Modern research has taught us a lot about what keeps people in love — and what makes them fall out of love.
There are dozens of research that teach us a lot about what keeps people in love. Many of them point to the importance of work and effort. Successful relationships emerge when two people invest in their relationship — over time their love becomes stronger, more exciting, and full of fresh emotions and feelings.

Relationship researchers are deeply motivated to identify interpersonal patterns of successful relationships and marriages.

Dr John Gottman, a renowned psychological researcher who focuses on marital stability and divorce prediction, argues that the "Four Horsemen" can predict the end of a relationship — Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling.

He says identifying these communication styles is a necessary first step to eliminating them and building a strong relationship. To avoid destructive communication in our relationships, we recommend we replace them with healthy, productive ones.

Whenever the cat sitter texts Georgia Mason and her husband photos of Sylvie and Luke, their two brown tabbies, "we usually agree if our cats are looking cheerful or grumpy or anxious," she says.

Now, a new study led by Mason, a behavioral biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, shows that people who can consistently decode feline expressions belong to a special clan: That of the cat whisperer.

For the research, Mason and colleagues created an online survey and invited internet users (aka, the cat's biggest fan club) to take part. The 6,329 participants from 85 countries watched between two to 20 short videos of cat expressions, and then responded if they thought the felines were distressed or happy. These random users got an average of 11.85 out of 20 ratings correct — better than chance, but not by much.

A world immersed in paranoid concerns of safety distorts one's outlook, which is detrimental to the ability to function and thrive.

It's a tough time for Generation Z. Mental health problems, specifically mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, are skyrocketing. Gen Z is the least likely to report good or excellent mental health and the most likely to report poor or fair mental health. Suicide rates for US teens and young adults are the highest ever.

As a 23-year-old Gen-Zer who has dealt with these issues personally and has seen the impact on fellow friends and loved ones, it breaks my heart.

On the path of bettering my mental health and trying to help others, my journey has led me to seek explanations on why things have gotten so bad, and I found a compelling hypothesis in the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and legal scholar Greg Lukianoff.

In their co-authored book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Haidt and Lukianoff examine Gen Z's mental health problem. They argue that youths have been immersed in a world characterized by paranoid concerns of safety, which distorts their thoughts and is detrimental to their mental well-being.

"Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt," they say.

I drop into an outdoor freezer full of water and ice, with no clothes on, in December. My body starts to buck, breath unable to leave my lungs. It feels as if I'm going into cardiac arrest.

I suspect that this one-to-one session with Tony Riddle, ultra-athlete and natural lifestyle coach, will be my ruin. When he greets me, too early in the morning, he is disconcertingly hale, with the focused gaze of a Viking approaching shore. Worse, he is wearing a pair of those amphibious foot-gloves. You know, the ones with individual toe sheaths that make you think a gorilla is walking towards you on its hands.

"Inside every human is an endurance athlete," is one of his remarks on meeting, which is a) too inspiring for a Tuesday morning, and b) not true. Beneath my feckless exterior is an even lazier core slob, only kept at bay with strategic food bribes and inconvenient council tax demands.

Riddle's "rewilding" philosophy is about reconnecting humans to natural behaviours - particularly ways of moving that modern lifestyles have estranged us from. We were not designed to sit for 10 hours a day, he explains. Electric lighting confuses our sleep cycles. Urban architecture encourages bad posture. The artificial repetitions of the gym encourage strain and uneven musculature. He winces when he sees my trainers, which is rich. Why are most shoes narrower at the front than the heel? he asks. A foot's natural shape is the opposite - toes are meant to spread, and grip the ground: we have more than 100 muscles down there. Thick-soled, cushioned running shoes cause these to atrophy, and deprive us of sensory feetback. I mean back feet. I mean feedback. Sorry, I've been sitting for a while.

Roger Scruton and Jordan Peterson have captured the attention of the Christian imagination in a way few, if any, explicitly Christian writers, thinkers, or movements in recent years can claim to have done. Intellectually serious Christians who come across them cannot help but be fascinated by the way in which these public intellectuals have been able to reach down into our secular culture and extract an unmistakably Christian message, without putting off readers or listeners who do not have any concrete religious convictions to speak of, let alone any experience of institutional Christianity. Both have tapped into a growing sentiment in our otherwise disenchanted culture that Christian civilization in the West may be worth preserving after all, even at this late hour.

Scruton and Peterson intrigue us because they have both reach and staying power — the very things Christians in missionary mode hope for most.

Scruton's staying power is beyond dispute. He has built up a richly deserved reputation over the course of forty years as one of the — if not the — leading conservative philosophers of our time.

Peterson appeared on the world stage much more recently, but his staying power is beyond doubt as well. If his critics had been right about him, his 15 minutes would have been up by now. But this psychologist from the Canadian prairies spent years thinking deeply about the strengths and weaknesses of our culture — to which his first book and magnum opus, Maps of Meaning: An Architecture of Belief (1999), is a testament — so that when his moment came, he would be ready for it. As has been the case for much of Scruton's career, with Peterson, people came for the controversy but stayed for the substance.

The late psychonaut/philosopher Terence McKenna once said "The cost of sanity, in this society, is a certain level of alienation," and I think my regular readers will immediately and experientially understand exactly what he was talking about.

It's not always easy to be on the outside of consensus reality. Our entire society, after all, has been built upon consensus — upon a shared agreement about what specific mouth sounds mean, on what money is and how it works, on how we should all behave toward each other in public spaces, and on what normal human behavior in general looks like.

We all share a learned agreement that we picked up from our culture in early childhood that it's normal and acceptable to stand around with your hands in your pockets and babble about the weather to anyone who gets too close to you, for example, whereas it would be considered weird and disruptive to stand around slathered in Cheese Whiz shrieking the word "Poop!" But we could just as easily reverse that consensus on behavioral norms tomorrow, and as long as we all agreed to it we could do it without missing a beat.

In the Pixar film Inside Out, the emotions of an 11-year-old girl are personified as perky Joy, petulant Disgust and hulking Anger. Sadness - voiced by The American Office's Phyllis Smith - is, predictably, a downer with a deep side-parting and a chunky knit. Amy Poehler's Joy can hardly stand to be around her, like a colleague you would time your trips to the tea point to avoid.

But the takeaway of the 2015 film - said by Variety to "for ever change the way people think about the way people think" - was that both emotions were necessary, and Sadness was as valid a part of life as Joy. Now there is a case for not only accepting Sadness, as in Inside Out - but embodying her, too. Researchers from Hong Kong and Texas recently found that individuals asked to think of their sadness as a person reported feeling less sad afterwards, a result they attributed to the increased distance perceived between the self and the emotion.

Study participants were asked to imagine Sadness's personality, appearance, conversational style and how they might interact with them. In doing so, the idea was they would make it separate and less relevant to them. "The underlying mechanics of it is detachment - when they think about sadness as a person, it's like they are endowing independence to the emotion," says Li Yang, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and corresponding author of the paper, published in September in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. "They feel detached from it, and that's why they would feel less sad afterwards."

Sadness is well established by research as leading people to focus on short-term and often indulgent rewards. By picturing their sadness with human traits and characteristics, study participants ameliorated its effect and were then more likely to display self-control. Such anthropomorphic thinking was even shown to be an effective advance strategy, preparing consumers to choose a healthier (or more practical) option.

The first successful person I ever met — truly successful, with accomplishments I admired and ambition I strove to emulate — was an entrepreneur in his forties, a client of mine in the first real business I'd ever started. I was 24 and eager to learn; he was constantly cheerful, and had more money than he could count.

We became close friends, and he told me eventually that he'd lost his wife, the love of his life, a half-decade before we met — the kind of loss, he said, that you never get over. It was a story that made his positive outlook seem all the more remarkable to me: Here was someone who had been through tragedy, and yet still made it a priority to do good things with his time and his money. He seemed to truly care about other people.

Often, he'd tell me what he saw as the secret to his success: "I just try to avoid being unsuccessful," he said. He studied what made someone (avoidably) unhappy, broke, or unmotivated — and then he avoided making the same mistakes.

I knew in my bones that he was right. Too often, we adopt a plug-and-play attitude: "If I do x, I'll be successful." But if success was easy and predictable, we wouldn't be seeking advice on how to achieve it. Instead of studying what's worked for other people, I've followed my friend's advice, paying close attention to the habits that hold people back from reaching their goals.

Here are 10 of the most common self-imposed barriers. If you find yourself bumping up against one, use them as a signal to reevaluate, reflect, and reverse course.

For Japanese workers in big cities, a typical work day begins with a state called sushi-zume, a term which likens commuters squeezed into a crowded train car to tightly packed grains of rice in sushi.

The stress doesn't stop there. The country's notorious work culture ensures most people put in long hours at the office, governed by strict hierarchical rules. Overwork is not uncommon and the last trains home on weekdays around midnight are filled with people in suits. How do they manage?

The secret may have to do with what Japanese call ikigai. There is no direct English translation, but it's a term that embodies the idea of happiness in living. Essentially, ikigai is the reason why you get up in the morning.

To those in the West who are more familiar with the concept of ikigai, it's often associated with a Venn diagram with four overlapping qualities: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.

"I can't go on. I'll go on."
~ Samuel Beckett

Sometimes it just gets to be too goddamn much. You just finished a soul-draining argument with a family member who insists that Putin controls all major world events because that's what the TV said so it must be true, then you check the poll numbers for the upcoming elections in the US and UK and you see your favorite candidates just don't have the kind of numbers they're going to need, the latest revelation that the US and its allies deceived the world about what's happening in Syria has been completely swept under the rug by the establishment news churn, Bolivia has been taken over by US-backed Christian fascists, and now you're watching Mike Pompeo's stupid asshole face spouting some made-up bullshit about Iran that you know the news media will never hold him accountable for.

And it's just too goddamn much.