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Decoding The Mind
Psychology in Everyday Life: From Stories and Research to Self-Discovery and Personal Growth
Psychology Hits explores psychology in everyday life through stories, research, insights and articles on trauma, relationships, emotional well-being and human behaviour. Decode the mind and browse real-life psychology explained through everyday experiences.
See psychology topics below. The full stories are available on Medium.
This brings together psychology blog articles, stories and topics in one place.
Biblical boundaries can become confusing when saying no feels selfish, disobedient or unloving. Christian boundaries are sometimes interpreted through beliefs about responsibility, forgiveness and sacrifice that can make setting healthy limits feel wrong.
Yet boundaries are also about responsibility and ownership. They help distinguish what belongs to us from what belongs to someone else and allow us to care without taking responsibility for another person’s choices, emotions or behaviour. In unhealthy relationships, blurred boundaries can also make it easier for manipulation and coercive control to take hold. Attachment can be weaponized and emotional hostage-taking occurs.
This story examines eight Christian boundary myths, including beliefs that setting boundaries is selfish, that saying no hurts others, that anger makes boundaries wrong. That guilt means we have acted badly. It also looks at how people pleasing and over-responsibility can create a boundaryless life.
Healthy Christian boundaries do not require withdrawing love or compassion. They can instead create clearer, more truthful relationships in which responsibility, limits and care can exist together.
Social media notifications can make compulsive phone checking surprisingly hard to resist. Messages, alerts and unpredictable rewards can keep us checking our phones, even when we intended to look only once. The result is phone addiction. But why do unpredictable notifications keep us checking our phones? We do this even when most notifications lead to nothing important. The underlying psychological mechanism of intermittent reinforcement may explain why unpredictable likes, messages and online attention are so difficult to ignore.
This research-based story, including personal experience, explains how variable rewards, social approval and behavioural addiction influence our actions. The story explores how changes from consistent reinforcement to intermittent reinforcement lead to the reward itself changing. It is the anticipation and hope that keep us hooked and become the reward.
Research cited in Science Direct suggests that variable rewards keep us hooked. Think shopping, gambling, social media, etc. The unpredictable and variable nature of how intermittent rewards work keeps us checking what might happen next. It keeps us hooked, and breaking away isn’t so easy.
The danger may be over, and in your mind you know you are safe. Yet your body still reacts as though the threat is recurring. Your mind knows you’re safe, but your body doesn’t. Sudden noises, changes in tone or small disruptions may trigger tension, fear or a racing heart. As your muscles tighten and stress hormones increase, you prepare for fight-or-flight.
This fight-or-flight story on Medium explores how trauma can leave the nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight mode. It explains why insight alone may not be enough to stop trauma reactions. Constant watching and hypervigilance develop, and healing often requires repeated experiences of safety rather than reassurance alone.
If traumatic experiences resemble the past, even when the past is over, it makes sense that experiences showing the opposite pattern are the route to healing and recovery from trauma.
People rarely intend it as a compliment when they say you’re “living in a world of your own”. Yet what looks like withdrawal or disengagement from the outside may actually be a deeply absorbing and emotionally regulating state known as autistic flow. To this extent, autistic flow and losing track of time may very well support wellbeing.
Research with autistic adults suggests that deep hyperfocus can provide relief from overwhelming environments. In addition, it can support emotional regulation and create a feeling of calm and safety. This autism and hyperfocus story on Medium also explores the fragile side of flow and time blindness. For example, interruptions, sudden changes and task-switching can feel especially disruptive when concentration is serving an important psychological purpose.
Autistic hyperfocus, flow state and time blindness can make hours disappear. Explore how intense focus may affect awareness of time and everyday routines. The combination of autistic hyperfocus, flow state and time blindness can help explain why someone may become deeply immersed in an activity and suddenly realise that hours have passed.
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