Author: Jeff Wise

The year 1975 holds a lofty place in the annals of stress research. That was when the Federal government decided to deregulate the telephone business, which at the time was a monopoly held by AT&T. Recognizing the opportunity to observe the effects of mass stress, Salvatore Maddi, a professor of psychology at UC Irvine, began a 12-year project to track the fate of 450 managers at a Chicago subsidiary. What he found upended basic ideas about human psychology and paved the way for a whole new perspective on stress.

When the breakup took place in 1981, half of the company’s employees were laid off. For two-thirds of them, the transition was traumatic. Many were unable to cope. They died of heart attacks and of strokes, engaged in violence, got divorced, and had mental health issues. But the other third didn’t fall apart. Their lives actually improved. Their health got better, their careers soared, and their relationships blossomed.

The finding was revolutionary. “The general idea at the time was that you should stay away from stress because it can kill you,” Maddi recalls. “But it turned out that some people thrive on it.”

What made these people different? Sifting through his data, Maddi discerned a trend. Continue reading How to Thrive Under Stress

It’s four o’clock in the morning,  the temperature ten degrees below freezing in the pitch-black Georgia forest. Troy Espiritu has been running for 20 hours, and he’s so exhausted that he’s hallucinating that the trees around him are falling inward. Is he lost? There’s no way to know. He keeps running, one foot in front of the other. It’s at least another five miles to the next checkpoint. Nausea twists his throat. He stumbles, falls to his knees, and retches a watery bile onto the frozen ground. As the spasms subside, he huddles on the ground, trembling. I’ve just got to get to that tree over there, he tells himself. He pushes himself to his feet, stumbles a couple of yards. He’s moving again. He’s running.

Espiritu is an ordinary guy, a 39-year-old podiatrist with a wife and four kids. Four years ago he was just another casual runner, jogging a few miles a couple of times a month. He’d heard of ultramarathon races, and he thought that the guys who ran them were insane, not his type at all. Man, he thought, there is just no way I would ever do that.

Then he became one of them.

How can a person learn to become tough? People have wondered that since the dawn of time, but only recently have psychologists begun to come up with detailed answers. One of the most important insights is that there is not one variety of toughness, but many. Continue reading An Ultramarathoner’s 5 Secrets of Toughness

In a life-or-death situation, human beings are capable of incredible feats of bravery and self-control. One of the most remarkable ever recorded is the that of Leonid Rogozov, the medic at a Soviet Antarctic research station who was forced to remove his own appendix. I write about the incident at some length in Extreme Fear; to my delight, I’ve discovered that Rogozov’s son has recently published a paper providing even more details on the case. The more I learn, the more incredible it seems. Continue reading No, You Did Not Have a Bad Day. THIS Guy Had a Bad Day

As I’ve written earlier, human beings have an innate skill at dishonesty. And with good reason: being able to manipulate the expectations of those around us is a key survival trait for social animals like ourselves. Indeed, a 1999 study by psychologist Robert Feldman at the University of Massachusetts showed that the most popular kids were also the most effective liars. Just because our aptitude is hardwired doesn’t mean it can’t improve with practice and skill. Here are ten techniques that top-notch liars use to maximize their effectiveness. (By the way, this information is offered as a way to help detect deceit in others, not to practice it yourself. Honestly!) Continue reading Top 10 Secrets of Effective Liars

Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Blink was premised on the idea that our subconscious minds are more gifted than we imagine, and can form uncannily accurate judgments very quickly in very little time. Now, in the past, I’ve criticized certain aspects of this book, and so have other people. But lately I’ve been thinking about the part in which he extols our intuitive ability to quickly understand, with just a few seconds’ exposure, the essence of a person’s personality. He quotes producer Brian Grazer describing how he intuited right away the actor’s exceptionable likeability, and goes on:

My guess is that many of you have the same impression of Tom Hanks. If I asked you what he was like, you would say that he is decent and trustworthy and down-to-earth and funny. But you don’t know him. You’re not friends with him. You’ve only seen him in the movies, playing a wide range of different characters. Nonetheless, you’ve manged to extract something very meaningful about him from those thin slices of experience, and that impression has a powerful effect on how you experience Tom Hanks movies.

This has always struck me as a rather implausible argument. Continue reading “Boy, Was I Wrong About Him”: Why It’s So Hard to Size People Up