Love of Lights

Self-efficacy is a concept in behavioural psychology that basically describes one's belief in oneself. Yeah, it sounds lame and clichéd, but this is something that people have attempted to scientifically study and have patterns and explanations about. Basically, high self-efficacy means you have a "can-do" spirit; low self-efficacy means you doubt your ability to achieve your goals. I've fluctuated in levels of self-efficacy throughout my life. As a child, I believe I've had extremely high levels of self-efficacy: I can and will be an author, I can and will get into x university, I can and will be one of the smartest in my class, etc. etc. One of the key features of self-efficacy is that having it affects outcomes . In other words, psychology has shown: if you believe you can do it, you have a higher chance of successfully doing it. Isn't that crazy? One aspect of success is literally self-fulfilling your own prophesies. Over the past few years, I've h...

I was basically just gonna say I realise you can be in a relationship and just secretly still be attracted to and interested in other people, but by doing it secretly, I feel like it just makes it worse if it turns out your feelings for another person are actually serious. Like, if it were just understood by the people in the relationship that it’s normal to still be attracted to and interested in other people, you could just be more honest and feel less guilt and hopefully there would be less animosity. So for example, if I were with a girl for a while and she mentioned one day that she’s been hanging out with a guy and she thinks she might have feelings for him (and he might have feelings for her), I’d naturally be a bit jealous and sad, but then I would ask, “Does this mean you don’t feel anything for me anymore?” And if she said yes, she’s lost her feelings for me -- sad day, and the relationship is over. But the honesty also leaves open the possibility that she says, “No, I just ...

One way to figure out how to improve your levels of happiness is to figure out what circumstances make you sad and to minimise them. This might be more effective than merely trying to figure out what makes you happy and doing that, simply because it's easier to get sad than it is to get happy, so blocking sadness out at the root provides you with a kind of safety net, so to speak, upon which you can build your happiness. In other words, if you're trying to build your happiness on rotten foundations (having not yet removed and cemented over the possible sources of sadness), your happiness is likely to crumble more frequently. Now, sadness, like almost everything, has a structure by which it operates. It's not impossible that all the things that make you sad make you sad individually, with no connection to each other, but typically there is a shared feature amongst them that makes you sad. Instead of analysing every single thing one-by-one, it's going to be more useful ...