Eric Barker's Blog, page 10

This Is How To Have Emotionally Intelligent Relationships: 4 Secrets

Jamie was one of the nicest and warmest people I’d ever met. He was also one of the most dangerous people I’d ever met.

Jamie was two-time national champion in Kali. Kali is the martial art they taught Matt Damon for the Jason Bourne movies. And at this point Jamie was training for the world championships. Day in, day out, nothing else. The last thing you wanna do in a fight is think. You train until every technique is an instinctive reaction.

But after a few weeks of this, Mr. Deadly-Nice-Guy...

4 Rituals To Keep You Happy All The Time

It had been a wonderful day. Now he was going for his usual 4-mile walk.

What made today special was his grown children had come home. They hadn’t all been together in six months. And there was even a new member of the family: his first grandchild. Three months old and adorable.

He mused about how wonderful it all was…

And that’s when the car hit him.

He was thrown 14 feet and landed in a ditch. He was going in and out of consciousness. Wiping a handful of blood from his eyes, he looked down t...

How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done – 5 Expert Secrets

I remember a time when someone, possibly me, had a lot of trouble getting motivated. This was not fun.

Three years ago, I starred in a suspense film titled Oh Good God I Have To Write My Second Book. Some might be thinking: “That must have been easy, you’ve done it before.” Oh No No No No — that’s not how it works. First time out you have no idea what’s going on. It’s stressful but you can naively jump into the maelstrom. However, after you’ve been to war, you now know just how hard it’s all g...

New Neuroscience Reveals 5 Rituals That Will Make Your Life Awesome

The fact that they fell in love was, on the surface, ridiculous. She was a leading researcher on love. He was the leading researcher on loneliness. And yet it happened. Ironic? Poetic? Probably both.

Steph was at a boring academic lecture. The guy next to her whispered in her ear: “If I start snoring, punch me.”

She giggled. The man seated to her other side was already dozing. Steph whispered back: “He’s snoring. Do you want me to punch him, too?” They laughed.

“I’m John, by the way.”

But she ...

This Is How To Get People To Change: 5 Secrets From Research

Trying to help someone change can be sanity-straining. Even when people face serious health scares they often don’t do enough to alter their habits, like they’re stuck on some monorail track of doom.

That said, we often go about trying to help in all the wrong ways. We know that lectures probably don’t help — but we often find ourselves doing it anyway. It’s like the reasons we give them for changing have almost no effect at all…

And, actually, that’s close to true. So what’s the answer?

Hundr...

Thank You

Alain de Botton wrote: “Writing a book is like telling a joke and having to wait two years to know whether or not it was funny.”

And my circus brain has spent much of the past few weeks thinking of the eleventy billion ways the book launch could go wrong and whether or not my future career entailed selling doilies on Etsy. Like some sort of digital Freudian slip, my phone has been autocorrecting “publishing” to “punishing”. (Often, the most difficult part of being a grown up is keeping your sc...

My New Book “Plays Well With Others” Is Now Available!

It’s finally here!

My new book Plays Well With Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong is now available.

Grab it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, Indiebound or Bookshop. (No, you cannot borrow my copy.)

And, yes, there’s an audiobook. It’s read by Roger Wayne in such dulcet tones that your ears will weep.

After the massive multi-dimensional quantum dumpster fire that was 2020 and the ensuing existential obstacle course of...

The Lazy Way To An Awesome Life

The old maxim says that with others you should just “be yourself.”

But is that really true?

In researching my new book, Plays Well With Others, I went down the rabbit hole to see whether it’s accurate — and also what we can do to be our best selves. (Never be ashamed of who you are… that’s your parents’ job.)

In the excerpt below we’re going to learn a dead simple way to become more of the person you want to be.

This is part of the section I had to cut from the book. I wish I could have includ...

This Is How To Have A Long Awesome Life

There’s a lot of pseudoscience out there offering fake answers on how to be healthier and happier. They’re like cubic zirconia; they only look real — and typically have a Magic 8-Ball level of scientific effectiveness.

On this blog I typically attack those things with Occam’s Razor – heck, I use all of Occam’s toilet kit. (I firmly believe the only time crystals heal you is when you’re sodium deficient.)

But in researching my new book, Plays Well With Others, I came across plenty of evidence t...

This Is The Most Fun Way To Make Your Life Awesome

When you’re young, you gossip about the couples that are having sex. When you’re older, you gossip about the ones that aren’t.

Keeping love alive isn’t easy. And when I was researching my new book Plays Well With Others, well, I learned a lot of very harsh truths about the current state of marriage.

While I had no desire to write a “Romantic Necronomicon” that would drive readers mad (or just make them mad at me) I do cover a lot of difficult stuff that most relationship books wouldn’t touch w...