You Brain Thinks it's Surviving a Famine You wake up, check your phone, and immediately feel behind. Texts, emails, notifications, a meeting you forgot about, and a calendar full of commitments that sounded reasonable when you made them, back when “future you” was apparently going to become a completely different person. Before your feet even hit the floor, your brain is already triaging. Scarcity Scarcity is different from stress or overwhelm. Stress is pressure. Overwhelm is too much at...
6 days ago • 2 min read
Dangers of Dopamine Stacking Try this tomorrow. Wake up and don’t touch your phone. Don’t put music on. Don’t put a podcast in. Don’t grab caffeine immediately. Just get up. You will probably feel restless within ten minutes. The way you start your morning sets the standard for what your brain expects next. And you may be setting that standard way too high. A quick scroll, coffee, notifications, group chats, music, maybe something sweet with breakfast... because apparently being alive now...
13 days ago • 2 min read
The Emerging Research Let's talk about some new research findings I think you should know. 1. Your tired brain is a bad narrator One sleep study found that sleep deprivation weakens the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, which means the brain has less top-down control over emotional reactions. Later work also found that sleep loss can make neutral stimuli feel more emotionally charged. And sleep is not the only biological state that changes your read on reality....
21 days ago • 2 min read
How to Survive the April Slump By April, a lot of people are cooked. Students are dragging themselves toward finals. Taxes just got paid. Parents are stretched thin. Work has been humming for months. Everyone can see summer coming, which almost makes it worse, because the relief is close enough to feel but not close enough to touch. So no, it’s not just you. This time of year tends to expose people. Energy drops. Patience gets worse. Sleep gets sloppier. Phone time goes up. Food quality goes...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Korab Idrizi, M.S. PhD Candidate & Coach Leverage the Psychology Vegas Uses to Improve Your Own Life Casinos understand something most people do not: Behavior is trainable. Vegas makes billions by exploiting a simple principle: What gets reinforced gets repeated. That principle is not just about gambling. It shapes your phone use, work habits, productivity, parenting, training, and ability to learn new skills. The problem is that most people are being reinforced by accident. Their...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Introspection Is Getting Bad Press Introspection is no longer cool Yes, you read that correctly. Introspection. You know, that old antiquated idea of looking inward to gain insight into your own thoughts, feelings, motivations. If you’re advanced enough, maybe even approaching your own inner world with curiosity and skepticism. If you’re really bold, questioning the origins of your inner experiences. Apparently this is now weak behavior. Marc Andreessen recently said he aims for “zero”...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
The Sacred Let’s talk about the sacred. The sacred barely exists in our agnostic world, and that is a shame. What does it mean for something to be sacred? It means something is sacrosanct, deserving of veneration, connected to the highest of values, to truth. It means it should be protected at all costs and practiced without exception. So what does it mean that the sacred no longer seems to exist? It means we have very little left that feels worthy of reverence. We are deprived of rituals and...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
You Become the Sum of the Systems You Inhabit Why are you confident in one room and hesitant in another? Why do some people become articulate, thoughtful, and assertive at work, then turn strangely small around their family? Why do others claim to value honesty, but cannot say what they really think to the people closest to them? Most people answer these questions too quickly. They attribute these tendencies to personality, but I think that's naive. There is a lot of discussion right now...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Performative Living There is a certain type of guy now who reads Jane Eyre in a coffee shop while drinking matcha, not because he likes either, but because he likes what the combination says about him. He wants to be seen as thoughtful, masculine, refined, emotionally literate, and slightly above the culture while still being perfectly of it. That guy is not unique. He is just one expression of a much larger phenomenon. The manosphere guy is doing it too. So is the looksmaxxing guy. So is the...
2 months ago • 3 min read