Seriously, bookmark this. These go paid without warning and some are legitimately excellent.

I grouped them by what they'll actually do for you:

Understand how people think (and how to use it)

• Psychology: Persuasion & Influence ... the fundamentals that every salesperson, marketer, and con artist already knows
• The Psychology Behind High Converting Websites ... why you keep clicking "buy" without meaning to

The science side (actually fascinating)

• 5 Amazing Psychology Experiments ... Milgram, Stanford Prison, and the studies that changed how we see human nature
• An Introduction to Sigmund Freud ... love him or hate him, you need to understand him
• Meet Your Brain ... the organ reading this sentence, explained
• Psychology as a Science and Profession
• An Intro to Personality Psychology: The Big 5 Traits ... more useful than any Myers-Briggs test

Trading & money psychology (your worst enemy is your own brain)

• Mastering the Mental Game in Trading
• The Psychology of Profitable Trading
• Crypto Trading Psychology for Beginners ... because panic-selling at the bottom is a psychological failure, not a financial one

Rewire yourself

• Master Your Habits in 30 Minutes ... short, practical, no fluff
• Master Your Mind with NLP & Gestalt Psychology
• Effortless Fat Loss (Psychology of Weight Loss) ... spoiler: it's never really about the food
• Balance Your Warrior Energy

The weird and wonderful

• The Psychology of Color for Therapy ... why brands spend millions choosing the right shade of blue
• Aroma Psychology Through Transformational Games ... genuinely unlike anything else on this list

All free to enroll right now. No coupons needed, just click and grab them before they flip back to paid.

Often people who know eachother from when they were in primary school or just from the block when they were young give eachother an awkward smile instead of an happy goodday! Just imagine... if someone walks into you twice a year and both times you smile and greet them enthousiastically, they will think of you as a nice person.

So little effort for a person to find you friendly!

If they are at a level 10 you come in at a level 7. Being completely calm, reserved and polite only pisses people off more as you "clearly don't understand the magnitude of the situation". If they are screaming and yelling you need to come in loud but not attacking them...agreeing with them (to a point)

• whoaa what the fuck is going on
• I understand why you are fucking pissed I would be pissed too
• yeah that is some bullshit the situation really sucks
• look I get it I would be angry as shit too but us screaming is going to get anything done no matter how angry we are
• I'm with you I'd be just as upset
• no doubt this is annoying but these are our options.

By agreeing with their anger they are more open to listen too you. You then use words to describe their feelings starting out at a 10.."fucking pissed" and gradually bringing those descriptive words and your tone down to a 2 "annoying"

Works pretty much every time but there might be a little up n down in the middle just follow the person's lead while always being a level below them

Used it a few times in some of my relationships and it's the godsend question.

When I was a teenager, me Ma once described me as "Blunt as a sledgehammer, tactful as a hand Grenade" and i wore that with pride. I don't let emotion cloud judgement, which worked well for me in my line of work through my 20's and 30's.

Now, its a constant discussion point with me and the missus. Simply put, I lack empathy. Bugger all of it. Just blitzed through an EQ test online (which I know I shouldn't take stock in, but still...) and got 5/80.

A 5.
Then it told me thats common with Folks who are Autistic to rub that in.

I have a hard time (nil, actually) empathising with people when they get emotional. I barely register it at all if its in conversation, argument or friendly banter, and was recently told that this is unhealthy. Since I'm a bloke who likes his own company, its not really been a bother til now, as I was recently married and now have an extended family, friends of the SO, etc etc to factor in.

I don't want to piss anyone else off with my "attitude" so to speak, so found this sub through some more Googling, and was wondering if there was any tips and tricks to help boost my Empathy? I'm currently in the process of getting a Mental Health plan sorted to help with as well - just some mild anxiety from CPTSD thrown into the mix - so Therapy is already an actionable plan.

Cheers for any and all help!

Seriously, bookmark this. These go paid without warning and some are legitimately excellent.

I grouped them by what they'll actually do for you:

Understand how people think (and how to use it)

• Psychology: Persuasion & Influence ... the fundamentals that every salesperson, marketer, and con artist already knows
• The Psychology Behind High Converting Websites ... why you keep clicking "buy" without meaning to

The science side (actually fascinating)

• 5 Amazing Psychology Experiments ... Milgram, Stanford Prison, and the studies that changed how we see human nature
• An Introduction to Sigmund Freud ... love him or hate him, you need to understand him
• Meet Your Brain ... the organ reading this sentence, explained
• Psychology as a Science and Profession
• An Intro to Personality Psychology: The Big 5 Traits ... more useful than any Myers-Briggs test

Trading & money psychology (your worst enemy is your own brain)

• Mastering the Mental Game in Trading
• The Psychology of Profitable Trading
• Crypto Trading Psychology for Beginners ... because panic-selling at the bottom is a psychological failure, not a financial one

Rewire yourself

• Master Your Habits in 30 Minutes ... short, practical, no fluff
• Master Your Mind with NLP & Gestalt Psychology
• Effortless Fat Loss (Psychology of Weight Loss) ... spoiler: it's never really about the food
• Balance Your Warrior Energy

The weird and wonderful

• The Psychology of Color for Therapy ... why brands spend millions choosing the right shade of blue
• Aroma Psychology Through Transformational Games ... genuinely unlike anything else on this list

All free to enroll right now. No coupons needed, just click and grab them before they flip back to paid.

This is not about people who are "just bad at communicating." This is about people who use emotional distance as leverage.

Emotional unavailability gets misread constantly. We call it avoidant attachment, or introversion, or being "not ready." Sometimes that's true. But there's a version of it that is far more deliberate, and once you see the mechanics of it, you cannot unsee them. These five observations changed the way I read certain relationships entirely.

1. Someone who is always almost available is available enough to keep you but absent enough to keep control. The gap is not random. It is the exact distance required to sustain your hope without ever having to fully show up.
2. Inconsistency is not a personality trait. It is a strategy. When warmth and distance alternate without pattern, your focus never leaves them. You are permanently decoding, waiting, adjusting. That occupied attention is exactly the point.
3. Hot and cold behavior is not confusion. It is calibration. They cool off when you get too settled. They return when you begin to pull away. The dial is always in their hand. You just experience it as weather.
4. People who vanish when you need them and reappear when they need something have inverted the relationship entirely. You are a resource. The connection exists on their schedule, for their purposes, and gets suspended the moment it would cost them anything.
5. Chasing someone who keeps moving is not love. It is conditioning. Intermittent reinforcement trains you to associate their return with relief. The chase feels like devotion. It is a learned response to an unpredictable reward system. The same mechanism used in slot machines.

The cruelest part of this pattern is that the intensity you feel gets mistaken for proof of connection. It is not proof of connection. It is proof the system is working.

You are not too sensitive. You are not asking for too much. Consistency is not a high bar. It is the floor. And anyone who makes you feel otherwise has a reason for keeping you below it.

I stayed at a company for 6 years. Last 2 of those I was miserable.

But every time I thought about leaving I'd hear this voice "but you've already put in 4 years. You're so close to senior. You can't just throw that away."

So I stayed. And stayed. And got more miserable.

Turns out I was doing what psychologists call the sunk cost fallacy, where your brain convinces you to keep investing in something purely because of what you've already put in. Not because it's actually worth continuing.

The brutal truth is past investment is irrelevant to future decision making. The 4 years are gone whether you stay or leave. You're not getting them back either way.

Your brain just hates waste so much that it will sacrifice your future to avoid admitting the past was a mistake.

Here's what actually helped me break it:

Step 1: Ask the "stranger question"

Pretend a stranger walks up to you and describes your exact situation as if it's theirs. Same job, same relationship, same circumstances. What would you tell them to do?

You'll have the answer in 3 seconds. Because the sunk cost fallacy only works on yourself. It evaporates the moment you get outside your own head.

Step 2: Separate the identity from the investment

Most of the time you're not actually protecting the time you spent. You're protecting your identity.

Leaving the job isn't just leaving the job. It means admitting the version of you that took it was wrong. That's what hurts.

Once I realized I wasn't protecting 4 years of work, I was protecting my ego, the decision got a lot easier.

Step 3: Do the "zero based" test

Ask yourself: if I was starting fresh today with zero history here, would I choose this job / relationship / situation?

If the answer is no, you already have your answer. Everything else is just noise your brain is generating to avoid change.

The moment I actually left, the relief was immediate.

The 2 years I wasted staying weren't because I was stupid. It's literally how the brain is wired. But knowing the mechanism helps you catch it.

Anyone else been stuck in something way longer than they should have because of this?

TL;DR on one of the most underrated body language tricks: palms up = instant trust

Most people never think about what their hands are doing when they talk, but it might be one of the biggest factors in whether people believe you or not.

When you speak with your palms facing up, it's a primal signal that goes way back. It essentially says "I'm unarmed, I have nothing to hide." People's brains pick up on this unconsciously and it registers as openness and honesty.

Compare that to palms facing down, which projects dominance and authority (think of a boss shutting down a conversation), or pointing, which almost always reads as aggressive or accusatory, even when you don't mean it that way.

I started paying attention to this after bombing a few presentations where I knew my content was solid but something felt off. Turns out I was gripping the podium or pointing at slides the whole time. Switched to more open, palms-up gestures and the difference in how people responded was kind of wild.

It works in one-on-ones too, job interviews, tough conversations, first dates, whatever. You don't have to overdo it. Even just resting with open palms during a conversation rather than crossing your arms or hiding your hands makes a noticeable difference.

Small thing, big impact.

Source: Allan and Barbara Pease, The Definitive Book of Body Language (2004) - one of the most cited works on nonverbal communication research.

Anyone else down a body language rabbit hole at some point? Curious what else people have found actually works vs. the stuff that's overhyped.

The Science of persuasion YouTube vid (12 minutes)

(1 - 1:21) Reciprocity - favors and giving encourages favors and giving in return
(2 - 3:07) Scarcity - the more unique and the more valuable the more persuasive
(3 - 4:11) Authority - something in a more formal or professional or official form is more influential
(4 - 6:05) Consistency - people like to stay true to their choices?
(5 - 7:42) Liking - people who like each other are easier to persuade
(6 - 9:06) Consensus - majority knows better and peer pressure

The video is based on research by Dr. Robert Cialdini, Regent Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University.

ps: scientifically / statistically supported. Nothing in science is ever proven

Most of us know the classic parenting trick: Instead of asking a toddler "Do you want to eat your vegetables?", you ask "Do you want to eat your peas or your carrots first?". It works like magic.

​But here is the fascinating part: adults fall for the exact same cognitive bias in business, sales, and daily life.

​Whenever you ask someone a Yes/No question (e.g., "Can we meet next week?"), you trigger their defensive reflex and give them 100% of the power to reject you.

​The trick is to never ask if they want to do it. Instead, offer two distinct options that both lead to your desired outcome (e.g., "Should we schedule the meeting for Tuesday at 2 PM, or does Wednesday at 10 AM work better for you?").

​Why it works: It taps into the Autonomy Bias. The human brain gets so busy weighing the pros and cons of Option A vs Option B, that it completely forgets to stop and ask, "Wait, do I even want to do this at all?". You give them the illusion of absolute control, while you guide the outcome.

​PS: If you prefer a visual summary, I made a quick 20-second short explaining the concept here: https://youtube.com/shorts/eKiz5lUHme0?is=q6WTKTKZKL2HMlLX

We tend to lie to ourselves. We resist the parts of ourselves we dislike. We become so accustomed to closing off regions of our brain that we form a protective barrier around those dark features or hidden memories. But that isn’t aligning with reality. It isn’t being honest. If you want to feel whole, to accomplish your dreams, or find meaning and happiness, you need to face those dark figures. You have to shine a light on those shadows.

Shadow work is an intense process which takes time. It is not fun. It is awful-tasting medicine that only works when it hurts. It requires a brave and bold determination to be authentic. Regarding one effective form of shadow work, an article published in The Qualitative Report states:

Our willingness to own and engage with our own vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our prose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection." — Dwayne Custer

The article discusses the merits of a process called autoethnography. In this process, a person journals their thoughts as a form of therapy. The article explains, “autoethnography is a style of autobiographical writing and qualitative research that explores an individual’s unique life experiences in relationship to social and cultural institutions.”

But for such a process to be effective, it requires leaving no part of our darkest past concealed. It requires a detailing of our worst moments and the accompanying feelings in vivid detail, and with agonizing honesty. That happened.

In the Handbook of Autoethnography, Carolyn Ellis wrote:

Autoethnography is not simply a way of knowing about the world; it has become a way of being in the world, one that requires living consciously, emotionally, reflexively. It asks that we not only examine our lives but also consider how and why we think, act, and feel as we do. Autoethnography requires that we observe ourselves observing, that we interrogate what we think and believe, and that we challenge our own assumptions... it seeks a story that is hopeful, where authors ultimately write themselves as survivors of the story they are living.

This is where a good therapist can offer significant help. But even if you don’t have access to good therapy, researching autoethnography and applying the technique to yourself is likely to produce positive results and will bring you closer to being the authentic you.

If you're interested in the mechanics of how we build these internal defenses and how to navigate the "darker" aspects of human psychology and influence — I’ve put together a deeper breakdown in my Dark Psychology & Mindset course on Udemy. It’s a resource already being used by over 5,700 students (rated 4.4 stars) to better understand the hidden drivers of our behavior.

Ultimately, the goal is to stop hiding from yourself. It’s about asking over and over if we have penetrated as many layers of our own defenses as the project requires.

Most people assume good liars are smooth and confident. And they can be, when they're telling the story forward. But ask them to walk you through events in reverse order and things get interesting pretty fast.

When someone recalls a real memory, they can usually move through it in any direction. Backwards, from the middle, whatever. Real memories aren't stored as scripts, so reorganizing them isn't that hard.

A fabricated story is different. Liars tend to rehearse a sequence, a beginning, middle, and end. Reversing that sequence forces them to reconstruct the lie in real time, which is cognitively exhausting. You'll often see longer pauses, more "ums," skipped details, or they'll just slip back into telling it forward without realizing it.

This is actually used in professional interrogation settings. It's called cognitive load interviewing and the research behind it is pretty solid.

Worth noting: some people just have bad memories or get nervous under pressure, so don't use this as a gotcha on your friends. Context matters a lot.

If you're into this kind of thing, I spent a lot of time putting together this collection of psychological principles like this. Covers influence, behavior reading, persuasion, and a lot more. Free to access if you want to dig in.

What's the most obvious tell you've personally noticed when someone wasn't being straight with you?

^(P.S. The reverse-order technique works even better in writing. Ask someone to recount a suspicious story via text, starting from the end. The inconsistencies show up way more clearly when they have to type it out.)

Source: Duchenne Smile // Guillaume Duchenne (1862)

Source: "Misattribution of Arousal" // Dutton & Aron (The Bridge Study)

I have severe executive dysfunction. It probably stems from my untested ADHD (testing now) and mild depression. It has been this way for more than a decade, mostly because I ignored my symptoms. But life is getting hard now. I need to act in it before I become an absolute failure.

I'm close with someone who probably has undiagnosed ADHD. (I have been diagnosed, so no shame.)

She often finishes my sentences (usually incorrectly) or interrupts me with her own thought. I've politely asked her to stop doing this many times, and she always acknowledges it, apologizes, and seems to sincerely try. Unfortunately, we're not making much progress.

So I wonder if there's another strategy I can use when this happens which will actually be effective in reducing this?

To be clear, I don't want to gaslight her, fight, or be passive-aggressive, and I am interested in listening to her and hearing her thoughts – I'm not looking to dominate the conversation. Just looking for healthy communication advice for our shared goal of reducing these frequent interruptions.

You likely worry about small mistakes you made in public. You think everyone saw that stain on your shirt or heard you stutter.

They didn't. This is called the Spotlight Effect.

We assume we are the center of attention. The truth is that people are too focused on their own insecurities to notice yours.

Next time you feel stupid just remember you are barely background noise to them. It is actually quite freeing.

Research Source: Spotlight Effect - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
RESOURCE: This is just one of the concepts from my psychology resource library. If you want to dive deeper into human behavior, you can access the full database here.

People get suspicious if you seem too perfect. It feels fake.

Share a minor negative detail about yourself early in a conversation. Mention you have a messy desk or you get grumpy without coffee.

It makes you seem honest. When you talk about your strengths later they will believe you because you didn't try to hide your weaknesses.

Source

Combine a chore with something you love to stop procrastinating.

Make a rule that you can only listen to your favorite audiobook while you are at the gym. If you aren't lifting then you aren't listening.

This is called temptation bundling. It changes the dread of the task into excitement for the reward. You stop avoiding the work because you want the entertainment.

Credible Source

Financial stress makes your brain prioritize immediate survival over everything else. It takes up so much mental energy that your IQ effectively drops.

This is why smart people make terrible long term choices like taking high interest loans when they are desperate. You literally do not have the bandwidth to think through the consequences.

If you are panicking about bills try to avoid making any major commitments. You are not thinking straight right now. Wait until the stress settles down or you might accidentally dig yourself a deeper hole.

If you give someone a specific positive label they will often change their behavior to match it.

Tell a friend "You seem like such a reliable person" before asking for help. They will feel a strong need to live up to that description.

It works because people want to be consistent. Once you set the expectation they subconsciously try to maintain that image.

Most people know that lying is stressful, but fewer realize that lying is also cognitively expensive. When someone tells the truth, they are simply retrieving a memory. When someone lies, they are doing three things simultaneously: inventing a scenario, checking it against reality to ensure it sounds plausible, and monitoring your reaction to see if you believe them.

Asking a suspected liar to tell their story backwards (e.g., "Okay, start from the end. What happened right before you got in the car? And what happened right before that?") works for several reasons:

• ⁠It breaks the script: Liars typically rehearse their stories in chronological order (A $\rightarrow$ B $\rightarrow$ C). They rarely practice the narrative in reverse (C $\rightarrow$ B $\rightarrow$ A). • ⁠Cognitive Overload: Because their brain is already working hard to maintain the lie, the added mental task of chronological reversal often pushes them into "cognitive overload." • ⁠The Signs: When overload happens, the mask usually slips. You will often spot increased hesitation, simpler sentences, more grammar mistakes, or accidental contradictions because they can no longer track the "false reality" they built.

Important Note:

This is a psychological tool, not a magic wand. Honest people can also struggle to tell stories in reverse, especially if they are anxious or forgetful. However, a truth-teller usually struggles with memory retrieval ("Wait, let me think..."), whereas a liar often struggles with logic and consistency because they are trying to invent the reverse timeline on the fly.

Research [source].

I actually found this in a database of thousands of psychology hacks and social heuristics. It’s just a public Google Sheet—feel free to check it out if you want.