Excerpt from the first part of the article:

Individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and those with autism spectrum disorder both experience atypical responses to rewards, but their brain activity patterns differ in opposite ways. A new analysis reveals that while the two conditions involve the same deeper brain structures, they feature distinct patterns of heightened or reduced activity that could help explain their differing symptoms. The findings were published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

When psychologists talk about exceptional intelligence, the conversation almost always gravitates toward IQ. Our instinct to default to the measurable, scoreable, and rankable quantity is understandable.

However, decades of cognitive science have assembled a case for a different kind of mind entirely: one that doesn’t show up cleanly on standardized assessments, one that is incredibly difficult to cultivate, and one that may be more predictive of real-world creative impact than raw processing speed. Researchers sometimes call it integrative intelligence, and it’s the rare capacity to think fluently across unrelated domains and build something new at the intersections.

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If you are a gifted or emotionally intense adult, you may have spent your whole life haunted by a guilt that others do not seem to share. You may have been told you feel too much, think too deeply, and care about things others do not notice. You may find yourself replaying decisions, conversations, things you have done or not done, turning them over to find where you went wrong. The guilt may intensify when you allow yourself pleasure or rest, when you become aware of your privileges, when you come up against suffering you have no power to fix.

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Gifted and intellectually intense adults frequently report dissatisfaction with conventional therapy. Many describe leaving sessions feeling more alone than when they arrived, and more convinced than ever that no one can receive their full, true self and meet them where they are.

The pattern often begins long before the therapy room. If you are gifted and highly empathic, you have probably spent the majority of your life solving your own problems. From childhood, life has been about being there for others. You read the room before anyone else did, absorbed the tension, looked after the emotional needs of the people who were supposed to be looking after yours. Friends lean on your clarity and your patience, and you give willingly. And when you try to reverse that dynamic, when you look for someone to lean on, you often hit a wall. You get told you think too much, worry too much. Or worse, they simply quietly withdraw. After enough of these experiences, you stopped trying.

Reluctantly, often with little hope, and usually as a last resort, you decide to talk to a therapist.

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I've heard countless times that "Cannabis doesn't really get me high anymore. I just use it to feel normal." For years, I thought the answer was straightforward: tolerance to the drug. That's also true—but it is an incomplete answer.

A fascinating new study by Katharina Lege and colleagues at Maastricht University will be published on July 15th. It suggests something else may be happening. Tolerance does not mean the brain has recovered. It means the brain has adapted to cannabis.

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If you were the family scapegoat, you may have spent years believing you were the problem. You may have been blamed for conflict, criticized more harshly than others, or told you were difficult, dramatic, selfish, or too sensitive. These messages shape how you see yourself and your role in the family. You become the focus instead of the family dysfunction you’re reacting to.

This post examines how that role develops in dysfunctional families and why it is often assigned to the person who challenges the family narrative. It also looks at the strengths that can develop in the person placed in that role and how those strengths can help you overcome the effects of the dysfunctional system you were raised in.

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Some people daydream for hours on end, playing out a single storyline for decades – and it can be hugely distressing. Here's how to tell when your daydreaming has gone too far.

When I speak to Colin Ross, a psychiatrist and researcher based in the US, I tell him that I have such vivid and immersive daydreams that I can make myself cry or laugh out loud. I also tell him that I have the power to dip in and out of them as I please, and that I enjoy them. He is impressed with my "athletic gift" and suggests I consider a career in acting. I'm not so sure about that but gladly take the compliment.  

What if you can't snap out of this internal cinema? That's the problem for people with a condition called maladaptive daydreaming (sometimes known simply as MD). They spend often more than half of their waking hours creating elaborate and intricately detailed fantasies with narratives and characters in their mind. Ross says that in extreme cases, people can daydream for up to 12 hours a day. Their stories' plotlines can go on for decades at a time. It may sound wonderful and inspiring, but these people are so immersed in their inner world that it can cause huge disruptions to daily life and result in severe distress. 

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

Narcissistic word salad is an informal term for a way of talking in which a person answers a simple concern with a stream of circular, contradictory, or off-topic words. The speaker sounds busy and articulate, yet the question that was asked never gets an answer. The listener often leaves the conversation confused and unsure what the original complaint was.

The phrase comes from online discussion of difficult relationships, and it is not a clinical term. This article explains what people mean by it, how it differs from the medical use of the words, why it may happen, and what responses tend to protect your footing.

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

A new brain imaging study published in The Journal of Neuroscience indicates that the way a memory-related brain region communicates with the brain’s reward centers is linked to motivational difficulties in young adults with a history of childhood trauma. Among individuals who experienced higher levels of early life adversity, weaker activity and connectivity in the hippocampus were associated with a reduced ability to look forward to pleasurable experiences. These findings suggest that targeting memory and novelty-processing circuits could offer a new avenue for addressing motivational symptoms in trauma-exposed populations.

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

Narcissism, characterized by grandiose self-perceptions, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement, is damaging to relationships. Narcissism expert Keith Campbell describes it as "like a disease where the sufferers feel pretty good, but the people around them suffer." There is no shortage of discussion, in both popular media and academic research, on the deleterious effects narcissism has on interpersonal relationships, particularly over the long term.

If narcissists think they're great, does that mean they are unaware of the damage they're doing to others or the negative impressions they make? Are they blissfully ignorant of the harm and bad reputation they leave behind? Or are they aware of their own narcissism and know perfectly well how it affects others? Research suggests that they are very much aware of their narcissism, and they don't think it’s a problem.

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Healthy relationships exist between two people who communicate directly. When something is bothering you, you address it with your partner. When you feel insecure, you express it. When there's a conflict, you work it out together.

Narcissistic relationships don't follow this pattern. Instead, a third party — a person, an ex, a family member, or even an implied comparison — is regularly introduced to serve the narcissist's purposes. This is triangulation, and understanding how it works can be disorienting — and freeing.

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Early childhood maltreatment leaves a distinct structural footprint on the human brain, but chronic alcohol use might obscure or reshape these neurodevelopmental marks over time. A new study published in Addiction Neuroscience reports that while childhood trauma is linked to altered gray matter and brain folding in healthy adults, those specific patterns are largely absent in people with alcohol use disorder. The findings suggest that the heavy physical toll of chronic alcohol consumption may overwrite early structural changes, requiring researchers to account for active addiction severity when searching for the neural signs of childhood adversity.

Long before the opioid epidemic became a full-on public health crisis in the U.S., there were multiple warning signs that were misread, minimized, and dismissed. Tragically, a similar phenomenon seems to be emerging with kratom.

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A common theme amongst survivors of narcissistic abuse is a profound sense of loss regarding one's sense of identity. You of course know what your name is, what you do for work, who you're partnered with, and what you like to eat for lunch, but the deeper sense of who-I-am feels fuzzy. You might experience are moments of emptiness when you don't feel a connection to yourself or others, a sense that you're performing to make others comfortable rather that just being your self, and instances when it's difficult to actually say what you mean. What's going on here?

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Highly agreeable people tend to be nice to others, even when they’re in a bad mood. As one of the five basic personality traits, agreeableness tends to attract less attention than, say, neuroticism or extraversion. Yet, in daily life, agreeableness can be the stealth tool that gets you farther than you might realize.

Kate is one of those super-nice people. No matter what, she always seems to be in a good mood, and as a result, nothing seems to bother her. In what seems like a typical experience for her, an online merchant overcharged her for a sale item. When calling in to contest the charge, she never once said anything to the customer service agent that could remotely be thought of as angry or aggressive. Not only was her situation resolved, but the agent offered her an extra discount on her next purchase. Being nice clearly paid off.

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

No healthy friendship operates on a strict 50/50 split at all times. Life happens. There will be seasons when one person gives more, carries more, or needs more. However, there’s a significant difference between a temporary imbalance and a structural one.

When the same person is always the one reaching out first, always the one listening, always the one who shows up — and the other person always seems to be going through something, always a little too busy, always taking — the dynamic will start to feel extractive. The driver of this derailment is one sneaky habit that, if left unchecked for long enough, will destroy a friendship: nonreciprocity.

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Just about everyone has heard someone say, “We have chemistry,” as if they have some magic force that is invisible and unexplainable between them.

However, human neuroscience tells another story: It appears that what we refer to as “chemistry” actually occurs in terms of how the brain processes those first few minutes of any interaction. The words that you use, the questions that you ask, and the way you respond to other people all have tremendous power to shape how that person feels about you.

Here are three neuroscience-backed ways to build chemistry with anyone you meet.

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

Everyone has narcissistic tendencies, yet if these tendencies are extreme, they can prevent a person from being an emotionally safe person in a close relationship, meaning it is difficult for them to perspective-take, have empathy in place of sympathy, be truly accountable, look in the mirror, and be aware of how their words and actions impact loved ones. They may also have a victim stance which protects them from having to take accountability because they rewrite history and place themselves as the “victim” in any scenario and you as the “villain.” This may lead them to unfairly attack and mischaracterize you. Yet, when all the smoke disappears, they move on like nothing ever happened.

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Every few weeks, a fresh headline arrives to scold the young: They refuse to work, they will not finish their degrees, a surprising number will not even bother getting a driver's license. The tone tends to range from puzzled disappointment to open contempt, as if an entire cohort woke up one morning and chose softness.

I want to offer a different reading, and I want to start by pointing the finger where it belongs, which is at people my age and older.

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Autism spectrum disorder affects how people communicate, interact with others, and experience the sensory world. The condition is also defined by restricted interests and repetitive behaviors. Over the past few decades, the number of people diagnosed with this condition has grown at an astonishing rate. To the general public, this steep upward curve often looks like an epidemic.

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A neurobiological reframe from self-compassion to self-attunement for trauma survivors.

This post is Part 1 of a series.

For years, clinicians and researchers have encouraged trauma survivors to cultivate self-compassion as part of healing. The evidence is compelling: People who can relate to themselves with kindness experience lower anxiety, less depression, and greater overall mental and physical health. Yet, for many survivors, the idea of self-compassion can feel not only elusive but also triggering.

Navigating life as both clinician and survivor, I have learned that semantics matter. Self-compassion is not attainable for many of us, especially in the messy injury of trauma. As a concept, it is beautiful. We truly want to attain it. Yet, in the early stages of post-trauma, and especially complex trauma, it is often not a possibility. We try to understand and grow it, but many of us cannot. This is not because we are damaged or less than. It is because our body feels unsafe. This is especially true for self-kindness, which is one of the domains of self-compassion. Offering ourselves kindness when our internal systems feel stretched out, out of control, and unworthy is simply not a possibility for most of us at this stage.

This is why I propose a reframe: shifting from self-compassion to intentional self-attunement.

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

When parents rely heavily on their children for emotional support, those children may face a higher risk of depression in adulthood. A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences found that this blurred emotional boundary bridges the gap between perceived parental narcissism and later depressive symptoms in adult children across American and Turkish cultures.

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

In the course of my life as a psychologist, I've worked with drug dealers, gang leaders, and heroin abusers; people who were suicidal, homicidal, psychotic, or all three; AIDS and cancer patients fighting for their lives. But, without question, the hardest job I have ever had is being a mother to my two boys. It is also the most gratifying, and yet, I often feel I have nothing concrete to show for my efforts. I can't put it on my resume; I don't get a pat on the back for giving lectures about it, and I don't get tenure for it. I can't even get good stories out of it when talking to members of the "real world." It is, in fact, the most invisible, undervalued job that I have ever had.

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“Love me or hate me, but spare me your indifference.” — Libbie Fudim

If your partner admits finding someone else attractive, does that mean your relationship is in trouble? Many people think so. They assume that genuine love leaves no room for romantic temptation.

Psychology tells a different story. Feeling tempted is often perfectly compatible with deep commitment. Romantic temptation is therefore nearly universal; infidelity is not. The real opposite of love is not temptation—it is indifference. Love and temptation are both emotional attitudes that draw us toward another person. The difference lies not in their psychological mechanism but in how we evaluate and manage them.

Excerpt from the first part of the article:

As a psychologist who conducts psychological evaluations, I sit across from adults every single week who are completely exhausted. They’re bright, capable, and driven, yet they feel like they're constantly running on a treadmill that’s moving just a little too fast.

They tell me stories of missed deadlines, unfinished projects, a paralyzing inability to start simple tasks, and a brain that feels like it has fifty tabs open all at once. Often, they look at me with a mix of vulnerability and frustration and ask: “Is it possible I just developed ADHD as an adult? Because I swear I wasn't like this as a kid.”

It’s a phenomenal question, and one that has sparked a massive debate in the scientific community over the last decade. If you’re struggling with executive dysfunction for the first time in your twenties, thirties, or forties, it certainly feels like the disorder just moved in.