Category Archives: Body & Mind

A Toolkit for Addressing Misinformation

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

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

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.

Want to be Successful? Spend Time with Your Friends

Are you worried you aren’t successful? Don’t be! The greatest success one can have is found in their social network, and size doesn’t matter. According to a 75-year long study done by Harvard the path to success is spending time with friends. Take a moment out of your day today and send somebody you know a nice message.

If you don’t have a large group of friends, or don’t have a partner, don’t worry. A person only needs a few close relationships to be happy.

“It’s not just the number of friends you have,” Waldinger says, “and it’s not whether or not you’re in a committed relationship. It’s the quality of your close relationships that matters.”
…
It’s a reminder to carve out more time to connect with people who you enjoy being around, sure. But unlike landing a new job or buying a new car, you many not see changes to your mood overnight. “Relationships are messy and they’re complicated,” says Waldinger. Investments in them can take time to pay dividends.

Read more.

Solving Problems is the New Life Goal

It’s now February and those of you that decided to commit to a New Years resolution have probably given up on them, that’s ok. Trying is always the first step. One of the reasons you may have missed your resolution goal is because it was a goal. Instead of focussing on achieving a goal, you should focus on what problem you’re trying to solve and give it a hard think about the best way to go about solving it.

“Goals feel good to set, but they’re just a diversion,” he told me. “People face no consequence if they don’t reach their goal. So they forget it and set another one again and mess that one up, too.”

No, Kashey wanted to talk about problems. Too often, he said, we use goals to gloss over problems, pulling arbitrary benchmarks out of thin air — like losing 10 pounds or reading 30 books in a year — without pausing to consider whether hitting those benchmarks will improve our lives.

When we want to do or change something, a more productive framing, he said, is to ask ourselves, “What problem am I trying to solve?”

Read more.