Eric Barker's Blog, page 2

This Is How To Increase Self-Esteem: 4 Secrets From Research

There are days when you feel like you can do anything. And then there are other days…

Days where your self-esteem is playing hide and seek, and let’s just say it’s really good at hiding. You’re looking for it like, “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” and it’s under the bed, snickering and reading old issues of “Inadequate Weekly.”

We hear a lot about how to increase self-esteem. Unfortunately, most of that stuff should be filed under “Hooey and Nonsense.”

No, repeating “I am a strong, conf...

This Is How To Feel Better And Achieve Your Goals: 4 Secrets From Research

We all reach a point where we feel hopeless. Your inner monologue sounds like a rejected Alanis Morissette lyric and any level of optimism you possessed is now playing varsity level hide and seek. You’re Cinderella’s ugly stepsister in this fairy tale, and those shoes were never meant for you.

You could use a little hope. Yeah, the thing people love to tattoo in cursive on their ribcage next to a butterfly. It’s the kind of word that feels like it should come pre-packaged with a glitter pen.

H...

How To Become An Expert At Anything: 5 Scientific Steps To Mastery

Here’s the problem with advice about becoming an expert: it’s almost always junk. It’s not just that the advice itself is bad, it’s that it’s somehow both incredibly vague and aggressively overconfident:

“Practice makes perfect!” Oooh, it’s got that motivational poster energy “Embrace failure.” Look, I’ve embraced failure so many times we’re in a common-law marriage.“Just start!” Another winner. Just start. Really?

Here’s the thing: there’s a whole field of legitimate research dedicated to ...

Ancient Wisdom Reveals 6 Secrets To A Long Awesome Life

The thing about aging is that it’s sneaky. It doesn’t just show up one day, wearing a T-shirt that says, “I’m here to ruin your life.” No, it’s more subtle, like a ninja with joint pain.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the graceful, Helen Mirren-in-a-L’Oréal-ad kind of aging. You used to wake up with a song in your heart. Now you wake up with acid reflux. Your bladder is the size of a shot glass and your body has decided, without consulting you, that anything past the hour of ten is an act of sedit...

New Neuroscience Reveals 3 Secrets That Will Make You Happier

Why can’t we just be happy all the time?

From a neuroscience perspective, the best answer is probably “because of habituation.”

It’s the insidious process by which the extraordinary becomes the utterly banal, the miraculous the miserably mundane. Sadly, our brains are hardwired for buzzkill, ensuring that no matter how amazing something is, we’ll eventually end up taking it for granted.

You finally get that thing you’ve wanted for months, maybe even years — a new car, a promotion, a date with ...

How To Be Successful: 4 Secrets Backed By Research

These days the world strongly associates success with youth. The cultural narrative goes something like this: if you didn’t create a world-changing algorithm in your dorm room before you could legally drink, then why are you even trying?

Don’t get me wrong, the world loves a good late bloomer story — but only in retrospect.

If you’re a potential late bloomer, chances are you’ve already spent enough time listening to your own voice drone on in your head like a sad audiobook of unmet potential. ...

New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Secrets That Will Make Your Teenager Motivated

Trying to motivate a teenager is like trying to push a boulder up a hill, except the boulder has a phone and keeps telling you that it will roll itself up the hill later, just give it a minute.

So you remind them. They need to do their homework or their chores. This will get you The Teenage Sigh. This is no ordinary sigh. This is a long, theatrical exhale so weighty it could be used to measure atmospheric pressure. It is a carefully engineered emotional payload designed to make you feel like t...

New Neuroscience Reveals 6 Secrets That Will Make You More Productive

Some days it feels impossible to get anything done at the office. (There’s a reason Susan in marketing has a voodoo doll of everyone, neatly labeled, in her desk drawer.)

What can we do about it? Well, neuroscience — yeah, that thing you vaguely remember hearing about in a TED Talk you half-watched — has some answers to our office productivity problems. With a few simple tweaks, we can take a miserable workday from “soul-crushing marathon of existential despair” to “hey, this isn’t so bad.”

So...

How to Be Healthier Without Really Trying

You’ll take roughly 670 million breaths in your lifetime. But we don’t think about breathing much. It’s only when something goes wrong — like when you’re choking on a chicken nugget — that you suddenly realize breathing isn’t as optional as it appears. At least with eating, you can skip a few meals. But with breathing, you slack off for even two minutes, and suddenly everyone’s calling an ambulance.

Here’s the thing: most of us have been breathing wrong. Seriously. Breathing’s one of those thi...

New Research Reveals 8 Secrets That Will Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Succeed

New Year’s resolutions: the annual ritual of declaring war on your own bad habits while simultaneously proving that you, in fact, are your own worst enemy.

“I’m going to learn Spanish, quit caffeine, organize my closet, and become someone who hits the gym every morning!”

Aaaaand a few days later, it’s all on fire.

New Year’s resolutions failing doesn’t even seem like an accident anymore; it feels as much a part of the tradition as resolutions in the first place. The worst part is how quickly i...