James' World 2

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You are sitting at lunch at your desk, worrying that the report you just finished isn’t good enough. You know about the benefits of self-compassion and wonder if practicing it would make you feel better about your work.

For example, there is one self-compassion exercise where you think of something that bothers you about yourself. You then write a letter from the perspective of a compassionate friend. There’s another exercise in which you imagine a compassionate friend comforting you as you struggle. And there’s an exercise meant to tackle the self-critical voices in your head.

You could use a compassionate friend right about now to reassure you about your report. You imagine a friend sitting next to you, saying words of reassurance: “It’s OK, you did your best on the report and that’s all you can ask of yourself. It will be fine.”

But your friend’s imagined words feel empty. You don’t feel any better. In fact, you feel worse; now you are thinking about that time you turned in a report that your boss thought was terrible. You are now even more convinced your report is bad.

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Greater Good

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— Searching for the Right Reasons

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Yuricazac/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

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A few years ago, I started noticing that my normal news diet left me feeling depleted and depressed. I tried mixing up my news habits, like moving my morning reading routine to the afternoon and giving up TV news entirely. Some days, I’d read a couple newsletters and not much else. It felt like a shameful secret. Shouldn’t journalists love consuming the news?

For a long time, I thought the problem was me. But eventually, journalist friends started confessing that they needed a break from the news, too. And I started to ask myself a bigger question: Was the problem the news itself? And how journalists typically identify, frame and deliver the news? And if so, was there a way to fix it?

On a two-part episode of How To!, we investigated that question with the help of some very smart people: Nicole Lewis, an editor at Slate (now with The Marshall Project), and David Bornstein, co-founder/CEO of the Solutions Journalism Network. Nicole and David are two people who are trying in different ways to redesign the news for human consumption. In these episodes, we talk about how journalists can regain the trust of their audience—and how news consumers can find stories that both inform and inspire. With help from our listeners, we try to get to the heart of how the news became so broken, and how we can put it back together again.

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We try to use our time wisely—both at work and in leisure—but we often waste it. We may blame work for stripping us of recreation, but when valuable free time comes around, we can often revert back to more work.

What explains the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? A conversation with Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans helps us analyze our complex relationship with time and how to orient our time use around what we value.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.

Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by the Fix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), Gregory David (“Under the Tides”), and Yomoti (“Nebula”).

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Getty / The Atlantic

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Therapist Kelly McDaniel has spent more than a decade helping her clients overcome grief.

In counseling hundreds of women, she noticed a particular grief many of them experienced that had nothing to do with death. Rather, McDaniel saw women who longed for the love of a mother, even if theirs was still alive.

In 2008, McDaniel coined the term “mother hunger” in her book “Ready to Heal.” She fleshed out the term in her 2021 book “Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance” after noticing the phenomenon in so many of her clients.

Mother hunger isn’t a medical diagnosis. Rather, it’s McDaniel’s theory to explain how specific types of childhood neglect lead to attachment injuries, which can impact how a person acts in future relationships.

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Kelly McDaniel is a grief therapist who coined the term “mother hunger” in 2008. Courtesy of Kelly McDaniel

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When we talk about “downsizing,” it’s usually referring to the size a person’s home. For example, people may decide to sell their larger family home after their children have grown up and moved out because they simply no longer need that much living space anymore. Others buy or rent a home that initially seemed like the right size for them but later realized that it’s too large.

Whatever the reason for your move, part of the downsizing process involves clearing out stuff you no longer need, and ensuring that everything has a spot in your new place; in other words, some serious decluttering. Here are some strategies that may help.

How to declutter when downsizing

There’s no need to wait until you have solid moving plans to start decluttering. In fact, the sooner you’re able to get it done (or at least begin the process), the better: That way you’ll feel less overwhelmed during the already-stressful experience of packing and moving. (see article)

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Photo: SeventyFour (Shutterstock)

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In the 13th canto of “Purgatorio” in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the 14th-century Italian poet describes the ultimate punishment of people who in life had fallen prey to envy, one of the seven deadly sins. He shows them perched precariously on the edge of a cliff. Because envy started with what they saw, their eyes are wired shut. To avoid falling, they must support themselves upon one another, something they never did in life. This is a pretty grim punishment—not surprising, perhaps, given that envy is the only sin that is forbidden by not just one of the Ten Commandments in the Catholic tradition, but two.

Perhaps you are less concerned than Dante with punishment in the hereafter. There is plenty of evidence that envy—the resentful longing for what someone else possesses—can give you a little bit of hell or purgatory in the here and now. We all know how envy feels—how it sours our love and desiccates our soul. How it brings out the ugly, spiteful phantasms inside us that take pleasure in the suffering of others for no other reason than that their good fortune makes ours feel insufficient in comparison. As the essayist Joseph Epstein has written, “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.”

Envy, in short, is a happiness killer. Unfortunately, it is also completely natural, and no one escapes it entirely. But if you understand it better, you can stop fueling it and step back from that cliff’s edge.

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Jan Buchczik

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A 31-year-old gardener wonders what she should be eating in the day to improve her sleep at night.

A little about me:

Age: 31

Occupation: gardener

Number of hours sleep you get each night: 6 hours

Number of hours sleep you wish you got each night: 8-9 hours

Any officially diagnosed sleep-related problems: no

How much water you drink on average per day: 1 litre (not enough)

How much exercise I do on average per week: 1 cardio workout a week, plus the manual labor of my day-to-day job (see article)

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Lead image design: Ami O’Callaghan; Photos by Getty Images

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

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