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Are You ‘Phubbing’ Right Now? What It is and Why Science Says It’s Bad for Your Relationships
Written by Emma Seppala. “Phubbing” is the practice of snubbing others in favor of our mobile phones. We’ve all been there, as either victim or perpetrator. We may no longer even notice when we’ve been phubbed (or are phubbing), it has become such a no …
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Stanford Psychologist Says This Mindset Shift Will Make You More Happy and Successful
Written by Zameena Mejia. If you want to be more happy and successful in life, it’s important to fight the brain’s natural tendency to focus on the negative. Instead, try looking at the world through a positive, self-compassionate mindset, according to …
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LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Billionaire Jack Ma, and This Famous Brain Surgeon Agree: You Will Need This 1 Rare Skill to Be Successful
Written by Marcel Schwantes. World-renowned neurosurgeon James Doty, author of the New York Times best seller Into the Magic Shop, has a compelling story that credits mindfulness and visualization as important first steps that turned a life of poverty …
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Stanford Researchers: The Secret to Overcoming the Opioid Crisis May Lie Partly in the Mind
Written by Beth Darnall and Emma Seppala. Chronic pain affects an estimated one in three Americans — more than cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined. This widespread struggle has led to the wide use of pain medications, and a mounting national c …
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4 Things Science Says You Can Do to Be Happy
Written by John Boitnott. People spend years chasing happiness, only to learn the hard way that it wasn’t where they thought it was. They assume career success, riches, retirement or the “perfect relationship” will bring the happiness they’ve always wa …
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How to Recognize Burnout Before You’re Burned Out
Written by Kenneth R. Rosen. Emma Seppala was working as an intern at The International Herald Tribune (the past iteration of The International New York Times) one summer in college in Paris, shuttling between the newsroom writers and editors on the se …
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Finding Our Common Humanity in Those Houston Rescue Videos
Written by Susanna Schrobsdorff. We’ve all been thinking about how to help Texas after the unfathomable devastation of Hurricane Harvey. But after watching the way the people of that state have responded to this vast tragedy, I think that Texas might s …
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Can Compassion Have Economic Benefits?
Written by Glynis Board. An ice pop factory in Wheeling, West Virginia, called Ziegenfelder Corporation, recently embraced hiring practices that ignore felony status and addiction history. CEO Lisa Allen said about 20 percent of her employees have some …
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Tibetan Buddhism-Based ‘Compassion’ Training for Doctors Targets Burnout
Written by Meeri Kim. A mere three years after completing her residency training in 2011, surgeon Carla Haack found herself in the throes of job burnout. She had been devoting her life to the hospital, working 14-hour days including weekends for months …
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Having Work Friends Can Be Tricky, but It’s Worth It
Written by Emma Seppala and Marissa King. How often have you had the following conversation at work? How are you? Good. You? Fine. It is a script we stick to even if we are dying inside. It’s hard to build real connections with your colleagues if you n …
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Find Compassion for Difficult People
Written by Elizabeth Bernstein. It takes compassion to deal with the difficult people in your life. New research suggests the answer to avoiding the anxiety, high blood pressure and disappointment of interacting with a person that rubs you the wrong wa …
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Can Teaching Kids Compassion Change Culture?
Written by Glynis Board. As compassion training is becoming more popular in schools across the country, a school in West Virginia is taking on a pilot compassion curriculum project of its own. The goal is to improve student achievement and foster healt …
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Should Companies Allow Mental Health Days?
Written by Shawn Radcliffe. If you’ve had a job long enough, chances are you’ve taken a mental health day. But did you have the nerve to tell your boss that you needed some time off to decompress after months of chasing deadlines or quotas? Even these …
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Burnout at Work Isn’t Just About Exhaustion. It’s Also About Loneliness
Written by Emma Seppala and Marissa King. More and more people are feeling tired and lonely at work. In analyzing the General Social Survey of 2016, we found that, compared with roughly 20 years ago, people are twice as likely to report that they are a …
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Turning Empathy Inward
Written by Beth Kanter. Most modern workplaces have become so impersonal and demanding that we’ve gotten desensitized to caring about coworkers. Many people who work for nonprofits suffer from passion fatigue and compassion burnout because they already …
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Why You Should Tell Your Team to Take a Break and Go Outside
Written by Emma Seppala and Johann Berlin. Wellness programs are becoming an integral priority for most human resource managers. After all, research shows that a happier workplace is more productive. To this end, workplaces are adding health-related pe …
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Social Interaction is Critical for Mental and Physical Health
Written by Jane Brody. Hurray for the HotBlack Coffee cafe in Toronto for declining to offer Wi-Fi to its customers. There are other such cafes, to be sure, including seven of the eight New York City locations of Café Grumpy. But it’s HotBlack’s reason …
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Recapturing the Awesome Meaning and Power of ‘Love’
Written by Emma Seppala. Sharon Salzberg is a well-known Buddhist meditation teacher who, along with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., one of the most prominent meditation centers in the Wester …
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The One Fear All Managers Have is Also Their Greatest Weapon
Written by Kevin Kruse. Can caring be a competitive advantage? Oftentimes leaders feel as though they have to have a disciplinary hand when it comes to dealing with employees. There is a fear that to give compassion means risking being taken advantage …
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The Problem with Kindness – and its Vast Potential
Written by Donna Thomson. In 2004, the effects of our son’s disabilities spiraled into serious illness and constant pain. As a caregiver and mother, I was raw and vulnerable – it was the worst of times. I remember saying to doctors and family members, …
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Ways of Seeing, Johanna Nichols: Charter for Compassion Offers Hope
Written by Johanna Nichols. I love walking outside. It is my favorite form of exercise, but I have a few ground rules. The temperature has to be minimum 20 degrees, with no wind, and it can’t be icy or driving rain. When the weather fails the test, I p …
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Do You Feel Like We Do? Stanford Psychologists Examine How Culture Can Guide Giving
Written by Milenko Martinovich. How can culture influence giving? Some scholars have argued that people are more likely to share with others who are similar in terms of race or sex, but the evidence for this is mixed. New research by Stanford psycholog …
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Half Full or Half Empty: Negativity Kills Employee Engagement
Written by Jenna Cyprus. There’s a time and place for being critical in the workplace. Companies can’t improve and move forward without listening to what people have to say and correcting their mistakes. However, there’s a difference between constructi …
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Another Way that Being Too Busy is Making Your Life Worse
Written by Cari Romm. The problems with overscheduling yourself are pretty self-evident: You’re stressed. You’re exhausted. You don’t have any time to do all the fun stuff you want to do. For that matter, you also don’t have any time to just veg out an …
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Dignity Health Has a Strategy to Prevent Nurse Burnout: Promote a Culture of Resilience
Written by Paige Minemyer. Nurses across the country face high rates of burnout and stress, but at Dignity Health, leaders are supporting their clinical staff before they reach that point by promoting a culture of resilience. Page West, R.N., senior vi …
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