blog
Notes on people
Plain-language pieces about patterns, relationships and the research underneath our tests.
Rehearsing the Breakup While They're Still Here
Nothing has happened and the ending has already been written, cast and performed. What pre-emptive grief costs while the relationship is still running, how pulling back first manufactures the distance it was braced for, and the cases where the foreboding turns out to be accurate.
Read the article →Screen Time Is the Wrong Number
The weekly figure counts minutes because minutes are the only thing an operating system can see. Four hours of calls with family is not four hours of a feed with no bottom, and the counter cannot tell them apart. Two better questions, and how far the evidence on screens and mental health actually goes.
Why I Feel Nothing After a Hard Year
Numbness usually arrives after too much feeling rather than instead of it, and a loaded system cannot turn down only the half that hurts. How to tell calm from numb, what the protection costs, and why recovery starts with the body rather than with feeling.
The Part of Stress That Techniques Cannot Reach
Breathing, mindfulness and exercise have measurable effects, and those effects land on two of the three things stress is made of. Where the third one is driving the number, more technique buys a higher tolerance for an amount that should come down.
Is Being Hangry Actually a Thing?
The word bundles three different claims and they do not have the same evidence behind them. What daily life studies really found, why the blood sugar mechanism is the weakest part of the story, and what to do with a theory about yourself that cannot be checked after the fact.
The Half Second Before You Say Yes
Learning to say no fails because it aims at the wrong moment. Conversation runs at about 200 milliseconds and deliberation does not, so the only available intervention is buying time rather than finding better words.
Lowering the Bar Will Not Make You Mediocre
The fear that keeps perfectionism in place is that the standards and the suffering are the same object, so letting go of one means losing the other. Four decades of measurement say they are separable, and that the half nobody wants to give up is not the half doing the damage.
Why Praise Doesn't Land When You Feel Like a Fraud
Credit goes to luck, timing and whoever helped. Mistakes come home. Under a rule like that a compliment arrives already reclassified, which is why more of them changes nothing. What the attribution research says about the asymmetry, and the one record worth keeping.
What Overstimulation Feels Like in an Open Office
Overload is not a weakness, it is an account: how much arrives, how fast the ceiling comes, how much gets paid back. The open-plan office matters because it is the one thing that works on both sides of that account at once.
The Difference Between Lonely and Alone
Loneliness is not a count of the people around you. It is the absence of anyone who knows what you are going through, which is why the worst of it happens in company. The three layers, the loop that keeps it running, and what the health numbers do and do not say.
Why More Friends Doesn't Fix Loneliness
The standard advice for loneliness is to meet more people. For the most common kind of loneliness it adds the one thing that was not running short. What the research says about being known, and why a recurring Wednesday beats a good evening.
Why I Stay Up When I'm Already Exhausted
Four different situations end at the same half past midnight, and they respond to completely different things. Three of them do not respond to sleep hygiene at all, which is most of why the advice has not worked.
What High-Functioning Anxiety Actually Costs
The pattern gets paid, promoted and thanked, so nothing in a person's life ever asks it to stop. What the treatment-delay research says about problems that produce no bad day, where the bill actually arrives, and why productivity is the worst warning light to watch.
Do I Have Anger Issues, or Am I Just Depleted?
The phrase anger issues asks a question about character. The answer is more often a question about capacity. What the research says about sleep, pain, hunger, caffeine and medication lowering the threshold, why holding it in is not the healthy option, and why venting does not work.
Why Reassurance Makes Health Anxiety Worse
A clean test result works, and then it drains. What the research shows about how long medical reassurance lasts, why searching and avoiding are the same loop, why asking the people closest to you costs the most, and the one change at the doctor's end that is actually actionable.
Was That a Panic Attack, or Something Else?
Ten minutes that felt like dying, and now a search bar. What to rule out first and why that order is right, why the attack peaks and falls on its own, what else produces the same sensations, and why the standard breathing advice makes it worse.
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