The nature of dismissive comments: Comments such as "it was just a joke," "don't take it so personally," or "don't be so sensitive" are attempts to dismiss your feelings, trivialise the consequences of what was said, and control the eventual outcome of a conversation. These remarks can gradually erode self-esteem and cause frustration.
Your right to decide the impact: You, as the recipient of a comment, are the sole individual who gets to decide what hurts you and what the consequence of a remark is; the person making the comment does not get to dictate that.
The ineffectiveness of defensiveness: Reacting defensively—by getting upset, scoffing, or visibly bristling—will make you appear weaker and inadvertently validate the dismissive comment. This can make it seem as though you are indeed exhibiting the behaviour they are accusing you of, such as being "sensitive".
The universality of sensitivity: It is important to understand that everyone possesses sensitivity; its expression is subjective and depends on the specific topic, context, and environment. Dismissing someone as "sensitive" is often a way for the speaker to evade responsibility for the impact of their words.
The impact of being talked over: When someone talks over you, the immediate reaction is often to stop talking, leading to a feeling of defeat and the interrupter dominating the conversation.
Ineffective responses to interruption: Trying to yell, gain more attention, or use sarcastic remarks (e.g., "Excuse me, am I interrupting you?") are the wrong approaches. Such actions make you appear desperate, put you in a weaker position, and look like you're grasping for control, which never works. Raising your voice to out-talk an interrupter only escalates the situation into a shouting match where no one genuinely listens or learns. This behaviour is merely a power grab for attention.
The power of maintaining composure: Continuing to talk with an even, controlled volume and pace, despite being interrupted, demonstrates that you are planted and grounded. This highlights a discrepancy where you appear controlled, while the interrupter appears to be grasping for attention, making them look weak.
The magnetic effect of one's own name: People have a natural affinity for the sound of their own name. Using someone's name is a powerful tool to snap their attention and create a window for you to re-enter or take control of the conversation.
Unconscious behaviour and establishing patterns: Sometimes, individuals may not realise they are talking over others. However, allowing this behaviour to continue unchallenged establishes a pattern where your opinion is perceived as less important than theirs. It's crucial to address it immediately.
Boredom isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. Harvard professor Arthur Brooks explains why boredom unlocks creativity, activates a powerful brain network, and might even protect you from depression. Learn how the mind wanders—and why that’s a very good thing.
Understanding Boredom and its Importance
Boredom is not merely an absence of activity; it triggers the brain's default mode network (DMN). The DMN activates when your mind is not otherwise occupied, allowing for deeper thought.
While often perceived as uncomfortable, this DMN activation prompts reflection on existential questions, such as the meaning of life, which is described as "incredibly important, incredibly good".
Many people actively dislike boredom, to the extent that some participants in an experiment chose to administer painful electric shocks rather than sit in silence for 15 minutes.
Modern society has significantly reduced opportunities for boredom, primarily through the constant use of mobile devices, which effectively "shut off" the default mode network.
The continuous avoidance of boredom creates a "doom loop of meaning," making it harder for individuals to find purpose in their lives and contributing to increased rates of depression, anxiety, and a sense of hollowness.
Embracing boredom can lead to more interesting ideas and enhance your "skill of boredom," making you feel less bored with routine aspects of life like your job or relationships.
Crucially, allowing for boredom helps you delve into profound life questions concerning purpose, meaning, coherence, and significance, potentially leading to greater happiness.
Humans have an asymmetry of errors. We over-index exceptions - we use things that break the pattern we’ve come to expect as a serious learning opportunity. But we tend to only learn much faster from errors of commission (things we do), not errors of omission (things we don’t do).
You only learn the sting of misplaced trust when someone betrays you, but when you refuse to trust and miss out on love, partnership, or help, the loss leaves no scar to remind you.
It’s obvious when quitting for a new career turns out to be a mistake; it’s far less obvious when staying put quietly drains years of your life that you’ll never get back.
The YouTube video, featuring trial lawyer Jefferson Fisher and host Mel Robbins, provides actionable strategies and insights into mastering communication to improve all aspects of life, from personal relationships to professional interactions. The core message is that what you say is who you are, and the power to communicate effectively can change everything you want about your life.
1. The Foundational Power of Your Words
Your Words Define You: For the vast majority of people, their entire personality is compressed into what others hear them say. People experience who you are almost entirely through your words and how they make them feel. You cannot be a kind person if you do not say kind things; similarly, rude behaviour is perceived through disliked words.
Anyone Can Learn: It doesn't matter if you're shy or an introvert; anyone can learn to be a better communicator. More words do not necessarily equal better communication; often, you can say a lot with less.
Practical and Relatable: The advice offered is practical, not hypothetical, stemming from real-world conflicts and interactions, making it highly relatable. Jefferson Fisher's tips are short, concise, and applicable to improving the next conversation.
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. They are mental shortcuts, or heuristics, that the brain uses to simplify information processing and make decisions more quickly. While often useful, these biases can lead to distorted perceptions of reality and flawed decision-making. Here's a summary of 20 common cognitive biases and their effects on how we perceive our environment and make choices.
Biases Affecting Belief and Information Processing
These biases influence how we seek out, interpret, and recall information, often reinforcing our existing beliefs.
Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information that confirms or supports one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. This affects our decision-making by causing us to selectively gather evidence, leading to skewed perspectives and poor choices. For instance, an investor might only seek out news that is positive about a stock they own, ignoring any negative indicators.
Anchoring Bias: The over-reliance on the first piece of information offered when making decisions. This initial "anchor" influences subsequent judgments. In negotiations, the first price suggested often sets the stage for the rest of the discussion, and in everyday life, the initial price we see for a product can make subsequent, lower prices seem like a better deal than they actually are.
Availability Heuristic: Overestimating the importance of information that is most readily available to us. Events that are more recent, vivid, or emotionally charged are more easily recalled and thus perceived as being more common or likely to occur. For example, after hearing several news reports about a plane crash, you might feel that air travel is more dangerous than it statistically is.
“You are a different character in the mind of each person who knows you, because their impression of you is made of the bare bones of what they’ve seen, fleshed out by their knowledge of themselves.” - Gurwinder Bhogal
The Lonely Chapter has another perspective to it - as you grow, you don’t fit in with your friends, but this means that your friends don’t fit in with you either, and this causes a reaction from their side too.
The hardest part of changing yourself isn’t just improving your habits, it’s escaping the people who keep handing you your old costume.
Others don’t just remember who you were, they enforce it - which is why reinvention so often feels like trying to break out of a prison you can’t see.
Psychologists call this dynamic an Object Relation.
When people interact with you, they’re not engaging with you in your full, living complexity.
They’re dealing with the version of you that exists in their head, a simplified character built from fragments of memory and coloured by their own projections.
For most of his life, Dr Glover, the author of the groundbreaking No More Mr Nice Guy, was what he calls a "bad dater." He assumed the women he wanted were not interested in him. He believed that women disliked sex and thought men who wanted sex were bad. When he did get a girlfriend by practicing what he calls "Nice Guy Seduction," he typically hung on way too long for fear of having to enter the dating world all over again. But this all changed when he got divorced in his mid-forties. Dr Glover decided to approach dating as if it were a scientific experiment. To his surprise, he quickly found that talking with women, getting numbers, and getting laid was nowhere as difficult as he had thought. He often wondered what planet he had landed on.
Dating Essentials for Men was born of this experiment. Dr Glover has since taught thousands of men how to interact confidently with women and find the love and sex they have been seeking.
Are you ready to let go of the games, the tricks, the seduction, the pickup, the negs, the cocky-funny routines, the buying women drinks, the volunteering to help their sister move? Do you want to learn how to create the kind of authentic attraction that naturally brings women to you? If so, Dating Essentials for Men is the only dating guide you will ever need.
In this episode, I explain cortisol and science-based protocols for properly setting your cortisol rhythm, which can significantly increase your daytime energy, focus, mood, and stress resilience, while also improving your sleep quality. Most people mistakenly think cortisol is bad, and many assume their levels are too high, when in fact many health and performance challenges simply stem from a disrupted cortisol rhythm. Getting your cortisol rhythm right can be transformative for your health and performance. I outline behavioural, nutritional, and supplement-based strategies to raise or lower your cortisol levels at the appropriate times of day and night. I also provide specific protocols for overcoming burnout. If you’re dealing with stress, low energy, hormone or sleep challenges, or simply want to optimise these for the sake of your physical and mental health and performance, this episode offers science-backed protocols to help.
Introduction to Cortisol and Burnout
Cortisol is a powerful lever for overall health and well-being, impacting mood, sleep, the immune system, and long-term well-being. While commonly associated with stress, cortisol's primary role is to deploy and direct energy to tissues, particularly the brain, for various demands, not just stressors. It releases glucose (blood sugar) into the bloodstream from the liver and muscles to provide this energy. Cortisol is produced in the adrenal glands and operates on a slightly slower timescale than adrenaline/epinephrine. Unlike adrenaline, cortisol is lipophilic, allowing it to cross the blood-brain barrier and act on receptors in the brain, especially in the hippocampus, which is crucial for memory. Burnout is a real condition, and understanding cortisol's role is key to addressing it. The goal is to achieve a high cortisol early in the day and low cortisol before and during sleep. If this rhythm is corrected, it can resolve issues like morning anxiety, low energy, and sleep difficulties associated with burnout. There are two main patterns of burnout: being stressed in the morning and exhausted in the afternoon, or being stressed at night and exhausted in the morning.
Public apologies are often perceived as insincere and forced, made under pressure to protect one's career, income, and social status. These apologies frequently do not lead to genuine feelings of improvement or significant change, and are often criticised as "phony Hollywood apology videos". The video highlights instances where public figures like Will Smith, Logan Paul, Kanye West, and Kevin Spacey made apologies under pressure, only to later contradict or disown them once the pressure subsided.
This issue extends beyond public figures into private life, where "fake apologies" are given and received, leading to no growth, empathy, or repair, effectively making them as useless as no apology at all.
Shame as the Core Issue
According to Joe Hudson, the fundamental problem with most ineffective apologies is shame. He explains that children are often taught to apologize by being told to do so, which makes it a transfer of shame, akin to a "shame hot potato".
The video uses the Will Smith slapping incident as a detailed example of this "shame hot potato" cycle:
Chris Rock's joke about Jada causes Jada to feel shame.
Will Smith, observing Jada's reaction, fears getting the "shame hot potato" for being a perceived bad partner.
Will then unloads this shame onto Chris Rock by slapping him.
Subsequently, social media places the shame back on Will (and Jada).
A year later, Chris Rock, through his comedy special, redirects the shame back at Will and Jada.
The video argues that when society deeply shames individuals, it makes it more probable that the problematic behaviour will continue, as people either avoid the situation or perpetuate the behaviour, rather than transforming it.
Anne‑Laure Le Cunff is a neuroscientist, founder, and author.
We live by unconscious mental scripts. Most of the time, we don’t even realize it, until we wake up and see the life we’re living isn’t what we truly want. So how do we unlearn what no longer serves us and rewire our mind to align with who we really are?
Expect to learn what the problem is when people obsess over finding their purpose, how to know if you’re following your own dreams or someone else’s, the tactics you can learn to begin unlearning cultural scripts, how to get more comfortable with uncertainty, how to deal with the shame of letting go of busyness and driving toward your purpose, why posture is so overlooked in mental health, how to improve a destructive mindset, and much more…
Has modern feminism betrayed the very women it promised to empower? Deborah France-White (Guilty Feminist), Louise Perry, and Erica Komisar go head-to-head on sexual freedom.
Deborah Frances-White is a bestselling author and host of The Guilty Feminist podcast, Louise Perry is a journalist and author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and Erica Komisar is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, and author of books such as, ‘Chicken Little the Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety’.
This video, presented by Ali Abdaal, addresses the common question of how to make time for everything, utilizing a "168 hours" spreadsheet to illustrate time allocation within a week.
Part 1: Analysis of Average American Time Use
The first part of the video uses data from sources like the American Time Use Survey, Nielsen data, and research conducted by AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude) to estimate how the average American spends their 168 hours per week.
Sleep: On average, Americans sleep approximately 8.7 hours per night, which equates to 56 hours per week. Including 30 minutes for winding down before sleep, the total time dedicated to sleep-related activities is 59.5 hours per week (about 35% of life).
Work: An average 8-hour workday, five days a week, combined with a 30-minute lunch break, a 30-minute commute each way, 45 minutes for getting ready, and 15 minutes for changing after work, totals 52.5 hours per week (about 31.3% of life).
Food: Eating and preparing meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) consume an average of 12 hours per week. Grocery shopping adds another 60 minutes weekly.
Chores: Tasks such as cleaning, laundry, and other miscellaneous chores account for roughly 6.5 hours per week, though this is noted as potentially an underestimate and varies greatly, especially with children.
Fitness: The average American allocates about 2.5 hours per week to fitness and exercise.
Entertainment: This category is substantial, with the average American spending 19 hours a week watching TV shows, movies, and streaming content (including YouTube). An additional 3.5 hours per week are spent on social media apps, though for 18-24 year olds, this jumps to 5.1 hours *per day*. Other entertainment like gaming (1 hour) and general entertainment (6 hours) further contribute to this total, reaching 29.5 hours per week.
Relationships: Time for quality family and partner interactions (3 hours) and general socialising (1 hour) are also factored in.
Jordan Peterson has delivered some of the internet’s most iconic debate moments. But his Surrounded video doesn’t quite reach that same level.
Many will dissect the substance of the debate—the semantic haze, the definitions, the back-and-forth. That’s not where I want to focus.
What matters most in a debate, if your goal is to actually change someone’s mind, isn’t clever semantics, gotcha moments, or even airtight logic. It’s the emotional connection you build through rapport and charisma. That human link is what opens the door to real persuasion.
Dr. Russell Kennedy is a neuroscientist specialising in anxiety treatment, a physician, and an author.
Why is anxiety so common now? It once helped us survive, like when lions chased us. But today, we feel it even when there's no real threat. So what's going on? What does science say about this ancient emotion, and how can we manage it in the modern world?
Expect to learn why anxiety is so common nowadays, the neuroscience of why we worry, the big differences between anxiety and worry, the biggest triggers of anxiety and how to manage them better, how to undo-chronic anxiety and how anxiety shows up differently for men and women, if it is it a blessing or a curse to feel things deeply, where people pleasing come from neurologically and much more…
In todays moments episode, Chris Williamson dives into why real relationships seem harder to find in today’s world - and what you can do about it. With the challenges of modern dating, and the rise of disconnection, Chris offers a hopeful perspective on how to navigate these hurdles and create deeper, more meaningful connections in your life.
I used to think being attractive was all about confidence, teasing, and strong body language, but I was missing something deeper. In this video, I break down the 3 traits of grounded masculinity that most men overlook. These traits make women feel emotionally safe, connected, and irresistibly drawn in.
0:00 – Why Typical Attraction Advice Falls Short 2:39 – Containment: The Balance Between Holding Space and Setting Limits 4:18 – Empathetic Attunement: Feeling Without Getting Lost 7:08 – Grounding Someone in the Now (Not the Logic)
Everyone wonders how to reach the top 1%; most people think it's all about discipline and hard work. In this video, I'm sharing the deeper success habits I've learned from Joe Hudson that go beyond typical productivity advice. These principles have transformed my life this past year, and I hope they help you too..
1. Prioritise Pace over Perfection (The Iterative Mindset)
Instead of getting bogged down in meticulous planning and waiting for everything to be perfect, highly successful individuals focus on taking action with minimal preparation (around 20%) and then iterating based on feedback. The pace of movement is considered more important than getting it absolutely right initially because it accelerates learning and allows for necessary adjustments. A common barrier to action is the fear of making public mistakes. This habit aligns with an "Ready Fire Aim" approach.
My guest is James Sexton, Esq., a renowned attorney specializing in contracts related to love and money—prenuptial agreements, divorce and custody. We explore the counterintuitive fact that people with prenuptial agreements tend to stay married longer and report more satisfying relationships than those who don’t. We discuss how legal contracts can foster deeper understanding by encouraging vulnerability and honest communication about each partner’s values and expectations.
We also examine what defines true, lasting love versus generic romantic ideals—and how social media can distort our understanding of what we truly need. Additionally, we review how cultural traditions, gender dynamics, courtship length, and age at the time of marriage shape marital outcomes.
This episode offers practical tools for anyone—single or partnered—to build more successful and stable relationships through deeply honest dialogue and contracts that reflect genuine values around love and money.
