Have you ever noticed how some days you can handle stress with ease, while other days the smallest inconvenience sends you spiraling? Or perhaps you’ve experienced moments when you suddenly feel numb and disconnected, unable to feel much of anything at all?These experiences point to...
In the days following the death of Renee Good, many people—including myself—have described feeling a certain “heaviness” that’s hard to explain. Most of us didn’t know her personally. And yet the grief feels raw and real. But this reaction, this heaviness, is more common than you might think, and it has a name: collective grief.
We often think of tolerance as a virtue, and it is. Tolerance allows people of different backgrounds, beliefs, and identities to live together in community. But there’s an important catch, known as the paradox of tolerance: if a society tolerates intolerance without limits, the intolerant can eventually destroy tolerance itself.
Many of us are our own worst critics. We hold ourselves to impossibly high standards, replay mistakes in our heads, and use harsh self-talk in the hopes it will somehow motivate us to do better. But in reality, self-criticism often leaves us feeling stuck, anxious, and defeated.