anxiety
A look at anxiety in its many forms and manifestations; what is the nature of this specific pattern of extreme fear and worry?
The Quiet Recession Nobody Is Measuring: Why Adults Are Losing the Ability to Make Friends
Nobody writes obituaries for friendships. When a relationship ends — a romantic partnership, a business partnership — there are cultural scripts for acknowledgment, grieving, and recovery. But when a friendship simply dissolves over months or years, fading from regular contact to occasional birthday texts to nothing at all, there is no funeral, no仪式, and remarkably little discussion of the loss.
By Mxolisi Makhubela6 months ago in Psyche
Why You Feel Tired All the Time in 2026 (And How to Fix It)
You woke up this morning after a solid seven and a half hours. Maybe eight. And still—that familiar heaviness. Like your limbs are filled with wet sand. Coffee helps for about an hour, then the fog rolls back in. By 2 PM, you’re staring at your screen, reading the same sentence four times. By 9 PM, you’re too exhausted to watch a movie but somehow too wired to fall asleep.
By Kamel Saidani6 months ago in Psyche
The Shape of a Better Life: How Doughnut Economics Reimagines Wellbeing
It is normal to be curious as to what Doughnut Economics is, and what it has to do with the mental health of people, both individually and collectively. Absolutely everything. Interest in this topic came about picking up an old, shrivelled up copy of Wellbeing Magazine at a random cafe. That article would have certainly been written prior to the pandemic, where a prolonged period of inflation and the rising cost of living followed suit.
By Justine Crowley6 months ago in Psyche
The Mandela Effect: Why thousands of us share the same "false" memories of history.
The dust motes danced in a shaft of jaundiced afternoon light. I was holding the book, its cardboard cover cool and slightly damp against my palms. The smell was that of a forgotten attic—sweet rot, old glue, and the ghost of a thousand silverfish. I stared at the name on the spine. Berenstain. My thumb traced the 'a' in the penultimate syllable. It felt like a jagged piece of glass. It looked like a typo carved into the bedrock of my childhood. I knew, with a certainty that hummed in my teeth, that it had once been an 'e.' The world had shifted. Or perhaps, I had.
By The Chaos Cabinet6 months ago in Psyche
The Anger Room
THE GOOD GIRL WHO WAS DYING INSIDE 😤 I was very good at being good for a very long time. I was the calm one in every crisis and the reasonable one in every conflict and the one who said it is fine when it was not fine and who absorbed other people's difficulties with the specific generosity of someone who has confused self-erasure with virtue and who has been praised for that confusion long enough that the praise became a need. I was good at minimizing my own pain because pain seemed like an imposition I did not have the right to make. I was good at explaining other people's harmful behavior to myself in the most charitable light available because charity felt spiritual and anger felt ugly. I was good at keeping everyone comfortable, including the people who had hurt me, because keeping people comfortable was the primary skill I had developed and it had been so thoroughly rewarded that I had never seriously examined the cost 🙏
By The Curious Writer6 months ago in Psyche
The Mirror Test
THE REFLECTION YOU AVOID 🪞 There is a specific way people look at themselves in mirrors that has nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with self-knowledge, and it is the look they never take. They will check their teeth before a meeting and examine their outfit before a date and monitor a pimple for a week and watch their hairline for years but they will almost never look directly at their own eyes in a mirror with the specific intention of seeing rather than evaluating. Not seeing whether they look good or presentable or rested or professional, but actually looking at the person who is standing there, the one behind the appearance, the one who has been making decisions and forming relationships and constructing a life and who may or may not be someone they recognize or like or respect or would choose if choosing were possible 🔍
By The Curious Writer6 months ago in Psyche
