Eric Barker's Blog, page 4

New Neuroscience Reveals 5 Secrets That Will Make You Smarter

IQ is real, folks. It’s a number that tells you how good someone is at puzzle-solving, logical reasoning, and making you feel inadequate at dinner parties. But here’s the rub:

IQ isn’t everything.

Greater education and intelligence don’t necessarily lift you up; sometimes they just provide better tools for digging trenches. Check this out: “Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from others. And when they do err, they are bett...

How To Defeat Anger: 4 Secrets From The Ancients

Anger’s greatest trick is making you think you’re standing up for yourself, that you’re finally taking control. It tells you that your outburst is justified, that your righteous fury is not only warranted but essential. It whispers in your ear: “You’re not being unreasonable. You’re being assertive.”

But you’re not. You’re a grown person screaming at a parking meter. You look like a constipated gorilla trying to pass a watermelon. People are crossing the street to avoid you.

And let’s not forg...

This Is How To Conquer Anxiety: 4 Secrets From Research

Anxiety is the modern age’s favorite emotional sport. It’s like carrying around a tiny, paranoid screenwriter in your head, constantly pitching you horror movie scenarios about your own life.

Your brain is always preparing to fight a bear or run a marathon, except you’re just trying to order a coffee. “Should I take this job? What if it leads to my ultimate undoing? Should I go on this date? What if they’re a serial killer or, worse, someone who claps when the plane lands?” And social anxiety ...

New Neuroscience Reveals 5 Rituals That Will Make You An Awesome Parent

The teen years. This is the age where one’s room can simultaneously resemble a FEMA disaster site and a meticulously curated museum of personal angst, each discarded clothing item a testament to a fleeting mood or an identity crisis.

What causes all the problems? The teenage brain. It’s a marvel of nature, a biological enigma wrapped in a riddle, encased in a skull that’s often adorned with questionable hairstyle choices. But say a word about it and you’ll invoke an eye roll so powerful it cou...

How Psychology Can Make You A Better Cook: 5 Secrets from Research

You wanted to have friends over for dinner and impress them. Now the kitchen has become your personal Jackson Pollock canvas. Flour has turned the countertops into a winter wonderland, a lone egg yolk is weeping into the sink, and you’re wearing most of the other ingredients.

Why is this so hard? The recipes always call for some fancy ingredient that you’ve never heard of and couldn’t find if your life depended on it. (What the hell is fennel pollen, and why does it cost more than your car ins...

This Is How To Get Healthy: 4 Powerful Secrets From Research

Health. You know, that elusive state of being where your insides are all sparkly.

Unfortunately, these days every health tip should be met with the kind of skepticism usually reserved for UFO sightings. The suggestions we’re provided with range from “more alien than a David Bowie concept album” to “unintentionally hilarious.” To get health tips online is to have your brain explode in a shower of absurdity, leaving you wondering if the human race is really the most intelligent species or just t...

This Is How To Make Your Baby Smarter: 4 Secrets From Research

Being a new parent isn’t easy. Babies are essentially tiny, drunk roommates. They stumble around, they’re loud at all the wrong hours, they throw up on you without a hint of remorse, and they don’t pay rent. You’ll find yourself considering the merits of just squirting puree directly onto the floor just to cut out the middleman.

And this is all made more difficult by the fact that they can barely communicate. Babies come equipped with a range of sounds that are designed to trigger every parent...

How To Be More Resilient: 6 Steps To Success When Life Gets Hard

Sometimes life doesn’t just hand you lemons — it pelts you with them like you’re in a citrus fruit dodgeball game. Yeah, we’re talking about when you have to deal with grief, like the death of a loved one or other serious tragedies.

You’re left with this bizarre, jagged-edged picture that sort of resembles your life, but not really. It’s a process that’s as confusing as trying to read a book where every other page is from a different novel. You cry so hard you dehydrate yourself. You feel your...

This Is How To Have A Long Awesome Life: 4 Secrets From Research

There’s no specific moment when you know you’re getting older. No ceremony where they hand you a cardigan and a book of crossword puzzles and say, “Welcome. You’re one of us now. The Wi-Fi password is getoffmylawn.”

But the wrinkles and gray hairs start accumulating. Your brain’s default setting has gone from “efficient” to “making that dial-up internet sound.” And you wake up with injuries from sleeping wrong. SLEEPING. You know, that passive activity where you’re unconscious and immobile. It...

This Is How To Be More Lucky: 4 Secrets From Research

At times, inexplicably bad stuff happens to all of us. The kind of thing that makes you want to stand in front of the universe with a sign reading, “Really? This is what we’re doing now?”

And sometimes we call it “bad luck.” Oh, magical thinking, my favorite kind of thinking when I want to avoid responsibility and logic, which, if I’m honest, is most of the time. We all have a friend who believes every retrograde Mercury heralds personal disaster. I never thought I’d have a friend who blames l...