Ever feel like the you’re not making progress on a problem, despite working endlessly on it? Well there’s a very clear explanation for that. #markmanson #psychology #bluedoteffect

There's an amazing discovery in psychology that I like to call the blue dot effect. Years ago, researchers at Harvard sat people down and showed them a series of dots and asked them to identify which ones were blue. At first, there was a mix of blue and non-blue, and people were pretty accurate. But as the experiment went on, there were fewer blue dots shown, and people became less accurate, regularly mistaking shades of purple for being blue. Okay, big deal, right? Well, they next showed people human faces, and told them to identify the threatening ones. At first, people were good at this. But then, as researchers showed fewer threatening faces, as with the blue dots, people began to mistake friendly faces for being threatening. They then repeated this over and over again with threatening language, unethical job proposals, dangerous groups, and so on. So why is this important? Well let's say there's a big problem in your life, and you spend a lot of time and energy trying to solve it. The blue dot effects suggest that instead of feeling as though you're making progress on the problem, your mind will simply redefine the problem in such a way that you never totally stop experiencing it. That's why...