- “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” — Killingsworth & Gilbert

- The default mode network is “the narrator who won’t stop talking.” — Judson Brewer

- Psychedelic “ego-dissolution” tracks the disintegration of the default mode network — Robin Carhart-Harris

- "All these thoughts and feelings may be the products of an overactive default mode network, that tightly linked set of brain structures implicated in rumination, self-referential thought, and metacognition—thinking about thinking."— Michael Pollan

HATERS GONNA HATE.

And reader — to borrow a phrase from Michael Jordan: I took it personally.

I’m a creativity researcher who has spent years studying the upside of the wandering mind — positive-constructive daydreaming: the playful, exploratory, future-oriented inner life that fuels imagination and insight. And Jerome L. Singer, the “father of daydreaming” who pioneered that whole line of work, became a close personal friend and sat on my dissertation committee. He is, I’m quite sure, rolling in his grave every time he hears a mindfulness researcher hate on the cognitive machinery behind daydreaming.

So when the field brandishes the brain network behind all of that as the prime suspect in human misery? I have SO MUCH to freaking say about this one. If I sound super-duper passionate in a way some of my other posts maybe don’t sound, well, that’s just the truth of how I am feeling about this topic!

They’ve got the wrong villain.

Meet the accused

The “default mode network” (as cognitive neuroscientists like to call it) is the system that’s most active when you turn inward — when you stop chasing an external goal and start to drift, remember something personal, imagine your personal future, reflect, and wonder. The textbooks file it under “task-negative,” as if it only switches on when nothing important is happening. I’ve spent my career arguing the exact opposite, which is why I call it the Imagination Network: because what it’s doing is anything but nothing!

Here’s the résumé of the accused — the actual jobs this “villain” performs:

• It writes your story. It builds your autobiographical memory and stitches it into the running internal narrative that makes you you across time.

• It travels through time. It lets you step out of the present to imagine your future self, rehearse your goals, and run the “what if” scenarios that planning a life requires.

• It reads other minds. It’s the seat of perspective-taking, empathy, and theory of mind — how you climb out of your own head and into someone else’s, modeling what another person thinks, wants, and feels.

• It incubates your best ideas — and powers creative flow. Daydreaming and mind-wandering, its signature activities, are essential creative insights. And when you drop into creative flow— improvising, generating, making without self-conscious effort — this network is right there, driving the spontaneous, self-generated stream that flow is made of.

• It can work in cooperation with other brain networks. In research I’ve published with Roger Beaty, creativity depends on this network coupling with the brain’s executive-control system — the dreaming and the steering, firing together to turn an inner vision into a meaningful creative result.

Now read that list again. These are not idle defaults or bugs to be patched out. In my view, they are the soul of human existence! They are the most personal functions we have — the very machinery of selfhood: who you’ve been, who you might still become, how you reach other people, what you create. Strip them away and there’s no inner life left to speak of. They are, in the most literal sense, essential to self-actualization itself.

And here’s the part the mindfulness zealots keep missing: the network they smear as the self-absorbed “me” network is also the “us” network. Perspective-taking, empathy, connecting, inhabiting another person’s mind — that’s the same machinery. What the mindfulness researchers view as self-obsession is the very faculty that lets you get out of yourself and into someone else. It’s not just how we daydream. It’s how we connect — and how we love.

This brain network is irreducibly personal and contextual — built from your memories, your people, your imagined future, and meaningful only in the situation you’re actually in. There’s no universal verdict to hand down on a network that is, by definition, about you. Which is exactly what makes “just turn it down” such a category error.

That is not the résumé of a villain. That’s the résumé of the most human part of the human brain.

The real culprit was never the network

So why does the network keep showing up at the scene of every crime? Because it also hosts rumination — the stuck, repetitive, self-attacking loop where the same dark thought circles the drain for the hundredth time. Rumination is real, and it is genuinely a source of suffering.

But here’s the irony I learned the hard way on the cushion: rumination isn’t even really wandering. When you ruminate, your mind isn’t roaming free — it’s locked in, grinding one groove, doing the precise opposite of what an unleashed imagination does. So rumination is one mode of the Imagination Network that got stuck on another network (such as the amygdala), not the network itself.

The science actually backs this up if you read past the headlines. “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” turned out to be far more nuanced than the title promised: whether mind-wandering lifts or sinks your mood depends on its content and type. Spontaneous, negative, can’t-stop-it wandering hurts. Deliberate, prospective, playful wandering — the kind that solves problems in the shower and writes the next paragraph for you — helps.

The crime isn’t wandering. It’s getting trapped in your wanderings, and losing the freedom to wander back out.

The irony that gives the whole thing away

Here’s the part I find almost funny. The people prosecuting the Imagination Network keep, in the same breath, marveling at its gifts.

Robin Carhart-Harris’s own data describes the psychedelic state as a wider, more flexible, dreamlike repertoire of mind — an “entropic brain” overflowing with novel connections. That is not the absence of the imagination network’s contribution. That’s imagination, unleashed.

And Pollan? For most of How to Change Your Mind, the default mode network is the ego to be vanquished — he credits it with mental time-travel and the very sense of self, then celebrates the dissolution of his own ego, on psilocybin and toad venom alike, as the breakthrough: I dissolved my ego and found God. In his last chapter (a point in which I chucked my Kindle into the ocean), Pollan closes with a coda titled “Going to Meet My Default Mode Network,” in which he straps on a 128-electrode cap in Judson Brewer’s lab to drive down activity in his posterior cingulate cortex — a major hub of the Imagination Network. The triumphant finish? Recalling a psychedelic vision of his ego as an empty steel pylon drifting away, he sends the readout plunging below baseline and signs off “squinting to make out something wondrous.” The whole arc of the book seems to point to this defining moment where he considers the whole journey a success because he silenced his Imagination Network!

Brewer describes that exact brain region as the place where we “take something personally” — the brain’s “But enough about you” center. So the field’s most beloved narrator goes looking for transcendence by switching off the part of his brain that takes things personally. Reader, you already know how I took that. As I’ve argued repeatedly, a strong sense of self is a very different thing than a strong ego. You can have a quiet ego and maintain a strong sense of who you are, what you value, and who you wish to become.

And what’s the deal with his epilogue?! The richest irony: in his epilogue titled In Praise of Neural Diversity, he gives a plea to value many modes of mind. Which is, of course, my whole point. They are all standing over the thing they claim to have defeated, in awe of everything it gave them. After nearly four hundred pages prosecuting the default mode network, Pollan ends the book in rapture over a sustained mental space where ideas drift in and out and “you can launch a topic or change it, like a channel” — a state in which, he admits, “the ego is not entirely absent” and “a certain kind of mental work is getting done,” one that keeps handing him “usable ideas, images, or metaphors.” He calls it “one of the great gifts” of the whole journey.

Folks: that’s positive-constructive daydreaming!!!! That’s the Imagination Network, doing the very thing I’ve spent my career documenting. He demonizes it for nearly four hundred pages, then ends his book in awe of it.

You don’t have to dissolve the imagination to be free. You have to free it.

To be fair to the prosecution

I’m not here to tell you meditation doesn’t work. Meditation can be deeply meaningful and transformative. I’m a regular mindfulness meditation practitioner myself. I did the full eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course, sat about forty minutes a day, and came away genuinely changed: my grip on my own anxiety loosened, and I wrote up the whole journey as a skeptic who became convinced in the merits of a regular mindfulness practice.

The benefits are real, and meditation is excellent training for the executive attention network— the brain’s ability to flexibly control one’s attention. But the single deepest thing I learned on the cushion is the very point of this essay: mindfulness is not the opposite of mind-wandering.

If that sounds like a contradiction — a meditator defending the very network meditation is supposed to quiet — it isn’t. It’s a yes/and. A regular meditation practice doesn’t delete the imagination network; it tunes it, calming the self-critical, ruminative parts while leaving the imaginative ones free to roam. Regulation isn’t suppression — it’s the freedom to choose when to focus and when to wander.

My quarrel is with the story: the triumphalist framing that the default mode network is the enemy of a good life, the thing to suppress, dissolve, or “defeat.” (I’ve made this case to Jud Brewer directly more than once, and I’ll happily keep making it.) Because here’s what that story misses.

It’s the integration, not the war

In a whole separate line of research, my colleagues and I have been showing that higher-level creative cognition requires a very strong integration between the executive attention network and the Imagination Network — the steering and the dreaming, firing together. Divergent thinking and openness to experience lean hard on Imagination Network processes: daydreaming, imagining the future, visualizing your future self, reaching back into your most personal memories. In our work, the Imagination Network isn’t the villain. It’s the hero!

The receipts, if you want them: default–executive coupling supports creative idea production (in Nature’s Scientific Reports); openness to experience and default-network efficiency; how eminent and non-eminent thinkers differ in brain activity and in large-scale network interactions during creative thought; brain morphometry and creative achievement; and Roger Beaty’s elegant recent work showing that “control-default hubs” act as an integrative core supporting complex cognition and creativity.

Put the two literatures in the same room and the resolution is obvious: the goal was never to crown one network the hero and the other the villain. It’s all about the integration.

And I suspect that’s the real reason the default mode network keeps getting cast as the enemy. Underneath the neuroscience sits an older ideology — that the self is the problem, and the destination is no self at all: dissolve the ego, silence the narrator, erase the “me.”

But run that program to completion and you don’t get a sage. You get a freaking zombie! No inner life, no rich imagination, no thoughts of the future, no contact with your own deepest memories, and no self left to actualize. Who, exactly, wants that? (The opposite extreme is no prize either: all imagination and no control is just aimless mind-wandering and that can certainly be quite frustrating.) The whole game is the two networks working together — and keeping the strong sense of self the mindfulness researchers seem so eager to delete.

Honestly, meditation researchers and creativity researchers should be running more studies together — instead of casting the same brain network as savior or saboteur depending on which conference they’re standing in.

A different goal

In my view, the aim of a life well-lived is not a quiet mind. It’s a free one — a mind that can drop fully into the present when the present is what’s called for, and roam the past, the future, and the wildly possible when that’s what’s called for, and move flexibly between the two.

So no — I won’t be “defeating” my default mode network. I’ll keep it, thank you very much! The rumination I’ll work on. The imagination I’m keeping for good.

The Imagination Network isn’t the villain of your inner life. It’s the protagonist.

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P.S. I'm bringing my Columbia course, The Science of Living Well, to the public this summer — learn with me: scottbarrykaufman.com/livingwell.

Okay, I’m genuinely thrilled to announce this one.

This summer, I’m bringing my popular Columbia course — The Science of Living Well — out of the university and straight to you!

The most common email I get goes something like this: “I wish I could take your course. Is there any way someone outside the university could?” For years the answer was no. So I’m finally doing the thing people keep asking for. I’m teaching it live, online, outside the ivy walls.

Here’s the structure: Eight weeks, one live 90-minute session every Wednesday, starting July 8. It’s built on humanistic psychology and the science of well-being and self-actualization, and we move through the essential human needs: security, growth, mindfulness, healthy self-esteem (not the narcissistic kind), connection, love, creativity, purpose, and the peak and transcendent experiences that remind you what it means to feel fully alive.

But the part my students kept coming to office hours about wasn’t the lectures. It was the Growth Challenges. Every week pairs the science with one small, real-life experiment that gets you out of your comfort zone and helps you grow as a whole person. Because here’s the dirty secret of self-help: The shift doesn’t come from just reading the books, it comes from actually doing something with what you know. So that’s how the whole course is built. You don’t just learn it. You live it.

This whole thing is live. We’re in a room together. There’s a group of people doing the work alongside you (we call everyone “Transcenders”, affectionately), and former students tell me that part mattered as much as anything I said. There will also be an additional group coaching session each week with one of our world-class faculty members.

It's $395 to register early, through Sunday, June 28. After that it's $497, and there are a few financing options at checkout if you need them. Which, for the record, is a lot less than four years of Ivy League tuition — same professor, none of the student debt.

Reserve your spot here

And if the timing’s not right, genuinely no worries. Everything I write here stays free, always. But if you’ve ever finished one of these essays thinking “I’d love to actually go deep on this with him” — well, this is the deep version. I’d love to have you in the room.

— Scott

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I think the medical establishment has ADHD all wrong.

It hit me the other day in the shower: the truest description of the ADHD mind isn’t a deficit at all — it’s a radio. While I’ve never been formally diagnosed, I know this dial intimately, from the inside. Let me tell you what it actually feels like. I suspect a lot of my readers will relate.

We named ADHD “attention deficit.” But it was never a shortage of attention. When I’m tuned in, I have more of it than almost anyone I know. The trouble is the *tuning* — finding the frequency, and leaving it there.

The ADHD manuals barely mention the other half of this: hyperfocus. Researchers call it “the forgotten frontier of attention.” People with this kind of mind don’t just lose focus more easily — they lock on harder, and catch the faint, weird, faraway signals everyone else has tuned out. A lot of creativity comes from exactly that.

New on Beautiful Minds: “ADHD: The Hard Part Isn’t Focus — It’s Choosing the Station.” If you know this dial, this one’s for you. beautifulminds-newsletter.com

#ADHD #hyperfocus #neurodivergence #creativity #attention #mindwandering #flow #daydreaming #executivefunction #selfacceptance #psychology #BeautifulMinds

When I finally lock onto something, the world narrows to a single bright band of signal. The room goes quiet, not because it’s silent but because I’ve stopped receiving it. Hours collapse into what feels like twenty minutes. Someone can say my name twice and I won’t surface; the thing I’m working on has become the only station broadcasting, and it’s coming through at full volume, crystal clear, no static. I am not trying to concentrate. There is nothing effortful about it. I am simply, completely, there. People sometimes call this discipline. It isn’t. It’s closer to being pulled under.

That’s one half of my attention. The other half is the part nobody romanticizes: I often can’t choose which station to tune to in the first place. Using the language of Kierkegaard, I often (too often) drown in the sea of possibility. I’ll sit down with twelve worthy things to do and the dial just spins: a smear of half-caught signals, no single one resolving, a low anxious hum of everything-at-once. For me, and I suspect for so many of my readers, the trouble was never a shortage of attention. When I’m tune in, I have more of it than almost anyone I know.

The trouble is the tuning itself: choosing the frequency, and then leaving it there.

I think this is the part we get backwards.

We named it “attention deficit,” as if the problem were an empty tank. But as the authors of one of the few serious reviews of the subject put it, “despite its seemingly self-descriptive name, ADHD is not solely a disorder of attention.” It’s a disorder of regulating attention: of allocation, of selection, of getting the dial to land and hold. And the flip side of that, the part the diagnostic manuals barely mention, is the thing those same researchers call hyperfocus: “the forgotten frontier of attention.” People with ADHD don’t only lose focus more easily. They also lock on harder, and more often, than everyone else. The deficit framing only ever describes the spinning dial. It has nothing to say about the signal coming through at full strength.

What a signal it can be! When the station is the right one, what pours through isn’t just concentration — it’s a particular kind of mind. A growing body of research is finally taking the strengths seriously instead of only the struggles. A 2026 systematic review by Biqing Chi, Rebecca de Leeuw, Marieke Fransen, and Martine Hoogman at Radboud University — “Character Strengths in People with ADHD: A Systematic Review” — pulled together 59 studies and kept surfacing the same cluster: elevated curiosity, creativity, and a restless kind of zest (alongside the real costs, like lower self-regulation and perseverance). While it’s still a preprint (so hold the findings lightly), I find this to be a very important line of research with promising results.

Years ago I wrote about this in “The Creative Gifts of ADHD” for Scientific American. I wrote about the way a mind that won’t stay neatly on the assigned channel is also a mind that keeps catching the faint, weird, faraway frequencies everyone else has tuned out. I was taken then by Darya Zabelina’s finding that real-world creative achievers tend to have a “leaky” attentional filter: they let in the noise the rest of us screen out, and some of that noise turns out to be signal. Divergent thinking. Original ideas. The willingness to wander off the dial and find something nobody else was looking for.

This is also why I’ve never thought “creative” and “scattered” were opposites. As they say, a wandering mind is not always lost. In Wired to Create, Carolyn Gregoire and I argued that the creative mind runs on a kind of cognitive both/and: it generates wildly and it evaluates ruthlessly, alternating between the two. The generating half, the part that throws off sparks and chases tangents, looks an awful lot like the ADHD mind on a good day. The hard part, for all of us, is the switching: knowing when to stop generating and start choosing. Knowing which station, of all the ones now lit up, is the one worth staying on.

Because there is a real cost here, and I don’t want to wave it away. The same research that finds the curiosity and the creativity also finds the other half of the ledger: lower self-regulation, less perseverance, a harder time with the boring-but-necessary tasks of everyday life.

Executive function (the brain’s air-traffic control for inhibition, working memory, task-switching) is genuinely harder to come by, even if (and this matters) it isn’t equally impaired in everyone who’d meet the criteria. The gift and the difficulty aren’t two different people. They’re the same dial. The thing that lets you disappear into the signal is the same thing that won’t let you change the channel when dinner’s on the table and your kid is calling your name for the third time.

Now, here’s where I part ways, a little, with some of my colleagues.

When I’m in it, it certainly feels like flow. It feels like exactly what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described in Flow: the self dissolving, time bending, the sense of being used by the work rather than doing it. This isn’t a new hunch for me. The “Imagination Network” is my name for the brain’s default mode network, the wellspring of daydreams and self-generated thought, and it’s the network an ADHD mind has the hardest time quieting.

In research I’ve published with Roger Beaty, we found that creative idea production depends on the coupling of that imaginative network with the brain’s executive-control system: the generating and the steering, firing together. The same network that floods an ADHD mind with signal is the one creativity runs on, and the one that carries flow. The researchers who wrote that hyperfocus paper landed in roughly the same place: they concluded that flow and hyperfocus “appear to be the same phenomena, just with different names,” reported by different fields that never compared notes.

But plenty of careful scholars are adamant that they’re different, and I want to be fair to them, because their point isn’t trivial. Flow, in the classic sense, is voluntary and redirectable; you can come up for air. It tracks the sweet spot between challenge and skill. It tends to leave you better off. Hyperfocus, they argue, looks more like perseveration: you can get locked onto something pointless as easily as something sublime, you can’t always pull yourself out, and you lose three hours you needed. In ADHD samples, the felt overlap between the two turns out to be surprisingly modest. So the clinicians warn, reasonably: don’t romanticize the lock-on. Sometimes the station you can’t leave is just noise.

I hold both of these views at once (surprise surprise). I suspect the truth is a spectrum — shallow flow shading into deep flow shading into the kind of absorption that won’t let go — and I think the experts are right to flag the failure mode. But I also think the inner experience is real data, not an illusion to be corrected. When it feels like flow, something true is being reported about what’s happening in there. We don’t have to choose between the neuroscience and the experience. In my view, we can keep both.

Which brings me to the question I keep circling, the one about labels.

I’ve wondered, honestly, whether I’m also a little bit on the autism spectrum — whether some of that detail-drunk, won’t-let-go absorption is more than ADHD alone. I could go get evaluated. I suspect I’d qualify for something, or more likely a lot of things.

But the longer I sit with it, the less the precise label seems to matter, and the more I want to just describe the experience— because I don’t think it belongs only to the people with the diagnosis. I think a lot of you know this dial. If you know, you know! You know the glory of being tuned all the way in. And, you know the misery of standing in front of the receiver, every station lit, unable to commit to one. You’ve felt both, maybe in the same afternoon.

So I’ll leave the diagnosis to the diagnosticians. What I can tell you is the experience of it, from the inside: the problem was never that I can’t pay attention. It’s that my attention, once it catches a frequency, becomes the whole sky — and the real work of my life has been learning, slowly, which station to choose, and how to forgive myself for the generous static in between.

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Hello dear friends and fellow transcenders,

You may have noticed I’ve really stepped my game up around here lately. I’ve been writing more, digging deeper, and showing up far more consistently than I have in a long time. There’s a story behind that — and an honest update I want to share with you.

Back on March 1st, I wrote you a post straight from the heart explaining why I was pausing all paid subscriptions and making Beautiful Minds completely free. The reason was simple, and a little uncomfortable to admit: I had paid subscribers, I wasn’t writing consistently, and I couldn’t shake the guilt of accepting money for value I didn’t feel I was reliably delivering. I was in the middle of a big life transition — phasing out of academia, dreaming up my magic show, building the self-actualization coaching work — and it just didn’t sit right with me to charge you while my attention was scattered across a dozen things at once.

I meant every word of that post.

You might remember I titled it “Beautiful Minds is Completely Free (For Now).” I left those two words in on purpose. Because I made myself a quiet promise: I wouldn’t ask you for money again until I genuinely felt I was offering something worth it — something consistent, something valuable, something I’d feel proud to put my name on every single week.

I want to be just as honest with you now as I was then: I’ve reached that point.

Here’s what’s changed.

Over the past few months, I’ve found my rhythm again. I would even go so far to say that I reconnected with my soul. I’m now publishing a new essay just about every week — pieces grounded in my own research and twenty-five years of thinking about creativity, self-actualization, neurodiversity, well-being, and the light and dark sides of human nature. Not recycled hot takes, but the ideas I actually care about, written for you.

I’ve also launched a brand-new monthly feature I’m genuinely excited about: the Research Roundup — ten new studies on the mind that made me stop and think, each explained in plain language with an honest caveat about what it can and can’t show. The response to the first one was wonderful, and it told me something: this is the kind of steady, high-value offering I can sustain, because it draws on the thing I love doing most anyway — reading the science and making sense of it for real people.

In other words, I’m finally delivering the way I always wanted to. And I’m confident I can keep it up.

So here’s what I’ve decided:

I’m gently turning paid subscriptions back on — but I want to be crystal clear about what that does and doesn’t mean:

• Almost everything stays completely free. The weekly essays and the monthly Research Roundup will remain free to everyone. You will not lose access to the work you’ve come here for. That matters deeply to me — I never want money to be the reason someone can’t read something that might help them.

• Paid is simply a way to support the work if it has meant something to you and you’re able to. Think of it less like a paywall and more like pulling up a chair a little closer.

• Down the road, I may add a few subscriber-only extras as a thank-you — I'm imagining things like the occasional bonus post, virtual meet-ups, or other ideas I'm still dreaming up. I'm not locking myself into anything yet, and nothing you already love will disappear behind a paywall. But if and when I add these, they'll be a happy bonus for supporters — never the point.

Two simple ways to support, if you feel moved to:

1. Become a paid subscriber. A regular monthly or yearly subscription — the most straightforward way to back this work. (Remember: nothing you love moves behind a paywall. This is support, not a gate.)

2. Support Scott" — name your own amount. Choose whatever feels right to you — anything from $70/year on up. You're supporting not just this newsletter, but the whole humanistic mission: the writing, the research, and the dreams I'm building. Every bit helps me keep doing the work I love.

Let me be clear: However you show up here — free reader, paid subscriber, or supporter — you're a Transcender to me, and I'm grateful you're here.

And the honest heart of it:

I’ll be honest with you about where I am in my life, as well. Truth is, I’m entering a chapter of my life without much (if any) financial stability, and I genuinely don’t know exactly what comes next. But here’s what I do know, with complete certainty: I love this. I love digging into the research, making sense of it, and sharing it with you. I want to keep writing, keep educating, keep helping people glimpse their own potential — and that part of me isn’t uncertain in the slightest. Your support helps me keep doing the very thing I’m most sure about, in a season when not much else is.

I’m still not in this for the money (though, as I joked in March, I do have rent to pay!). I’m in it because I genuinely want to help you connect with your most alive, creative, fully human self — and to do that, I need this work to be sustainable enough that I can keep showing up for it every week.

If you’re a free subscriber and you stay a free subscriber forever, you are every bit as welcome and valued here. Nothing changes for you, and I mean that. There is zero pressure. But if Beautiful Minds has added something to your life and you’re in a position to support it, your subscription helps me keep the lights on and the essays coming — and I’d be deeply grateful.

Thank you, truly, for being here. I still say it all the time and I still mean it: I have the best readers in the world.

With love and gratitude,

Scott

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Welcome this new monthly feature from the Beautiful Minds Newsletter!

I read a lot of psychology research. It is, more or less, my favorite thing to do, and it has been since I was a graduate student staying up way too late with a stack of journal articles when I probably should have been sleeping. Most of what crosses my desk never makes it into an essay, a podcast, or a lecture, which always feels like a small loss. So I am starting something new.

Once a month, I am going to bring you a roundup of the studies that genuinely made me stop and think. Not the splashy headlines, and not the stuff that confirms what we already believe, but the research that sits at the intersection of the things I have spent twenty-five years caring about: human potential, creativity, the inner life, well-being, personality, neurodiversity, and the light and the dark sides of who we are.

A quick word on how I am doing this. I am going to give you each finding straight, in plain language, and I am always going to tell you what the study can and cannot actually show. A lot of this work is early, correlational, or small, and I would rather you trust me than oversell you. So you will see an honest caveat on every single one. Let’s get into it!

1. A brisk walk can sharpen your creativity about an hour later.

Okay, this one is just fun. Researchers followed 157 people through their ordinary days, sensors on, no laboratory, and randomly pinged them to do quick creativity tasks. What they found is that a brisk ten-to-twenty-five-minute walk reliably predicted sharper verbal creativity about an hour later. Not during the walk, and not right after it. An hour later, once the body had settled and the mind was free to roam. Two details I loved: gentle strolling did not help, and was actually tied to lower scores, and neither did all-out intense exercise. It was the moderate effort, plus the delay, that lit up original thinking, and they replicated the effect in a second group to be sure. This is something I keep coming back to in my own work on creativity. The best ideas rarely come from gripping harder. They come from moving your body and letting your mind wander its way to the answer. (One honest caveat: it is exploratory and observational, so think correlation, not proof.)

Source: “The Exercise of Creativity,” Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology (2026).

2. A 20-minute writing exercise can help people reframe depression as a kind of strength.

This study genuinely moved me. Researchers ran three experiments with people who had lived through clinical depression. Half of them did a short, twenty-minute writing exercise in which they read accounts of others who framed surviving depression as a feat of strength, and then wrote about the perseverance and the emotional skill their own struggle had required. The other half just read standard facts about depression. The reframing group walked away believing more in their own capacity, and it showed up in behavior, not only in mood. Two weeks later they had made about 64 percent progress on a personal goal, compared with 43 percent for the control group. That is nearly fifty percent more movement, from twenty minutes of seeing your pain as evidence of your resilience. This sits close to how I think about honest love. The suffering is real, and you can still grow through it. (Caveat: progress was self-reported and tracked for only two weeks, so we do not yet know how long the effect lasts.)

Source: “Depression-Reframing,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2026).

3. People who forgive tend to live a little better, across 23 countries.

The scale of this one alone is wild. Researchers tracked nearly 208,000 people across twenty-three countries, measuring how readily a person forgives others, and then checked back about a year later on fifty-six different markers of well-being. People with a steady habit of forgiving tended to report modestly better lives a year on, especially when it came to higher optimism, a clearer sense of purpose, and more satisfying relationships. The lift showed up in character too, in things like gratitude and an orientation toward doing good. Here is the wrinkle I loved, though. The pattern was not uniform. In the United States, the UK, and Japan, forgiveness tracked with well-being almost across the board, but in places under heavy economic or political strain, the link mostly vanished. Context matters, and I appreciate a study that says so. (Honest caveat: this is observational, with two snapshots a year apart, and the effects are small. Think correlation, not proof.)

Source: “Longitudinal associations of dispositional forgivingness with multidimensional well-being,” npj Mental Health Research (2026).

4. Supportive relationships may quietly shape who you become.

This one lands right in my wheelhouse. Researchers followed about 1,400 university students over eight months, looking closely at the people in their lives who backed their goals. Specifically, they measured autonomy support, which is the kind of support that respects your perspective, offers you real choices, and explains the reasons why, instead of leaning on guilt, pressure, or strings attached. Students who felt more of that kind of support nudged upward over the year in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, and they reported better well-being. The friends and family they nominated mostly corroborated it. What strikes me here is the mechanism. Being supported in a way that honors your volition seems to help you become more fully yourself. That is self-actualization in slow motion. (One caveat: it is longitudinal but not an experiment, and the changes were small, so we cannot call it cause and effect.)

Source: “Autonomy Support, Personality Traits, and Subjective Well-Being,” Journal of Personality (2026).

5. Brain growth patterns may predict whether childhood ADHD fades.

This one is fascinating, and I think it will matter a lot to the neurodiversity crowd. Researchers tracked the brains of more than 7,000 kids, scanning them around age ten and then following their ADHD symptoms across adolescence. The big finding is that the different paths actually showed up physically, in how the brain matured. Kids whose symptoms faded tended to show faster growth of the left hippocampus, a region tied to memory and emotion, while those whose symptoms persisted or worsened showed different patterns in the cortex. A computer model trained on the early scans could even forecast symptoms years later, and the hippocampus result held up in separate samples. One detail is worth sitting with: Starting medication early did not predict who landed in the fading group. This is helpful for managing symptoms, sure, but maybe not for reshaping the long arc. (Caveat: this is observational, so the brain changes correlate with the paths, they do not prove they cause them.)

Source: “Cortical thinning and hippocampal expansion as brain signatures of ADHD symptom trajectories,” Nature Mental Health (2026).

6. The traits that predict who lives generatively in later life are more active than you might guess.

Here is a study I keep thinking about. It is about generativity, which is the drive to give to and to guide the next generation, in older adults. A researcher fed data from about 2,800 American adults, ranging in age from 39 to 93, into a machine learning model, and then asked which traits best predict who actually lives generatively. The strongest predictors were not income, or health, or even emotional stability. They were social potency, meaning assertiveness and leadership, along with openness to experience, feeling socially connected, personal growth, and a real drive to achieve. Purpose and self-acceptance mattered too. I love what this implies. Generativity is not a quiet settling-down at the end of life. It is active, curious, and a little bit risky. It reads less like comfort and more like ongoing self-actualization, aimed outward toward the world. (Caveat: this is cross-sectional, a single snapshot in time, so we cannot say these traits cause generativity or grow out of it.)

Source: “Key Predictors of Generativity in Adulthood: A Machine Learning Analysis,” The Journals of Gerontology: Series B (2025).

7. Machiavellianism and psychopathy look identical on personality tests, but not in daily life.

This new study finally pins down something that has puzzled personality researchers for years. On paper, Machiavellianism and psychopathy look like the same trait, since scoring high on one almost guarantees scoring high on the other. So researchers ran a 30-day diary study with 317 people, pinging them every evening to report how they had actually behaved that day. Across the full month, the two traits overlapped by more than seventy percent, exactly as the tests predict. But day to day, that overlap collapsed to about sixteen percent. A person could have a coldly strategic, Machiavellian day without having an impulsive, psychopathic one at all. There was even a direction to it: a strategic, manipulative day tended to be followed by a more impulsive, reckless one, but not the reverse, as if Machiavellian restraint eventually gives way to psychopathic impulse once the coast feels clear. I find this kind of work clarifying. The dark traits are not one undifferentiated blob; they each have their own distinct rhythm. (Caveat: the sample was mostly young, educated women in Poland, and it relied on a single evening check-in, so the daily picture is real but partial.)

Source: “The (in)distinguishability of Machiavellianism and psychopathy? Discovering the daily dynamics,” Journal of Research in Personality.

8. Live music syncs your brain more tightly than a recording does.

This one explains something I have always felt but could never quite name. Researchers brought people into a real concert hall and had them listen to solo Bach violin, half of it performed live by a professional and half played from a high-quality recording through a speaker in the very same spot. Same volume, eyes closed, so the sound itself was essentially identical. While people listened, EEG caps tracked their brain waves. For the fast pieces, the live performance locked the brain’s rhythms onto the music about 31 percent more tightly than the recording did, and the stronger that syncing, the more pleasure and engagement people reported. This is part of why I keep pointing people toward awe. Live music does something to us that a perfect file on your phone does not quite reach. (Caveat: this was a small sample of 21 musically trained listeners, alone with their eyes closed, so it is an early, controlled peek rather than the full concert experience.)

Source: “From Lab to Concert Hall,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2026).

9. Brainwaves reveal two different roots of psychopathy.

This one is dark, but it is fascinating. Researchers had 115 everyday adults, with no criminal records and no diagnoses, look at disturbing and pleasant images while a smartphone tracked their startle blinks and EEG caps read their brainwaves. Here is the twist. Psychopathy is not one thing, and its two big traits showed up as completely different brain signatures. Boldness looked like an attention bottleneck, where those folks locked so hard onto whatever was in front of them that they barely registered a sudden threat. Meanness looked like a genuine emotional flatline, a blunted physical reaction to other people’s distress. In other words, two people can land in psychopathic territory by totally different routes, one over-focused and one under-feeling. Honestly, I find this hopeful. If the mechanisms differ, then the interventions can differ too, broadening attention for the one and building emotional pathways for the other. (Caveat: this was a small community sample, it is correlational, and these were everyday traits, not clinical psychopaths.)

Source: “Emotional and attentional anomalies underlying triarchic psychopathic traits,” BMC Psychology (2026).

10. Spoiling kids predicts dark traits, while genuinely praising them does not.

Ooof, this one might ruffle some feathers. Researchers asked 720 adults how their parents had treated them growing up, and then measured their dark-personality traits. The pattern is striking. Recalled parental indulgence, the overvaluing, no-limits, give-them-whatever-they-want style, predicted higher narcissistic antagonism, psychopathic meanness, and impulsivity. But parental praise, the kind that affirms a kid’s real worth, predicted the opposite, namely healthy confidence and social agency rather than entitlement. The paper’s title says it all: “Praise the light, indulge the dark.” Affirming a child and spoiling a child are not the same move, and they may grow very different adults. This lands close to my own work on the Light Triad. The takeaway is not that praise is bad. It is that warm, genuine affirmation builds the bright traits, while indulgence without limits feeds the dark ones. (Big caveat: it is correlational and based on adults’ memories of childhood, so read it as a meaningful pattern, not proof, and the high scorers here were not actual psychopaths.)

Source: “Praise the light, indulge the dark: Parenting strategies and dark personality traits,” Current Psychology (2026).

So that’s the first one. Ten studies that earned a little real estate in my brain this month, from the creative payoff of a brisk walk to the two very different roads into psychopathy.

What did you think? Was this helpful? I would genuinely love to know which of these struck you. Drop a comment and tell me the one that surprised you, or the one you are skeptical of, because the skepticism is half the fun. I will be back next month with ten more. Until then, keep paying attention to the things that make you wonder.

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Somewhere in the last decade, flow got hijacked.

The state Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent thirty years studying — the absorbed, time-stretched, self-forgetting condition that shows up when a person is fully inside what they’re doing — became a productivity hack. Silicon Valley founders started microdosing into it. Wall Street traders started zapping their brains for it. Executive coaches started selling courses on how to “trigger” it on demand. The keyword that grew up around it was optimal performance.

It’s worth pausing on what got dropped in the renaming. Csikszentmihalyi’s foundational book is called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Not optimal performance. Optimal experience. The word that named the phenomenon for the rest of psychology to study was the one the productivity world quietly removed.

I’m not introducing a new argument here. I’m recovering an older one.

What Maslow already knew

Before Csikszentmihalyi named flow, Abraham Maslow had already mapped the same territory under a different name. In a 1956 address to the American Psychological Association — a talk titled “Cognition of Being in the Peak Experiences”— Maslow described what he had been collecting from self-actualizing people for years: brief, transformative moments he called peak experiences, or, more philosophically, transient states of absolute Being (I love this phrase so much).

I wrote about this in Transcend in 2020. Maslow’s list of seventeen characteristics of the peak experience reads, today, like an almost line-for-line preview of what the field would later call flow:

• Complete absorption

• Richer perception

• Disorientation in physical time and space

• Intrinsic reward of the experience

• Ego transcendence

• Dichotomy transcendence

• Momentary loss of fears, anxieties, and inhibitions

• Heightened aestheticism, wonder, awe, and surrender

• Fusion of the person and the world

That last one is really the heart of it. The peak experience, for Maslow, was a moment of fusion — the person and the world briefly stop being two different things. Csikszentmihalyi later operationalized something very close to this when he defined flow as the state in which “action and awareness merge.” Different vocabulary; the same underlying experience.

There’s a lineage here that the productivity culture has forgotten. Flow is not a 1990s discovery in performance optimization. Flow is the empirical operationalization of a much older humanistic psychology tradition that named these moments not as hacks but as the farthest reaches of human nature— Maslow’s exact phrase — and the spine of his posthumous book collecting his late-career thinking on this territory. He wasn’t pitching a leadership seminar. He was naming what makes a life worth living.

What flow actually is

Here’s a clean working definition of flow, drawn from the original research: flow is the state of being so fully absorbed in an activity that you lose self-consciousness, time distorts, action and awareness merge, and the activity becomes its own reward. The structural conditions are well-described — a clear goal, immediate feedback, and a challenge that matches your current skill level so closely that it neither overwhelms you nor bores you. Fun fact: Csikszentmihalyi originally wanted to call his book “The Autotelic Personality”. The word autotelic refers to any activity, behavior, or personality trait that is done for its own inherent joy, not in order to achieve something external or for future benefit. As you might imagine, publishers weren’t so keen on calling the book “The Autotelic Personality”, but I give you this little bit of history so you get a sense of where Mihaly’s head was at when he wrote his first book on the topic.

Neurologically, something striking happens during flow: the prefrontal cortex quiets down. Charles Limb’s MRI work on improvising jazz musicians showed reduced activity in the brain region responsible for self-monitoring — the inner critic. Researchers call this transient hypofrontality. You can think of it as a temporary vacation from the part of your mind that’s keeping score.

This is where it gets interesting for the question I want to ask. The vacation from self-monitoring is precisely what makes flow feel so good as an experience. It’s also, separately, what makes flow useful as a performance state. The same neural condition is doing two different jobs at once — and the self-development world has been buying the second one without admitting it’s also paying for the first.

Who actually enters flow

Back in 2011, in an article for Psychology Today, I covered a study by Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues in Sweden that asked who actually reports flow most often in their daily lives. The answer was people who score lower in neuroticism, higher in conscientiousness — and there was no relationship to IQ. In other words, flow proneness isn’t a function of how smart you are; it’s a function of how peacefully and single-mindedly you can attend to what’s right in front of you.

The researchers’ summary was telling: “Flow may thus be a state of subjectively effortless attention that occurs during skilled performance and has different underlying mechanisms from attention during mental effort.” Effortless attention. Not maximal cognitive output. The two states have different neural signatures and probably different developmental routes. The IQ test and the flow state are not the same animal.

That finding doesn’t disqualify flow as a performance enhancer. It does suggest, though, that what we’re enhancing when we enter flow may not be the thing the productivity culture is selling us. We’re not pushing harder. We’re attending more peacefully.

Where the optimization frame goes wrong

Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal’s fascinating book Stealing Fire documents the lengths the high-performance world has gone to in order to manufacture flow on demand: military officers on month-long meditation retreats, traders with electrodes on their scalps, lawyers stacking off-prescription pharmaceuticals, engineers microdosing with psychedelics. The book describes this as the democratization of altered states. Another way to describe it is people working very hard to feel less effortful.

There’s an irony here that the field hasn’t fully sat with: Flow is the experience of not trying to optimize yourself. The conditions that produce it — absorption, self-forgetfulness, intrinsic enjoyment, attention without effort — are the structural opposites of the conditions that produce the chase for it. You don’t get to flow by squeezing. You get to flow by getting interested.

I said something to Cadillac Magazine in 2018 that I still believe more than ever: “Sometimes, for optimal productivity and creativity, you need all your wits about you as well. You can’t get yourself into a state that reduces your rational facilities and expect that to be a cure-all.” The reduced-self-monitoring state is wonderful for certain tasks and a liability for others. Your air traffic controller is not someone you want in transient hypofrontality. Neither is your surgeon mid-incision. Flow is a condition, not a moral category. Treating it as a universal performance solvent flattens it into something it isn’t.

Flow as a way of being in the world

Here is the part the optimization frame structurally cannot say.

When I’m listening to music with friends, or deep into writing something I care about, or watching a beautiful sunset, or genuinely lost in conversation with someone whose mind I find beautiful, the flow state is doing none of the things the performance literature talks about. It isn’t making me more productive. It isn’t optimizing my output. It is making my life feel like a life. It is the thing that, looking back, I will remember as having been worth it.

This is what Maslow was pointing at when he wrote about peak experiences. It is what humanistic psychology has been quietly maintaining for seventy years while the rest of the field was busy measuring things. In his 1956 APA address speech (which he never got to deliver in person due to health concerns), he wrote that peak experiences are the moments in which a person is at their “happiest and most thrilling,” and also at their “healthiest.” Not most productive. Healthiest.

The deepest moments of a human life are not always the most efficient ones. They are the most fully lived ones — the moments in which the person and the activity, the person and the world, briefly stop being two different things. Maslow called this fusion. Csikszentmihalyi called it flow. The self-development world has been selling it as output. Two of those framings are about the experience itself. One of them is about what you can extract from it.

You can enter flow while gardening. While dancing in your kitchen. While listening so closely to a piece of music that you forget you’re listening. While laughing with your family about something stupid that happened. None of these things will appear on a performance review. All of them will appear, if you’re lucky, in the highlight reel of your actual life.

A reframe, not a correction

I’m not arguing that flow’s performance benefits aren’t real. They are. The research is solid. Idea generation accelerates, motivation rises, creative integration improves. Use it for those things if you want. They’re a legitimate harvest.

What I’m arguing is that flow is the rare condition where the means and the ends collapse into each other. The performance is a side effect of the experience. The experience is the actual thing — and was the original thing, before the productivity industry got hold of it.

If you find yourself trying to bio-hack your way into flow so you can ship more code or close more deals, you’ve already missed it. The state you’re chasing is the state of not chasing. Try a slower entry: notice which activities, in your real life, make time disappear and leave you feeling more like yourself. Do more of those. Let the performance benefits arrive as a byproduct, the way they were always meant to.

Csikszentmihalyi titled his book Optimal Experience. He could have titled it Optimal Performance. He didn’t. The choice was deliberate, and it has aged better than most of what came after it. Maslow, before him, called these states the healthiest moments of a human life — and stationed them at the very top of his hierarchy of needs as the thing the whole climb was for.

We can use flow to get more done. We can also use flow to get more out of being alive.

The second one was the original promise. It is still the better one.

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I have a confession.

If someone asks me for my time— a favor, a phone call, a read of their manuscript, a coffee, an introduction to someone in my network— and I say no — and I then go and read a novel, take a long walk, play cello, learn a new magic trick, let an afternoon stay mine, eat ice cream, or watch Netflix (especially if I’m eating ice cream while watching Netflix)— I feel guilty. But why?

I’ve never been able to explain this to myself. The enjoyment is the trigger. The pleasure itself becomes the evidence of the crime. As if I could have gotten away with saying no, right up until the moment I was caught having a good time instead.

I think about this more than I’d like to admit. And underneath the guilt, when I actually look, there are three questions I’ve never fully answered.

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The first. If I know I have the skill to help someone — if I’m genuinely capable of doing the thing they’re asking — how do I look myself in the mirror after saying no? Incompetence is an excuse. Capability isn’t. To have the gift and withhold it feels like a small betrayal of the person asking, and maybe of the gift itself.

The second. Isn’t the whole point of life to be useful? We praise it in eulogies. He was always there for people. She never turned anyone away. Nobody gets remembered for the afternoons they kept for themselves. If usefulness is the measure of a life well lived, then every hour I treasure is an hour I’m failing the only test that counts.

The third. And if I flip it — if I say the point of life is to enjoy it, to treasure my own hours, to protect my own experience of being alive — isn’t that just selfishness with better marketing? Isn’t “self-care” the most flattering word we’ve ever invented for putting ourselves first?

Am I the only one who thinks so much about this stuff?

I’m not asking these questions rhetorically. I’ve sat with them for years, and for years I assumed one of them had to win. Either I’m here to serve, or I’m here to savor.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that the guilt was pointing at a hidden assumption, not a real debt. Look again at the question I keep asking myself: How much of my time am I allowed to treasure?

Allowed. By whom?

There’s an auditor buried in that sentence. Someone keeping the books, deciding how many units of enjoyment I’ve earned against how many units of service I’ve banked, ready to flag the moment I overdraw. The guilt is just that auditor clearing its throat. And for most of my life I’ve negotiated with it — pleading my case, justifying my walk, earning my novel by being useful enough beforehand to deserve it.

So at some point I went looking for the auditor. I wanted to find the authority that grants permission to enjoy a life, so I could finally ask it directly how much I was cleared for.

You know what I found?

There’s no one there.

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There never was. No cosmic ledger, no committee, no figure at the desk tallying my hours.

The permission I’d been waiting to receive was never going to be granted, because there was no one outside me with the standing to grant it. I was the one holding the pen the whole time. I’d been writing myself overdraft notices and then feeling terrible about a debt I’d invented.

That’s the first move, and it sounds almost too simple until you try to live it: the question “what am I allowed to enjoy” dissolves the moment you realize you’re the only one who was ever keeping score.

But I can feel the obvious objection, because I raise it against myself constantly. Doesn’t this just hand me a permission slip to be selfish? Congratulations, the auditor was imaginary, now go ignore everyone who needs you. If no one’s keeping the books, what stops me from spending every hour on myself and calling it enlightenment?

This is where the second move matters, and it’s the one I actually believe in.

A life you genuinely treasure is not the opposite of a life of service. It’s the precondition for the kind of service that doesn’t quietly destroy you. The person who never keeps a single hour for himself — who says yes to every request because no felt unsurvivable — isn’t being generous.

When you give from an empty place, the giving curdles. It turns into resentment dressed up as virtue — and the people you're helping can feel it. They sense the quiet tally of what they now owe you, even when you swear you're not keeping one.

This is what I’ve come to call, in my own work, honest love — and it applies to how we treat ourselves first. The love part says your own experience of being alive is real, and just as valid as anyone else’s. The honest part says you can’t pour from a self you’ve spent into nothing. Both are true at once. That’s not a loophole. That’s the actual structure of a sustainable human being.

So the three questions I opened with were rigged from the start, because each of them assumed a tradeoff that doesn’t exist.

Let’s try again.

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How can I look myself in the mirror if I say no when I’m able to help? You can, because being able to do something has never been the same as being obligated to do it. Capability is not a summons. If it were, the most capable people would owe the most and rest the least, which is exactly the trap so many of them are caught in.

Isn’t the point of life to be useful? Usefulness is a beautiful part of a life. It is not the whole of one, and the moment you make it the whole, you stop being useful in the way that actually matters — present, generous, unbegrudging — and start being merely available.

Isn’t enjoying life selfish? Only if you think your enjoyment comes at someone else’s expense. Treasuring your own time crosses into the toxic kind of selfishness when it actually costs someone something that was theirs — when you break a promise that mattered, walk away from a responsibility that was genuinely yours, or get what you want by using someone. Saying no to a stranger's request so you can rest doesn't do that. Skipping your own kid's recital after you promised you’d be there because you couldn't be bothered does. The difference isn't how good it feels to you. It's whether someone who was actually counting on you pays the price.

My treasuring an afternoon takes nothing away from you. The man who has tasted his own life is, it turns out, far more capable of helping you taste yours. Enjoyment and contribution were never on opposite sides of the ledger. They were never on a ledger at all.

In fact, this question is what sent me to study this in the first place. I built a Healthy Selfishness Scale (you can take the test here). I define healthy selfishness as “having a healthy respect for your own health, growth, happiness, joy, and freedom.” The items on the scale include:

• “I have a healthy form of selfishness (e.g., meditation, eating healthy, exercising, etc.) that doesn’t hurt others, but brings me greater happiness.”

• “Even though I give a lot to others, I know when to recharge.”

• “I give myself permission to enjoy myself, even if it doesn’t necessarily help others.”

• “I take good care of myself.”

The people who scored high on my healthy selfishness scale weren't more self-centered. In fact, paradoxically, there was a negative correlation with narcissism! What’s more, they reported higher levels of well-being, lower levels of depression, and more genuine reasons for helping others — not fewer.

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I sometimes still feel the guilt. I want to be useful; I want to help everyone. I’d be lying if I said the auditor went silent the day I discovered it was imaginary. Old voices don’t leave because you’ve out-argued them; they leave slowly, as you keep declining to obey them.

Now, when the guilt arrives in the middle of the walk, I can name it. That’s not a debt. That’s a habit. And I keep walking. I’ve become better at distinguishing between wanting to help someone from a place of abundance vs. needing to help someone because of a compulsion. There is a difference. A big difference. I’m much better now at feeling the difference in my body and trusting myself.

The answer to “how much of my time am I allowed to treasure” was never going to come from outside me, because there was never anyone out there to ask. The answer is: all of it. Every hour you’re alive is yours to treasure. One of the most profound realizations you could make in life is just how short life is, how fast it all goes, and just how much your time is actually worth.

And the finitude cuts both ways: enjoying your life doesn't take away from how much you can give to others — it’s what makes giving possible in the first place. Filling up your own cup gives you a stronger container to give to others.

You were always allowed to treasure your life. You were just waiting for someone else to say so.

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Hold on a sec while I turn on my red light. OK, ready.

So, I’ve noticed that there’s a particular kind of exhausted I keep seeing in high performers. They’ve optimized their morning routine, their inbox, their attention spans, their gut bacteria, their sleep architecture, their cold plunges, their ice baths, even their freaking saccades (see core saccade drills)— and somewhere along the way, they seem to have lost the ability to tell you what any of it is for.

Look: I am not throwing rocks from outside the house. I stay up to date on the latest biohacking innovations. I track my steps. I track my macros. I track my reading. On bad weeks, I have been known to track my own emotional state in a Notion database, which I will admit is a choice. So when I tell you that optimization has no soul, I am throwing rocks from inside the house, where I live, with the rocks.

But here is what I have come to believe after twenty-five years of studying human potential: optimization is a blunt tool. Don’t get me wrong: It is a good tool for some things but it is the wrong tool for most of the things that make life most soulful. And we are in the middle of a generational confusion about which is which.

The thing the dashboard can’t see

When I was teaching at Penn, students would come to my office hours with spreadsheets where they were tracking their sleep, their caffeine intake, their exam scores, their relationship satisfaction (rated 1–10 weekly), their gratitude practice (binary, yes/no), and their perceived sense of meaning (also 1–10, also weekly). They wanted to know which inputs were predicting the meaning score.

I would ask how the meaning score was doing. More than one of them told me it had been around a 4 for months. I would ask what a 4 felt like. They would pause for a long time. And one of them, eventually, said very quietly: “I don’t actually know what an 8 would feel like. I think I forgot.”

That is the optimization trap in one sentence. You can keep all the dashboards. The dashboards will be perfectly honest with you. They will tell you that your sleep is good, that your gratitude practice is consistent, that your relationship satisfaction is stable at a 7. But they will not tell you that you have forgotten what an 8 feels like, because forgetting what an 8 feels like is the kind of thing dashboards are constitutionally unable to notice.

This is not because the people who build dashboards are bad. It is because the soul is the part of you that knows the difference between a 4 and an 8, and the dashboard is the part of you that records that you said it was a 4. These are different organs. They do different work. We have spent a decade pretending they are the same organ, and the soul has been losing the argument.

Maslow already told us this

The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who gave us the hierarchy of needs that has been mangled by every management consultant in America for sixty years, was very clear on this point. The hierarchy is not a video game. You do not unlock self-actualization the way you unlock the next level of Candy Crush. The needs work in tandem, across your whole life. You return to them. You move between them. You do not “complete” love and belonging and graduate to esteem. I think a sailboat is a much more apt metaphor for the journey of self-actualization than a clunky pyramid.

But I digress. What Maslow understood — and what I tried to update for the twenty-first century in Transcend — is that the destination is not a metric. The destination is becoming more fully who you already are. You can’t measure that with a Fitbit. You can’t biohack it. You can’t A/B test it. You can recognize it when it shows up, and you can recognize when it has gone missing, and that recognition is itself a kind of intelligence that the optimization mindset systematically disables.

And here is the punchline Maslow added at the end of his life, which most popular psychology dropped on the floor: self-actualization is not the end of the journey because self-transcendence really matters. The deeper move is outward. Past the self. Into service, awe, connection, beauty, the experience of being smaller than something. None of which has a metric. None of which can be optimized. All of which is exactly what the people who can’t tell you what their optimized life is for are starving for.

Yes, and

Again, let me be crystal clear that I am not anti-optimization. That would be cheap and it would not be true. I am writing this on a Mac that I keep optimized. I sleep better on weeks when I track my sleep. There are real, useful, life-improving optimizations available to anyone with a smartphone and the willingness to use it.

But there’s an empowerment move from Rise Above that I keep coming back to, and it applies here. The empowerment mindset is structurally a yes/and. Yes, I have suffered, and I can still handle hard things. Yes, the world has been unfair to me, and I am still responsible for what I do next. The yes/and is the move that lets you take both halves of the truth at the same time without collapsing one into the other.

So: yes, optimize the parts of your life that respond to optimization. And no, don’t believe for a second that those are the parts of your life that make you a person.

Yes, track your macros. And no, your relationship with your body is not a system to debug.

Yes, batch your emails. And no, the conversations that change your life are not in your inbox.

Yes, A/B test your habits. And no, the call you’ve been avoiding for three months is not waiting on better data.

The yes/and is the antidote to both the productivity gospel (”optimize everything”) and the romantic anti-productivity backlash (”optimization is the enemy”). They are both wrong because they are both monistic. The honest answer is two-handed: a hand for the system, a hand for the soul.

What the substitute teacher saw

There is a story I tell in Rise Above that I will tell here too, because it is the cleanest example I know of what the dashboard cannot see.

I was placed in special ed in third grade for an auditory processing disability. Then, for reasons nobody ever bothered to explain to me, everyone just sort of forgot to take me out. I sat in that classroom for years longer than any test result said I should have. A substitute teacher walked in one day, looked at me — really looked — and said: I see you. I can sense your frustration. What are you still doing here?

That was not an optimization. That was a person. There was no dashboard that would have flagged me for removal from special ed. There was no metric that would have caught what she caught. There was a human being in a room with another human being, and one of them was awake enough to see the other.

The trajectory of my life rotated on its axis because of that moment. Cello. Choir. Latin scholar. Penn. Columbia. The Psychology Podcast. Transcend. Rise Above. The book I hope to write next. None of which would have happened without a person walking into a room and looking, really looking, at a kid the system had quietly written off.

I think about her a lot when I think about optimization. There is no version of an optimized education system that catches that moment, because the optimization is measuring the wrong thing. The optimization is measuring throughput. The substitute teacher was measuring potential, and measurement too often gets a person’s potential wrong. This is why I call it seeing with your soul.

The world is full of people who need to be seen this way. The dashboard cannot see them. You can. And being able to is a kind of literacy the optimization culture is quietly training us out of.

What I want you to do with this

Pick one thing this week that you have been treating as a system, and let it be a relationship instead. Your body. Your inbox, if it contains people you actually care about. Your morning. Your kid. The friend you’ve been meaning to text for three months. Your Mom who keeps calling you. The relationship with yourself.

You do not have to stop optimizing the rest of it. Track your sleep. Batch your tasks. Run your A/B tests. That stuff is fine. It is more than fine — for the things it actually works on, it is genuinely useful.

Just remember which hand you are using.

The system hand keeps the lights on. The soul hand decides whether the lights are pointing at anything worth looking at. You need both. You especially need the second one, because the second one is the part of you the metric mindset cannot count, cannot reward, cannot even see — and which, in a culture that increasingly believes only what it can count, is the part of you most quietly at risk of going missing.

Optimization has no soul. It was never supposed to. That was never its job.

That job is yours.

— — —

If this resonated, share it with one person who has been optimizing themselves into a tizzy. And tell me in the comments: what is one thing this week you’re going to stop optimizing, and start seeing with your soul?

Friends—

I wanted to let you know about this internship opportunity hosted by Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles this Summer, June 15-July 2. I am teaming up with the astrophysicist Dr. Sarah Rugheimer to teach critical thinking and the search for truth in L.A. for high school students. Spaces are limited and will fill up fast! If you know of any high school students in the L.A. area who may be interested in this internship, have them register an application asap: hwleadership.campbrainregistration.com/Landing.

(Once you signup at HW, click on “Registration for Leadership and Entrepreneurship 2026” and then click on “3 Week Internship: The Search for Truth in the Digital World” to register.)

See the attached flyer for more info, and feel free to pass this along to any other friends who might be interested!

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My friend and longtime collaborator Charlene Li has just published a really important book called "Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success (co-authored with Dr. Katia Walsh), and I couldn’t resist asking her a few questions. I think you’ll find her answers as energizing as I did. This is a very important topic for our rapidly changing times!

SBK: Your book makes a counterintuitive claim: That organizations don’t need an AI strategy; they need AI to serve their existing strategy. But if AI is as transformative as everyone says, doesn’t it reshape strategy itself? How do you hold those two ideas together?

CL: It’s a real tension, and I hold it by thinking about what never changes. The mission of an organization — why it exists, who it serves, what value it creates — that doesn’t change because of AI. What AI changes is your ability to execute on that mission faster, at greater scale, with more precision than was ever possible before. So when I talk to CEOs, I’m not asking them to rethink their purpose. I’m asking them to look at their top strategic priorities and ask: where is AI the accelerant? That reframing alone changes everything about how they approach implementation.

SBK: I’m fascinated by your concept of the “superhuman” — people who combine AI’s cognitive infrastructure with what’s irreducibly human: empathy, intuition, judgment, wisdom. Maslow would have recognized this. But developing those capacities takes time and inner work. How do you reconcile that with your argument that speed is the new competitive moat?

CL: What I’ve seen in the research — and in practice with leaders across industries — is that speed and wisdom aren’t actually in conflict. They’re in conflict only when leaders treat AI as a decision-maker rather than a thinking partner. The leaders who move fastest with the best outcomes are the ones who use AI to compress information-gathering so that their human judgment — which is irreplaceable — can operate on better inputs, faster. Jeff Maggioncalda at Coursera called this “cognitive bootstrapping”: he’d form his own perspective first, then use AI to pressure-test it, surface blind spots, and accelerate the vetting process. The judgment is still entirely his. The speed comes from how he gets there.

SBK: The human capacity for self-reflection — noticing patterns in yourself, choosing to change based on what matters to you — is something you can’t automate. And yet the AI conversation often centers on productivity and efficiency. Is there a deeper argument in your book about what’s at stake for human identity when we hand over cognitive tasks?

CL: Yes, and it’s the part I care most deeply about. There’s a real risk that organizations use AI purely to drive efficiency — which is fine as far as it goes — and miss the more profound opportunity: AI offloading routine cognitive work could free humans to be more human. More empathetic. More reflective. More creative. More purposeful. I call the people who realize that potential “superhumans” — not because they’re superhuman in some sci-fi sense, but because they’re finally able to express the full depth of what makes us human, which we couldn’t access when rote tasks cognitively depleted us. But it doesn’t happen automatically. Leaders have to choose to design for it. That’s the leadership question that’s most underasked right now.

SBK: What’s the one question you wish every leader reading your book would sit with before they start implementing?

CL: “What are you trying to accomplish — and for whom?” Not “what can AI do?” Not “what are our competitors doing?” Just: what is this organization actually here to do, and who does winning serve? Leaders who start there end up making much better decisions about where to deploy AI and how to measure success. The ones who start with the technology almost always get lost.

Charlene Li and Dr. Katia Walsh’s Winning with AI: The 90-Day Blueprint for Success is available now at winningwithaibook.com.

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Eric Zimmer is the host of one of my favorite podcasts “The One You Feed”. He is such a wise guy and a friend. Which is why I was excited to see his new book “How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes For a More Meaningful Life”. I appreciate that he took the time to do a little interview with me!

SBK: How do you honor the real reasons you are the way you are without letting those reasons become your identity?

EZ: I think this is one of the central challenges to being human. We all have explanations for why we are the way we are. It could be temperament, family, trauma, culture, biology. Each of us gives those different factors different weights, but most of us know we are a combination of those things.

But an explanation is not destiny. The real danger is when those explanations turn into self-concepts. I’m an anxious person. I’m broken. I’m a hopeless addict.

One of the key ideas that runs through my book is that change happens when self-understanding and self-responsibility meet.

It’s not one or the other. We usually need both. Understanding drives compassion, which is important in our ability to change. Responsibility drives action, which is equally critical.

These questions are often hard to discern alone, which is why having trusted people in our lives that we can talk to is so valuable.

SBK: A lot of people have insight into why they struggle, but still don’t change. Why doesn’t understanding ourselves automatically lead to transformation?

EZ: Insight is important, but it is vastly overrated.

If you were watching the movie of my life, the pivotal scene would show a dingy yellow room in what was once a tuberculosis hospital in Columbus, Ohio, in the winter of 1994. A counselor would be talking to a young man slumped in exhaustion, looking equal parts frightened and lost. Me.

I weighed one hundred pounds, my skin jaundiced from hepatitis C, with the shadow of fifty years in prison hanging over me. I was a homeless heroin addict at the end of his road, and even I could smell the despair on my own skin.

“Eric, you need to go to long-term treatment,” the counselor told me.

“No, thank you,” I said, summoning what little dignity I supposed I had left. Then I dragged myself up and slouched down the hall like the wounded animal I was.

Back in my room, I had what they call a “moment of clarity”—that moment of insight—as I looked out my clouded window at cold gray skies. It was a few days before Christmas. I realized with sudden, terrifying lucidity that my current path led only to death or prison. Dope sick, shaky, and afraid, I turned, walked back down the hall to that yellow room, and opened my mouth before I could change my mind. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll go to your treatment.”

That would be the high-drama, dark-night-of-the-soul turning point in the movie of my life. And it was an important moment—but it’s also anything but the full story. In getting from that wounded place to where I am today, that scene is not as monumental as it may seem. Deciding to enter treatment would be nothing without the countless tiny decisions I made day after day, year after year afterward: deciding not to take the route past that bar, calling my sponsor instead of my dealer, showing up to a meeting when every cell in my body wanted to stay home and hide.

When we think about life-changing events, we tend to think in the singular. The epiphany. The miracle. The watershed choice that will put us on a new trajectory for good.

But that’s not how real change happens for most people, most of the time. It happens little bit by little bit, with a thousand chances to do A or B, each choice a thread woven into the fabric of who we become.

The story of me getting sober in the movie would be a classic recovery montage—gritted teeth, a couple of shaky smiles at a support meeting, a swelling soundtrack as I turn down a dealer’s offer. A few quick scenes and suddenly I’d be transformed.

But the reality can’t be abbreviated, because it is what happened in the long stretches of time the camera would never capture that turns out to make all the difference.

We need insight, but we also need the slow, steady accumulation of actions over time to make the insight into reality.

SBK: What’s the difference between self-awareness and self-preoccupation—and how do we know when we’ve crossed that line?

EZ: This is really tricky, and it’s a common trap. We do need self-awareness, and often that takes priority for a while.

There is a question that I use often in this, and it’s asking myself: “Is what I’m thinking about useful?”

There is a point where yes, I am gaining self-awareness. I am thinking of different strategies to handle the situation. I’m coming up with alternative approaches. I’m having new insights.

If I’m thinking about myself in a way that leads to better choices, more compassion, more honesty—great.

But then there comes a point where nothing new is happening. I’m just looping, rehearsing, analyzing, and staying stuck. I feel myself getting smaller and more contracted.

And at those moments the most healing thing isn’t more introspection—it’s doing the next right thing. It’s taking an action. It’s getting up and going outside. It’s reaching out to a friend for a new perspective.

This is really hard because thoughts get caught in loops and become obsessive.

But it’s a really important first step to start recognizing when it’s gone from useful to not useful. From there you can develop better strategies to move on from them.

SBK: You write a lot about small change. Why do people so often dismiss small actions when, in practice, they’re usually what actually change us?

EZ: Because who wants a lot of steps in a long process of change when you could have fifteen years of therapy compressed into one hour, which is the new thing I see on Instagram all the time? 😂

We want things faster and we want them easier. I think that is true for all of us.

I know those claims are ridiculous, and yet I feel myself drawn to them.

But the reality is, for most people most of the time, change happens one little bit at a time. The good news is that that dramatic change is indeed possible. Let me tell you what I mean.

I had been sober for about a week. I had been in detox and come home for Christmas. The game was over, the jig was up — I had told my parents and the people in my life I was an addict, and I was convinced that I wanted to be clean. As short a time as a week sounds, those first seven days are a big deal for any recovering addict, and that night I believed that it had been the first week of the rest of my clean and sober life. I went to a recovery meeting and came home. And then things took a small, disastrous turn.

There in the mail was a gift from my grandfather. Twenty-five dollars. At that time twenty-five dollars was the magic number (for a shot of heroin).

Instantly I felt an overwhelming craving to use. I didn’t want to, and at the same time I did. To this day I don’t know of a worse feeling than that sensation of being torn in two. One part of me screaming, “Don’t do it!” and another part screaming, “I have to do it!”

I paged my dealer, and he agreed to meet me in one of our five or so shitty regular spots around Columbus.

I remember driving there. It was snowing, and I was sobbing in the car. “Dream On” by Aerosmith was playing on the stereo. With every turn signal a fresh wave of shame broke over me, and yet it felt like an invisible, malevolent hand was steering the car down the road.

We can leave that particular story there. You know how it ends.

Now here’s the other side. Twenty-five years later, I was picking up opiates from the pharmacy and delivering them to my mother week after week. Oxycontin, to be specific. The good stuff. Once upon a time I might have robbed you at gunpoint for them, and now they had no more emotional significance to me than a loaf of bread.

I don’t tell those two stories to brag. I tell them to show just how different we can become, and how something that seems impossible now can become second nature down the line if we commit to the long process of change.

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This Wednesday, join me for a special FREE event online:

“ASK ME ANYTHING ABOUT HUMAN FLOURISHING with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and Rosie von Lila”

Weds April 1, 1pm-2pm ET on Zoom

REGISTER HERE FOR FREE:

https://www.vonlila.com/event-details/ask-me-anything-about-human-flourishing

DETAILS:

Get a little wild (and magical!) with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and Rosie von Lila in this anything-goes AMA on creativity, self-actualization, and the peculiar art of being human. Bring your curiosity, your questions, and even your existential dilemmas. Smart, playful, and just the right amount of joy for this era of global transformation.

DR. SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN: Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive scientist and humanistic psychologist whose work explores creativity, intelligence, and the full spectrum of human potential. His books include Rise Above and the bestselling Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. Dr. Scott is a popular professor, podcaster, and speaker who helps people apply cutting-edge psychology to live more creative, meaningful, and self-actualized lives.

ROSIE VON LILA: A multi-disciplinary creative, Rosie von Lila uses arts and technologies to bring people together around human flourishing and what academic research teaches us about the subject. Rosie founded FLORIS — the adventure club for people who are into flourishing. She co-authored The Practical Flourishing Assessment (TPFA), and is a published essayist. Through her creative culture and participatory culture expertise, Rosie was featured in Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal’s bestseller Stealing Fire.

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Most self-help is so freaking mind-numbingly boring.

No disrespect to all the self-help gurus out there (don’t want to hurt your egos!) but so much of what I see is targeted toward neurotypical people and I aint that (to the grammar police in my comments section: yes I said aint, deal with it).

I dunno, I just find myself really craving more self-help gurus that acknowledge neurodiversity and the many quirky and unique pathways people can take to self-actualization. So much of what I see is so vanilla and straight and narrow and says so many obvious things that neurotypical people love to hear (“being in a stable marriage is the key to well-being”, “connection is important”, “happiness requires being of service”, “the more you give, the more you get back”, etc. etc., blah blah yea we get it.)

I think the problem is that so much of self-help tries to sell this one-size-fits-all approach to growth and development. If you take this protocol, you will look like me and be as successful as me— often with the self-help guru held up as the pinnacle of human potential.

But that’s just not how self-actualization works. You’ve got to find your own path, and quite frankly, for most neurodivergent folk, the path looks anything but normal!!!

I’d love to see self-help that really truly acknowledges the many paths to self-actualization. That acknowledges the fact that you can be on the autism spectrum and maybe your path is an obsessive mastery of something and being extremely selective about who your friends are because that’s not actually your top priority. Or maybe self-help that acknowledges that you can have ADHD and that your path may involve jumping into a million different interests and being totally scattered and a freaking mess but still loving your life— and THAT’S TOTALLY FREAKING OK. Or maybe self-help that acknowledges that you can be a highly sensitive person and your path may look like reducing as much stimulation as possible and seeking out environments where people are equally as sensitive and creating something really weird and wonderful together. Or self-help for people who have schizotypy (a mild form of schizophrenia that is just a cool personality trait associated with creativity) that acknowledges the path of self-actualization may involve talking and dressing really weird and different and having a rich imagination and saying bizarre things that are totally awkward in a neurotypical context but in just the right context can be transformed into awesome art.

In essence, I think we need more self-help that is neurodivergent-friendly. Or heck, at least more self-help that doesn’t just repeat the same things over and over and over again about how we’re all supposed to live our lives. Because, well, the truth is that you are allowed to live the life that is best for you. And that just won’t look the same for everyone.

Who is with me on this one?

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Previously this article was under a paywall, but I decided to make it free to everyone since whole love is so important in the world today. Enjoy!

***

When I wrote Transcend, I had so much I wanted to say about love— especially romantic love— from a humanistic psychology perspective. However, I ran out of space. In this post I have put together my extensive science-backed thoughts on the topic and am offering it to my paid subscribers as a token of my appreciation. I put a lot of work into this and hope it helps you all lead a more fulfilling love life!

“We must understand love; we must be able to teach it, to create it, to predict it, or else the world is lost to hostility and to suspicion.” – Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Being

In his article “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person“, the philosopher Alain de Botton noted that “choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for”. There is surely some truth here. Due to the narratives and unrealistic expectations our society holds about romantic love, we enter relationships with ideas that are destined to lead to disappointment and resentment. We believe there is one right person out there for us, and we expect that partner to be our everything— we expect them to satiate our insatiable sex drive, satisfy our need for belonging, and quell our deepest existential feelings of despair. de Botton is quite right that romantic love doesn’t have to be perfect. By forgiving our own foibles as well as accommodating those of our partner, we connect with our common humanity and foster growth in ourselves and our partner.

Even so, certainly we strive for more than choosing how we would most like to suffer in our loving relationships! We strive toward a richer, deeper, more meaningful, and more transcendent experience of love. In Motivation and Personality, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow has a chapter titled “Love in Self-Actualizing People”, in which he notes that “self-actualizing love shows many of the characteristics of self-actualization in general.” Using that chapter as a spring board, I will draw on the latest scientific findings on love and attachment to outline ten features of what I refer to as whole love. I define whole love as an enduring loving relationship that is continually in a state of growth, health, and development.

Note that this is the template of an ideal. I personally do not know anyone who shows all of these characteristics! Nevertheless, I think this template for whole love offers a realistic— yet still transcendent— north star in which to point the love compass. Also, while the focus here is on romantic relationships (as well as the integration of sex and love), many of these characteristics could apply equally to any loving relationship that one has in their lives. I fully acknowledge that some people have multiple intimate romantic relationships (polyamory), and that some people embrace the single life.

Therefore, I’d like to emphasize that it’s not the status of being in a romantic relationship that signifies whole love, it’s the quality of the connection that is the critical variable. I hope that the principles in this humanistic guide can help you in your journey to have more health, growth, and developing all of your loving relationships in your life.

1. Openness to Love

“It is true of our self-actualizing people that they now love and are loved… they have the power to love and the ability to be loved.” – Abraham Maslow

The most essential aspect of whole love is being open to love.

Whole love is open, receptive, and good-natured. Both giving and receiving love are equally as important in whole love. Of course, being open to love doesn’t guarantee that love will be received, but it does help to create the possibility. As Rollo May notes in his book Love & Will, “We cannot will love, but we can will to open ourselves to the chance, we can conceive of the possibility—which… sets the wheels in motion.”

Two central drivers of openness to love are trust and a lack of cynicism. The opposite of openness to love is avoidance of love. Research shows that those with an avoidant attachment style lack trust, and are extremely cynical about love. Julie Rothbart and Philip Shaver summarize the attachment view by noting that“it would be expected that secure adults view others as trustworthy and dependable… Avoidant adults would be expected to view others as generally untrustworthy and undependable … and relationships as either threatening to one’s sense of control, not worth the effort, or both.”

In one study, securely attached individuals scored highest on trust in loving relationships, whereas avoidants displayed fear of closeness and intimacy. Securely attached lovers were most likely to agree that “in some relationships romantic love never fades”, whereas avoidant lovers were most likely to say that “the kind of head-over-heels romantic love depicted in novels and movies does not exist in real life, romantic love seldom lasts, and it is rare to find a person one can really fall in love with.”

In another study, avoidant participants were found to not only view potential partners as untrustworthy, but were also generally suspicious of human nature and motives in general. Securely attached individuals showed the opposite pattern, and were more likely to view people as generally well-intentioned and good-hearted .

It may very well be that the avoidance of love is an evolutionary strategy, nature’s rational response to the unavailability of trusted others in one’s environment. Indeed, there is evidence that the drive for sex without love emerges in unstable reproductive environments, where there is little assurance that the partner will stick around, or even survive due to environmental instability and/or violence.

Even so, our patterns, regardless of the triggers, need not define us. We can be more than our evolutionary instincts, and in our loving relationships we can willfully transcend the urge for avoidance. Anyone can gain the riches of whole love by leaning in to love. By opening ourselves to the sorrows and pains of romantic love, we also open ourselves to the joys and opportunities for growth.

2. Love is the Center

“No description, no words can ever communicate the full quality of the love experience to one who has himself never felt it. It consists primarily of a feeling of tenderness and affection with great enjoyment, happiness, satisfaction, elation, and even ecstasy in experiencing this feeling (if all is going well). There is a tendency to want to get closer, to come into more intimacy contact, to touch and embrace the loved person, to yearn for [them]… Quite characteristic is the feeling of generosity, of wanting to give and to please.” – Abraham Maslow

The center of whole love is love.

Without love, whole love disintegrates, for the essential feature of love, is care. In his book Love & Will, Rollo May defines care as a “state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness.”

Likewise, in The Art of Loving, the humanistic psychologist Erich Fromm writes that “genuine love is an expression of productiveness and implies care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. It is not an ‘affect’ in the sense of being affected by somebody, but an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity for love.”

With love and care, whole love grows. Love is the center upon which the rest of the elements orbit, and contribute to the growth of the relationship. To be sure, the other elements of romantic love—attachment, caretaking, lust, and romantic passion— often attempt to bend love to its will, for they each have their own biological goals.

However, love is best when free to grow. Insecure attachment, manic romanticism, hyper-lust, and extreme sensitivity to rejection all warp whole love. Whole love is at its best when the rest of the elements help grow love, rather than the other elements desperately clinging to, or avoiding, love.

This central feature of romantic love is also a central feature of humanity. In a study of 37 societies, men and woman ranked love, or mutual attraction, as the first criterion for choosing a spouse. Without this mutuality of caring, without a stance in one direction to the exclusion of a stance in another direction, one cannot grow love, because there is no movement. As Rollo May notes in Love & Will, “[t]end means a tendency, an inclination, a throwing of one’s weight on a given side, a movement; and also to mind, to attend, to await, to show solicitude for. In this sense, it is the source of both love and will.”

3. Greater Taste and Perceptiveness

“The perception of healthy people are more efficient, more acute when in love than when not. Love may make it possible to see qualities in the loved person of which others are completely oblivious.” – Abraham Maslow

When it comes to attraction in romantic relationships, especially in the early stages, the passion and lust systems can lead to all sorts of distortions in perception. Whenever there is a narrowing of attention, it is more difficult to see the totality of a person, and to see the reality of their being. For instance, when the lust system is overactivated, we may focus on superficial aspects of a person, ignoring the whole person.

Whole love is involve a widening of attention, and a greater efficiency in seeing the reality of the partner more clearly. Attraction in whole love is typically based on deeper aspects of the person, such as kindness, courage, honesty, and sincerity, rather than more superficial aspects of the person, such as physical beauty. This does not mean that physical attraction is absent; on the contrary, witnessing the positive qualities of the other person often leads to an increase in physical attraction.

Additionally, diversity is embraced in whole love. Strangeness is not threatening, and there is a greater openness to being attracted to those who are very different. This may include different income, social status, education, religion, appearance, etc. Maslow writes,

“Thus physical imperfections, as well as economic, educational, and social shortcomings, are far less important to healthy people than are character defects. As a consequence, it is easily possible for self-actualizing people to fall deeply in love with homely partners. This is called blindness by others, but it might much better be called good taste or perceptiveness.”

4. Love as End Experience

“There is too much talk in the psychological literature of rewards and purposes, of reinforcement and gratifications, and not nearly enough of what we may call the end experience (as contrasted with the means experience) or awe before the beautiful that is its own reward.” – Abraham Maslow

“Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no limit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love in order that I may love…”  – St. Bernard of Clairvaux

A key characteristic of whole love is a lack of striving, a “spontaneous admiration”. As Maslow notes, “admiration asks for nothing and gets nothing. It is purposeless and useless.”

Nevertheless, admiration frequently leads to pleasure, naturally and spontaneously. Maslow compared this experience to the “eager passivity with which we allow ourselves to be tumbled by waves just for the fun that is in it; or perhaps better, to the impersonal interest and awed, unprojecting appreciation of the slowly changing sunset. There is little we can inject into a sunset.”

Maslow was clearly influenced by Eastern philosophy. In a brief, unpublished essay written in July, 1954, Maslow explicitly notes his reading of the Hindu philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and applies the Buddhist notion of “choiceness awareness” to acceptance of the beloved, “without desiring to change or manipulate the person”.

This idea also dovetails nicely with Carl Rogers’ notion of unconditional positive regard, in which a person does not attempt to change another person, but instead beholds that person in their totality. Continuing the sun metaphor (which apparently was a popular one among humanistic psychologists), Carl Rogers notes,

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”

A key to unconditional positive regard is listening. Rogers offered his clients an “active-listening approach”, which involves creating a climate of listening that involves equality, freedom, permissiveness, understanding, acceptance, and warmth. As Maslow notes, “You can’t really perceive the truth and be aware of reality as it is unless you put aside all your hopes, ideals, and standards—and just listen wholeheartedly… [The] thing to do is to let both things and people happen.”

5. Admiration of Virtue

The sort of admiration and acceptance the humanistic psychologists were discussing is related to Aristotle’s third type of friendship— virtue. In his seminal book, Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between three different types of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue.

In their book, Happy Together: Using the Science of Positive Psychology to Build Love That Lasts, Suzann Pawelski and James Pawelski– a married couple who are both experts and leaders on the methods and techniques of positive psychology– extended Aristotle’s ideas to the realm of romantic relationships. Consistent with love as an end experience, they argue that the highest, most transcendent loving relationships are those that are “not motivated by what each person can get from the relationship, but rather by the goodness each person sees in the other.” In other words, instead of expecting a relationship to make you whole, you engage in a romantic relationship so that each partner can help each other grow in a healthy direction.

Drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s work on the emotion of “elevation”, the Pawelskis’ argue that “when we are uplifted or elevated, our hearts are open and our thoughts are more focused on others than on ourselves. We seek ways to make positive changes to enhance our relationships and we experience moral growth and heightened positive relations like hope, and ultimately love.” According to the Pawelski’s, “Aristotelian love” is characterized by three interrelated elements:

1. Partners love the good they see in each other. This does not mean that we expect our partner(s) to always be perfect, or that we turn a blind eye to our partners’ flaws. Instead, this involves an active, willful attempt to spot the strengths of the partner, and see potential that they don’t even see themselves.

2. All partners are committed to supporting each other’s growth and health precisely because they see the positive potentialities in the other person. This doesn’t mean forcing or expecting the other person to be a particular way, but merely providing the secure base and support to help the partner “do their own growing”.

3. A wonderful side effect of helping another person grow is typically inspiring yourself to become a better person. By watching the process of development and growth unfold, you realize that change is possible, but also that change requires effort and patience. Being loving, admiring, and patient with others often has the effect of making us more loving, admiring, and patient with ourselves, creating an upward spiral of growth, health, and development.

If we can cultivate more gratitude, character strengths, and virtue in our loving relationships, we can have more whole love in our lives.

6. Self-Expansion

“One important aspect of a good love relationship is what may be called need identification, or the pooling of the hierarchies of basic needs in two persons into a single hierarchy. The effect of this is that one person feels another’s needs as if they were [their] own and for that matter also feels [their] own needs to some extent as if they belonged to the other. An ego now expands to cover two people, and to some extent the two people have become for psychological purposes a single unit, a single person, a single ego.” – Abraham Maslow

In whole love, the needs of one person are the needs of the other. This is grounded in a basic loving orientation toward others, as well as recognition of our common humanity. In Love & Will, Rollo May takes up this notion of caring:

“It is a state composed of the recognition of another, a fellow human being like one’s self; of identification of one’s self with the pain or joy of the other; of guilt, pity, and the awareness that we all stand on the base of a common humanity from which we all stem.”

Psychological studies support the notion that this “pooling of needs” (as Maslow put it) is a central feature of mature, healthy relationships. According to the self-expansion theory of love put forward by Arthur and Elaine Aron, a fundamental motivation in humans is self-expansion. One way (out of many ways) we fulfill this fundamental motivation is through romantic relationships, in which each partner incorporates aspects of the loved one’s self into one’s own self.

The self-expansion that occurs in romantic relationships often results in personal growth, since including a romantic partner in one’s self offers the opportunity to gain greater support, resources, perspectives, skills, and knowledge, and this all increases the capacity to reach one’s highest goals more easily. As Arthur Aron and his colleagues put it, “close relationships constantly and deeply shape, create, and recreate the self.”

Since self-expansion is pleasurable, engagement in self-expansion creates an upward spiral in which even more self-expansion is sought in the relationship. Self-expansion typically accelerates at a fast pace in the beginning stages of relationships, when partners know little about each other, and the joy of self-expansion typically slows down as the relationship continues, and couples become more familiar with each other.

Nevertheless, this need not be the case, as couples can continue finding new ways of experiencing the joys of self-expansion. For instance, research shows that couples can overcome boredom and stagnancy of passion in relationships by engaging in joint participation of self-expanding activities that are novel, arousing, and exciting, and that provide new information and experiences.

Another way of continually expanding the self in relationships is through self-disclosure, in which both partners feel that their innermost self is validated, understood, and cared for by the other.  As Maslow notes, “Very common is the desire for a fuller knowledge of one another, a yearning for a kind of psychological intimacy and psychological proximity and of being fully known to each other. Special delight in sharing secrets is common.” Maslow believed that self-actualizing relationships involved a dropping of defenses, and an increase in spontaneity and honesty. Indeed, it is through the act of mutual self-disclosure, we can connect to our common humanity.

In a classic study, Arthur Aron and colleagues sought out to test whether this process of accelerating self-disclosure could have an effect on feelings of closeness among strangers in only a very brief amount of time. They brought pairs of strangers into the laboratory and gave them a series of personal questions to ask each other, which required increasing vulnerability and self-disclosure.

The questions, which were divided into three sets, ranged from “Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?” (Set I), to “What is the greatest accomplishment of your life”? (Set II), to “Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life” (Set III), to “If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them? (Set III)”

After only a 45-minute period, the relationship of the strangers was rated as highly as the average relationship in their lives, and many participants even sought out the stranger after the experiment. In fact, after the 45 minutes of interaction, the relationship was rated as closer than the closest, deepest, most involved, and most intimate relationship of 30% of similar college students at the same university!

It may be that pooling of needs, self-expansion, and mutual self-disclosure is the greatest protection humans have from the profound emptiness and anxiety that can arise from the awareness of our inevitable existential isolation. After all, at the end of the day, we remain isolated from each other, separated by the physical boundaries of our bodies, and we can never truly know another person as well as we know ourselves.

As Maslow notes, “of all such efforts that we know anything about, the healthy love relationship is the most effective way of bridging the unbridgeable gap between two separate human beings.” Likewise, in The Art of Loving, Fromm notes that “love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”

7. Harmonious Integration

Through self-expansion, we certainly change, but that doesn’t mean we have to neglect other areas of our “old self” that also gave us resources, meaning and support. The key is how one integrates the loving relationship into the core of their identity. As we saw earlier, Robert Vallerand argues that not all forms of passion are equally as growth-enhancing.

Harmonious passion, according to Vallerand, stems from a sense of freedom, and a healthy integration of a loved activity into a person’s identity. The passion is in harmony with other areas of the person’s life. In contrast, obsessive passion stems from a sense of an uncontrollable urge to engage in a loved activity. With the obsessive passion, the activity takes up a very large space in one’s life and can lead to neglecting other loved activities, creating inner and outer conflict and discord in one’s life.

Applying these two forms of passion to romantic relationships, Vallerand and colleagues found that self-expansion can certainly lead to personal growth, but it can also come at a cost. Across a number of studies, the researchers found that harmonious passion in a relationship promoted personal growth and also allowed the person to remain engaged in other areas of one’s life, such as maintaining relationships with friends and family, as well as maintaining interests and activities outside the relationship. In contrast, those who were obsessively passionate in their romantic relationships did not display as much personal growth, and often disengaged with other areas of their life.

This often has the consequence of limiting growth, considering that distancing oneself from close family and friends can increase loneliness and decrease support in one’s life. As the researchers note, “individuals who withdraw from their friends and relatives when they are in a romantic relationship would appear to cut themselves off from people who could help them maintain a strong and thriving romantic relationship.”

What can be done to increase one’s harmonious passion in a romantic relationship? Vallerand suggests that one way to increase your harmonious passion in a relationship would be to consciously reflect on the ways in which this romantic relationship is personally meaningful to you, and to remind yourself (or at least reflect on whether) your decision to stay committed to the growth of the relationship was freely chosen, and is in harmony with your most cherished values. If upon reflection you realize that this relationship is too obsessive, and too far from being enhancing and growth-oriented, you might want to rethink your choice of current partner!

8. Love and Eros

“Sex and love can be and most often are more perfectly fused with each other in [self-actualizing] people.” – Abraham Maslow

A critical distinction, which has been made many times throughout human history, is between eros and sexuality. The mere physical act of sexual intercourse can be driven by many potential needs, whereas eros has a very specific function: to grow and express the depths of one’s love. Sexuality is about stimulation and release, whereas eros is about imagination and possibility. As Rollo May notes in Love & Will, “the essence of eros is that it draws us from ahead, whereas sex pushes us from behind.” Similarly, Maslow noted that sexuality among self-actualizing lovers is “used as a foundation stone upon which higher things are built.”

It is noteworthy that Maslow never defined sex as a need, especially considering that in the strict evolutionary sense, sex is very much a need, being a main mechanism for propagating the genes into the next generation. However, in terms of the whole self, we don’t need sex as much as we need love. When we go through a dry spell sexually, it may not be pleasant, but it rarely reaches the level of catastrophic depression we feel if we go through a long enough period deprived of love and affection. Nevertheless, since sex is such a powerful propagator of our species, it would make sense that the need would be powerfully attached to a wide variety of psychological needs to encourage us to have more sex. As self-help writer Mark Manson insightfully puts it, “Sex is a strategy we use to meet our psychological needs and not a need itself.”

Indeed, research shows that while there are many reasons why we have sex, they can be mapped onto to various. human needs. Cindy Meston and David Buss identified 237 distinct reasons why humans have sex, from the drive for simple stress reduction and increase in pleasure, to the motivation to increase power and social status, to the drive to increase self-esteem, to the drive for obtaining secure resources, to enacting revenge, to the exploratory drive of seeking a varied experiences, to the expression of love and commitment.

Not all sexual motives are equally conducive to sexual satisfaction, however, and our attachment system can interfere substantially with our sexual satisfaction. Those with the lowest levels of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance (i.e., those who are most securely attached in their relationships) report the highest levels of sexual satisfaction.

Why is this the case? It has to do with the motives for having sex. Research shows that those high in attachment avoidance tend have sex for reasons others than expressing love, such as avoiding negative relational consequences, or increasing one’s status and prestige among friends— for instance, by impressing them with dramatic sexual exploits. In turn, these motives for having sex, along with their lower sensitivity to their partner’s needs in times of distress, are associated with lower sexual satisfaction.

Those high in attachment anxiety tend to have sex in order to please their partner(s) and reduce their uncomfortable feelings of relationship insecurity. While those high in attachment anxiety tend to report that they are more sensitive to their partner’s needs, in actuality they tend to show less sensitivity toward their partner’s real needs, are more controlling of the direction of the relationship, and are less likely to use sexuality as a way to value their partner. These behaviors, in turn, are associated with lower levels of sexual satisfaction. As one pair of researchers put it,

“These [anxiously attached] individuals appear to be lacking in their ability to recognize the actual needs and cues of distress in their partners, possibly because of being preoccupied with their own self-centered worries and internal self-doubts. Such chronic worries would tax their internal resources and prevent them from fully and genuinely attending to their partner’s own emotional experiences and needs… and this would perhaps explain their lower tendency to use sex to value their partner.”

Along these lines, research shows that people with elevated levels of social anxiety report less satisfying sexual experiences—reporting experiencing less pleasure and feelings of connectedness when sexually intimate compared those who are not socially anxious. When you are preoccupied by self-evaluation or relationship insecurity, it’s difficult to fully enjoy sexual activity.

The antidote? Add more love into the sex. Since eros involves a focus on growth rather than outcome, it is better suited for actually enjoying the experience. Anik Debrot and colleagues found across multiple studies that affection explained the link between sex and well-being. Tender moments during sex included “moments of love and security” and “affectionate or thoughtful signs from my partner.”

The more of these moments during sexual intercourse, the greater the levels of life satisfaction and positive emotions during the day, even having effects on the person’s positive mood the next morning. What’s more, drawing positive emotions from sexual intercourse was a protective factor for relationship decline, leading to greater relationship satisfaction over time. Consistent with Maslow’s notion of pooling of needs discussed earlier, the greater one partner’s positive emotions from sex, the greater the other partner’s relationship satisfaction over time.

Another study conducted by Todd Kashdan and colleagues found that higher reported sexual pleasure and intimacy leads to not only boosts in positive mood, but also to increases in a sense of meaning in life. The closer the sexual partner, the more pronounced the effects on mood and meaning, even lasting the next day. The reverse was not the case, however: increases in happiness and meaning did not lead to next-day sexual activity, pleasure, or intimacy.

Of course, whole love does not require a single partner, as alternative sexual arrangements, such as polygamy, are becoming increasingly popular. The key is that all of the sexual activities in one’s life are integrated and harmonious with each other, creating minimal conflict with other areas of the relationship and with other activities in one’s life.

Regardless of one’s erotic appetites or consensual arrangements, the more that one’s sexual relationship(s) can afford time, imagination, caring, and trust, the more satisfying the experience is likely to become. As Rollo May notes, “The untamed eros fights against all concept and confines of time…. Love grows in depth by virtue of the lovers experiencing encounter with each other, conflict and growth, all over a period of time.”

Just like life, growth often takes time, and eros can be an important path to growth.

9. Security vs. Exploration

“It seems quite clear that even the strictly sensual and physical satisfactions can be improved by familiarity with the partner rather than by novelty in healthy people. Of course, there is little doubt that love in the sexual partner is very exciting and attractive for many people, but our data make it very unwise to make any generalization about this, and certainly not for self-actualizing people.” – Abraham Maslow

When it comes to romantic love, we often think of passion and excitement as being at odds with security and comfort. To be sure, when it comes to romantic relationships, the human drive for exploration does often conflict with our drive for stability and security. In her insightful book, Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel notes,

“We seek a steady, reliable anchor in our partner. Yet at the same time we expect love to offer a transcendent experience that will allow us to soar beyond our ordinary lives. The challenge for modern couples lies in reconciling the need for what’s safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what’s exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.”

While this is a common given dilemma of existence, Maslow argues that “in self-actualizing people the quality of the love satisfactions and the sex satisfactions may both improve with the length of the relationship.” How do self-actualizing lovers maintain the excitement, mystery, and unpredictability of the relationship while still maintaining great affection and closeness? I asked Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Love, what she thought, and she told me the following:

“Obviously, romantic relationships are extremely complex, but from a meditative point of view, it’s also interesting just to look at the simple role of attention. How often do we stop paying attention to our partner? You know, any amount of complacency, or taking someone for granted, mystery doesn’t necessarily only come from that sense of excitement, it doesn’t only come from the unknown, it also comes from discovery sometimes, as we discover each other.”

I love this answer, and it reminds me of the important distinction between wanting and liking. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is getting what one wants, and other is not getting it.” Can we ever want what we already have? As Ester Perel points out, we can too easily operate under the false illusion that we ever have our partner, as if they are a possession of ours in the sense that we own a new smart phone, or shiny, new car. With material possessions, we often obsess over a product and all the possibilities of how we will use it, only to find us not caring or wanting it anymore after we finally purchase the item.

However, this reasoning makes no sense when it comes to human beings, who are constantly growing and developing. The moment we take our partner(s) for granted, and assume that we have them forever, is the moment we stop discovering and admiring the depths of their full humanity. It’s no wonder that a common cause of eros declining in a relationship is the taking of each other’s existence for granted.

Another route to resolving the security/exploration dilemma in relationships is by unlocking what Perel refers to as “erotic intelligence”—willfully and deliberately creating conditions in a relationship for moments of mystery, playfulness, distance, and erotic excitement. Precisely because love and caring is the center of whole love, a fuller exploration of one’s sexuality and eroticism can be expressed.

Maslow noted that among self-actualizing lovers, there is a freer, more open discussions about sex, and even a greater interest in unconventional sexual practices. With trust and intimacy at its base, one can explore many expressions of sexuality, including those that may satisfy our other needs, such as power and curiosity.

Maslow notes that self-actualizing lovers can be both active and passive lovers, exchanging and experimenting with power dynamics, and are comfortable teasing and being teased. He goes on to note that this

“can go pretty far, almost to the point of reminding us of sadism and masochism. There can be a joy in being used, in subjection and passivity, even in accepting pain, in being exploited. Also, there can be an active and positive pleasure in squeezing and hugging and biting and in being violent and even in inflicting and receiving pain, so long as this does not go beyond a certain point.”

The eros of whole love– with care and consensuality at its root– affords many possibilities to drive excitement, novelty, and mystery. The sustainability of eros in a relationship is only limited by the imagination of the partners, and the commitment to creating safe spaces for the full exploration and growth of each other’s sexuality, and the many needs that can be fulfilled through sexual intercourse. This is why enduring, whole love relationships are so conducive to eros. As Rollo May noted, “Eros takes time: time for the significance of the event to sink in, time for the imagination to work, and if not ‘time to think,’ at least time to experience and to anticipate.”

10. Detachment and Individuality

“The fact is that self-actualizing people are simultaneously the most individualistic and the most altruistic and social and loving of all human beings. The fact that we have in our culture put these qualities at opposite ends of a single continuum is apparently a mistake that must now be corrected. These qualities go together and the dichotomy is resolved in self-actualizing people.” – Abraham Maslow

Maslow points out yet another paradox, noting that “self-actualizing people maintain a degree of individuality, of detachment, and autonomy that seems at first glance to be incompatible with the kind of identification and love that I have been describing.”

Indeed, most of us fear that by becoming too close to another person, we will lose our individuality and sense of self, and there is an entire literature on the potential for “role engulfment” when entering a relationship, in which a person’s identity becomes based on the role as a good relationship partner, causing detachment from other roles, goals, and priorities in life (“role abandonment”).

Nevertheless, Maslow notes that this is only an “apparent paradox”, and that detachment and need identification can coexist harmoniously. As we saw earlier, role engulfment is most likely to exist among those who are obsessively passionate about their relationship. Those who are harmoniously passionate about their relationships show greater personal growth, and maintain friendships, interests, and activities outside the romantic relationship.

Another way that individuality and self-expansion can coexist is by maintaining a certain degree of  “healthy selfishness” in a relationship, which Maslow describes as “a great self-respect, a disinclination to make sacrifices without good reason.” Maslow notes that self-actualizing lovers demonstrate “a fusion of great ability to love and at the same time great respect for the other and great respect for oneself.”  The notion of healthy selfishness is also an essential feature of Erich Fromm’s notion of a “productive orientation” towards life. Becoming a whole person requires setting appropriate boundaries, and balancing one’s own needs with the needs of others.

But perhaps the clearest way this paradox is resolved is by acknowledging that both partners can be interested in helping each other grow in their own direction. As Maslow notes, this requires not needing each other:

“They can be extremely close together and yet go apart when necessary without collapsing. They do not cling to each other or have hooks or anchors of any kind… Throughout the most intense and ecstatic love affairs, these people remain themselves and remain ultimately masters of themselves as well, living by their own standards even though enjoying each other intensely.”

As we’ve already seen, anxiously attached individuals have a desperate need to merge with the other, whereas avoidant individuals have a desperate need to maintain their individuality. The loving person does not cling or push away, but witnesses, admires, and helps the other person grow. There is nothing incompatible between that and keeping your own sense of self.

This has hints of the Buddhist notion of “nonattachment”. On first blush, it may seem as though this is at odds with attachment theory. However, as Baljinder Sahdra and Phillip Shaver point out, both attachment theory and Buddhist psychology “highlight the importance of giving and receiving love and of minimizing anxious clinging or avoidant aloofness and suppression of unwanted mental experiences.”

They developed a scale to measure Buddhist notions of nonattachment, which included items such as “I can accept the flow of events in my life without hanging onto them or pushing them away”, and “I have a hard time appreciating others’ successes when they outperform me”, and “I can enjoy pleasant experiences without needing them to last forever.”. They found that nonattachment was associated with lower levels of both anxious and avoidant attachment, with the negative relationship with anxious attachment being particularly pronounced.

While the Buddhist notion of nonattachment is not the same as secure attachment (nonattachment in the Buddhist sense is broader than attachment to a caregiver), they are clearly related. The more we can be present in our relationships, and not try to make the moment meet our prior expectations, the more we can help our partner grow as an individual. As Maslow notes,

“To be fully aware—as close to complete awareness as possible—means to focus wholly on the experience: to concentrate utterly, to pour one’s whole self into it, and to be unaware of everything else in the entire world and in all of time. This state necessarily includes a nonawareness of one’s own ego. Just as one knows that one has really listened to music because self-awareness disappeared (which also occurs during true creating and absorbed reading), so also is complete love marked by forgetting the self.”

Temporarily forgetting the self, however, does not mean that we lose our individuality. On the contrary, as Maslow notes:

“[W]e have customarily defined [falling in love] in terms of a complete merging of egos and a loss of separateness, a giving up of individuality rather than a strengthening of it. While this is true, the fact appears to be at this moment that the individuality is strengthened, that the ego is in one sense merged with another, but yet in another sense remains separate and strong as always. The two tendencies, to transcend individuality and to sharpen and strengthen it, must be seen as partners and not as contradictories. Furthermore, it is implied that the best way to transcend the ego is via having a strong identity.”

This observation is backed up by our research: we’ve found over and over again that both a genuinely loving orientation toward others and a quieting of the ego is strongly correlated with having a strong, not weak, sense of self. In whole love, this apparent paradox fades away as two self-actualizing individuals find a love that is in a state of constant growth and development.

For more on how to become a whole person, see Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization

References

Alain de Botton, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality

Rollo May, Love & Will

David Schmitt (2005). Is Short-term Mating the Maladaptive Result of Insecure Attachment? A Test of Competing Evolutionary Perspectives.

Julie Rothbard and Phillip Shaver (1994). Continuity of attachment across the life span.

Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver (1987). Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process.

Nancy Collins and Stephen Read (1990). Adult Attachment, Working Models, and Relationship Quality in Dating Couples.

Jay Belsky, Lawrence Steinberg, and Patricia Draper (1991). Childhood Experience, Interpersonal Development, and Reproductive Strategy: An Evolutionary Theory of Socialization.

James Chisholm (1996). The evolutionary ecology of attachment organization.

David Buss (2003). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating.

Scott Barry Kaufman (2014). Is Kindness Physically Attractive?

Carl Rogers and Richard Farson (1957). Active Listening.

Abraham Maslow (1954), Acceptance of the Beloved in Being-Love.

Sara Algoe and Jonathan Haidt (2008). Witnessing excellence in action: the ‘other-praising’ emotions of elevation, gratitude, and admiration.

Arthur Aron and Elaine Aron (1997). Self-expansion motivation and including other in the self.

Arthr Aron, Elaine Aron, and Christina Norman (2004). Self-expansion Model of Motivation and Cognition in Close Relationships and Beyond.

Arthur Aron et al. (2000). Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality.

Charlotte Reissman et al. (1993). Shared Activities and Marital Satisfaction: Causal Direction and Self-Expansion versus Boredom.

Arthur Aron and Elaine Aron (1986). Love and the expansion of self: Understanding attraction and satisfaction.

Arthur Aron et al. (1997). The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.

Daniel Jones, The 36 Questions That Lead to Love

Irving Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy.

Catherine Raelle et al. (2012). Passion in the romantic sphere: A look at relational outcomes.

Mark Manson, Sex and Our Psychological Needs

Cindy Meston and David Buss, Why Humans Have Sex

Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.

Katherine Péloquin et al. (2013). Integrating the Attachment, Caregiving, and Sexual Systems Into the Understanding of Sexual Satisfaction.

Emily Impett et al. (2008). Attachment and daily sexual goals: A study of dating couples.

Dory Schachner and Phillip Shaver, Attachment dimensions and sexual motives.

Todd Kashdan et al. (2011). Effects of social anxiety and depressive symptoms on the frequency and quality of sexual activity: A daily process approach.

Anik Debrot and Nathalie Meuwly (2017). More than Just Sex: Affection Mediates the Association between Sexual Activity and Well-Being.

Todd Kashdan et al. (2017). Sexuality Leads to Boosts in Mood and Meaning in Life With No Evidence for the Reverse Direction: A Daily Diary Investigation.

Scott Barry Kaufman, The Science of Passionate Sex

Frederick Phillipe et al. (2016). Understanding the Cognitive and Motivational Underpinnings of Sexual Passion From a Dualistic Model.

Baljinder Sahdra and Phillip Shaver (2013). Comparing Attachment Theory and Buddhist Psychology.

Baljinder Sahdra et al. (2010). A Scale to Measure Nonattachment: A Buddhist Complement to Western Research on Attachment and Adaptive Functioning.

Esther Perel (2006). Mating in Captivity.

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Ever since I announced a few days ago that I’m temporarily making my newsletter free to everyone, it felt like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I suddenly felt a surge of intrinsic motivation to write again. There is so much research suggesting that when we do things for external rewards, our mind starts to convince itself that the reason why we are doing that thing is for that reward, even if we loved what we were doing before the rewards.

I am working on changing my relationship to money. I live a very intrinsically motivated existence and have never quite squared that away with the need to well, pay my rent (which is a constant concern). But for now, at least, the deep within me love of writing is starting to come back and I’m excited about that!

Something I feel more inspired to write about is the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). I think this trait is so misunderstood. It’s one of those IF YOU KNOW YOU KNOW traits. If you’re in the approximately 15% to 30% of people who is an HSP, you certainly don’t need me to tell you that you are HSP. You live it every damn second of your life! But if you’re far, far away from that trait, it might be hard for you to comprehend what the inner experience of an HSP is like.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about is the link between being an HSP and self-belief. I think being an HSP can really do a number on your self-esteem. Because HSPs tend to be really attune to the perspectives and emotions of other people, and are in such deep touch with their own emotional lives, I think it’s really easy for HSPs to have a constantly in flux sense of self-belief.

Self-belief is an interesting thing. I went to middle school and high school with Kobe Bryant (may he RIP) and was fascinated with his unflappable self-belief. He just knew he was destined for greatness, or at least acted as if he was enough that others started to believe him. What is that inner experience like?

Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of self-belief, and I needed a heaping dose of it to fight my way out of special education and show my school that I was highly capable. So it’s definitely possible to be both an HSP and have high self-belief. But I still think there are unique challenges for the HSP in this regard.

I can feel really good about myself and confident and excited, but if I express myself fully and authentically and the person doesn’t like what I’m offering or has a very neutral response (“Whatevs”), it can really affect me. I wish I could just say “haters gonna hate” or let it just brush off my shoulder, but I think part of the issue is that I care (too much, arguably) why the person didn’t receive me in the way I intended or hoped. It’s kinda like a puzzle for me to figure out. I just really want to understand everything. It’s in my DNA. That’s part of being an HSP.

Also, because I am really good at perspective taking, it can be super difficult separating my mind from the mind of another person. I can feel super confident and excited to express myself and if someone is wholly unimpressed, for a moment I automatically become unimpressed with myself. Again, it’s something just wired into my DNA, because I can just go into their head and see the world from their perspective. But it sometimes makes me lose my own perspective, and thus, my own internal sense of self-belief.

I’ve been working on this for decades and have come a long way. I’m not quite at the “haters gonna hate” level (and I’m not even sure that level is healthy and most conducive to growth in the long-run anyway) but I try to just stay super mindful and ACCEPT that not everyone will receive me as I intended or hoped. I have slowly transformed myself into harnessing a greater level of acceptance. You can honor your people (you know who your people are) and also honor that someone else can experience the world fundamentally different from you and have different preferences and filters on the world, and that’s OK. That’s what makes humans so beautiful.

So I think doing this “self-anchoring” work is extremely important for HSPs. It’s not a course that is taught in high school or college. HSPs have to figure this stuff out on their own in a world that is so noisy and judgmental and quite frankly, insensitive. My dear friend Susan Cain wrote a beautiful book about being an introvert in a world where people won't stop talking. I would add that it’s also tough being a sensitive person in a highly insensitive world.

Hopefully posts like these can help. Drop me a comment below if this post resonated with you. Where are my beautiful HSPs at?

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Hello dear friends and followers,

This newsletter entry comes from my heart.

First and foremost, I hope everyone is safe and doing well. I know these are tumultuous times. Things are rapidly changing beneath our feet and it’s hard to know what’s up and what’s down, who to support, and what tomorrow will bring.

Second of all, thanks to all of you for supporting this newsletter from the start. I am continually touched and grateful beyond measure for your ongoing support and thoughtful comments. I say all the time that I have the best followers in the world. True transcenders!

For months now, I have had sleepless nights feeling immense guilt that I have paid subscribers and I’m not writing articles with great frequency. I keep telling myself “this week I’ll write an epic piece” but then life gets in my way and I don’t do it. Then I feel guilty again. Because the truth is, I want to offer you all the best value for your money and don’t take it lightly that some of you paid to be a subscriber.

Truth is, I am going through a huge transition in my life right now. I am phasing out of academia completely and am cooking up a few things (some I’ll say here and some I’ll keep secret for now!).

For one, I’m working on a dream magic/mentalism show (that’s right, a magic show!) that combines my passions for psychology, magic, mentalism, and perhaps even Opera (we’ll see about that part!). In recent years, I’ve really gone down the rabbit hole of mentalism and even have a stage name “The Amazing Dr. Scott” (see Big Think article here for my vision of what mentalism could be). I have been trying to figure out a way to create more awe and wonder in people’s lives (a strong value of mine) and have all sorts of ideas entering my head at all times of the day and night of how I could create a truly profound psychological experience for people that leaves people feeling inspired to embrace the mysteries of human existence and also to realize their fuller potential. I am in touch with some potential producers and I am looking for venues in NYC or L.A. to do my show, so if anyone has any ideas of where could be a great place to do this, please let me know!!! I’m all ears!!!

Also, I have also been thinking a lot lately about how I can make a bigger impact on the education system— a long time dream of mine. My book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, which came out in 2013, will always be my baby. I know it impacted a lot of people— especially parents and reachers— but it didn’t become a best-seller. Some say it was the title (“too negative”). Some (very kind friends) say I was ahead of my time. All I know is that after a recent re-airing on NPR of my personal story and mission to redefine intelligence (see Hidden Brain episode), I’ve been receiving an outpouring of emails from people from all over the world who have been overlooked because of their neurodiversity or because their unique intelligence doesn’t let them fit into one of the many standardized boxes that society (and educators) like to put on people. I know deep in my soul that I was put on this earth to help the oddballs like me find their special place in this world, and I want to go after that more.

Third, I am really getting into my self-actualization coaching training program. Right now we have another cohort of incredible experienced coaches from all over the world. Big shout-out to Jordana Cole (watch her TEDx talk right now!!) and Sophie Hamisch who are leading the charge on this with me. It already feels like one big family of transcenders who are committed to helping people become all that they can truly become. I’ve long had a dream of bringing self-actualization coaching to entire school districts and have been thinking a lot lately what that could look like and how I could go about making that a reality.

So I decided to make space to go after these dreams while I’m going through this major life transition and I don’t feel comfortable charging people if i’m not writing here consistently. Therefore, I decided to pause all paid subscriptions for now and make this newsletter completely free. I am not in this for the money (although I do have to afford my rent!!!). I genuinely want to help people self-actualize and connect with their most alive, unique, creative center of being.

Don’t worry, you’ll still be hearing from me (lol). I’ll still use this newsletter to make announcements from time to time about upcoming courses I’m doing and I will also still write new articles from time to time.

But for the time being, Beautiful Minds will be free to everyone.

Sincerely,

Scott

p.s.: I’m trying to figure out a way to add an option for people who would like to donate to my dreams if they feel called to do so. I’m in touch with Substack support about how to only have that option instead of subscriber options, so we’ll see if I can do that!

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My Hidden Brain Episode re-aired on NPR a few days ago and I am so touched by all the emails from people all over the world who have been emailing me with similar stories in childhood of being “overlooked” or being neurodivergent and not feeling like they fit in. Listen to the full episode here and let me know what you think! This remains one of my all-time favorite podcast/radio appearances:

https://www.hiddenbrain.org/podcast/why-youre-smarter-than-you-think/

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