The Japanese word ikigai describes “the reason you get up in the morning”: the point where what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and — when possible — what you can be paid for, all meet. Popularized in the West through books and articles about the longevity of the people of…

Starting in 2003, psychologist Kristin Neff, of the University of Texas at Austin, gave scientific shape to a concept that is today among the most studied in positive psychology: “self-compassion.” Neff breaks it down into three mutually reinforcing elements: self-kindness (instead of harsh self-judgment), common humanity (recognizing that failing and suffering are part of the…

In 1986, psychologist James Pennebaker and colleague Sandra Beall published an experiment in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology that became a classic of health psychology: they asked a group of university students to write for fifteen to twenty minutes a day, for four consecutive days, about a difficult or traumatic emotional experience, while a control…

For some years now, scientific research has been paying growing attention to a two-way communication channel between the gut and the brain, called the “gut-brain axis”: an ongoing conversation carried through the vagus nerve, the immune system, and substances produced by the trillions of bacteria living in our intestines — the so-called microbiota. A review…

In 2023, a team of Stanford researchers led by Melis Yilmaz Balban together with David Spiegel and Andrew Huberman published a study in Cell Reports Medicine comparing four different five-minute daily breathing practices against classic mindfulness meditation, over a full month. The most interesting finding: all the breathing practices improved mood more than meditation alone,…

As children, many of us were taught to “control” our emotions, as if they were an intruder to be kept in check while true intelligence lived elsewhere, in cold, calculating reason. American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, one of the most influential voices in contemporary moral philosophy, turns that idea on its head. In her book Upheavals…