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Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) affects roughly 21 million US adults each year according to the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5-TR, making it the l...
Read article →Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) affects approximately 3.1 percent of US adults in any given year and 5.7 percent over a lifetime, according to the National Institute of Mental Health and the Americ...
Read article →Persistent Depressive Disorder (PDD), historically known as dysthymia, affects approximately 1.5 percent of US adults in any given year and roughly 2.5 percent over a lifetime, according to the Nation...
Read article →Burnout became an official medical classification in May 2019, when the World Health Organization included it in the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). The change...
Read article →Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) affects approximately 12.1 percent of US adults at some point in their lives, according to the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Psychiatric Associatio...
Read article →Trepverter is the Yiddish word for the perfect comeback that arrives ten minutes after the conversation ended. You are walking down the stairs. You are already in your coat. And suddenly the devastati...
Read article →Toska is the Russian word for a spiritual ache that has no clean English equivalent. Vladimir Nabokov, who translated his own novels between Russian and English, famously wrote that "no single word in...
Read article →Mono no aware (literally "the pathos of things") is a Japanese aesthetic concept describing the gentle sadness that washes over you when you notice something beautiful and realize it will soon be gone...
Read article →Iktsuarpok is an Inuit word from the Inuktitut language for the restless feeling of expecting someone and going outside again and again to see if they have arrived. You keep opening the door. You keep...
Read article →Tartle is the Scots word for the moment of panic when you have to introduce someone and suddenly realize you have completely forgotten their name. Your mouth is already open. Your hand is already exte...
Read article →Sehnsucht is the German word for an aching longing for a place that does not exist and possibly never did. It is the homesickness for a home you have never visited. The yearning for a life you cannot...
Read article →Gigil is the Tagalog word for the almost violent urge to squeeze, pinch, or bite something unbearably cute. You see a chubby baby and your hands clench. You hold a puppy and feel a strange desire to s...
Read article →Yuutsu is a Japanese word for a specific kind of depression that grows out of obligation and rigid social order rather than out of personal failure. Where English "depression" implies something has go...
Read article →Between 60 and 80 percent of people report experiencing déjà vu at some point, and the phenomenon has fascinated philosophers, novelists, and neurologists for centuries. The term itself, French for al...
Read article →Roughly 55 percent of people report experiencing frisson, the technical term for the chills or shivers that specific moments of music produce. Some of these moments also trigger tears, even when the s...
Read article →A specific smell can transport you to a moment from decades ago with an intensity and emotional vividness that no other sense can match. This phenomenon is called the Proust effect, named after Marcel...
Read article →The phenomenon of having your best ideas in the shower is so widely reported that it has become a cultural cliché, yet the underlying neuroscience explains why it happens with surprising precision. Cr...
Read article →Roughly 98 percent of people experience earworms, those fragments of songs that repeat in your head long after you have stopped hearing the original. The phenomenon has a formal scientific name, invol...
Read article →Roughly 8 percent of people will experience sleep paralysis at least once in their lives, and many of them will describe the experience in nearly identical terms. They wake up unable to move, convince...
Read article →Most people assume everyone has an internal monologue, that continuous inner voice narrating thoughts, planning speech, and commenting on experience. Recent research has shown that this assumption is...
Read article →Approximately 70 percent of people experience hypnic jerks, those sudden muscular contractions that happen just as you are falling asleep. They are often accompanied by a vivid sensation of falling, a...
Read article →Approximately 4 percent of people experience synesthesia, a neurological condition in which one sensory or cognitive pathway automatically triggers another. The most common form is grapheme-color syne...
Read article →You walk into a room and immediately forget why you came in. This experience is so universal that it has its own name, the doorway effect, and it has been studied experimentally with surprising rigor....
Read article →Sleep is not a single state. It is a structured sequence of neurological phases that your brain cycles through roughly every 90 minutes throughout the night. Each stage performs distinct biological fu...
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