Have you ever wondered why we feel less motivated after a tiring day at college or at work? Why does a cheat day or skipping the workout routine feels like heaven on such occasions? This article is tailored to give answers about that.

According to the researches of psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues, we the humans, seems to have only a limited reserve of mental/emotional energy. His researches shows that this reserve of energy could get depleted with tasks that demands mental/emotional effort. The conclusion he made was that the motivation to do other tasks requiring any mental/emotional effort are affected when our energy reserves are depleted and this later came to be called as the term ego depletion.

Pause for a few seconds and ask yourself: “ how do I feel today?”. What springs forth in your mind?

In our busy lives seldom do we find time for ourselves: a time to reflect on our thoughts and our feelings. Having such a time called the “me-time” will help us to make our subconscious conscious. Paying attention to our subconscious mind enables us to reveal our hidden thoughts, emotions, memories, and behavior patterns into our awareness. This plays a key role in facilitating a deeper understanding of ourselves and promotes a more fulfilling life.

Have you ever wondered why the joy of passing a difficult exam or getting that dream job you ever wanted or getting married to the love of your life isn’t a constant source of happiness? Why does such happiness fade with time? Why is it so hard to feel good every day?

One theory that sheds light on this is that the sole driving force behind our evolutionary process was never the magic potion of happiness. It is rather a blend of diverse emotions that enabled our ancestors survival, with happiness playing a role alongside others like fear and anxiety which significantly contributed to our overall well-being. If all of our ancestors got happy at the sight of a Lion at 100m rather than running for their life with fear, or if they were joyous to experience an Earthquake instead of finding a safe hide out, or if they ate any Fruit that they saw without being anxious about its safety, neither you nor I would be here today. Only the ones who got anxious, who was afraid and who was alert survived history and we are their descendants. Positive emotions like happiness, while it is super cool to experience, unfortunately did not significantly contribute to the survival of our species.

Eating dark chocolate has been proven to shift our moods gradually. How can something that we eat affect how we feel?

While nutritional psychiatry is a growing branch of study, it is important to first understand how our physiology works before understanding how nutrition affects both our mind and body.

Brain is our CPU. It is capable to send instructions to different parts of the body for different tasks, including breathing or running or instructing your arm to pick that banana on that table right in front of you. It is also responsible for how we feel at a given moment of time. So how does the brain send such instructions and how does it affect our mood?

Most of us get busy with our lives and knowingly or unknowingly, have slipped into autopilot mode at some point or the other. So what is autopilot mode and how do I know if I’m functioning in autopilot mode?

If your supervisor at work ask you to start the coffee machine so that all of you can enjoy a nice hot cup of coffee, you could either randomly press all the available buttons in the machine and let the machine start after n number of tries or, you can take a moment and try to understand the machine and press the right buttons in the right order and let the coffee pour out of the machine.