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Helen Mayberg, a neuroscientist from Emory University called depression, “emotional pain without context.” In other words, here is this emotional pain and the brain can’t figure out where it’s coming from and so it feels lost, stuck and helpless. There is a strong lack of self-trust in these moments.

When it comes to trusting ourselves, we need to have retrievable memory of experiences where we were able to rely on ourselves to handle a difficult situation.

Most of us see vulnerability as something to stay away from because there is the fear of getting hurt or rejected in it. But the truth is, we can’t learn to trust ourselves without being vulnerable. You need one to build the other.

If we can learn to intentionally pay attention to our moments of vulnerability, without judgment, and meet it with a curious and caring awareness, we can build that into our hippocampus, and make it readily retrievable when we need it most. We condition the natural ability to trust and rely on ourselves.

But like anything, it takes intention, attention and practice.

Just sitting with yourself for 5, 10 or 15 minutes (or more) and paying attention to your breath or your body is, for many of us, an act of being vulnerable. The fact is, most of us are guarding against being alone all throughout the day by either staying busy in activity or staying busy in our mind.

In doing this you build trust that you can actually be with yourself with whatever is here. Through practice and repetition, the brain changes and a new thought emerges from the neural growth that “I can handle this, it’s going to be okay.”

Some research says the best way to spark creativity is to walk away and that the best ideas come from those least-expected “aha!” moments. So maybe procrastination isn’t such a bad thing after all. Or is time spent on those cat memes taking its toll? Can procrastinating ever be a source of productivity?

Here’s the complete guide to procrastinating at work:

DO: Delay to Gain Perspective Before a Big Decision
[…] Some used procrastination as a trigger for a helpful amount of stress needed to ignite positive action. Others saw it as a “thought incubator”: They put off making a decision because they wanted to fully process it before finding a solution.

DO: Check Things Off the Bottom of Your To-Do List
[T]asks [done] while avoiding work were helping in other areas of their life. They were procrastinating efficiently and taking care of other responsibilities.

DON’T: Delay Important Work Out of Fear You’ll Fail
[P]rocrastinators aren’t simply managing their time poorly. It’s a tactic deployed by those with vulnerable self-esteem and has a lot to do with perceived notions of time.

DON’T: Delay Taking Important Action
There are those who delay making decisions, and those who delay taking action. [T]he decision-avoiders are dependent on others, relying on them to make their minds up for them. They’re more submissive and prefer to pass the buck to someone else whom they can blame them if it all goes wrong.

The task-avoiders, on the other hand, are generally characterized by low self-esteem; they make a decision but don’t follow up on it. Of course a lot of people fall into both categories, but the findings go some way in explaining the different ways people procrastinate.

DO: Mind Your Work Habits From an Early Age
Though procrastination might seem merely a personality quirk, scientific opinion is divided as to whether it can be put down to nature, or is the product of a person’s environment.

[F]actors like “time perspective” affect someone’s likelihood to procrastinate. Time perspective is how people understand and interpret their past, present and future. For example, someone who focuses on the bad things in his past is more prone to bitterness and resentment. […]

Other research, though, has found that environment is also a contributing factor in procrastination. [F]or example, found that procrastination often starts at school, where a lack of rigor in curricula and not being punished for missed deadlines can breed time-wasting habits.

DON’T: Be Hypocritical About Other Procrastinators
[…] When asked to the evaluate the poor performance of a co-worker who has the same procrastinating tendencies and habits as themselves, workers were harsher on them than their non-procrastinating co-workers.

DON’T: Get Sucked in by Cat Memes
That trance you can go into when finding yourself scrolling through cat memes or chatting an afternoon away has a name. It’s called “flow”. The concept was coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and was originally considered a good thing because it’s a state of deep engagement and absorption, as he abstractly explains in a Wired interview.

[…] Unsurprisingly, [there’s] a strong link between procrastination and problematic internet use, as they wrote in the Journal of Computers in Human Behavior. But they also found that when someone was in a state of flow while engaged in a non-work related activity, she was more likely to end up with problematic internet use.

In a way […] this frames procrastination not as a time-wasting phenomenon, but more as a disconnect between intent and action. Flow is a desirable state to be in when you’re working, but you misdirect it at something else, like avoiding a boring task or the pressure of an assessment, you fall down a rabbit hole.

DON’T: Hire Neurotic Procrastinators
[…] People who believe in some form of fate or pre-destination – in a hopeless, “it’s out of my hands” kind of way – are more prone to procrastination, because such people tend to be more neurotic and anxious.

But more surprising, perhaps, is that the other main characteristic of the typical procrastinator is a relatively healthy life outlook. According to the study, people who have a glowing, nostalgic view of their past have a high tendency towards procrastination. This new finding (the study was conducted in 2012) runs opposite to previous research in the field, and scientists don’t yet have a concrete explanation for what seems rather counter-intutive.

There is a psychology behind where everyone stands when they get in an elevator. Do you follow this pattern? The men and women are very different.

In a nutshell, older men seem to stand at the back of the elevator, younger men typically stand in the middle, and women (regardless of age) usually stand in front of everyone, right behind the elevator door. The second thing she noticed is that men will look around at everyone in the elevator, while women usually avoid eye contact.

She tells NPR that she doesn’t know why these patterns exist, they just do. It could be a power thing, since the senior men at the back have a view of everyone. It could be more simple that that. Maybe it just comes down to shyness. The psychology behind it all is still a mystery. So the next time you get in an elevator, instead of being annoyed by the kid who pushes all the buttons or the person talking loudly on a phone, check out where everyone is standing.

Music moves people of all cultures, in a way that doesn’t seem to happen with other animals. Nobody really understands why listening to music — which, unlike sex or food, has no intrinsic value — can trigger such profoundly rewarding experiences. Salimpoor and other neuroscientists are trying to figure it out with the help of brain scanners.

[R]esearchers from Stanford reported that when listening to a new piece of classical music, different people show the same patterns of synchronized activity in several brain areas, suggesting some level of universal experience. But obviously no one’s experience is exactly the same.

A few years ago, Salimpoor and Zatorre performed another type of brain scanning experiment in which participants listened to music that gave them goosebumps or chills. The researchers then injected them with a radioactive tracer that binds to the receptors of dopamine, a chemical that’s involved in motivation and reward. With this technique, called positron emission tomography or PET, the researchers showed that 15 minutes after participants listened to their favorite song, their brains flooded with dopamine.

“New music is presumably rewarding not only because it fits implicitly learned patterns but because it deviates from those patterns, however slightly,” Wheatley says. But this finding leads to new questions. “It just made me wonder whether people have different preferences or tolerances for how much a new song deviates from the well-worn path of previously heard music structures.”

Music […] is an intellectual reward. “It’s really an exercise for your whole brain.”

Happiness studies are booming in the social sciences, and governments are moving toward quantitative measures of a nation’s overall happiness, meant to supplement traditional measures of wealth and productivity. The resulting studies have a high noise-to-signal ratio, but we can expect that work with an aura of scientific rigor on something as important as happiness is going to be taken seriously. Still, our first-person experience and reflection can catch crucial truths about happiness that escape the quantitative net.

In offering here my views on the subject, I make no claim to special authority and present my thoughts as an example and an incentive for readers to develop their own perspectives. Such personal perspectives are a necessary check on the often questionable suggestions of happiness science.

In the author’s opinion, happiness involves four things:

[T]he first one is mostly a matter of luck. You have [to] be sufficiently free of suffering — physical and mental — for happiness to be even possible. Suffering can be noble and edifying, but it can also reduce us to a state where there’s nothing beyond our distress that can make it meaningful. Of course, we can fit an occasional bout of even extreme suffering into an otherwise happy life (see Peg O’Connor’s recent post on William James and the “misery threshold”), but there’s a level of sustained misery that wipes out happiness.

[T]he second requirement for happiness: fulfilling work. Since humans are distinct persons but with essential ties to a community, my work must be fulfilling both individually and socially: I must do something that satisfies me as an individual and that I regard as producing significant good for others. Of course, unless I have the luck of being born rich, my work must also generate enough income to provide me the minimal goods without which happiness is not even possible. The challenge is to find satisfying work with an adequate income.

A third feature of happiness is what the ancient Greeks called the proper “use of pleasure.” Here I am using “pleasure” to refer not to just any feeling of satisfaction but to the immediate gratification of the senses: not only the five physical senses but also the aesthetic sensibilities directed to art and nature. All of these diverse pleasures are important aspects of happiness. They typically come to us fairly randomly as we move through life and are a delightful supplement to the more diffuse and less intense satisfactions of our work.

Finally, and often most important, there is the happiness of human love , where my happiness arises from and contributes to the happiness of my spouse, my children, my friends — even perhaps of all humankind. Such love can take us beyond the domain of mere happiness, into the world of moral and religious values. It can even lead to sacrificing my happiness for another’s. Love is both the culmination of happiness and a reminder that there is more to life than happiness.

Beating chronic stress is a long-term effort, and we’ve shared a lot of ways to deal with it—but what if you’re overcome with stress right now and just want to calm down? Here are ten ways you can bust through stress and get on with your day.

1. Catch It Right Away

2. “Label” Your Feelings

3. Fix Your Posture

4. Eat [properly]

5. Turn Off Your Phone

6. Make a Decision

7. Laugh Out Loud

8. Exercise

9. Meditate

10. Fight Your Long-Term Stress Now

Read the article for more details.

From an evolutionary point of view, […] music doesn’t seem to make sense. Unlike sex, say, or food, it did nothing to help our distant ancestors survive and reproduce. Yet music and its effects are in powerful evidence across virtually all cultures, so it must satisfy some sort of universal need — often in ways we can’t begin to fathom. A few years ago, a single composition lifted Valorie Salimpoor almost instantaneously out of a deep funk (it was Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, to be precise), and from that moment, she decided it would be her life’s work to figure out music’s mysteries.

In the experiments reported in Science, Salimpoor and her colleagues gauged subjects’ responses to music by exposing them not to songs they already knew (which might be too firmly linked to pleasurable memories of that first kiss or that road trip to Florida), but to songs they have never heard but would probably like, based on their known preferences as filtered through a Pandora- or iTunes-like prediction algorithm.

What the scientists found was that the songs that triggered the strongest response from both the emotional and intellectual parts of the brain were correlated with a willingness to pay more. And that suggests that people get not just a sensory reward from listening to music, but a direct intellectual one too — even if they’re not aware of it. The nature of that reward, Salimpoor believes, based on this and earlier research, has to do with pattern recognition and prediction. “As an unfamiliar piece unfolds in time,” she says, “our brains predict how it will continue to unfold.”

These predictions are culture-dependent and based on experience: someone raised on rock or Western classical music won’t be able to predict the course of an Indian raga, for example, and vice versa. But if a piece develops in a way that’s both slightly novel and still in line with our brain’s prediction, we tend to like it a lot. And that, says Salimpoor, “is because we’ve made a kind of intellectual conquest.”

Music may, in other words, tap into a brain mechanism that was key to our evolutionary progress. The ability to recognize patterns and generalize from experience, to predict what’s likely to happen in the future — in short, the ability to imagine — is something humans do far better than any other animals. It’s what allowed us (aided by the far less glamorous opposable thumb) to take over the world.

If music is tied into this most important of survival mechanisms, no wonder we like it so much. “People often put music on the list of the top five things that are most pleasurable for them,” says Salimpoor. You surely thought of none of this the first time you heard “Satisfaction” — nor would you have wanted to — but it helps explain why you’ve listened to it ever since.