The Best Psychology and Self Improvement Articles of 2016

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Time flies when you’re learning, growing, and improving. This is officially the 7th year of The Emotion Machine and it was easily one of our best yet.

As many of you know, every year I try to put together a “best of” collection. This year it was incredibly hard for me to choose a “best of” because I’m so proud of the many articles we published in 2016.

However, I buckled down and finally chose 18 awesome articles that I think reflect the very best of The Emotion Machine over the past year. Did you miss any of these?

Check out our best psychology and self improvement articles of 2016!

Goals are often temporary changes, but systems are long-term. If you want to make a sustainable change in your life, you need to approach it as a systematic change.





What does it mean to be normal? As it turns out, being “normal” is a very rare thing and being “different” is way more common. This is the key principle behind individuality.





What does it means when someone has a “presence” or “aura” about themselves? How can we build an undeniable presence for ourselves?





Meditation isn’t magic, it’s a type of technology. Like a telescope or microscope, it can help extend our awareness toward things we aren’t usually conscious of.





Confidence is a very valuable trait to have, but an unhealthy ego is often an unjustified sense of confidence that can end up destroying us.





There’s no such thing as a life without a little chaos and turbulence. The “Five Whys” exercise is a great tool for recalibrating our values during these difficult times.





Our memory is a fickle thing. Only a small percentage of information we are exposed to we actually remember. How can you make your ideas more impactful?





It’s important to be open and honest when you communicate your feelings to others, but we also have to be careful not to turn ourselves into “emotional manipulators.”





Our body language can often be more honest than our words when it comes to communicating our true thoughts, feelings, and intentions.​​​​​​​





We’re constantly being bombarded with facts, statistics, and graphs on news sites, blogs, and social media. How can we be a more skeptical thinker in the face of all this information?





In our increasingly complex world, how can a simple checklist help us stay focused and avoid making silly and stupid mistakes?





Do you have performance anxiety when it comes to public speaking, job interviews, or first dates? Check out these must-know tips to help you “steal the show” every time.​​​​​​​





“Being yourself” isn’t easy. It means being upfront and honest about who you are, and that entails the possibility of getting judged by others. While “being yourself” has real costs, the reward of being true to yourself is well worth it.​





How does culture influence our minds and how we see the world? Psychologist Richard Nisbett shares his extensive research on the difference between “Western” and “Eastern” minds.





Do you feel like you’re a part of your local community? If your answer is “no,” you’re not defective, this is actually how many people feel today.





A group of smart people can often feed off of each other and become more than the sum of their individual parts. They bring out the best in each other – and this is just as true for a business or organization as it is for a nation as a whole.





We often want to do good in the world, but we don’t know the best way to do it. What’s the difference between “effective altruism” vs. “feel good altruism?” How can we make our efforts to improve the world more impactful?





Campfires provided an important evolutionary step in “group-bonding” that likely influenced the development of society and civilization as a whole.

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These are the best psychology and self improvement articles published at The Emotion Machine in 2016.

There’s a lot of amazing information and insight here, so I recommend at least taking a quick glance at all of these.

Thanks to everyone for all your love and support this year. Let’s keep learning, growing, and improving into the new year!



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