Sometimes it is obvious to us what our biggest problem is. We can pinpoint one thing in our life that is by far our biggest source of unhappiness or stress, and we know that if we were to correct it, our life would be substantially improved. When this happens, it makes self-improvement easier in a certain sense, since it provides us with an obvious route to improving life. If you have twenty probl...

Attraction is often thought of as a magical thing. Two people will meet and feel immediately attracted to each other, whereas another two, though they like each other personally and acknowledge each other's good qualities, will feel only friendship. The latter case is often explained with phrases like "they just didn't feel it" or they "had no spark", whereas the former, if it were to lead to marr...

Sometimes, in a given situation, what we feel like doing is precisely the opposite of what would be best for us. Our natural inclinations about what action is helpful in a given circumstance can lead us in entirely the wrong direction. Consider, for example, what happens when you feel tired. The obvious and natural thing to do is to lie down. This works well when there is time to sleep or nap. ...

I tend to enjoy myself quite a lot when I swim. And yet, I would very rarely choose to swim when the opportunity was available. One might conclude from this that though I liked to swim, I didn't want to swim, so my "wanting" and "liking" were out of sync. But on further reflection, something more subtle was occurring. When I would try to decide whether I wanted to go for a swim, I would do so by p...

People will often debate questions like "why did the U.S. invade Iraq?" One group claims it was due to a fear of nuclear weapons. Another group claims that the action was oil related. Yet another claims that George Bush had a vendetta against Saddam. But proposed answers like these often seem to assume something that isn't likely to be true: that there was a single reason why this action occurred....

When we think of super powers, we usually consider things like invisibility, super strength and the ability to fly. Technology is bringing us closer to the realization of these dreams (for examples see invisibility, strength, flying). But there is a super power that has existed for much longer, which we might call "truth discernment". This is the ability to figure out what is likely to be true in ...

What are top pure mathematicians experts in? How about top doctors? The easy answers would be "pure math" and "medicine", but these are a bit too vague to be satisfying (What is pure math? What is medicine?). They also don't capture all of what these experts excel at. To know what an expert of a particular type is truly expert at, we need to understand the system that creates that type of exper...

One of the most effective ways to get ourselves to regularly do a behavior is to make it automatic through habit formation. Once something has become a habit we no longer have to worry about forgetting to do it, or worry about lacking sufficient motivation. We do the behavior without even trying to do it, without even thinking about it. Habits make behavior effortless. We can program ourselves ...

It can sometimes be useful to think of yourself as consisting of multiple systems. You have an emotional system that constantly processes your sensory input and thoughts, and produces emotions like fear, anger, happiness and contempt based on this input. You also have a reasoning system, which is what you use when you are reasoning, planning, analyzing and consciously predicting. But the operation...