This week’s email is about a technique that helps when you’re being too hard on yourself.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from my article):

• Self-compassion involves extending sympathy to yourself, particularly when you struggle or suffer.

• Self-compassion has three components: self-kindness, which involves being nice to yourself; common humanity, which involves recognizing that everyone experiences challenges; and mindfulness, which involves accepting your emotions in a non-judgmental manner.

• Self-compassion isn’t about self-pity or self-indulgence, but rather about facing problems head-on in a balanced way, while taking responsibility for your actions.

• Expressing self-compassion can improve your wellbeing and productivity, by helping you move past obstacles like self-blame and shame.

• To express self-compassion, you can consider how you’d help a friend in a similar situation, remind yourself that everyone is imperfect, forgive yourself for past mistakes, and soften or respond to your inner critic.

On a separate note, this week I want to ask you for a quick (but important) favor.

My book, Solving Procrastination, came out last week. It’s a practical guide to understanding why we procrastinate and how to stop, based on 500+ studies and years of in-depth research.

Getting positive ratings and reviews now will make a huge difference in helping me get the book in front of more people. If you could please take a minute to leave a rating or review on Amazon (UK link) or on Goodreads, I’d really appreciate it.

Thank you,
Itamar

This week’s email is very special, as I’m beyond excited to share the release of my book, Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop (published by Penguin Random House).

It’s a definitive practical guide that’s based on hundreds of studies, and takes you step by step through everything you need to know about how to stop procrastinating. It’s been featured in places like the New York Times and BBC News, and has been called “an unusually useful book on a problem everyone struggles with” and “the book procrastinators actually need”.

If you keep promising yourself you’ll do things, only to find yourself putting them off again and again (each time saying you’ll start “tomorrow”, or “soon”, or “in just a few minutes”), this book is for you. Same if you know someone who does this, and you want to help them.

If this sounds relevant—or if you’ve found my emails helpful and want to help me back (which I’d greatly appreciate!)—here’s what you can do right now:

• Order the book (it’s widely available, including on Amazon US, Amazon UK, Bookshop US, Bookshop UK, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and Penguin).

• Leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you buy the book (you can potentially do this even if you haven’t finished reading it yet but are excited to).

• Share the book with friends and family who might be interested, via email, social media, or whatever approach works for you.

On a more personal note: This book represents years of extensive research and writing, and is the best piece of work I’ve ever produced, by far. If you’re looking for a way out of the procrastination cycle, it’s what I genuinely recommend.

Thank you,
Itamar

When we need to choose between different available options, we usually do it by evaluating their attributes. This typically involves either averaging the value of the different attributes or adding them together.

For example, let’s say we’re on the fence about applying for a job that we’d rate as a “3” in terms of appeal on a scale of 1-5, where higher is better. Re-reading the job description, we notice an additional benefit we previously missed that we’d rate as a “2”. If we add the attributes, we’d now consider the job more attractive, because the value of that benefit is added to the total value of the job. If we average the attributes, however, we’d now consider the job less attractive despite having more benefits, because the value of this benefit is lower than the average value for the job.

In other words, seeing that mediocre benefit can paradoxically make the job feel less attractive, even if having that benefit is expected to have positive value overall, because it reduces the average perceived value of the job. And, in practice, people not only regularly use averaging in their decision-making, but also tend to default to it when it’s hard for them to evaluate the available options, for instance because they need to quickly choose between many options.

This distinction is important for understanding people’s thinking, including your own, and for influencing people’s decisions. As an example, if you’re a hiring manager, you might prioritize offering a few great benefits over many mediocre ones, and also avoid weak benefits entirely.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about how staying silent temporarily can help you be heard better when you speak up.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• Strategic silence involves intentionally withholding or delaying untimely information.

• Information can be untimely due to factors like irrelevance to current priorities, lack of readiness of the person who wants to raise it, and lack of availability of the people it would be raised to. For example, as an employee, you might wait before raising an issue to your team if the issue is irrelevant to your team’s current priorities, if you need to gather more information about the issue, or if your manager is in a bad mood.

• Although silence is often perceived as harmful and driven by factors like fear, strategic silence is driven by deliberate planning and can be beneficial, both in terms of how people respond to what you say and in terms of how they perceive you.

• Strategic silence isn’t the opposite of speaking up, but rather a way to improve how you’re received when you do speak up. This highlights the importance of considering not only what you say and how, but also when you say it. It also shows that being silent isn’t always a bad thing, just as speaking up isn’t always a good thing.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about common issues that get in the way when we try to be happy.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• Often, the more strongly we pursue positive emotions, like happiness, the less likely we become to experience them.

• One reason for this is that as we pursue happiness, we tend to set high or impossible standards for what it would look like, which can lead to discontent when we fall short of those standards.

• Another reason for this is that we sometimes mispredict what will make us happy, which leads us to engage in ineffective or counterproductive activities.

• As we pursue happiness, we also tend to actively monitor our pursuit of this goal, which can hinder our ability to be happy.

• To avoid the paradoxical negative effects of actively pursuing happiness, you should (1) make sure to set reasonable expectations for what your happiness will look like; (2) focus on productive ways to increase happiness, by asking yourself whether any given activity or thing is likely to actually make you happy; and (3) try to monitor your happiness less while prioritizing habits that automatically make you feel happier.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about the equivocation fallacy: a logical fallacy that involves alternating between different meanings of a word or phrase, in a way that renders the argument that contains it unsound. An example of this fallacy appears in the statement “I have the right to say whatever I want, so it’s right for me to do so”, where the word “right” is first used to refer to something that someone is entitled to, and then to something that is morally good.

You can respond to the equivocation fallacy by pointing out the problematic shift in meaning (“just because you have the right to do something, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for you to do”). To help with this, you might want to replace the problem term with a synonym or full definition, which will highlight how its meaning differs each time (“just because you’re legally entitled to do something doesn’t mean it’s the moral thing to do”).

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about a pitfall that often gets in the way of achieving our goals.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• A key part of successfully pursuing goals is monitoring our status and progress.

• People often bury their heads in the sand by intentionally avoiding or rejecting information that could help them monitor their goal progress, a phenomenon called the ostrich problem.

• For example, an entrepreneur building a business might avoid key metrics that tell them how well they’re currently doing.

• This is mainly due to the desire to avoid unpleasant emotions, for instance if relevant information would reflect poorly on us, conflict with our self-image, or remind us of a stressful commitment. Accordingly, this problem occurs when short-term (proximal) concerns, like the desire to avoid feeling bad right now, override long-term (distal) goals, like success and self-improvement.

• Being mindful of this problem can help you address it in yourself and in others. To help further, you can also identify the exact information you’re avoiding, ask yourself why, and consider the benefits of engaging with it.

I’m also excited to share that Cambridge published a press release about my upcoming book, Solving Procrastination, which was covered in places like BBC News and Inc. Magazine.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about insights from self-determination theory: a key psychological framework for explaining what motivates us.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• We have three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy (being able to dictate our path), competence (being able to deal with our environment), and relatedness (feeling connected to others).

• There’s a distinction between motivation that’s autonomous (driven by our own desires) and controlled (driven by external pressures, like a boss, or internal ones, like guilt).

• There’s also a distinction between motivation that’s intrinsic (driven by a desire to engage in an activity for its own sake, for example because it’s enjoyable) and extrinsic (driven by a desire to achieve a certain outcome, like a promotion).

• We usually perform and feel better when we’re autonomously and intrinsically motivated.

• The effects of different types of motivation aren’t always additive; for example, adding an extrinsic motivator to an intrinsic one can undermine our sense of autonomy, which can reduce our willingness to act.

This can be useful for motivating both yourself and others.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about a principle that encourages empathy and moral reasoning.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from my article):

• The golden rule is a moral principle which denotes that you should treat others the way you want to be treated yourself.

• For example, if you want people to treat you with respect, then you should treat them with respect too.

• This concept has been formulated in various ways throughout history, and used as a key principle for guiding how people should behave toward each other.

• A key problem with this principle is that others don’t necessarily want to be treated the same way you want to be treated; this can be addressed by also considering the platinum rule, which denotes that we should treat others the way they want to be treated.

• The golden rule can also conflict with other considerations, like the need to punish people for harming others, so it should be viewed as one tool that you use alongside others, rather than an absolute law.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about a key aspect of the psychology of regret (plus an exciting announcement).

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• Taking action tends to lead to more regret than inaction in the short term, but inaction tends to lead to more regret in the long term.

• People’s biggest regrets in life are often things they didn’t do, like take more risks, be more assertive, or spend more time with family.

• The pain of regrettable action tends to decrease faster over time than the pain of inaction, because of mechanisms like the tendency to search for positive aspects (“silver linings”) of our actions.

• The pain of regrettable inaction tends to increase faster over time, because of mechanisms like the tendency to remember ourselves as being more confident than we actually were, which makes our failures to act feel inexplicable.

• Failures to act also tend to be more memorable than actions, because they tend to be associated with things that feel unfinished.

On a semi-related note, I’m extremely excited to share that I have a book coming out at the end of summer with Penguin Random House: Solving Procrastination: The Science of Why We Put Things Off and How to (Finally!) Stop.

It’s been called “an unusually useful book on a problem everyone struggles with” and “the book procrastinators actually need”. If you procrastinate (or care about someone who does), and want a step-by-step practical guide that will help you, please pre-order the book now. Doing this guarantees you’ll get it as soon as possible, and will make a huge difference to the book’s visibility in a way that will help get it in front of lots more people.

Super excited about this! Let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions.

Thank you, and have a great week,
Itamar

PS If you have a Goodreads account, please consider also adding the book to your “Want to Read” shelf now, as this can further help increase its visibility.

This week’s email is about an important consideration when deciding how to spend resources like your time and money.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from my article):

• Opportunity cost is the value of the best alternative that you miss out on as a result of choosing a certain option.

• As an example, if you choose to invest in something, your opportunity cost is the money you could make by investing elsewhere (namely, in the best alternative available to you).

• Considering opportunity cost is especially useful for realizing that just because a certain option has value, that doesn’t mean you should choose it, because alternatives could be better.

• To calculate opportunity cost, compare the value that you can expect from a certain option with the value that you could get from the best alternative that you’ll have to forgo.

• A common pitfall to watch out for is calculating opportunity cost based on the value of all your forgone alternatives, rather than just the best one, which can cause you to overestimate this cost.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about three techniques that you can use to become a better listener:

• Perspective-taking. Mentally put yourself in the place of the person who’s speaking, to try to see the situation from their perspective.

• Bird’s-eye view. Visualize the conversation as it looks from an external perspective. (This is a form of self-distancing that can also help reduce egocentric bias, alongside the previous technique, which revolves around empathizing.)

• Tuner-transmitter. Pretend you will need to pass what you’re hearing along to someone else later.

Whichever of these techniques you use, just make sure it helps you get more out of listening, instead of distracting you.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,

Itamar

This week’s email is about an ancient reminder that can help you live more deliberately.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from my article):

• Memento mori is a Latin phrase stating “remember that you will die”. It is meant to remind you of your own mortality, and of the brevity and fragility of human life.

• This reminder can put your problems in perspective, help you figure out which goals to pursue, and motivate you to take action.

• For example, if something small bothers you needlessly, you can tell yourself “memento mori—this is too minor and temporary to be worth worrying about.” Similarly, if you struggle to decide what you should spend your time doing, you can ask yourself “memento mori—what do I really want to spend my limited time on?”

• If this reminder stresses you, you can use a milder formulation (like “I only have limited time to do things today”) or a self-distanced one (like “you only limited time to do things today”).

• If it still stresses you more than it helps, it’s fine to drop it entirely; not every technique works for every person.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about common beliefs we have about emotions, and how these beliefs shape our actions.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• We differ based on whether we believe that emotions are good or bad and controllable or uncontrollable.

• These beliefs vary across factors like the type of emotion (e.g., happiness/anger), the person experiencing it (e.g., yourself/your partner), and the context (e.g., home/work).

• Beliefs about the controllability of emotions affect whether we try to engage in emotion regulation, while beliefs about the goodness of emotions affect the direction of this regulation (e.g., in terms of whether we try to suppress or prolong an emotion).

• You can try to actively change your and other people’s beliefs about emotions as needed, for example by encouraging someone to recognize that a harmful emotion of theirs is both bad and controllable.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about thinking about how you learn.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from my article):

• Reflective learning involves actively monitoring and assessing your knowledge, abilities, and performance as you learn.

• For example, if you’re studying for a test, you can ask yourself how well you understand each topic you’re studying, and then spend extra time on topics you struggle with.

• Reflective learning can help you understand your situation, develop your metacognitive skills, and increase your feelings of autonomy, all of which can lead to more effective learning.

• You can reflect on any specific aspect of your learning (like how well you can implement what you learned), the learning process itself, and your general abilities, preferences, thoughts, and goals.

• You can encourage and guide reflective learning by asking questions like “which parts of the material do I struggle with?”, “which learning techniques work well for me?”, and “is there anything I can do to help me learn better?”.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about how people perceive and form social groups.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from my article about ingroups and outgroups):

• Affirmational categorization involves defining people by what they are (e.g., liberal/conservative), whereas negational categorization involves defining people by what they aren’t (e.g., not a liberal/conservative).

• These two types of categorization can lead to different outcomes; for example, negational categorization can sometimes cause more intergroup conflict than affirmational categorization.

• A superordinate social group is comprised of various subordinate social subgroups; for example, ‘citizens of country X’ can be a superordinate group, within which there are subgroups of people with different political affiliations.

• When members of different subordinate groups perceive themselves as belonging to the same superordinate group, this can have serious implications, for example if they disagree about how well their subordinate group represents the values of the superordinate group.

• Perception of group identity can change based on factors like the environment a person is in; for example, depending on circumstances, basketball fans who support opposing teams can either focus on their shared superordinate group (as basketball fans) or on their separate subordinate groups (as fans of different teams).

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about an issue that causes people to wrongly reject good opportunities.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from my article):

• Reactive devaluation is a cognitive bias that causes people to devalue things that are offered to them, especially if offered by someone they perceive negatively.

• For example, reactive devaluation can cause someone to wrongly dismiss a good business proposal as bad, just because they dislike the person who offered it.

• Reactive devaluation can lead to the rejection of valuable opportunities, breakdown of negotiations, and serious interpersonal conflicts.

• To reduce reactive devaluation, you can focus on the proposal itself (rather than the party who made it), pretend that it came from someone else, and highlight its benefits as well as the downsides of reactively devaluing it.

• Other ways to reduce reactive devaluation—including when making offers to others—are to explicitly list the goals of both sides in advance and/or go through a third-party mediator.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about a simple but effective technique for reducing anxiety.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• We sometimes feel anxious in anticipation of tasks like speaking in public or taking a test.

• The main strategy we often default to in order to deal with this pre-performance anxiety is to try to calm ourselves down.

• An alternative strategy you can use is to reappraise (or reframe) your anxiety as excitement.

• For example, instead of telling yourself “there’s nothing to worry about,” you can try saying “I’m excited about this!”

• This strategy redirects your nervous energy, rather than trying to suppress it, which can help you feel and perform better, and encourages an opportunity mindset (instead of a threat mindset).

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about a misleading way of presenting opposing views.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from my article):

• False balance occurs when multiple things (like theories) are presented as more equal to each other in some regard (like level of supporting evidence) than they really are.

• For example, false balance occurs when a journalist presents the baseless opinion of a random layperson as being as credible as the evidence-based perspective of a scientific expert.

• To respond to false balance, you can explain why it’s false or ask questions that demonstrate this, explain the dangers of false balance, address the underlying intentions that caused it (like a person’s desire to appear objective), or sidestep it by focusing on a different argument that you want to convey.

• When responding, you should consider factors like what you aim to achieve and who your audience is, and remember that not all balance is false.

• Make sure to avoid creating false balance yourself when deciding when and how to present information, by considering factors like the strength of supporting evidence behind different theories.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar

This week’s email is about how to communicate evidence-based information more effectively.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• Communicate with the goal of informing people, rather than persuading them.

• Provide balance by presenting all the significant perspectives, and avoid false balance by making it clear how well-supported each is by evidence.

• Disclose uncertainties around the evidence you present, for example by highlighting things that researchers are unsure about.

• State what the quality of the evidence is, for example by discussing the size of the sample that was used to reach a certain conclusion.

• Inoculate people against misinformation by identifying and pre-empting misconceptions they might have, for instance by explaining why a common myth they might run into is wrong.

A related concept I’ve written about is the burden of proof, which is the obligation to provide sufficient supporting evidence for claims you make.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar