Mind Space

Protect Your Wisdom by Leaving Facebook

- Adam Clare

steaming mug

American adults who got their news about COVID-19 from Facebook were less knowledgeable and more likely to believe falsehoods about the pandemic. The solution is to spend less time on the site and more time getting your news from other sources. The good news is that most adults agreed that Facebook is not a good source to get news, whereas official government websites were.

Leaving the site entirely is too much for some people as it’s a way to stay in contact with friends; so just reduce your time on the site – and avoid all “news” on the platform.

In summary, adults whose most trusted information source is government health websites are more likely to correctly answer questions about COVID-19 than those with another most trusted source. Individuals whose most trusted source is television news and those who use Facebook as an additional source of news are less likely to correctly answer COVID-19 questions. Effective public health emergency responsiveness requires that effective information dissemination and public compliance with precautionary measures occur. To increase public knowledge of COVID-19 in order to maximize information dissemination and compliance with COVID-19 related public health recommendations, those who provide health information should consider use of the public’s most trusted sources of information, as well as monitoring and correcting misinformation presented by other sources.

Read more.

You Make Choices to Have a Good Life

- Adam Clare

steaming mug

How you think about the world around will influence what you do in the world, which in turn impacts how you react to what’s happening around you. It’s a cycle, and you can influence it. Positive thinking won’t work, instead you can use tried and tested ways to better your life through making educated decisions. Practice mindfulness, self-reflection and consider how you react to stimulus to help you make decisions in your life.

Facing what you don’t want to deal with is not easy at first. There is courage within us; we have to find and make friends with it. I found courage through prayer, asking for help, and digging deep inside my heart to find my courage. The heart knows what is right and can be our inner guidance system. The heart doesn’t care about the future or the past — it only cares about what is best for you and doing the right thing.

When we face a challenging situation, it’s often necessary to make hard choices, and sometimes to get what we want, we have to let go of something significant. For example, if you choose to leave a marriage with children, you know changing the structure of the family unit will be difficult, but the reasons to do so are more critical than keeping it intact. That is not an easy decision.

Read more.

A Toolkit for Addressing Misinformation

- Adam Clare

Democracy functions best when the people are well educated and the group Evidence for Democracy wants exactly that: a smart public. With COVID vaccinations well underway it’s important to understand what exactly is happening with the vaccines and other public health solutions. First, we need to understand that a lot of misinformation is accurate information misrepresented in a misleading fashion, which makes it more difficult to address. Thankfully Evidence for Democracy put together a toolkit for anybody to help identify misleading information in these crazy times.

You can watch the video above and/or check out the toolkit PDF linked below.

With research on this topic quickly evolving, we’ve updated our recommendations based on a review of the best available evidence and tailored our advice for the science community. In this webinar, we walk through best practices for addressing misinformation online. Tune in to learn how we can all do our part in the collective effort to address online misinformation!

Check out the toolkit!

A Meta-Analysis of Well Being Reveals how to Help Your Mental Health

- Adam Clare
community

Many people are feeling worn out, down, and stressed after living through a year of the COVID-19 pandemic. People in nations which reacted swiftly and took scientific approaches to containing the spread are doing better, but those of us in areas with poor leadership (I’m in “Conservative” Ontario) the pandemic is stronger than ever. With no end in sight for this pandemic how can we keep our mental health?

We can turn to a recent meta-analysis of mental well-being studies for some guidance. Researchers looked through 420 research trials to find what commonalities exist and if there is anything we can learn form it. There is, and you can start practicing things to help you right away.

Amongst the many forms of interventions included, two in particular stood out for their consistent associations with positive findings across trial cohorts: mindfulness-based interventions, and multi-component PPIs (positive psychological interventions), which package together a range of treatment methods and activities designed to cultivate positive feelings, behaviors, and thinking patterns.

To a lesser extent, other interventions also appeared to deliver benefits, including acceptance and commitment therapy-based interventions, cognitive therapy, singular PPIs, and interventions focusing on reminiscence.

Read more.

You Don’t Have to Love Your Job

- Adam Clare

Too many people are told to follow their passion and find their dream job above all else. This is bad advice. Instead, go get a job that you can do, pays you well, and is filled with respect. There is no reason to be a sycophant at work.

Sarah Jaffe recently wrote a book titled Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and in it she explores our modern and utterly bizarre expectation that you should love your job. Over at the Next Big Idea Club she highlighted five key points from her book, and it’s worth looking at.

2. The idea that we should like our work is actually a relatively new concept.

The way we work and the way we think about work have changed over time. And so while humans have long been presumed to do some kinds of work for the love of it, that’s an expectation that has grown and spread from a couple of types of work to pretty much everything. The idea that we work in order to find fulfillment, rather than a paycheck, wasn’t particularly widespread even just a couple of generations ago. When you’re digging coal or building cars for a living, no one expects you to do it because you like it. You did it because it paid decently—or because it paid at all.

Read more.

Scroll To Top