Are you unhappy at your job? Are you starting to consider a change of career because of how your current work makes you feel? Do you know why? According to our guest in this episode, Dr. Tessa West, a psychologist at NYU, if you are currently contemplating whether you want to do the work that you do everyday you should know that although this feeling is common, psychologists who study this sort of thing have discovered that our narratives for why we feel this way are often just rationalizations and justifications.

Can intellectual humility be measured? What influences it and affects it, limits it and enhances it? What even is it, scientifically speaking? We explore all of this and then play an episode of How to Be A Better Human featuring psychologist Tenelle Porter telling comedian Chris Duffy how she is researching how to conduct better research into intellectual humility.

This episode is about suicide prevention and awareness. Author Kelly Williams Brown tells us about her book, Easy Crafts for the Insane, in which she recounts how, after she gained fame and success as a NYT bestselling author, her world came apart. Then an anti-anxiety-drug-induced manic state nearly ended her life.

What is misinformation? How does it differ from disinformation or just plain ‘ole propaganda? How do we protect ourselves from people with nefarious intentions using all of these things to affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? That’s what we discuss in this episode with Matthew Facciani, social scientist and author of Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How it Spreads, and What We Can Do About It.

Two psychologists who study love, relationships, and human mating behavior pick apart the movie “The Notebook” and tell us what it gets right and what it gets wrong when it comes to portraying how humans actually, truly think, feel, and behave. Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick are the cohosts of the Love Factually podcast, a show that discusses the romantic/scientific accuracy of movies, and on this episode we listen in as they examine one of the most popular romance movies of all time.

In this episode, we sit down with therapist Britt Frank to discuss the intention action gap, the psychological term for the chasm between what you very much intend to do and what you tend to do instead. It turns out, there’s a well-researched psychological framework that includes a term for when you have a stated, known goal – a change you’d like to make in your life – something you wake up intending to finally do or get started doing, but then don’t do while knowing full well you are actively not doing what you ought and wish you had done by now. After we discuss this phenomenon and how to deal with it, we get into procrastination and how to escape all manner of dead-end behavioral loops.