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Psychological health is often directly linked to nutritional deficiencies. The severity of a nutritional deficiency can even determine the extent of illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.

In short, food directly impacts your physiology which directly impacts your psychology—your mental health.

Fortunately, research has shown that healthy eating and guided supplementation can help alleviate painful symptoms that accompany depression and other psychological disorders—even in advanced stages. Some supplements have demonstrated the ability to be nearly twice as effective as antidepressant medication, without dangerous side effects.

The article goes on to suggest how certain food groups can help keep us mentally healthy.

Dodging traffic and weaving through crowds aren’t the only obstacles urbanites face when trying to take their workout to the streets. New research in Belgium shows that people who live in a city and exercise outdoors have higher levels of inflammation and lower scores on cognitive tests than those who exercise outside in the suburbs.

The findings: High levels of air pollution in the city prevented participants from gaining exercise-induced cognitive benefits such as brain plasticity (the ability for the brain to change when presented with new knowledge), comprehension, and mental health. The urban group also had significantly higher blood levels of some inflammation markers.

To make sure pollution isn’t ruining your health, use Meeusen’s tips before you head outside.

1. Brave rain and wind. These climates blow the fine particles away so you’re not left inhaling them.
2. Avoid rush hour. The more cars, the more pollution from exhaust fumes.
3. Head to the park. The more trees between you and the road, the better.

These excerpts were taken from Roger Fisher’s excellent book Getting It Done: How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge.

Everyone has filters to select information that receives attention. If we don’t consciously choose them we fall back on unconscious ones. Typically these default rules for selecting data limit the useful information we receive. Like a magician’s sleight of hand, they direct attention away from true action.

A selection, including books I’ve read, look interesting, or are by authors I’ve heard of:

The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver

People who miss the election.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan

Cool nerds.

Threats, Amelia Gray

Weird nerds.

The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker

Wannabe nerds.

The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling

People who still have their fake plastic glasses from buying Harry Potter books at midnight.

I Am An Executioner, Rajesh Parameswaran

People who weren’t ever allowed to have pets.

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel

Your mom.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann

Your dad.

Enchantments, Kathryn Harrison

Romantics with a taste for blood.

HHhH, Laurent Binet

Manic Pixie Dream Boys you met in History class.

A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers

People who think the world is doomed — but can laugh about it.

Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon

People nostalgic for times they never experienced.

This is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz

Regretful repeat cheaters.

How Music Works, David Byrne

The self-consciously hip.

Arcadia, Lauren Groff

Wannabe ex-hippies.

The Wind Through the Keyhole, Stephen King

People who can just never let anything go.

Fifty Shades Freed, E.L. James

Non-readers.

Building Stories, Chris Ware

Adults who miss Legos.

Continuing my research into what motivates highly respected achievers, I’ve come across a few gleaming nuggets of a subject that eludes most of us – what makes some people truly love their jobs. And by “love” I don’t mean that they never have a day when they’d rather be doing anything but their job, but rather that they experience a consistent contentment with what they do. For the most part, these are the people that get up thinking about what’s going to happen at work that day, minus the impending sense of dread many of us have as we’re brushing our teeth.

Here are the reasons:

1. They seldom feel disconnected from the challenge that first engaged their interest.

2. They’re remarkably well-attuned to the “early years.”

3. They are “portfolio” thinkers.

4. They don’t care what you think.

5. They are born succession planners.

6. They will stay…but just know, they’ll also leave.

7. They won’t be stopped.

8. They draw people to them without even trying.

9. They live in the now.

10. They never, ever limit their vision to serve the interests of petty competition.

Read the full article for more info.

[T]he “endowment effect” […] explains our irrational tendency to overvalue something just because we own it. Or, as Thaler puts it, “goods [that] are included in the individual’s endowment will be more highly valued than those not held in the endowment, ceteris paribus.”

In the last few years some psychologists have pointed out that the endowment effect results not from loss aversion but from a sense of possession, a feeling that an object is “mine.”

Riffing on the findings produced by Morewedge, Maddux and other researchers, Dommer and Swaminathan posit that, “loss aversion has typically accounted for the endowment effect, but an alternative explanation suggests ownership creates an association between the item and the self, and this possession-self link increases the value of the good.”

The takeaway is obvious enough. We humans are not perfect calculators. Instead, we overvalue our possessions because they contribute to our identity and the identities of the groups we belong to. We don’t overvalue goods because we’re loss averse; we overvalue goods because they are part of who we are.

Quart and the growing chorus of neuro-critics are half right: our early-twenty-first-century world truly is filled with brain porn, with sloppy reductionist thinking and an unseemly lust for neuroscientific explanations. But the right solution is not to abandon neuroscience altogether, it’s to better understand what neuroscience can and cannot tell us, and why.

The first and foremost reason why we shouldn’t simply disown neuroscience altogether is an obvious one: if we want to understand our minds, from which all of human nature springs, we must come to grips with the brain’s biology. The second is that neuroscience has already told us lot, just not the sort of things we may think it has.

The real problem with neuroscience today isn’t with the science—though plenty of methodological challenges still remain—it’s with the expectations. The brain is an incredibly complex ensemble, with billions of neurons coming into—and out of—play at any given moment. There will eventually be neuroscientific explanations for much of what we do; but those explanations will turn out to be incredibly complicated.

The sort of short, simple explanations of complex brain functions that often make for good headlines rarely turn out to be true. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t explanations to be had, it just means that evolution didn’t evolve our brains to be easily understood.

We all enjoy a good story, whether it’s a novel, a movie or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us that they’ve experienced. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?

It’s in fact quite simple. If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that’s it, nothing else happens.

When we are being told a story though, things change dramatically found researchers in Spain. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain, that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.

We know that we can activate our brains better if we listen to stories. The still unanswered question is: Why is that? Why does the format of a story, where events unfold one after the other have such a profound impact on our learning?

The simple answer is this: We are wired that way. A story, if broken down into the simplest form is a connection of cause and effect. And that is exactly how we think.

Now, whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing experiences. That’s why metaphors work so well with us. Whilst we are busy searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate a part called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, disgust or else.

See also: This Is Your Brain on Metaphors.