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No Action Without Emotion — On emotion as operating system

• [article] Stress and Creativity — 28 Mar 2025
  Stress promotes bias—stereotypical thinking and behaving. Less stress promotes cognitive flexibility—an openness to new ways of thinking and behaving. Neither is better than the other. It’s about the situation you deploy them in.
• [article] Speaking in tongues — 23 Aug 2024
  Glossolalia has a unique pattern of neural activity, distinct from psychopathologies and even other trance-like states. So, the feeling underneath is special, but the actual speaking itself seems learned. It makes you wonder where that feeling comes from.
• [article] Why do people kill themselves? — 16 Aug 2024
  Suicide is the interaction between personal despair and the failure of communities to provide reasons to live. We can’t answer Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem” for people, only they can. But we can provide an argument to live, by showing people where they fit.
• [article] Active listening is misleading — 11 Jan 2024
  Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.
• [article] Trans-opportunism is boring — 22 Nov 2022
  Focusing on edge-cases of “trans-regret” is missing the point. If you actually care about these cases, then the interesting issue are the underlying vulnerabilities that lead to regrettable decisions. But probably you shouldn’t care.
• [article] Useful Pharmacology — 28 Jul 2022
  We absolutely love some drugs. Others terrify us. The difference is familiarity more than any other single thing and the result is confusion. A much more principled framework for thinking about drugs is thinking of them as tools.
• [article] The five stages of grief are a lie — 12 Apr 2022
  The five stages of grief were never supposed to be an orderly process, despite the common wisdom of many clinicians. Rather, anyone can experience any stage at any time, and the best support recognises this.
• [article] The beauty of stress — 30 Nov 2021
  Stress is one of the most valuable pieces of biological technology we own. Don’t confuse ancient lion chases with email notifications. Our responses to modern stressors are just as well calibrated then as now. The difference is that some stressors we choose.
• [article] Elemental Personalities — 5 Nov 2020
  Captain Planet and his Planeteers always seemed a little trite to me. Five young people, each with an elemental ring. And each with a personality to match. Seemed like lazy writing but now I’m wondering whether they intended to tap into millennia-old thought on personality styles, or whether it was just a happy accident.
• [article] The predictability of humans — 15 Sep 2020
  The human animal is an animal first–responding adaptively to the environment around it. Humans are only unpredictable because we’re obsessed with the human mind and uncomfortable accepting how influential our environment is.
• [article] The value of the details of trauma — 29 Aug 2020
  There’s a division in therapeutic circles—should we focus on the details or trauma or not?
• [article] The trouble with repressed memories — 27 Aug 2020
  The notion of repressed memories gets a lot of attention, which has done more harm than good. Memory is a mercurial thing, but by examining it we learn that the kind of memory doesn’t matter. It’s the emotion that’s the key.
• [article] On Emotion — 31 Jul 2020
  Emotion is an impossible term to define. Seems important though, so let’s try anyway.
• [article] Why being sad isn't always a bad thing — 7 Apr 2020
  A great deal is made about depression these days. Depression is on the rise. Suicide is on the rise. Anxiety is on the rise. It’s alarming, and it often dominates the headlines. Most egregious is the claim that ‘perhaps young people these days are too fragile’. It’s not just a deflection of responsibility. What this new media narrative misses is that it’s OK to be sad sometimes. In fact, some would say that being sad can actually be a good thing.
• [article] Why catharsis is a (dangerous) lie — 24 Feb 2019
  Aristotle used the term catharsis to describe the ‘purge’ of emotions by indulging in them. Then we made it into a theory. But ‘venting’ your emotions doesn’t fix them, it just makes it worse. Much worse.