthy, and financially secure—but allow ourselves to go down a path that could potentially land us in a very different place.

Tim Pychyl, a psychology professor at Carleton University in Canada, has looked at just this sort of time travel mistake.

In one study, he and his former student Eve Marie Blouin Hudon surveyed hundreds of college students. (While conducting research on undergraduates often comes with limitations, they present an excellent testing ground for all things having to do with not completing assignments on time.) The scientists asked the students about their procrastination habits as well as the relationships they have with their future selves. Those who felt more of a sense of similarity and emotional connection with their future selves, it turned out, were also the least likely to needlessly delay the critical tasks they set out to do.

It wasn’t just a sense of similarity and connection that mattered, though. The research participants were also asked how vividly they imagined the future. For instance, if you were in this study, you’d be asked to think of an image of the sun rising over the ocean on a hazy day. In your mind’s eye, how vivid is that image? At one extreme, it might be super clear—almost as if it’s something you could see right in front of you. At the other extreme, though, it might be as if there’s no image at all, but rather, you just sort of “know” you are thinking about the sun rising.

In Blouin Hudon and Pychyl’s research, the students who reported conjuring the most vivid mental images also felt the strongest relationships with their future selves and were the least likely to procrastinate.

In thinking about the future in a merely surface level way, we end up traveling to a different future than the one we meant to go to.

These are correlations, but they’re suggestive of something compelling. Having an easier time fully and vividly imagining ourselves in the future may make it harder to justify putting something off to the version of ourselves who will suffer from today’s failures to act. Because we can conjure up the disappointment of our future self in Boston, we’re more likely to exert the effort required to plan the “right” trip.

I reached out to Professor Pychyl to ask him a bit more about this work. I was naturally curious whether he—an international expert in the study of procrastination—ever finds himself, well, procrastinating.

“Almost never!” he told me with a laugh. But not, he cautioned, due to some great virtue on his part. Instead, he reportedly recognizes procrastination for what it is: a desire to have our future selves do the things our present selves want to avoid. As he put it, “I know my future self isn’t going to want to do this thing any more than my present self does. And I have empathy for my future self: he’s going to be under enormous amounts of stress, so let’s just do this thing now.”

Excerpted from Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today by Hal Hershfield. Published by Little, Brown Spark. Copyright © 2023 by Hal Hershfield. All rights reserved.

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