Category: Psychology

The longer people follow this diet, the more depressed they are.

Time management research reveals if it really helps people achieve life satisfaction and career success.

Time management is the process of planning activities to increase productivity.

Over the past decade or so it has almost become a cult, with websites, books and gurus all claiming to have the answer to your professional advancement and, naturally, lack of time.

Now, new research looks at 158 separate studies including over 50,000 people around the world to find out whether time management works.

Can it really help you achieve life satisfaction and career success?

Before we get to that, though, here are the basic time management strategies skills and tools.

Time management strategies

There are a seemingly endless number of time management strategies, but most involve three basic components:

1. Structuring time

Encourages the use of daily routines so that work fits together in a structured way.

Time management strategies are generally trying to combat the unsystematic way that most people work.

In practice, this involves simply prioritising tasks and using to-do lists.

2. Protecting time

Protecting time is mostly about stopping other people interrupting you from working.

This could involve saying ‘no’ when asked to do something else, delegating tasks to others or keeping other people away during certain periods.

The idea being, we cannot get the work done with continuous interruptions.

3. Adapting time

Involves looking at your overall schedule and seeing what time can be adapted for different purposes.

For example, sometimes you know a period will be waiting time — what could be achieved in that space?

Adapting time is about time reclamation: seeing what currently ‘useless’ time can be swept up and put to good use.

Examples of time management strategies

Central to many different time management strategies is setting goals and priorities.

In the ABCD analysis, for example, long used in business management, tasks are prioritised on this basis:

• A – Tasks that are perceived as being urgent and important,
• B – Tasks that are important but not urgent,
• C – Tasks that are unimportant but urgent,
• D – Tasks that are unimportant and not urgent.

Another, the ‘Pareto principle’, states that 80 percent of tasks can be done in 20 percent of the time, so do those ones first.

Does time management work?

Time management does work, but not wholly in the way people imagine, the new study reveals.

It improves performance at work somewhat, but its main benefit is to happiness, through a boost to life satisfaction.

After reviewing 158 separate studies on time management, Mr Brad Aeon, the study’s first author, said:

“We found that it does have a moderate impact on work performance.

But we found that the relationship between time management and job performance actually increased over the years, and significantly so.”

Time management has become more important in recent years as work has become more autonomous.

Mr Aeon said:

“People have more leeway in deciding how to structure their own time, so it is up to them to manage their own time as well.

If they are good at it, presumably they will have a better performance.

And if they are not, they will have an even worse performance than they would have had 30 years ago, when they had more of their time managed for them.”

The researchers found that time management had the most effect on work, less on academic success and little on standard test taking.

Critically, though, time management improves people’s life satisfaction — makes them happier.

Mr Aeon said:

“Time management helps people feel better about their lives because it helps them schedule their day-to-day around their values and beliefs, giving them a feeling of self-accomplishment.”

Personality and time management

The researchers found three main factors that predicted who is better at time management.

First, they found that women are slightly better at time management than men.

Second, personality had some influence, with the trait of conscientiousness tied to better time management.

Conscientious people tend to have a strong sense of responsibility and are competent, dutiful and self-disciplined.

Mr Aeon said:

“The only trait that did correlate strongly with time management was conscientiousness.

That involves people’s attention to details, their desire for organization, to be reliable and systematic.

That is understandable, because there is a lot of overlap there.”

Third, people with an internal locus of control were better at time management.

An internal locus of control is high when people feel they have control and can change their lives.

It makes people more likely to reach their goals, because they feel they are attainable.

Time management envy

People like to show off their time management skills to each other, but it is best not to get involved in this game, said Mr Aeon:

“You see these social media posts saying, ‘Yes, there’s a pandemic, but I learned a new language or I woke up at 5 a.m. and accomplished more in a few hours than you will all day.

It makes the rest of us feel bad and creates unrealistic standards as to what we can and cannot do with our time.”

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Aeon et al., 2021).

People in one study lost weight without exercise or major diet change.

Eating slowly helps people feel more full from consuming the same amount of food, research finds.

In fact, chewing each mouthful for 30 seconds can double weight loss, one study has found.

When people eat slowly, it gives more time for the gut to secrete hormones that tell the brain to stop eating.

In contrast, eating quickly reduces the release of these hormones, causing people to carry on eating past the point where they have had enough.

It takes around 15 minutes for the message that the stomach is full to arrive in the brain.

Dr Alexander Kokkinos, the study’s first author, said:

“Most of us have heard that eating fast can lead to food overconsumption and obesity, and in fact some observational studies have supported this notion.

Our study provides a possible explanation for the relationship between speed eating and overeating by showing that the rate at which someone eats may impact the release of gut hormones that signal the brain to stop eating.”

For the study, 17 people ate 300ml of ice cream at different speeds.

Blood samples were taken to measure glucose, plasma lipids, insulin and gut hormones.

The results revealed that those who took the longest to consume the ice cream felt most full.

They also had higher levels of two critical gut hormones called peptide YY and glucagon-like peptide.

These are released by the gut after eating and signal feelings of fullness to the brain and that eating should stop.

Dr Kokkinos said:

“Our findings give some insight into an aspect of modern-day food overconsumption, namely the fact that many people, pressed by demanding working and living conditions, eat faster and in greater amounts than in the past.

The warning we were given as children that ‘wolfing down your food will make you fat,’ may in fact have a physiological explanation.”

The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (Kokkinos et al., 2019).

Psychobabble is often used by people to lend truth to what they are saying.

Psychobabble is when a technical psychological term is used out of context.

Many years ago I asked readers of PsyBlog to nominate and vote on their favourite examples of psychobabble.

Here are the best 30 submissions (including a few of my own).

1. “I get really OCD about…”

“My pet peeve is the use of OCD in, I get really OCD about cleaning my kitchen. What’s really offensive about the usage is that it suggests one can spontaneously develop and un-develop a disorder. This is offensive to people who actually live with mental illness daily. Unless it’s interfering with your functioning, it’s not a disorder.”
Erika

2. Fetish psychobabble

2. “Using fetish to mean ‘a fascination with’ rather than its true meaning (causing sexual arousal).”
Whistler

3. Reptilian brain

“Hands down, my biggest peeve is: reptilian brain. I heard two doctors on Oprah talk endlessly about how past life regression therapy works (!) because it bypasses your ‘normal functioning brain’ and goes straight for the ‘reptilian brain’, garnering knowing nods from the studio audience. I nearly chucked a shoe at my TV set.”
Allison

4. Acting out

“Every time I hear someone misuse the term acting out, I begin experiencing homicidal ideation. Of course ‘acting out’ is a psychoanalytic term denoting the enactment of an internal dynamic in the external world. You can’t recognize the internal feeling states and so it is necessary to ‘act it out.’ But even among fully trained, licensed clinical psychologists this term has come to mean ‘behaving badly’ — which of course makes it a useless term.”
David Godot

5. Retard

“Unfortunately, retard has become a word of choice as far as insults go. The words moron, cretin and idiot began as medical terms that got absorbed into common use over time.”
Romeo Vitelli

6. Self-medicating psychobabble

“I’m not a drug addict, I’ve been self-medicating.”
Ron Frederickson

7. Talk it out

“Talk it out or talk it through. I understand why the therapist wants one to endlessly relive the moment, the rape, the abuse, the arguments with mommy, but I fail to see how the constant repetition does much of anything but reinforce it. Repressed feelings, if there is such a thing, don’t automatically turn into mental bogeymen. In other places, it’s called forgetting.”
Troy Sumrall

8. Projecting

“My favorites: He’s totally projecting. She’s definitely OCD/NPD/some other diagnosis.”
Sara

9. I’m stuck at denial

“I’m stuck at denial. A reference to Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ ‘five stages of grief’ which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. Dr. Kubler-Ross never suggested one stage had to be completed before the next and there’s little evidence for these stages anyway.”
Me

10. Anal psychobabble

“Since I am not a native English speaker I didn’t come across someone calling me anal until I started to study in England. At first I was shocked, since I didn’t immediately understand my friend was not referring to my anus, but to my personality. I don’t think many people realize that they are referring to one of the personality traits emerging from the failure to successfully complete one of Freud’s developmental stages.”
Anon

11. Indigo Children

“Indigo Children. Bah. Humbug.”
the mad LOLscientist

12. Introvert and extrovert psychobabble

“Two terms that I think are way over used and misapplied are introvert and extrovert. Contrary to what people seem to believe, you’re not one or the other, and the huge lists of attributes that get attached to each term are by no means accurate for everyone.”
Stu

13. Bipolar

“When people claim they are bipolar when they’re really just moody. Saying you’re bipolar abdicates all responsibility for the control of your emotions.”
bigstevec

14. Their brains lit up in the scanner

“Their brains lit up in the scanner. Parts of the brain are said to ‘light up’ when we remember, lie, do our taxes and, probably, go to the toilet. Surely everyone knows this is just short-hand for increased blood-flow in a certain part of the brain? Do they hell.
Me

15. Borderline

“In every mental health job I have worked, the real pain in the ass clients are referred to as borderline. Borderline has now ceased to be a disorder; it’s psychobabble for ‘this client is so annoying and needy I would gladly chew off my own foot to escape’.”
Danny

16. Conversational psychoanalysing

“What annoys me most is conversational psychoanalysing – when someone you know (outside of a therapeutic context) frequently tells you that you don’t really mean what you’re saying, that you’re in denial about your true feelings or ignoring what is going on at a subconscious level. Particularly annoying is when they then go on to tell you what you’re really feeling!”
Lirone

17. Schizophrenia psychobabble

“The most irritating one is the word schizophrenia which is wrongly used whenever someone refer to split personalities. I just can’t hold myself back from being a besserwisser and telling them that they have no idea what schizophrenia is.”
Violette

18. Addicted to…anything

“Being addicted to…anything. If you do something more than twice a week it’s an addiction: from sex, to video games to the internet. Are you a marketer with something to promote? Just use the word addiction and watch those headlines flood in.”
Me

19. Type A psychobabble

“When people describe themselves or others as being Type A, when in fact they’re nothing like what Type A is supposed to be. Never mind the ridiculous dichotomy of dividing all human beings into ‘having these collection of traits’ and ‘not having these collection of traits’.”
Ruaidhri

20-22. Every child is gifted…

“One of the richest sources of psychobabble is educational psychology, particularly in the area of giftedness. So we have every child is gifted. My favorite is the reduction of Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities (in themselves a bit dubious) to OEs, as in ‘I know I’m gifted because I’m an OE.’ And we mustn’t forget Gardner’s ‘intelligences,’ which fertilized the ground for the creation of emotional intelligence.”
Catana

23. Retail therapy

“One of my most hated expressions is retail therapy.”
Gary Brandon

24. Vent psychobabble

“People don’t talk about their emotions anymore, they vent. Contrary to the psychobabble, though, people are not like steam engines.”
Me

25-26. Socialize and institutionalize

“Here are two glorious examples of psychobabble from the world of business… socialize, as in, ‘let’s socialize that idea around the group and get some feedback’ (translation: let’s let people know what our idea is and see if they like it), and institutionalize, as in, ‘once we’ve socialized our strategy and have gotten buy-in from our sponsors, let’s make sure it gets institutionalized throughout the organization’.”

Anon

27-28. Get closure

“After a traumatic event (say, the VA Tech shootings) ‘grief counselors’ parachute in to help the survivors/witnesses get closure and move on. My father died over 20 years ago; I still don’t have ‘closure’, though I stopped grieving after what apparently was an appropriate interval. His absence is an ongoing part of my life that I don’t think will ‘close’.”
Gregory Luce

29. Confuse psychologists with psychiatrists

“When people confuse psychologists with psychiatrists. The general public seems to have a very rudimentary understanding of two very different professions.”
kelligirly

30. Hardwired psychobabble

“Hardwired is surely one of the most abused terms in both science journalism and everyday language. According to even usually quite reliable sources, we’re ‘hardwired’ for money, risky behaviour, religion, feeling others’ pain, art, fraud, oh, and liking pink, if you’re a girl of course.”
Vaughan

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How to improve your body image.

Being more aware of your heartbeat and breathing might improve body image, research suggests.

People who are more mindful of internal body signals, including hunger and discomfort, appreciate their body more and take greater pride in it.

In addition, this mindful attention to the body is linked to less worry about being overweight.

Mindfulness exercises often involve paying close attention to the body in a compassionate way.

Self-acceptance, tolerance and loving kindness are the keys to being compassionate (more on this in my ebook ‘Accept Yourself‘).

Yoga can also improve body image and so can watching films about the natural environment.

Ms Jennifer Todd, the study’s first author, said:

“Unfortunately, experiences of negative body image are extremely common, to the extent that some academics consider this a ‘normal’ experience for women in Western society.

Our research finds associations between the awareness of internal body signals and measures of body image.

This could have implications for promoting positive body image, for example modifying interoceptive awareness through mindfulness-based practices.”

The study included 646 people who took tests of bodily awareness and of their body image.

For example, people were asked if they agreed with statement like:

• When I am tense I notice where the tension is located in my
  body.
• I can maintain awareness of my inner bodily sensations even
  when there is a lot going on around me.

The more they agreed with statements like these, the better they felt about their body, the study found.

Ms Todd concluded:

“However the research, which was conducted with exclusively British participants, also demonstrates that the relationship between interoceptive awareness and body image is complex and requires further investigation.”

The study was published in the journal Body Image (Todd et al., 2019).