In an earlier post here (that I encourage you to read first if you haven’t already), I argued that one of the most straightforward ways to understand the “neuroscience of well-being” is to ask the simple question: how does the brain know that things are going well? After I concluded my argument I left readers on a little bit of a cliff-hanger by not actually answering that question. Here is my attempt at an answer.

Positive evaluations of life, liberty, and sugar

When we feel positive emotions like joy or contentment, it means that we are positively evaluating (or appraising) some event that’s just happened. I feel giddy when Michigan beats Ohio State = I positively evaluated the game. I felt proud when someone complimented my post = I positive evaluated getting appreciated by others. You get the idea.

This is not a tricky concept. It’s easy to connect our positive evaluations of donuts, achievements, and a beautiful sunny day with the positive feelings these things give us. You see it, you like it, you feel it.

Less obvious is that we also make positive evaluations of more abstract concepts. I like the idea of justice and fairness. I love the idea of kindness and compassion. Well, what if those abstract concepts had to do with our lives? Our selves, relationships, and goals? Now, we’re talking about the foundations of our sense of well-being.

My argument, therefore, is that the brain knows things are going well because it makes positive evaluations of those parts of our lives that we care about. After all, “life satisfaction,” the cognitive component of well-being (Diener et al., 1985), essentially boils down to “I like how my life is going.”

So, what do we care about?

We care about our self-concept. How capable we are of doing things. When we make positive evaluations of our global self we tend to have high self-esteem (Brown et al., 2001). “I like me.”

We care about others. When we know that we have good relationships, we make positive evaluations of close others as well as our relationships with those others (Leary et al., 1995; Martz et al., 1998). “I like my relationships.”

We care about our goals. When we have positive evaluations of our goals and the pursuit of those goals, it can give us meaning. Indeed, a popular “meaning in life” scale includes items that reflect this like “I regard my ability to find a meaning, purpose, or mission in life as very great” (PIL; Crumbaugh & Maholick, 1964).” “I like my life goals and ability to pursue them.”

Well-being is right behind your forehead

I’d like to propose that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC; the front, middle part of your brain right behind your forehead) is one of the main brain regions responsible for making positive evaluations of the self, relationships, and goals, and therefore primarily responsible for people’s beliefs about their well-being.

The vmPFC is a member of the mesolimbic dopamine system along with the nucleus accumbens and other regions. Yes it’s the same region that loves cocaine and social media. We’ll talk about that later. The main job of this system is to tell us that some particular thing is good for us (it thinks) and we should be motivated to go get it (Berridge & Robinson, 2003). Therefore, this system makes positive evaluations.

What’s really cool is that the vmPFC makes positive evaluations of lots of different things so that it can compare them. For example, when you are deciding between going to the gym or watching TV, the vmPFC is making positive evaluations of both of those activities and comparing them to see which wins.

Therefore, it’s entirely possible that the vmPFC also makes positive evaluations across the different life domains that are relevant for well-being.

The oversimplified neuroscience of well-being

“I like me.” The vmPFC helps people make positive evaluations of various part of their selves. It’s there when we think about our best attributes (Chavez et al., 2017). It’s there when we have high self-esteem (Will et al., 2017). And it’s there when we think about our favorite memories (Speer & Delgado, 2017).

"I like my relationships.” The vmPFC also makes positive evaluations of others and of one’s relationships with others. Meta-analyses (lots of studies rolled into one) have shown that the vmPFC is activated when people think about close others (Van Overwalle, 2009). And the vmPFC loves it when those others are really close to us (Krienen et al., 2010). The vmPFC has also been shown to track with people’s sense of belongingness (Morrison et al., 2012).

“I like my life goals and ability to pursue them.” Studies have shown that the vmPFC is associated with making positive evaluations of simple goals like determining what to eat (Hare et al., 2008) as well as more meaningful, life goals like maintaining a sense of fairness and equality (Aoki et al., 2014). The vmPFC also seems to keep track of our autonomy to pursue those goals. A meta-analysis showed that the vmPFC is reliably activated when people make intrinsically motivated decisions (Nakao et al., 2012), such as when people get to freely choose the objects that they employ in tasks (Murayama et al., 2010).

Hold on just a second…

I have so far made the claim that the vmPFC is responsible for people’s beliefs that they are doing well. But there is more nuance to this than I’ve let on.

…so everything I like is related to my well-being?

The vmPFC generates positive evaluations, but the targets of those positive evaluations are not always relevant to well-being. For example, the vmPFC also makes positive evaluations of erotic stimuli, money, and sugary food (Sescousse et al., 2013). Therefore, just because the vmPFC makes positive evaluations of things related to well-being, it does not necessarily mean that vmPFC always leads to well-being. So, having a futuristic device that continuously activates your vmPFC is not the key to well-being…just ask cocaine and heroine.

…I thought well-being was about more than just our beliefs

Relatedly, just because vmPFC may represent well-being in your brain, it doesn’t always do the behaviors that contribute to your well-being. For example, although the vmPFC is involved in reflecting on engaging activities (Mitchell et al., 2010), vmPFC activation actually decreases when people are in the midst of those engaging activities (Ulrich et al., 2016).

…But what about meaning and purpose?

I’m not going to get into a big debate (although it would be fun) about the difference between hedonic (feeling good) and eudaimonic (meaning/purpose) well-being. I will say though that these two forms of well-being tend to be pretty correlated (Kashdan et al., 2008). But I also acknowledge that each may provide value in leading a good life (Deci & Ryan, 2008).

It might be that the reason why these forms of well-being are correlated is that they both involve making positive evaluations. On the other hand, they may still be distinct because they involve making positive evaluations of different types of things (e.g., one’s achievement vs. one’s meaningful goals).

Also, positive evaluations do not always lead to positive feelings, so there may be times when our vmPFC values something important (like autonomy, mastery, etc.) but we don’t necessarily feel all the gooey positive feelings along with it (although we can).

Hedonic well-being may require positive feelings, eudaimonic well-being may not. But the vmPFC is probably involved in both.

Give neuroscience a chance

Well-being is not only in the domain of psychology, but rightfully also belongs to other fields like philosophy, economics, sociology, etc. This neuroscientific perspective is not intended to replace these other disciplines, but rather to provide a powerful way of understanding how the brain represents well-being.

One of the keys of understanding how to have the good life is to understand how people believe (in their brain) that their life is good.

What do you think? Is a neuroscience approach to well-being useful at all? What did I miss? Can we distill it down to having positive evaluations of our life? If not, what else could it be?

Thanks so much for reading this post! I only ask that you consider doing some of the following things now:

1. Comment on it or restack it with a comment. I really want to hear what you think!

2. Share it with someone you think would appreciate it.

3. If this has been shared with you, please consider subscribing to read more pieces like it.

4. If you have a bigger response that doesn’t fit neatly in a comment, please do put it in a post and tag me in it. I’d love to read it!

Several years ago I was approached about writing a chapter on the neuroscience of well-being. It was an interesting proposition. I wasn’t classically trained in the big theories of well-being per se. My primary training was in laboratory and brain experiments on emotions and emotion regulation. But the reason I cared about those experiments was to investigate how people can have better lives.

So, I was intrigued. Is there something that an experimentalist who cares about the primary mechanisms of emotion and the brain can contribute to understanding the huge topic that is well-being? And, more fundamentally, can anyone know something about living a good, thriving life by looking at the brain?

Upon reflection, I decided to give it a go. My first job was to figure out how one would/should even approach examining well-being from a neural perspective. So I came up with at least 3 different perspectives that we could use to understand the neuroscience of well-being that each have their pros and cons:

Perspective 1: The brain as reflecting “trait well-being”

Many psychologists suggest that, even though well-being can be thought of as the state of an individual at a particular point in time, it has trait-like qualities. Diener and Lucas (1999), for example, suggest that subjective well-being is fairly stable across the life span. Subjective well-being is also correlated with personality traits. For example, extraversion and neuroticism are consistently positive and negative predictors, respectively, of subjective well-being.

So to understand the neuroscience of well-being, one thing we can do is to correlate some form of well-being derived from questionnaires with some form of brain structure of functioning.

And researchers have done this. For example, researchers have found that subjective well-being is related to the density of gray matter (the neuron cell bodies) in regions associated with emotion and emotion regulation such as the orbitofrontal cortex (Kong et al., 2019) and rostral anterior cingulate cortex (Matsunaga et al., 2016).

The benefits of this approach is that if well-being is stable, and possibly genetically heritable (Baselmans et al., 2019), then there are most certainly trait-like neural metrics that support it (Pennington et al., 2000).

There are, however, challenges with this approach to examining the neural basis of well-being. First, there are huge inconsistencies across studies in how people measure well-being and the neural metrics they use. So, the relationships between the two are inconsistent as well. For example, Sato et al. (2016) and Kong et al. (2015) found that subjective happiness is positively and negatively correlated, respectively, with gray matter density in the precuneus.

Second, it is difficult to interpret these findings without guessing how these brain regions and networks function to contribute to well-being. For example, researchers found that the middle temporal gyrus and fusiform gyrus were hubs of a functional network for high well-being individuals (Goldbeck et al., 2019) and they interpreted this pattern as “increased memory-based social daydreaming.” Huh? Is this interpretation possible? Sure, but the researchers most certainly did not think of it beforehand as the thing that most strongly characterizes well-being.

So these trait brain metrics may be helpful as a starting point for psychologists, but are not yet sufficient for understanding how well-being is produced by the brain.

Perspective 2: The brain as doing “well-being behaviors”

Modern theories of personality suggest that personality traits are best described as a collection of trait-relevant behaviors (Fleeson, 2001), interpretations and motivational processes (Jayawickreme et al., 2018). For example, although extraverts do not always act extraverted, they do extravert-relevant behaviors most of the time, are motivated to do extravert-relevant behaviors, and interpret the world in an extraverted way.

Neuroscience perspectives on personality (DeYoung, 2015) suggest that the brain is the source of this interpretation, motivation, and (production of) behavior and personality consists of reliable patterns of these processes.

For example, extraversion is correlated with cortical volume in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC; DeYoung et al., 2010) perhaps because the vmPFC makes positive interpretations of the environment (Roy et al., 2012) and motivates people to obtain things they feel positively about (Nakao et al., 2012).

This approach can work if researchers focus on one particular aspect of well-being and identify the functions produced by the brain to support it. For example, participants high in self-reported meaning in life exhibited enhanced connectivity in the medial temporal lobe, which the researchers interpreted as supporting mental simulation of the past and future (Waytz et al., 2015). The researchers then showed through a series of experiments that mentally simulating the past and future caused increases in self-reported meaning.

The primary challenge with this perspective when applied to well-being is that, unlike personality, well-being is often treated as an outcome of various behaviors, interpretations, and motivations instead of the causal agent of those processes (Huppert & So, 2013; Ryff & Keyes, 1995; Seligman, 2011). This leaves open the possibility there are many different causes of the things that leads to well-being.

For example, having good relationships is a cause of well-being, but there many different ways that we can have good relationships. Each of those different behaviors/motivations, etc. may reside in very different regions of the brain. This problem is referred to as the “multiple-cause of a single effect” and it really complicates how we might know what the brain is doing to produce well-being.

Perspective 3: How the brain represents well-being

To address the issues above, I proposed in my chapter that a neuroscience of psychological well-being begins with understanding how the brain represents it. This perspective, therefore, addresses the subjective aspect of well-being—those ideas of well-being that are based on people’s report of well-being directly, or their evaluation of those parts of their life (e.g., meaning, relationships) that contribute to well-being.

This subjective approach avoids the multiple-cause single effect problem by suggesting that there may be one set of brain regions that form a common system for “believing one has well-being” even if there are multiple ways of obtaining it.

For example, I might get a lot of my well-being from my hobbies and you might get yours from your achievements. However, when we both think about how good our lives are, we may use much of the same neural machinery to do that.

One big sticking point is that this subjective perspective is inconsistent with more objectivist views of well-being. Aristotle, for example, suggested that one cannot be flourishing if, objectively, one’s life is not going well or living up to its full potential (Brülde, 2007).

I have a lot of thoughts about this subjective vs. objective debate, but I’ll express those in another article. For now, though, it’s clear that the brain is inherently subjective so a neuroscience of well-being must approach it as such. That said, I do agree (a little) with objectivists that a neuroscience approach to well-being cannot capture the totality of what we understand well-being to be.

To be continued…

Now, I know what you’re thinking: I can’t wait to read how the brain represents well-being! Well, this article is long enough already. So, I wrote a Part 2 in which I describe how I think the brain knows that we’re doing well.

What do you think? Is a neuroscience approach to well-being useful at all? Are there ways to salvage the first two perspectives above? What are the potential downsides of treating well-being as inherently subjective?

Thanks so much for reading this post! I only ask that you consider doing some of the following things now:

1. Comment on it or restack it with a comment. I really want to hear what you think!

2. Share it with someone you think would appreciate it.

3. If this has been shared with you, please consider subscribing to read more pieces like it.

4. If you have a bigger response that doesn’t fit neatly in a comment, please do put it in a post and tag me in it. I’d love to read it!

This situation seems kind of obvious, but it exposes something very fundamental about how our brain works. We do not walk around the world just reacting to things that are happening, otherwise the reaction to the two guitar riffs would be the same.

Instead we walk around the world constantly making predictions about what’s going to happen next. When you are by yourself, your brain has no reason to predict the occurrence of a loud guitar riff, so when it hears it, your brain’s attention is jolted. Whereas at a concert you have every reason to predict a loud guitar riff, so it’s less jolting to your attention.

Your brain is a prediction machine and there’s a reason why. When we make predictions of our world, it makes it easier to plan for the next thing and do the behavior that will get us there. It also means that we can hold in mind an accurate of the world we live in by testing our predictions out.

When you first heard the riff, you were initially surprised because there was a prediction error - your observation of the state of the world (guitar riff) did not match your prediction at that moment (relative silence). When you have a prediction error, you have two choices:

First, you can update your predictions. For example, if you continued to hear guitar riffs randomly for the next several weeks, you might realize that it’s because someone who likes hard rock moved next door and their speaker is right up against your shared wall. You therefore update your predictions so that next time you’re not as surprised when you suddenly hear loud music.

Second, you can behave in such a way as to bring the state of the world in line with your predictions. In this case, perhaps you get the loud tenant thrown out of the building or buy the best noise-cancelling headphones on the market.

This prediction → observe → compare → adjust cycle is called Active Inference theory (see great book about it here) and it’s a fundamental mechanism of our brain that underlies seemingly disparate psychological phenomena. It’s super cool.

Optical illusions

This above image is called the checker(board) shadow illusion (made famous by Edward Adelson). When you look at the two tiles on the top checkerboard labeled A (second on top row) and B (third on third row), the A tile looks much darker than the B tile. But in reality, they are the same shade of gray as seen on the bottom checkerboard.

What gives? How can you see something as different when it’s really the same? It’s because of your sensory predictions. For your whole life, whenever you’ve seen something cast a shadow it meant that the shadowed area was going to be darker than the non-shadowed area.

So, your brain has a choice when it sees something shadowed. It can assume that the thing is now darker than it used to be or it can assume that it’s the same color but appears darker than it used to be. For obvious reasons, your brain adapted by doing the latter. Thus, when you see something in shadows you assume it’s naturally lighter than it appears. That’s what happens with tile B above.

Freaky, right? The point here is that even our very perception of the world is based on us making predictions about what the world should appear to be. Mostly this makes sense, but illusions expose the cracks in our prediction system.

Sugar cravings

This Active Inference prediction system also underlies our enjoyment of the things we like in life…like maple bacon donuts.

Right now as I’m writing this, I am sitting at my desk in a room devoid of food. So, my brain has zero predictions that I will receive a maple bacon donut anytime soon. However, what happens if my wife were to walk in with a freshly baked box of Krispy Kreme maple bacon donuts?

My brain would register a prediction error. I predicted no donuts and suddenly donuts arrive. To reduce this prediction error, my brain would update my predictions of the next moments to include eating a maple bacon donut and enact behaviors to make that prediction come true.

This is what dopamine does (see seminal paper on this here). It rockets up when you have these positive prediction errors - when things seem to be turning out better than you expected. If my wife started bringing me maple bacon donuts at 2pm everyday, then my dopamine system would teach me to predict yummy goodness at that time.

If, after two months of maple bacon donuts at 2pm, my wife suddenly stops, then I’d have another prediction error, but it’d be negative - things turned out worse than I expected. I’d feel deflated instead of excited and my dopamine would crash.

We get pleasure from eating yummy donuts, but the real thrill comes when they unexpectedly show up at our door (I’m hoping my wife reads this and gets the hint).

Resilience

So predictions matter for optical illusions and sugar highs, but does this very basic, fundamental prediction system also matter for the things we care about the most like our happiness and resilience?

My colleague Anthony Sali and I addressed this question in a paper a few years back. We started with the premise that often when we talk about predictions at higher levels of cognition, we call them beliefs.

I believe the sun will come up tomorrow. I believe that the Ravens will win the Super Bowl. I believe that people are generally nice. These are all predictions about how the world works such that if any one of them doesn’t come true, it results in an uncomfortable prediction error (especially the first one - that would be interesting).

When we think about our orientation to the world in terms of our place in it, we form beliefs and predictions as well. I believe that my life will continue being great. I believe that I’m a successful professor.

Notice how those two beliefs about my life and my being a professor operate at two different levels. Being a successful professor is nested under my life being great. It contributes to it along with lots of other things like my relationships, my health, etc.

Now what if there’s prediction error for that professor belief? What if, God forbid, I get fired this year? That would be an immense prediction error that would require resolving. I would have to find a different job, figure out how to save money until then, and rearrange a little bit of my identity as a professor.

The critical question then is what about my belief about my life? This is where Sali and I think resilience comes in. That if I’m able to maintain my belief about my life despite having this prediction error about being a professor, then I am demonstrating resilience. It means that my prediction for my life being sweet is not completely dependent upon my prediction that I’ll be a professor tomorrow.

By holding my life belief constant while updating my professor belief, I’m able to adapt to this new circumstance and maintain my well-being doing so. This shows that when things happen we are not always beholden to updating our predictions and beliefs about the world - only when it makes sense to do so.

The predictive mind

We gain a greater appreciation for how our mind works when we fully understand that we are not reactive creatures, but proactive ones. That we are constantly trying to guess what’s coming next, and checking that against what actually happens. When things go wrong, we adapt and learn whether it’s perceptually, behaviorally, or emotionally.

The fun part then is thinking about all the other beliefs we have in terms of: “I predict that X generally happens in Y context.” All of a sudden we have a deeper appreciation for almost anything we care about psychologically. I’m interested in hearing what beliefs you have that can be framed this way!

Thanks so much for reading this post! I only ask that you consider doing some of the following things now:

1. Comment on it or restack it with a comment. I really want to hear what you think!

2. Share it with someone you think would appreciate it.

3. If this has been shared with you, please consider subscribing to read more pieces like it.

4. If you have a bigger response that doesn’t fit neatly in a comment, please do put it in a post and tag me in it. I’d love to read it!

Here’s one where I talk about an interesting theory of consciousness!

Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.

Go to Notes

How to join

Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Vita Bona Science, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of Vita Bona Science can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.

Why Substack Notes

Fellow writers and readers are spending time in Notes for a variety of reasons.

Ted Gioia sees Notes as a forum for dialogue.

The idea behind Notes is simple. Millions of people now participate in Substack as writers and readers—but much of this is built on long articles and essays. We now have a forum for dialoguing and sharing shorter posts.

Chris Ryan is drawn to Substack as an alternative for legacy social media.

One of my main reasons for joining Substack was to wean myself off exploitative social media platforms. I’m hoping this is going to help move us along on that journey!

Sherman Alexie wants to create a kind and creative new space in Notes.

I’m going to focus on being positive, with my own thoughts and photos and by linking to songs, stories, poems from around the web and from other Substacks.

If you encounter any issues, you can always refer to the Notes FAQ for assistance. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Go to Notes

Picture Gigi, having a chat with her boss, when the meeting takes a sharp turn. Gigi’s boss tells her that her work has been lacking recently and that maybe she needs to stay late a couple of evenings to make it up. Surprised by her boss’s remarks, she feels the rumblings of anxiety rising in her mind and body. Psychology research suggests that Gigi feels anxious because she interpreted her boss’s remarks as something threatening that perhaps she can’t handle.

Just as Gigi starts frantically looking online for new jobs, she spies the “employee of the month” plaque on her desk from last year. She thinks to herself that maybe she can get back to her old form. She has changed her initial view of the situation (need to run away from a threat) to a new one (let’s rise to the challenge), causing her anxiety to subside. Psychologists call this process reappraisal.

Studies show that reappraising emotional situations is a powerful way to change how you feel. When you find the silver linings in bad situations or give others and yourself the benefit of the doubt, it can help you feel better.

I’m a psychology researcher who’s interested in how people change their emotions. Gigi may feel a little less anxious in the moment, but does she truly believe that she can make up the work on time and regain her former glory? My colleagues and I set out to investigate whether it’s possible to start the process of reappraisal without going all the way through with it. Are people getting the full benefit from trying to think differently about their emotions?

Reappraisal has multiple steps

When my colleague Kateri McRae and I first started thinking about what it means to fully reappraise emotional experiences, we were struck by something we saw in the emotion regulation research. Almost all of the studies treated reappraisal as a one-step process. Researchers would ask participants to “reappraise this to make yourself feel better” and then measure the effects.

However, theories about how people regulate their emotions suggest that, like any effortful psychological process, reappraisal involves multiple steps.

When you want to change how you’re feeling, you first generate a reappraisal. You bend and stretch your mind to come up with some alternative way to look at the situation. For Gigi, seeing the employee of the month plaque helped. She could have also thought of her boss’s previous compliments or how it felt to get projects done early.

After you generate a reappraisal, it might seem like you’re done, but you’re not. That alternative interpretation is fragile and must compete with your original take that’s driving your emotion. Somehow you need to strengthen that reappraisal so it can stick.

We call this implementation – when you focus and elaborate on that reappraisal to really change your mind about the situation. For Gigi, she may continue to think about all the ways that she can be a great employee so that it lodges firmly in her mind and makes her anxiety truly disappear.

We tested this idea in a study. We showed 89 undergraduate participants images of negative situations and asked them to first just generate a reappraisal of the image that could help them feel better about it. For example, they might see a picture of a frail man in a hospital bed and tell themselves that the man is getting good treatment and will be better soon. Then, we showed them the image again and asked them to focus and elaborate in their mind on their reappraisal.

Participants felt a little better after generating a reappraisal, but they felt much better after implementing it by focusing and fleshing out the details. In a follow-up study, we showed that these emotional boosts persisted when viewing the images later.

Choosing to commit to feeling better

So we experimentally showed that people reappraise their feelings in two steps. So what? That’s probably what everyone does naturally, anyway, right?

This was the next question we sought to answer. We conducted a study with 52 undergraduate participants like the earlier one, but with a twist. This time, after participants generated a reappraisal, we gave them a choice to continue the reappraisal process by implementing it or to stop the process by distracting themselves.

Participants chose to continue reappraising their emotions only about half the time. Even though reappraisal made participants feel better about the emotional images, there were still many times when they stopped the process prematurely and did not enjoy its full benefits.

In real life

These studies showing the benefits of fully following through on emotional reappraisals are lab experiments, but they have implications for how people try to help themselves feel better in real life.

First, it’s hard to intentionally change how you think about something, and people tend to dislike continuing to do hard things. Indeed, in our choice study, people opted to give up on reappraising when they weren’t feeling its benefits early on. Knowing this human tendency might give you the best chance of continuing reappraisal even when it doesn’t feel like it’s working or is hard.

Second, people often get reappraisals from others, and it’s tempting to think that hearing a new perspective is all you need. Indeed, we have unpublished data that shows that participants feel pretty good when receiving a reappraisal from someone else about their own situation. But other people cannot change your mind for you. You must do that yourself if you want to truly feel better.

Next time you’re in an unpleasant situation like Gigi’s, don’t just cursorily think that you can rise to the challenge. Really think through the situation and let your new perspective become your only one.

I’ll be the first to admit to you that I’m not a saint. I can be selfish, I get angry easily, and I am not as charitable as I should be. Yet, my wife and I are currently doing one of the most altruistic things that humans can do - raising other people’s kids. How can both of those statements be true?

A quick primer on fostering. When a family demonstrates that they no longer have the capability to take care of their children, social services will sometimes have to remove the children from the family and place them into care. The role of foster families is to take care of those children while the original biological family cannot.

There are many motivations behind fostering, some obvious, some less so.

First, many families foster with an eye toward adoption. If you were interested in adoption, it can be an extremely expensive proposition going about it through adoption agencies (and focusing on infants). Fostering is a nice way around that. You get to take care of children and you and they sort of interview each other to see if it’s a right fit for the future. If so, and the original bio family has to give up their parental rights, then bada bing, you have a new adopted child. We know many families who foster for this reason.

But it’s not ours. A long time ago, when my wife and I were still quite young, we agreed that we wanted to be young parents. My vision was twofold. We really wanted to be active parents, playing sports with the kids and wrestling with them well into their teens. And we wanted to be young with they left home so that we could still be active traveling, hanging with friends, etc. We knowingly traded the freedom of our 20s with the freedom of our 50s. So, adopting a 4 yo now when my youngest is 13 would set us back from that vision by 9 years and….I mentioned I was selfish, right?

Instead, our goal during fostering is to try and reunify the kids with the parents if at all possible, and absent that, prepare the kids to enter a loving adoptive home. Is it hard to say goodbye to kids you’ve learned to love? Yup. But do I want to buy an RV and travel all over North America when I turn 55? Also yup…

A second reason for fostering, which is far less prominent, but nonzero, is virtue-signaling. I’d be pretty naive to pretend that there aren’t some people who foster kids to look good to society, to their church, to their own parents and friends, etc. Those foster situations tend to not go so well. It’s hard to maintain the guise of performative virtue when you’re in a room by yourself with a kid who won’t go to bed.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t our reason either. We don’t make it a point to blurt out to the world that we’re fostering at every opportunity, although we don’t hide it either. We don’t post inspirational “look at how awesome I am, but I also need your help being so saintly” posts on facebook and bask in the glory of all the “oh my gosh, you are so brave” comments. But we do let others know about it when we want to raise awareness and maybe even ignite curiosity for fostering in others. Yes, I’m writing these posts, but the above stated motivations are why…(at least I think so).

A third, related reason for fostering is that doing the ‘right thing’ can feel good. Although humans like to think of our morality as this highly developed, consciously intentional system, more often than not, we base our morality on emotions. We don’t like things that harm us and our loved ones, and we like things that benefit us and our loved ones (see ’s book here for a great overview of this). So when thinking about fostering other people’s kids, it can feel good to know that you are rescuing these kids from harm.

I can’t lie. These feelings do factor in a little bit into why we foster. It’s impossible not to feel a sense of contentment seeing the smiles on these kids’ faces when you know those smiles were few and far between before they got to your house.

But, for us it can’t be the whole reason because there are plenty of competing bad feelings. Seeing the trauma in these kids, having to deal with never before seen behavioral issues, dealing with medical, mental and dental issues, and just the exhaustion from chasing around young kids for the first time in almost a decade.

This is why I believe that the reason we foster kids can be really summed up more of a ‘begrudging decision to care for others.’ Kind of like that decision you make when you don’t really want to go to the party with your partner, but they seem like they really want to go so you agree with a sigh.

Yes, we are taking care of others, and yes it sometimes feels good, but man oh man it would be way easier to not do this. How often do I vividly imagine going back to a simple life of golfing on the weekends, going on dates with my wife, or just simply having a quiet evening after dinner that doesn’t require wrestling kids into baths and beds.

I think it’s important to recognize this. That doing the “right thing” isn’t always pleasant and it doesn’t have to be. And moreover, that it’s ok to not feel inspiration and a “calling” to do good. Sometimes, you look at a situation, frown, recognize all the things you are about to lose, and just begrudgingly do it anyway. You don’t wait for the reward of good feelings to flow in. You just make a choice that this is something worthy to do.

Now, I know that this may make it sound like I’m taking some moral high ground, but I’m trying to convey the opposite. When we think of ‘saints’ I think we often see them as these people happily feeding the homeless, joyfully constructing houses for the unhoused, and excitedly accepting new children into their lives. I have a friend who fits this bill and I’m jealous. I often ask myself why can’t I be more like them? Is there something wrong with me?

This perception of saints like this can be demotivating for the rest of us who don’t feel that way. It’s easy think to ourselves that since we don’t get the same joy from these things there’s really no point. There are many times throughout this fostering journey that I think to myself “I don’t really want to do this” and it can make me feel like I’m not a good person.

But perhaps, there are some things worth doing whether we like to do them or not. And if we can get past those feelings and stop waiting to be inspired and for the feeling of the joy of giving and helping to wash over us, then we can give ourselves permission to feel kind of crappy about doing the worthy thing.

Then maybe we can accept that perhaps doing the right thing when we don’t like doing the right thing doesn’t make us terrible people after all.

In 2024, there were around 344,000 children in foster care in the US (see stats here) and the need for new foster families is as great as ever. If you’re interested in fostering and/or learning more about it, please feel free to reach out to me in the chat and I’d be happy to discuss it with you and point you to some cool resources.

Part of the issue was that if people did not put on the mask, they became hypoxic very quickly (within 15-30s). And hypoxia led to poor decision-making, confusion, etc. A couple of years later, these findings led to the Federal Aviation Agency telling people to put on their own oxygen mask before assisting with the oxygen mask of others.

A fairly logical safety issue - that one cannot help others if one is incapacitated - became an amazing metaphor for the rest of life.

Feeling emotions makes it hard to help others with theirs

One cool example of this metaphor in action came from a recent study looking at the effect of one’s emotions on helping others regulate their emotions.

However proud of ourselves we think we are, almost everything we accomplish requires the help of others. This is also true for our emotions. How often have you toiled through an emotional reaction to something only to be given the perfect perspective by your friend or partner? And when you find ourselves immersed in grief unable to climb out of it, it is others who often prop us up and show us the way.

In this study, the researchers recruited pairs of participants to try to help each other with their emotions. The “target” (the one being helped) watched an unpleasant video to get their negative emotions up. Meanwhile, some of the “regulators” (the helpers) watched the same video (high emotion condition) or just heard the target describe it (low emotion condition).

Afterwards, the regulators were told to help the target with their emotions in anyway that they wanted. So, they offered perspectives, validated their feelings, etc. Those regulators in the high emotion condition had less success helping their partner than those in the low emotion condition.

Why? When we are feeling highly emotional, we naturally turn our attention to ourselves to try and solve the problem and feel better. This leads less space for solving other people’s problems. In this study, the failed regulators tried out fewer strategies and validated the other person’s feelings less. They tried, but it’s hard to give the effort needed to help others feel better when we need to reserve that effort for ourselves.

Sleep to be kinder

My favorite version of “putting your own mask on first” is sleep. We all know that we should get good sleep. Of course it leads to better physical and mental health, and helps us keep our emotions appropriately in check (see review here).

BUT did you know that it affects how we treat others as well?

When we get poor sleep, we have less positive interactions with others (see study here), and we show less empathy (see study here). In fact, just having that one less hour of sleep during daily savings time can influence charitable giving (study here)!

Why? Just like when we feel selfishly emotional, when we don’t get enough sleep we turn our attention inward to protect ourselves and conserve the energy we need to live our life. Taking care of others becomes less of a priority.

And something happens to our humanity. In the daily savings study above, they also measured neural activity while people made social judgments (personality traits of others). They found that sleep deprived participants had less activity in a network of the brain designed for social cognition. This network is essential for treating humans as something special - something different than objects and other animals. Essentially, sleep deprivation made the participants just think less about the humanity of others.

Self-care to a point

There are a whole litany of studies on the importance of taking care of others and of kindness. It makes us happier (study), and helps us live longer (study).

So, the advice here is not directed at those who are naturally good at taking care of themselves and ignoring others. I’m looking at you basically everyone on reality TV shows.

The advice here is for those who think that they have to always self-sacrifice to take care of others. As the flight attendants will tell you, when you do this sometimes you can get weaker and weaker until you’re not taking care of others as well as you’d like.

So, yes, put the oxygen mask on first, but make sure you then don’t just sit back and relax while the plane goes down. Make sure others get theirs on too.

To sports fans, this joy may not be that surprising. We love sports because evolution has built in us a desire to identify with groups. Sports teams, with their regionality, logos, uniforms, and stars are extremely easy to identify with. And the games themselves are designed for peak emotional reactivity. We are most emotional when something we desire to have (a win!) or to avoid (a loss) are uncertain. Anyone who knows how awkwardly an oblong American football bounces knows that uncertainty is at its peak when watching sports.

And the joy of winning a conquest over another team is intoxicating. It combines our desire for our ingroup to be superior over the outgroup and the rush we get when we experience something that’s more pleasurable than we expected. And with the uncertainty of sports, even when our team is favored, a win is never guaranteed and always better than we expected.

But the sensation of this World Cup has moved more than just sports fans. It has ignited a cultural awakening for both the visiting international fans and North Americans. Many international fans who haven’t been to North America before have posted videos about how different it was than what they expected: nicer people, fewer guns, and better food. Some have even threatened to take ranch back to Europe with them.

For the North Americans they are visiting, there’s a palpable joy in hosting people who are genuinely appreciative of your home. I have seen more tear-filled displays of patriotism related to these international fans than I have seen about any of the more ostentatious events surrounding the 250^th year anniversary of the US. One social media post noted that sometimes it takes other people visiting our country for us to really appreciate it.

Now, some people are quick to point out that not all is well. For example, both fans and teams from abroad have had trouble getting past immigration. Some teams have had little time to prepare for their matches. And FIFA has banned some versions of flags that have sociopolitical implications. And, oh yeah, beyond the World Cup, there’s still war, poverty and cancer.

As an academic, you might think that this would be the point of the essay where I spend time making sure people remember all the bad things going on. “Don’t get too patriotic, because our country is under siege.” “Don’t be too happy, because many of these countries are still oppressing their citizens.” “Let’s keep our eyes on the activistic prize.”

But I’m going to take a different stance. I’m going to suggest that we fully embrace this collective warmth despite everything else that is going on. My research is on positive emotion and resilience. I and others have shown in studies that people who are able to experience and savor positive moments like this are happier and more resilient. And it doesn’t have to come at the expense of forgetting about the bad stuff.

Happy and resilient people aren’t the Pollyannas that grumpy people assume they are. In studies, we have shown that they experience the good when it’s good and the bad when it’s bad. They grieve when they experience loss and get angry at injustice. The real difference between the resilient and less resilient is that they can feel love and pain at the same time.

When confronted with the contradiction of happiness in times of anger and sadness, resilient people say “yes, and” rather than “yes, but.” Yes, there is joy and love spreading across the continent right now AND there is pain and suffering in the world. They both can be true because one does not have to negate the other.

And sometimes, it’s kind of nice to distract oneself from the problems plaguing one’s life for a couple of moments. Our lab has shown in studies that as long as people aren’t avoiding their problems, distracting themselves with moments of levity and positivity can help them cope with their lives.

So, to anyone who insists on reacting to joy with reminders of pain and suffering:

Shut up for a second.

Just for a second, allow the joy to flourish and envelop us. There’s always time for pain, but these moments of shared affection across millions of people and dozens of countries are rare. Let’s use this opportunity to heal before we have to go back to the fight.

“Of course,” we said. “We’ll have a get together at your house. And maybe have some veggie plates and wine. Is 6pm okay?”

“No. You don’t get it.” she said to us. “I want you to party with US, not US party with you.”

She clarified what this meant. Beer pong and other drinking games at her house, uber downtown, go to an underground club, everyone buys a round of shots for everyone else, go to another hot spot, eat a hot dog on the street, end up at a dance club until 2am, and then and only then go to sleep.

I know what most of you are thinking. “Maybe when I was 23, but I can’t handle that anymore.” And that’s extremely reasonable. That much alcohol and movement and lack of sleep is not designed for bodies over 40.

But we went and partied anyway. Why?

The official answer is because we discovered a long time ago that to truly connect with our kids, we had to meet them where they’re at. And it just so happened that my daughter was at a place in her life where she and her friends socialize by partying.

The unofficial answer is because she and her friends wanted us to. My daughter talked about how much she and her friends were looking forward to hanging out with us. I couldn’t believe it. I can kinda understand my daughter wanting to hang with us (kinda), but her friends too? That seemed almost too good to be true.

But it wasn’t and that’s what this post is about. We spent real, honest time with Gen Z college graduates in their space doing their thing. And it was enlightening. Here’s what we learned:

Yes, they are anxious. Studies have fairly reliably painted a picture of Gen Z as a generation that is more anxious and depressed than prior generations (see older study summarizing that here). And there are lots of reasons for it that I won’t get into here, but it’s not hard to see.

But, they know it and are trying to deal with it. It’s tempting for older generations to see stats like this and claim that the younger generations are doomed. But that kind of thinking is counterproductive both for them and for us (as well as pretty typical for every generation whether the fate-sealing culprit is social media, video games, the Vietnam war, or rock and roll music).

Gen Z needs help, but instead of providing it, we call them fragile and lazy. They know they need help. They ask us for it more directly than did any prior generation. We need to listen.

Somewhere between the cup stacking drinking game and getting frisked by bouncers, we also learned that Gen Z can be incredibly engaging. As a professor, I’m around this generation all the time. I almost always find them super interesting and willing to chat about all sorts of things. But I didn’t expect this while listening to hip hop at 120 db and throwing back green tea shots.

They loved talking about real things. We talked about their theses, their future jobs, their trepidation moving to a new place where they don’t know anybody, and heavy stuff like AI’s role in society. Not once did they roll their eyes or pretend they needed to use the bathroom. In fact, I was so deep into the AI conversation with one person that they shrugged off their friends asking them to dance. I got the sense that this generation is really trying to take things head on.

Intergenerational communication is a tough nut to crack (see a review on that here) and intergenerational engagement even tougher (see review here). We study how to reach and interact with other generations, but it seems like most of the research is really centered on how we treat the older generations and what impact that has on them.

While laudable, we need to turn our gaze to communicating and engaging with the younger generations. They are anxious, sure, but they are more accepting of mental health issues, they challenge the status quo, and they are happy to talk about all of these things with their elders.

We just need to listen and refrain from judging. And it doesn’t hurt to party with them. Now, you don’t have to drink like a fish and hang out until the wee hours of the morning. But you do need to meet them where they’re at.

One of the biggest intergenerational differences is each generation’s relationship with digital technology. It’s hard to connect with young people when their heads are buried in their phones. But be with them in a highly social context where all the fun is around them and not trapped in a 4 inch screen and you’d be amazed at how cool this generation really is.

Yeah, our biases even affect how we think about our biases!

So which is it? First, I’ll point you to a great recent media article I contributed to on this topic by on Vox. It’s a general take on the delusion vs. optimism debate.

But I’d also like to discuss a specific, super cool study here that really opened my eyes as to what it looks like to actually behave optimistically in the world.

In the study, participants played a game where they chose between fractals (colorful, complex images) and simple colored squares.

The participants played this game trying to amass the most reward (points) they could get.

Then, the researchers did something cool. They took each player’s data and, with computational modeling, could figure out their pattern of responding.

They determined that those who were high on optimism started off playing the game assuming that the unknown fractals would deliver them higher reward than those who were low on optimism. When faced with uncertainty, the optimists assumed that things were going to work out better for them.

This may be unsurprising, but what I thought was an important lesson is what happened when they started choosing the fractal images and getting rewards or not. Then, there was no difference between how well optimists and pessimists learned from the outcomes of their choices.

When faced with uncertainty, we have to start somewhere. Humans are notoriously bad at understanding probability and we really don’t have a way of representing “perfectly neutral.” So, we tend to make a choice. We choose to think good things are going to happen or that bad things are going to happen.

Importantly, though, we can’t blindly keep that faith when faced with evidence to the contrary. In one study demonstrating the danger of blind faith, they found that those married couples who ignored genuinely serious problems in their marriage did not do very well.

Go into the uncertain world with rose-colored glasses, but with eyes wide open.

Often, the couple’s friends express their uncertainty about the union. Although the primary gimmick of the show is to see if people can fall in love without seeing other, the friends don’t often question this part. Perhaps they are romantics, or, probably more likely, they don’t want to appear shallow on international TV. Instead, the friends most often question how the couple could fall in love and commit to each other so quickly.

The friends’ concerns seem quite reasonable. After all, recent surveys from dating and wedding sites show that people are dating somewhere between 2 to 5 years before tying the knot, about 25-60x longer than the month that the contestants have. And studies suggest that this is justified – couples who date longer before marriage tend to be more likely to stay married.

But these stats go out the window when referring to the Love is Blind contestants because of something that people always get wrong – time doesn’t actually affect anything.

When people think of ‘time’ they tend to use it as a proxy for change. “Time changes a person” and “Only time will tell.” The quantum nature of time makes it feel like it flows in one direction and we correlate this flow with change. Whether it be geological formations, people’s personalities, or the course of a disease, people think of time as the agent that alters, improves and destroys.

But time doesn’t do any of that. Instead, change happens because of certain processes that tend to occur across time or are observable because of the passage of time.

Take rocks for an example. Time does not wear down rocks. Natural forces like wind and water do. If a rock is protected from these natural forces by being surrounded by other rock, then it won’t change very much, no matter how long it’s been there. On the other hand, a river that gets rerouted to a new location will start wearing down rock that may have stood changeless for millions of years.

Human aging is another great example. It feels like aging happens because of time, but it’s really due to things like oxidative stress and telomere shortening. And people are starting to tackle aging as a process unlinked to time. For example, Bryan Johnson is a CEO who famously spends $2 million a year trying to reverse his aging process through strict diet, sleep and exercise protocols.

My interest in time is from my research on how emotions change across time (see some fun papers on that here and here and a book on it here). From my perspective, the most insidious example of time as agent is the advice we give people when they’ve recently lost someone:

“Time heals all wounds.”

On the one hand, this mantra has good intentions. When you are trying to help someone who seems totally consumed by fresh grief, you want to give them a sense of hope -- that things will eventually get better.

On the other hand, time is not what makes things better. People need to process the event and accept their emotions to start the path toward recovery. This emotional work occurs across time, but time, alone, can’t make it happen.

This matters, because thinking that time is the main causal agent for mental health improvement might stem people’s motivation for change (time will take care of it) or make them feel weak if they haven’t experienced recovery on the expected timeline.

Returning to our blinded lovers, it is not time that leads to better relationships, it’s having shared, novel experiences that allow them to learn more about and grow into each other. In studies on relationships, researchers aiming to increase closeness between two people will often have them participate in novel, arousing activities. The boat rides, paragliding, and horse rides featured in these shows serve the same purpose.

Usually, in the outside world, these novel experiences happen slowly over time. In the carefully crafted world of reality TV, the producers stack these experiences one after each other, accelerating the intimacy between the contestants. According to psychological theory, this rapid change in intimacy fuels passion and both intimacy and passion help drive feelings of love.

When the contestants try to explain themselves to their skeptical friends, the most common rebuff to their concerns seems to be: “It feels like we’ve known each other forever.” Perceptions of passing time can give a sense that experiences have happened, and the reverse is also true – having accelerated experiences can affect our perception of time.

For those contestants, it genuinely feels like time has passed more quickly than for the observers. In recognizing this oddity of time perception, these reality TV stars have accidentally stumbled onto a core principle of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but instead of their friends falling into black holes, they are falling into love (except for Season 9 – yikes).

For the past two weeks, Michigan basketball has been on a tear through the March Madness Tournament (4 straight games scoring over 90 points and with double digit wins!). I wrote before about how Michigan basketball actually saved my mental health when our football coach got fired and arrested last fall. So to see them on this winning streak has made my extremely happy.

Now, I want you to imagine watching an example game with me and following along with my emotions. In the first 10 mins, we’re up by 1 - I’m incensed. At halftime we’re down by 2 - I’m throwing things and my family has started quietly leaving the room. Ten minutes later, we’re up by 11 - better but I’m still tense. End of the game we win by 13 - now I can finally be happy.

Sounds like a typical fan’s emotions while watching a game. Contrast that with me watching another game (Duke-UConn - if you know, you know) and I was super excited by how close it was and the ending was thrilling.

As a Michigan fan, I hope that they crush everyone they play from the beginning of the game. I absolutely loathe close games. As a casual fan, it’s the opposite. Blow-outs are boring and close games are exciting. Why?

There are lots of reasons why, but I want to focus on mixed emotions, or ambivalence. One of the cool things about being complex human beings is that we don’t have to just feel one thing at a time. Sometimes (often?) we feel lots of things at the same time, even emotions that seem like they should be the opposite.

We feel happy and sad when we see our kids graduate from high school and go off to college. And we feel anxious and excited when we are awaiting something uncertain that could be good or bad. This is where sports comes in.

As a fan, Michigan winning is a great outcome and them losing is a horrific, tragic outcome. At the start of a game, when those outcomes are most uncertain, I feel both anxious (because they could lose) and excited (because they could win). I’m having a mixed emotional experience.

And studies show that we sometimes find those types of mixed emotions aversive. In one study, for example, they measured people’s emotional reactions to ambivalent information. When people had to make a choice based on that information, they showed negative emotional responses. Ambivalence was muddying up their decision-making process and they didn’t like it.

When things are important, we tend to like it when we know what to do. Having more information rather than less information. Having consistent information rather than inconsistent information.

When I’m watching an important game, I want to know what the ending will be. When it’s close, I don’t and that ambivalence drives me nuts. When it’s not close (in either direction), then I feel calmer.

Now, contrast that with when I’m watching a game where I’m just a casual fan. The game isn’t important to me, so now the uncertainty of the outcome doesn’t become a source of uncomfortable ambivalence, but a source of excitement. Think of how you feel walking into a mystery thriller or a movie you know has a twist somewhere.

People often value excitement (especially Americans - see study here). And uncertainty can be a source of excitement when one of the possible outcomes (e.g., Michigan losing) isn’t terrifying.

This difference between casual and intense fans is also why it’s often so tough for them to watch a game together. Their motivations for watching the game are different. When the casual fan celebrates a scoring run by the underdogs, the intense fan secretly (or not so secretly) seethes because they’d feel perfectly fine watching the underdogs be buried beneath their favored team.

Being a true fan can cost a little bit of your sanity every time you watch your favorite team, but gosh darn it is it worth it when they win - Go Blue!

Have you ever gotten into an argument where both of you are completely convinced the other person is wrong about what was said? They swear they told you the good parts about what you did before blasting you about the bad parts. You’re positive they didn’t. Or maybe you’re the one insisting that you calmly told them about all of the good things you did, while they stare at you like it’s the first time they’ve heard it.

In moments like this, it can feel like someone has to be wrong. Maybe one person is exaggerating. Maybe someone is twisting the story. Sometimes it even starts to feel like one person is gaslighting the other.

But there is another possibility, and it is a lot less dramatic than that. After one of these conversations, have you ever started to wonder: Did they actually say that… and I just forgot? Did I only imagine delivering my perfect response?

Sometimes, our brains are just not very good at telling the difference between something that really happened and something we vividly imagined happening.

Psychologists call this reality monitoring. It is the process we use to figure out whether a memory came from actual interactions with the outside world or from a creation inside our own mind. Most of the time, we do this pretty well. But under the right conditions, that line between reality and imagination can get surprisingly blurry. And it depends on how we think.

In one study, participants either saw pictures of objects, imagined the objects, or described the objects in words. The next day, they were asked whether they had actually seen a picture of each object. People were much more likely to think they had seen something when they had only imagined it than when they had simply described it verbally.

Thinking is not a homogenous experience. Sometimes we think in words, like silently asking ourselves if we locked the door. Other times, we use mental imagery by picturing the door in our mind, imagining our hand on the knob, and seeing ourselves walking away.

Those two experiences may feel similar, but they are not the same in the brain. Mental imagery uses many of the same systems that real perception does. When you picture something in your mind, parts of the brain involved in actually seeing that thing can become active too. In other words:

imagined experiences can leave memory traces that feel a lot like real ones

That makes a lot of sense when you think about arguments. We do not usually remember them like transcripts. We remember them as scenes. We picture the room, the person’s face, the look they gave us, the thing we wish we had said, and… the way the whole moment felt.

Yes, emotion is another important piece of the reality monitoring puzzle. Imagery does not just feel more real. It also tends to feel more emotional.

If I say the word spider, that is one thing, but if you actually picture the spider - its legs, the way it moves, the panic of realizing it is closer than you thought - that usually feels much stronger.

That’s because images make experiences feel vivid, immediate, and sensory in a way that words often do not. Which is great when you are daydreaming about being on a beach somewhere with a piña colada.

Less great when you are lying in bed at 1 a.m. replaying an argument with your friend.

Once emotion enters the picture, imagined moments can become even more convincing (see study here). The perfect comeback you thought of later may start to feel like something you actually said. The hurtful comment you keep replaying may feel sharper and more certain each time you revisit it.

To be clear, not every disagreement is just an innocent memory mix-up. Sometimes people really do lie, deny things, or rewrite what happened.

But not always.

So, the next time an argument turns into a debate over who said what, it may not always mean someone is manipulative, careless, or trying to distort reality. Sometimes, it just means one of you is remembering something that felt real, but only happened in the theater of your mind.

Always ask yourself: Did that actually happen… or did I just imagine it?

You reach into your pocket and wiggle your fingers around, only to feel a wave of disappointment when you realize you forgot your headphones. Music is such an integral part of our daily lives that we gravitate toward it almost automatically. Every time we get into the car, we turn on the radio. As we walk from work or class, we put headphones in our ears. As we train in the gym or study for a test, music is almost always there.

Humans have always loved music, but since the invention of portable music players like the walkman, the iPod, and now just your regular phone, music has become a familiar and pleasurable part of our routine and the way we experience the world. Music is our background as we move through the mundane parts of daily life making even routine tasks a little more enjoyable.

But while we rock out to My Chemical Romance or shake it off to Taylor Swift, scientists have been hard at work uncovering something quite fascinating about our favorite pastime. Music isn’t just background noise or a distraction while we pass the time. It’s actually changing our very brains to see the world differently.

One study, for example, found that people with greater musical sophistication (think of it like a combination of training on an instrument, going to concerts, and being able to carry a tune) were actually better at hearing speech in noisy situations. The researchers proposed that because music and speech perception processes overlap in the auditory cortex of your brain, improving one can affect the other. You didn’t know that your parents making you learn the flute would later help with being able to chat at a party, did you?

Perhaps most obviously, music changes the way we feel. Think about how quickly a song can shift your mood, one minute you’re stressed, and the next you feel calmer, excited, or even nostalgic. That shift isn’t random. Music taps directly into systems in the brain that process emotion.

When we listen to music, regions involved in emotion, like the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, become active, and neurotransmitters like dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, and serotonin (our brain’s “feel-good” signals) can be released. Many treatments for anxiety and depression, like SSRIs, work by increasing serotonin in the brain. In other words, some of the same chemical systems targeted by medication are also activated when we press play.

But music doesn’t just influence how we feel in the moment, it also helps us learn how to regulate our emotions over time. Rather than working through a single pathway, music engages overlapping systems in the brain involved in emotional regulation, cognition, and even speech processing. By activating these systems repeatedly, music can help strengthen the processes we rely on to manage stress and respond to challenging situations.

In that sense, music isn’t just background noise, it can function like a workout for the brain. While people might listen to Drake in the gym to strengthen their muscles, they’re also engaging systems involved in regulation, as well as pitch, rhythm, timing, memory, and attention. Over time, this repeated engagement can make it easier to shift out of stress and regulate emotions more effectively.

Music gives us a tool to process stress, reinterpret situations, and return to baseline more quickly after something overwhelming. And the type of music you use to do this matters.

One study found that gentle music, think The Lumineers or Billy Joel, tends to be most effective at reducing severe stress. So the next time you find yourself in a moment of panic, try playing Piano Man. On the other hand, joyful music like Taylor Swift or Bruce Springsteen can be particularly helpful for moderate stress, like the traffic that never seems to move on your way to work or school.

But maybe you don’t want to calm down, but instead you feel like you want to take on the world? One study found that when people were faced with the prospect of competing with someone else, they chose to listen to high arousal anger-inducing music beforehand than something more calming. This is why you are more likely to hear hard rock or hip-hop than smooth jazz in locker rooms before a big game.

Musicians and other artists who use music have known this forever. Think about the Netflix hit Stranger Things. The directors used Kate Bush’s Running Up the Hill to demonstrate how the show’s characters were reconnecting with their mind and body to find freedom. Artists know that music helps us re-center ourselves and re-engage the systems we rely on to regulate emotion.

From a therapy perspective, this is great. Empirical results show that music therapy can produce moderate reductions in anxiety, which is why it has been implemented in hospitals, pregnancy care, mental health settings, and many other environments.

Personally, I find all of this encouraging because it helps justify the 321 times I listened to Zach Bryan’s Oklahoma Smokeshow in 2025. I wasn’t just repeatedly playing my favorite artist. I may have been strengthening my emotional regulation and activating chemical systems that help improve mood. At least that’s what I tell myself.

So get your headphones, turn up the radio in the car, and go to concerts. Music is not just a pleasure for the senses, but a pleasure for the emotional mind.

“Give it all you can!” “You get an A for effort!” “No pain, no gain.” In our society, putting effort into our goals is valued. Think about people extolling the virtues of hard work, persistence, grit, and determination. When someone tells you a task is going to “take A LOT of effort,” do you feel a wave of panic? Do you start to dread the task before you’ve even begun?

It makes sense if you do. Effort is tough. It requires energy, self-control, and discipline. Effort is often described as the “metabolic cost” of a behavior. It’s the investment of physical and/or mental resources toward a goal. These resources are precious, so no wonder we hesitate to use them. For example, when people go on survival shows, contestants quickly learn that following a snake for miles through the desert won’t get them enough calories to make it worth the trek.

So, we have to evaluate effort as worth it in order to exert it. And our brain does this by calculating a couple of variables.

First, how much energy is this effort going to take? Our brains keep track of our energy reserves and the metabolic costs of doing certain behaviors. This is why you feel lazier when you haven’t slept much or are sick. This is also why our brain loves sugar as a quick boost of that energy.

Second, is the goal desirable? We tend to put effort into the most meaningful parts of our lives. We try at school, we give it our best in relationships, and we grind at careers, etc. We try harder when the goal we want to achieve means something to us.

Lastly, can you do it? No matter how much effort I can put into waking up early and becoming a morning person, I have finally come to realize that it’s never going to happen. Our brains can dream, but at the end of the day, they are also pragmatic managers putting the effort where it’ll reap the most likely gains.

Why aren’t we giving it our best shot?

The implications of this idea are pretty profound because it can give us an idea of why we aren’t really trying at something. Why is it that we do the minimal work at our jobs? Why is it that we don’t try to control our emotions when we should? Why didn’t we try to make it work with the love of our lives?

Was the goal not important enough, or did we not actually believe that we’d get anywhere? If it’s the former, maybe the solution is to figure out why it’s not important and what might be more important. If it’s the latter, then why don’t we believe we’d succeed? What about this task seemed impossible to us?

Or… maybe our brain just didn’t believe it had the energy to try. Some studies (see one here) have shown that people with depression and anhedonia, the lack of interest in pleasurable activities, seem to think of the effort required to do those activities as particularly costly. It’s not that they don’t want to do them, but that their brains convince them that they don’t have the energy to.

And you don’t have to have anhedonia for your brain to make this calculation. All you need is too little sleep, eating the wrong stuff, or exerting yourself in less worthy pursuits.

A sneaky solution to the problem of effort

It often feels like effort only feels good when it leads to an external reward: an A on an exam, a promotion, a compliment, a successful impression, etc. Of course, that makes sense. We just talked about how we put in effort because we expect something in return.

But what if I told you that effort doesn’t always need an external payoff to feel worthwhile? It can actually feel pleasant and enjoyable on its own.

Consider puzzles. Every day, millions of people solve the New York Times crossword or play Wordle. These tasks clearly require mental effort, and people know it, yet they still do them. In fact, many look forward to them. Why? Do they get a reward from solving them? Sure, but that’s just a validation of their effort, and we don’t do something to feel good about doing something unless doing that thing feels good. In other words, these puzzlers wrack their brains for what the missing letter in VO_UE can be because the effort of puzzling feels satisfying on its own.

This is the ultimate trick - to turn effort into something that’s not dreadful but enjoyable. And studies (see here) show that when we can do this, we try harder, we perform better, and ultimately are more successful.

So yes, effort can feel draining.

Yes, we’re more likely to use it when something is desirable and attainable.

But it’s also true that exerting effort isn’t always painful, and you don’t always have to be trading it in for a reward. Instead, sometimes the effort itself is enough.

When we think of our emotional experiences, we often focus on our feelings. For arguments sake, let’s say that feelings are conscious reflections on our internal states. So you feel pain when something activates your peripheral pain receptors and sends that information to your brain. You feel hungry when your stomach’s muscular lining contracts rhythmically.

And you feel nervous when your heart rate increases and baroreceptors send that information back to your brain, right? Ok, but your heart does that when it’s working out too. You don’t always get anxious when riding a stationary bike, right? Except of course when there’s someone standing behind you silently judging the amount of sweat you’re producing.

So, there has to be something that differentiates feelings of nervousness and the feelings of exercise. In the 1960’s, two psychologists, Schachter and Singer, showed that for emotions to happen you need to have both the arousal (e.g., heart rate) and a ‘cognitive label’ of that arousal. Modern emotion theorists call this cognitive label ‘appraisal’ because it reflects an evaluation that people make of their circumstances.

I was nervous when the men’s hockey game went into overtime because I appraised the outcome as uncertain. And this appraisal increased my arousal. So when I noticed I was sweatily gripping the sides of the couch, I interpreted this as nervousness due to the hockey game and not a heart attack.

Now we have two (of many) elements of an emotional experience. We have the appraisals of what’s happening in the world - like uncertainty, unpredictability, positive/negative, etc. And we have the feelings and bodily responses that come from those appraisals.

We have already established the feelings are necessarily conscious, but what about appraisals? Clearly, they can be - I was aware that my appraisal of uncertainty was due to that insane 3 on 3 match between those two titans of the ice. But do they have to be?

Evidence suggest that they don’t have to be conscious and this makes for some wild insights into our emotions.

Super fast reactions

One of the implications of appraisals being unconscious is that we can have super fast emotional responses that happen in the evolutionarily ancient parts of our brain. Enter in the amygdala.

The amygdala is a part of the brain associated with processing uncertainty and unpredictability. For example, in one study (see here) they found that people’s amygdala went crazy when they heard tones that were non-rhythmic (off of the beat by a little bit). It’s role is to mobilize the brain and body in response to possible threats.

The cool thing about the amygdala is that it can be activated super quickly. For example, there’s a direct line of communication from the eyes to the thalamus (a sensory relay station in the brain) to the amygdala that can operate on the order of tens of milliseconds. Studies have shown that you can show people some picture of a threat, like a snake, for around 20-30ms and then present another image right afterward (called masking) and it’ll activate the amygdala without people ever reporting seeing it.

Figure: This is why you’re terrified of bad drummers… (figure from Herry et al., 2007)

Are they feeling emotions, though? Well, yes and no. It seems like they are making appraisals of those images as threatening because they then attach those threat appraisals to subsequent stimuli that they do consciously see. But, no, they are not ‘feeling’ anything per se.

This means that some simple emotional experiences like threat can occur really quickly because we can make appraisals really quickly. Even before we ever feel anything.

Not knowing why we (dis)like something

Another interesting implication of being able to make unconscious appraisals is that sometimes we can like or dislike something without actually knowing why.

In one study (see here) the experimenters showed participants subliminal happy and neutral faces and then provided them with novel beverages with different combinations of water, flavored drink powder, etc. They found that thirsty participants enjoyed the beverages more when they had been paired with subliminal happy faces (vs. neutral faces). Did they know why they liked it more? Nope.

Some theorists talk about appraisals having two functions: react and reflect. Some appraisals tell us to react to something (like happy faces or snakes), and some tell us to reflect on our reactions (why do I like this orange drink?). These react appraisals do not have to be conscious, so often we walk around in the world behaving and reacting without really knowing why. But, we hate that feeling of not knowing, so we’ll often make something up that sounds reasonable, called confabulation. “Of course I liked this orange drink…it’s, ummm, more orange-y than the other one.”

Staying humble

The most important implication of having unconscious appraisals is that it means that we should probably stay humble about our and other’s emotional experiences. We feel what we feel, yes, but our brain is making appraisals about the world that we are often unaware of. These appraisals can then shape how we think and behave without ever really ‘feeling’ anything.

So question why you’re reacting a certain way to a friend. Is it because they really did something wrong or is it because you happen to be in threat mode right now from something else? This is why we get road rage after all. When we drive, our brains are constantly evaluating possible mortal threats and when something even minor happens, we apply those appraisals to the other driver and freak out.

And question why others are reacting a certain way as well. Are they throwing a block of cheese at you because they’re being too sensitive or are they in threat mode from something else (maybe they’re lactose intolerant)?

Feelings are conscious, but our emotional lives are much more complex than feelings. Recognizing this may offer a little grace we can give to ourselves and to others.

But I had a hunger. Whenever I encountered a new phenomenon I wanted to understand how the brain constructed it. So, I got a concentration in cognitive neuroscience and started conducting fMRI studies on stress and emotion regulation.

Fast forward to job interviews where I presented my research on how the brain represents the timing of emotions. For example, I showed that the intensity of an emotional experience seemed to track with how long a brain region was active as well as how intensely it was active. See that paper here.

On one of my interviews, I was asked by a skeptical professor about whether there was any utility in neuroscience research. They believed that neuroscience didn’t really add much to psychology research.

I was flustered. Psychology is what the brain does, so to me, it was self-evident why people would want to know about the brain. For example, if you care about emotions, wouldn’t you want to know how they are produced by the brain? Put another way, wouldn’t knowing how something works mechanistically automatically add value? Aren’t we scientists trying to pick apart and understand the fabric of our mind’s reality?

Well, this response wasn’t taken very well because it’s naive. It’s always difficult to be persuasive when one’s attitude boils down to ‘duh, of course it’s important!’

Luckily for me, I get a do-over.

I was recently scrolling through substack notes feeds and encountered this familiar attitude. A colleague and friend who I respect very much in the psychological science field had posted that

neuroscience is particularly ill-suited as a discipline to tell you how to live

I admit that I was a little shocked. Surely our field has advanced enough in the 15+ years since my job interviews that we understand the importance of neuroscience. So, giving them the benefit of the doubt that I misread the intensity of their anti-neuroscience attitude, I started a conversation in the comments section to defend neuroscience. You can read the entirety of that exchange here. After several exchanges I sought to find some common ground:

You’re right if the argument is “we need neuroscience for any psychology to be valid and helpful” I 100% agree that this is not true. And it feels like that’s what you’re arguing against given that you keep using words like ‘require’ and ‘need.’

But what if I say “neuroscience can be helpful to people because it outlines mechanisms for psychology?”

to which they replied:

There are many things I agree with. In general I’ve written 3 self help books and given 100s of workshops and have never found the need to use neuroscience to help explain what well being science and interventions suggest about living better.

I guess I read the anti-neuroscience attitude correctly. My colleague, who I’ll refer to impishly as Dr. Blackbox because of their insistence on continuing to view the brain as the impenetrable and unimportant black box in between stimuli and behavior (akin to 1950’s behaviorism), then wrote a nice piece outlining their views titled “Neuroscience is the wrong approach” that you can find here.

I’m writing this essay as a brief-ish response to that piece and to outline why I think, logically, neuroscience can be helpful to understand well-being science and provide some examples. What I will not argue is that it’s required to understand psychology. That would undermine all non-neuroscience psychology research, including my own. But saying something can be helpful is not the same thing as saying it’s required to be helpful.

For example, Dr. Blackbox likes car analogies. So do I. If I wanted to build a more powerful car, I could do so by observing all the attributes of cars that are already powerful, apply those to a new car and then test it. This is akin to how the psychology of well-being works. Observe that people high in well-being tend to have strong social connections, so then prescribe people social connection exercises to improve their well-being.

This approach is sound and has produced a lot of effective interventions over the years. It’s also produced ineffective interventions because just like there are thousands of different variables on a car that could affect its performance, there are thousands of different variables in our psychology that could affect our well-being. Good psychology studies will measure and control for each…one…by…one.

But what if I was an automotive engineer? Then I could use my understanding of the mechanics of airflow, weight, torque, etc to design cars that are more powerful. I may still get it wrong, and I definitely still need to test my designs, but understanding how cars work gives me a huge advantage when trying to make them work better.

Why can’t neuroscience do the same thing? Can understanding the brain help people work better too?

Well, according to Dr. Blackbox, this only applies sometimes.

Neuroscience is good for neuroscience-y things

Dr. Blackbox conceded that neuroscience research is required for interventions that are focused on specific issues with the brain:

There are domains where neuroscience has been genuinely indispensable. First thing that comes to mind is psychopharmacological interventions.

Deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s tremors has given people their lives back. When someone with essential tremor can suddenly hold a cup of coffee without spilling, that is intervention at the level that works. The electrical stimulation disrupts pathological synchronization in the basal ganglia in ways that no amount of psychological reframing could accomplish.

Methadone maintenance therapy works because we understand opioid receptor dynamics. Levodopa works because we understand dopamine synthesis (link). These are not cases of neuroscience providing a why for something psychology already solved. These are cases where the neural level IS the intervention level.

I will grant these fully. When your depression has become so treatment-resistant that nothing else works, transcranial magnetic stimulation targeting specific cortical regions might be your path forward.

But notice that these examples are all interventions for when the system has broken down in specific, mechanistic ways. They are medical treatments for neurological dysfunction.

I want to focus on this last paragraph in the quote because I think it reflects an implicit asymmetry in how people, including some scientists, view disease and health. These examples with Parkinson’s and drug addiction are “neurological dysfunctions” so are therefore worthy of neurological study and intervention.

However, the neural systems implicated in these “dysfunctions” are the same ones that underlie “functions” too. For example, the dopamine and opiate systems underlie most positive emotions like excitement, desire, and relief (see a cool paper on the theoretical connection between dopamine and positive emotion here). So, the positive emotions we feel can be considered “neurological functions.” Remember, all psychological processes occur in the brain.

I think this asymmetry in applying neurological bases to bad vs. good functions comes down to two things.

First, there’s this desire in people, including scientists, to try to use external reasons to justify why something went wrong and internal reasons to explain how something went right. This is called the self-serving bias. It’s why people think their favorite team won because they’re awesome but lost because of the refs.

Second, I think people often think of the brain as external to the self. Indeed, Descartes famously posited that the mind and body are separate, interacting entities. In some way we are all lay Descartians. We say things like “my brain made me do it” and “if I can convince my brain...”

Taken together, if people think of their brain as separable from themselves, it makes sense that people would blame their brain when things go wrong, but not when things go right. I’m depressed because my brain chemistry is off, but I am happy because I have freedom and friends.

In reality though, people are depressed and happy because their brain produces those states. They win and lose because their brain produces the behaviors that lead to each. They fall in and out of love because their brain produces all of our feelings.

Brain = me

I wrote a chapter recently about how the brain knows it’s happy. You can find it here. I won’t go into all the nitty gritty, but I proposed that a very simple system in the brain governs everything from positive attitudes about pizza to positive attitudes about yourself (self-esteem) and produces the same positive emotions when eating as it does when winning an award. Check it out if you’re interested.

Both the states we hate and the states we love happen in that same 3 lb organ in our skull.

The good news is that Dr. Blackbox is an accomplished psychological scientist who has “published quite a few social neuroscience studies.” So, I doubt that they think that positive psychological functions are not produced by the brain, just that you can’t improve them by knowing about the brain. This leaves us with an awkward grid mapping functions to interventions:

Now we get to the crux of it. The creme of the disagreement. The point of contention. Dr. Blackbox clearly does not think that interventions need neuroscience to improve functional states like well-being. They may not need neuroscience but can neuroscience help?

I believe that this question is made up of four related questions:

Can neuroscience interventions improve functional states in those who struggle with them?

Dr. Blackbox referred to the work of Dr. Cacioppo in their piece and rightfully so. Dr. Cacioppo conducted amazing work on loneliness, emotions, attitudes, and….social neuroscience (but let’s forget that for now). One of my favorite theories of Dr. Cacioppo is that positive and negative states are independent from each other even if they interact. See that paper here.

If so, that means that improving positive functional states in those who lack them is somewhat distinct from reducing negative functional states. The examples Dr. Blackbox referred to above with Parkinson’s and substance use clearly involve the reduction of negative states. For those suffering from these ailments, getting back to some semblance of normal is the big win.

But there are examples when neuroscience interventions have improved functional states. One of the most recent I’ve seen uses transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS; an electromagnetic pulse over your skull that can activate or inhibit neural activity), which Dr. Blackbox agreed is useful for depression. In this study (find here), after 4 weeks of TMS, some people with treatment-resistant depression started feeling better (less depression) and became more likely to view non-positive faces as positive. The authors suggested that because the faces were shown so quickly (500ms) their default response became “yep, I think that’s positive.”

I’m not saying the study was perfect and more studies are definitely needed, but if one looks at the current literature on neuroscience interventions like TMS and deep-brain stimulation and electroconvulsive therapy, more and more studies are showing that the effects of these techniques are going beyond reducing negative symptoms to also improving positive functionality as well.

Can neuroscience interventions improve functional states in those who don’t lack them?

This is where things get tricky. I think it is technically possible for neuroscience interventions to improve functional states in everyone regardless of where you start from. That’s because the brain does psychology. So, anything that you care about psychologically has a brain basis and hundreds of studies have shown that neuroscience interventions can change the brain.

HOWEVER, if one were to scrape the archives of research for studies showing this (like I did) you might come back relatively empty-handed. I have to hand it to Dr. Blackbox, I really couldn’t find a reliable set of studies showing the effectiveness of neuroscience interventions for improving functional states in relatively well-off people (feel free to add those in the comments if you can think of them!). Champagne and caviar to you, Dr. Blackbox, you got me.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be these types of interventions down the road. When we get shiny new tools, we humans tend to use them to fix problems first. This is the medical model – treat the sick and injured and leave the well alone. Of course this makes sense. We should focus on helping those who really need it before giving the relatively well-off an upgrade.

But we humans are also vain so eventually we’ll find a way to perfect our lives with whatever tools are available. After all, botox started off as a way to help people with eye spasms before it became a Hollywood favorite for smoothing out those dastardly wrinkles.

Right now, doctors are using CRISPR, the gene-editing technology, in hundreds of trials to help cure dozens of diseases including neurological ones. How far off do you really think we are before we’re using it to gene-edit our dopamine system to fall into love easier, or our oxytocin system to bond to others better (actually, some have tried this with sprays but it’s fairly controversial whether it works or not), or our opiate system to not have to feel the pain of rejection? Besides ethical considerations, there’s no neurological reason to believe that it can’t happen.

Can neuroscience inform interventions to improve functional states?

This is a critical question and I honestly believe that the way one answers it reveals a lot about one’s biases for or against neuroscience. As someone who is pro-neuroscience, of course knowing about the brain can inform interventions because it provides us the principles of mechanisms for change.

For example, we know that exercise leads to better memory, learning and mood because it, in part, increases something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a neurochemical that contributes to brain plasticity and learning.

A person with an anti-neuroscience bias might say that knowing that exercise improves BDNF does not change the fact that we know that exercise works. It’s an unnecessary and expensive detail. And I get that. We knew the beneficial effects of exercise on mental and physical health before we knew what it did to the brain.

We may not *need* to know about BDNF to know that exercise helps people on average. But *can* knowing it help? Turns out that there’s a genetic variation of BDNF across people called the Val66Met polymorphism, which affects the functioning of BDNF in the brain. And there’s preliminary evidence that exercise impacts people’s mental health differently based on their genetic profile. One study (here) showed that people with the Met allele of the polymorphism got a bigger benefit from exercise’s effects on depression than people with the Val allele.

This is quite preliminary and these genome-wide association studies are notoriously difficult to replicate. But this pro-neuroscience person believes that its very existence is a proof of concept that there’s a world where valid, reliable neuroscience knowledge can inform well-being interventions. This is just one way – by figuring out how effective those interventions are for some people vs. others.

Can neuroscience provide something that psychology cannot?

Now this is a tough one and I don’t believe that answering this question is necessary for showing that neuroscience is useful. However, this is all for fun, so let me lay out one specific set of (admittedly argumentative) arguments that suggests that the answer is possibly yes.

1. Much of psychological research (especially on well-being) relies on participants’ introspection on their emotions, attitudes, beliefs, etc.

2. Introspection provides information that we are consciously aware of.

3. By definition, introspection cannot provide any information about unconscious processes.

4. To measure unconscious processes, psychologists have to develop clever paradigms that rely on some behavior (e.g., button press, decision, hand grip squeeze). There are many problems with these and they can’t access unconscious processing that doesn’t directly lead to a behavior.

5. To access unconscious processes that do not lend themselves to specific behaviors will 100% require neuroscience.

6. Neuroscience is not quite there yet, but there are promising signs. Many studies on subliminal processing have identified neural responses to stimuli that the person is unaware of.

These arguments about the limits of introspection pertain to a provocative question that Dr. Blackbox asked:

Do we need parents and kids to go into an fMRI to determine whether they love each other?

Maybe not if the parents and kids both have full, accurate introspective faculties available and are willing and able to report those introspections to others truthfully, including experimenters.

But what if they don’t? What if the child is really young or has some form of developmental disability that prevents them from communicating (let alone introspecting)? I’m not saying that you should put such a child in an fMRI scanner just to see if they love you. But you might consider it for discovering other hidden states that matter to their well-being.

A final note about seduction

Like a lot of psychologists who have a problem with neuroscience, Dr. Blackbox gives the game away a little bit when they posted this:

Neuroscience is often lame and unproductive.

Don’t let the neuroscience influencers seduce you into thinking otherwise.

Ahh…there it is. The great seduction of neuroscience. You have no idea how many times I whisper “the brain” or “neural” around my wife on those special Thursday date nights. Of course, Dr. Blackbox means that people are more easily convinced that some finding is true when it has neuroscience attached to it than when it doesn’t.

This is true, but is it bad?

It can be bad if people make simplistic assumptions about how the brain works or they apply the term neuro- to every concept under the sun just to convince you its real (I’m looking at you neurogum). It can also be bad if the neuroscience is bad, but this is not specific to neuroscience. Using bad psychology to convince someone of something is also bad, yes? Indeed, this is one of Dr. Blackbox’s valiant missions with their postings.

So, for argument’s sake, let’s assume the neuroscience is well-researched and appropriately applicable to your concept of interest. If I am trying to convince you of B and I know how A leads to B, then why would I not tell you that? Can you imagine treating grown adults who care about their well-being like toddlers? When they ask “yes, I know that B works, but how?” and you reply “don’t worry about it. You don’t need to know.”

If knowing how A leads to B makes people more likely to do B, then “influencers” have two choices.

1. They can learn A so that they can affect more people in a positive way

2. They can tell them not to listen to anyone who knows A and insist, in a fairly patronizing way, that they don’t need to know it. And hope that ignoring mechanisms will convince them to do B.

Dr. Blackbox notes that they have never used neuroscience to justify their thoughts on well-being in their talks and books. I do all the time. I choose the first option above. So do a lot of my esteemed friends and colleagues. One time, a mother who had recently lost her son to an overdose told me that learning about the dopamine system at my seminar helped her forgive her child. I hesitate to call that revelation “lame and unproductive.”

Just because something is seductive doesn’t mean it can’t help get you to do the things you need to do to live a good life.

Epilogue (or things that I wanted to point out but didn’t have space)

1. Social neuroscience (basically fMRI studies of high level social processes) is a minority paradigm for neuroscience, but often the focus of psychologist’s ire.

2. Watch out for words like ‘need’ and ‘require’ in scientific discourse. They unfairly apply a super high bar that is rarely reached by any science. Indeed, psychology research is not needed to live a good life. Most people do fine without ever attending a psychology lecture or reading a psychology book.

3. Humbly, I’m only a part-time neuroscientist so forgive me if I over- or under-stated anything and I welcome comments from real-deal neuroscientists to set me straight!

Please let me know what you think in the comments! A big thanks to fellow “neuroscience influencer” Kateri McRae who helped me reason through some of these thoughts. And a big thanks to Dr. Blackbox for inviting me to have this fun conversation.

If you like this kind of thing, then please subscribe to my substack where I talk about positive emotions, stress, and emotion regulation, just be wary - sometimes I talk about neuroscience!

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First of all, storms like these are stressors. They present demands on our attention, energy, and emotions, and we have to do something to meet those demands. Driving is stressful because of the extra energy devoted to maintaining control of the car. Preparing for them is stressful because of trying to predict all the possible things that could happen like frozen pipes, power outages, falls, etc.

If resilience is about maintaining well-being despite stressors (see my article here if you’re interested in a more thorough treatment of resilience), then how we cope with a particular stressor like a storm may have lessons for us about resilience generally. Here are three (of the many) lessons I took from this particular storm:

1. Preparation. When things are in our control, resilience is about preparing to meet the challenges of stress. In this particular scenario, my wife and I covered the faucets, bought non-perishable food (although we realized later that we could literally just put the perishable food outside and it’d be fine), filled up tubs and buckets of water in case we lost water, and, most importantly for our sanity, downloaded movies and shows on our devices. This preparation seems obvious for a storm, but it applies to other stressors as well. When my students have a test, they prepare by studying. When I’m stressed about a presentation, I prepare by practicing it. One of the most under-appreciated parts of stress regulation and resilience is that sometimes the best thing to do about the thing you’re stressed about is to just prepare as much as you can for it.

2. Confidence. BUT!!! Preparation by itself is not enough. People who are high in anxiety and worry prepare their hearts out but often still feel anxious and worried. There’s a lot of reasons why, but I want to focus on one - confidence. When I talked with my wife about the storm and she expressed her concerns about the power going out I reminded her that we’d be fine. We’ve camped all over the country including places with freezing temperatures and storms. Was it miserable? Yup. Did we cope? Yup. That experience with prior similar stressors helped us be confident that we’d be fine even if we lost power. Some studies have even shown that having moderate stressors throughout one’s life may produce resilience because of that experience. Having confidence helps people stay positive, maintain optimism, and keeps preparations to an appropriate level for addressing the stressor.

3. Moments of joy. An ice storm is a stressor, but that doesn’t mean it has to be all bad. There can be positive moments too. We went sledding with our kids even though the snow was too fluffy and I had to propel myself with my arms like a penguin to get going. Others made snow (ice) men, snow-cream, had snowball fights, etc. It’s hardly ever the case that a kid sees a snow storm, gets out of school, and is bummed out about it. Most of my research is about how we can use positive moments like these to color our stressors (example paper here if you’re interested). Instead of a pure dark canvas of misery, positive moments can provide bright, colorful moments that turn the whole stress picture into something more interesting and fondly memorable. This applies equally to other stressors we have in our lives too.

Proper caveats apply here - I recognize and appreciate that the snow storm affected people in different ways and that it was more dangerous and threatening for some than for others. That said, opportunities like these are great reminders of the stressors in other parts of our lives and the resilient behaviors and thoughts that we can use to manage them. If the only thing you take a way from this is that the next time you’re really stressed about an upcoming event you think “How do I build a snow (ice) man out of this?” then you’re on the right track.

The point of this article is not to talk about Indiana themselves, but actually about everyone else in the college football sphere. Even though Indiana made it to the playoffs last year, many pundits still didn’t give them a chance this year. Even though they were undefeated when facing Ohio State in the Big Ten championship, they were still the underdog. Even though they soundly beat Ohio State, many people claimed there was no way they could beat perennial powerhouse Alabama (who had 3 losses at the time and ranked 8 spots lower). The doubts endlessly rained down upon Indiana until they hoisted the championship trophy.

This is a story about beliefs. People believed Indiana was weak. Why? Because they almost always have been. They were the bottom dwellers for so long how could they possibly change?

Beliefs are an interesting thing because they distort our normal learning processes. We typically learn a lot by reinforcement. If I expect an apple to taste good and it does, yay, I’ll eat that apple again. But if it tastes bad, then I may give it a couple more chances, but really I’m going to probably pick another fruit.

Tastes are subjective, but our body is pretty motivated to get it right. It doesn’t make sense to our health to keep eating apples that taste rotten. Of course, we can overcome taste with control - otherwise how would we ever eat vegetables without butter and salt? But even in those circumstances, we know that they don’t taste as good as we’d like.

Beliefs are also subjective, but they do this funny thing where they resist learning the truth about them. We’re motivated to have strong, immutable beliefs because they form the bedrock of our whole understanding of the world and the meaning we draw from it. So, they are tricky. They like to point us to information that confirms them and away from information that could challenge them.

For people who loved Indiana, or didn’t really care about college football, they readily accepted their ascent. Because, well, why not? It’s a cool story. But the people who refused to believe in them all shared one thing in common - an over-reliance on prior beliefs that they should be bad.

Some of that was motivated. For example, many of the talking heads could not even fathom another team outside of their beloved conference winning the championship again (you know who you are). But some of it was just…stubbornness. Even if they weren’t rooting against Indiana, they still held up their prior beliefs because accepting Indiana’s new dominance would make them challenge a lot of other beliefs they have. And that’s just annoying and hard to do.

Although I’m talking about Indiana, I’m really telling a story about how we think about others. To challenge those times when it appears that someone might be changing, but we refuse to really believe it. I think often about the trouble that ex-convicts have in getting jobs and changing their lives around. When so many people still believe you are the same person you once were, it’s nearly impossible to change their minds. After all, not many people have an epic, televised, no-doubt, one-on-one, national championship game to prove others wrong.

Side story: Another fun example of this belief system in college football is the SEC commissioner who commented that he thought more teams from the SEC should get into the playoffs because they are a tougher conference. What was hilarious was that he used subjective rankings as his evidence, without realizing that those subjective rankings are also partly based on prior beliefs about the teams. Essentially, he was arguing that the SEC should be promoted because of their prior success and pointed to evidence based partly on their prior success. Beliefs are not only strong and immutable, but sometimes they can put us into logic-defying circular reasoning loops!

Reframing stress is one of the most powerful ways of changing how you feel about it. But there’s a lot of nuance in how best to reframe. I showcase here a few reframing strategies that my colleagues and I have demonstrated can impact how successful you are changing your emotions.

What’s your goal? In this post I talk about the difference between reframing with the goal to improve your positive emotions or to decrease your negative emotions. There are subtle differences between these two strategies, including what you base your success on. Sometimes, we can’t feel less bad (think about grief after losing a loved one), so we have to focus on feeling more good.

Do you go all the way? In this post I talk about how reframing our stressors is composed of at least two steps. First, we have to generate possible ways to think differently about our emotions. Second, we have to pick a good reframing and really elaborate on it to make ourselves feel better. Sometimes, if we skip this second step, we feel like we’ve done something, but haven’t really been as successful in changing our emotions as we could be.

Are you stuck in the past? In this post I talk about how when we reframe our stressors we can take different time perspectives to help us. Sometimes, we look to the past to find meaning (“I used to be good at this, so I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it soon”), and sometimes we look to the future (“Things will be ok once this is all over”). We have found that, while both are effective, looking to the future can have special benefits.

Who is it coming from? In this post I remind people that often we get our reframings from other people who care about us. Sometimes these reframings can even be more effective.

BONUS: Seeing the good about the bad. This is a bonus post where I talk about a twist to reframing. Sometimes when we think about stressors deeply, we often come up with positive interpretations without actually changing anything.

Thanks so much for subscribing and supporting my substack! I hope you enjoy this recap while I work on new content for you!