Why awkward moments make us grind our teeth in despair and how we can train ourselves to embrace the cringe.

Why do we do a double-take when we hear our voice on a recording? It’s because our voice sounds lower to us as it reverberates through the skull. The bystander, on the other hand, hears an unmitigated, and therefore higher, version of our voice. We literally sound different to others than we do in our own heads.

In Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, author Melissa Dahl, co-founder of NYMag.com’s social science site Science of Us, explores the origin of why we cringe, and how we can train ourselves to break free from anxiety caused by awkwardness.

In this video for Bigthink, Dahl draws a link back to 1960s research where people received electric shocks — the study concluded that participants preferred knowing when they would receive a shock instead of not knowing.

The shock study, the recording example — both get at a central part of Dahl’s cringe theory: first, we like predictability, and second, it causes great discomfort when we come across as something other than we think we are.

Dahl calls this “the irreconcilable gap” — a term coined by psychologist Philippe Rochat at Emory University. She explains:

“What makes us cringe is when the ‘you’ you think you’re presenting to the world clashes with the ‘you’ the world is actually seeing, and that makes us uncomfortable because we like to think that we’re coming off in a certain way.”

Dahl explores three ways to shift your relationship to cringe:

1) turn cringeworthy feedback into useful field notes — you wanted a promotion, but things didn’t go your way. You insulted a friend but didn’t mean to. You could brush off these encounters as the other person totally misreading you, or you could glean something from their perception of you (without having to fully buy into it). Dahl explains: “I’ve figured out how to deal with this emotion a little better is to start thinking of it as useful information like, “maybe this is a way to start tiptoeing towards becoming this person that I see myself as, this person that I wish I was.” To read more from Stephany Tlalka, click here.

In my research, I’ve invited couples in romantic relationships to come into the laboratory and thank their partner for something—with video cameras rolling. They express gratitude for a wide variety of things, big and small: for keeping him company in the hospital during a week-long stay, for making sure to prioritize visits to the in-laws, for driving to the grocery store with money when he forgot his wallet, for making (her favorite) banana pudding from scratch, or simply for grabbing him an extra treat at a workplace function. They are heartwarming conversations to witness.

Lots of studies tout the personal benefits that can come from feeling and expressing gratitude in your relationships. People who express gratitude develop more positive evaluations of their relationships and even elicit more help and kindness from others. People who write letters of gratitude show improved mood and—especially if they feel low when they start—experience reduced symptoms of depression. What’s more, people who receive expressions of gratitude get a benefit, too.

Yet not all expressions of gratitude are created equal—and our thank yous don’t always go over well. How do we express gratitude to our partner in the most loving and constructive way. To read more from SARA ALGOE, click here.

OK, so maybe you’re one of those people who don’t wash their hands even after going to the bathroom because your dad never did and he never got sick.

Or you think a three-second hand scrub is more than enough.

Or you squirt on some hand-sanitizer and figure you’ve done your duty.

I have some news for you.

There’s a new study out on norovirus and the role hand-washing can play in stopping an outbreak.

To sum it up: Wash up!

Norovirus is responsible for roughly 1 in 5 cases worldwide of acute gastroenteritis. The symptoms are pretty horrible: nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. And it’s very, very, very contagious. It takes only one particle to infect a human, compared to roughly 50 to 100 particles of flu virus.

In countries with good health-care systems, a norovirus victim will have about three days of misery but likely recover. But for young children and the elderly, especially in developing countries, the prognosis can be grim. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 50,000 children a year, under age 5, die from norovirus, mainly in lower-income countries.

The virus is particularly effective at finding victims in crowded places: hospitals, schools … and cruise ships, where everybody is living, eating and sharing activities in the same spaces.

Researcher Sherry Towers became curious about norovirus after contracting a case herself. She believes she got it by using a bathroom in which someone had … barfed. She thought the facility had been adequately cleaned. (Only apparently not). To read more from Marc Silver, click here.

Are you guilty of “micro-cheating”? I’d forgive you for having no clue, because I’ve now read about two dozen articles on this latest pop-psychology buzzphrase, which went viral last month, and I’m more confused than when I started. It refers, as far as I can tell, to seemingly innocuous behaviours that actually count as infidelity. But the examples given by dating experts range from wishing someone happy birthday on Facebook, which plainly isn’t a problem, to taking off your wedding ring before chatting someone up in a bar, which plainly is. (Does your partner talk about their ex too much? That’s micro-cheating. But what’s “too much”? No one will say.) Confusing matters further, micro-cheating apparently also includes things that are obviously signs that your partner is having an affair of the conventional variety. If he spends ages staring goggle-eyed at pictures of another woman on his phone, while you look grumpy on the other side of the bed, there are only two possibilities: either you’re posing for stock photos for magazine articles on relationship problems, or you’ve got a relationship problem.

Micro-cheating is an unhelpful idea, as the psychologist Justin Lehmiller noted on The Cut website, because it implies that feeling the tiniest attraction to anyone else is a red flag – a notion so at odds with normal human functioning that it sets a standard no relationship could ever meet. Beyond that, like the idea of the “emotional affair” before it, it seems destined to worry or reassure precisely the wrong people. If you’re needy and insecure, you’ll suspect your partner is micro-cheating when they aren’t – possibly even driving them away, creating the very breach you feared. Conversely, if you’re trying to avoid confronting the truth that your relationship is in trouble, you’ll take false comfort if your partner’s actions happen not to tick any boxes on the micro-cheating list. To read more from Oliver Burkeman, click here.

It’s shaping up to be one of the worst flu seasons in years.

If you are one of the thousands of Americans who are sick with the flu, this one’s for you.

You’ve spent the past couple of days cooped up in your house watching bad TV, fighting the fever sweats and expelling a baffling amount of mucus. As you start to resemble a human being again, you might feel pressure to head back to work.

But when is it really OK to return? Many people go back as soon as their symptoms start to resolve, which could be putting your co-workers at risk.

Those unpleasant symptoms are actually the result of your immune response battling the flu virus. Take fever for example. Your body starts a fever because the flu virus doesn’t grow as well at high temperatures, and some immune cells actually work better.

All that gooey mucus you’ve been coughing up is good at trapping viruses before they can infect other cells.Your body is in an all out war, you against the virus. Immune cells seek out and destroy virus-infected cells.

As your airways get irritated, you cough and sneeze. And that’s exactly what the flu wants. That’s because the flu is spread from person to person in virus-containing droplets that are produced when a sick person coughs, sneezes or even breathes. When you cough, tiny droplets that fly from your mouth can travel as far as 20 feet at speeds ranging from 25-50 mph. Sometimes they can stay suspended for hours. To read more from MADELINE K. SOFIA and MEREDITH RIZZO click here.

To age well, we must eat well. There has been a lot of evidence that heart-healthy diets help protect the brain.

The latest good news: A study recently published in Neurology finds that healthy seniors who had daily helpings of leafy green vegetables — such as spinach, kale and collard greens — had a slower rate of cognitive decline, compared to those who tended to eat little or no greens.

“The association is quite strong,” says study author Martha Clare Morris, a professor of nutrition science at Rush Medical College in Chicago. She also directs the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging.

The research included 960 participants of the Memory and Aging Project. Their average age is 81, and none of them have dementia. Each year the participants undergo a battery of tests to assess their memory. Scientists also keep track of their eating habits and lifestyle habits.

To analyze the relationship between leafy greens and age-related cognitive changes, the researchers assigned each participant to one of five groups, according to the amount of greens eaten. Those who tended to eat the most greens comprised the top quintile, consuming, on average, about 1.3 servings per day. Those in the bottom quintile said they consume little or no greens.

After about five years of follow-up/observation, “the rate of decline for [those] in the top quintile was about half the decline rate of those in the lowest quintile,” Morris says.

So, what’s the most convenient way to get these greens into your diet?

“My goal every day is to have a big salad,” says Candace Bishop, one of the study participants. “I get those bags of dark, leafy salad mixes.” To read more from ALLISON AUBREY, click here.

Humans have suffered from migraines for millennia. Yet, despite decades of research, there isn’t a drug on the market today that prevents them by targeting the underlying cause. All of that could change in a few months when the FDA is expected to announce its decision about new therapies that have the potential to turn migraine treatment on its head.

The new therapies are based on research begun in the 1980s showing that people in the throes of a migraine attack have high levels of a protein called calcitonin gene–related peptide (CGRP) in their blood.

Step by step, researchers tracked and studied this neurochemical’s effects. They found that injecting the peptide into the blood of people prone to migraines triggers migraine-like headaches, whereas people not prone to migraines experienced, at most, mild pain. Blocking transmission of CGRP in mice appeared to prevent migraine-like symptoms. And so a few companies started developing a pill that might do the same in humans.

Clinical trials of the first pills were effective against migraine but halted in 2011 over concerns about potential liver damage. So, four pharmaceutical companies rejiggered their approach. To bypass the liver, all four instead looked to an injectable therapy called monoclonal antibodies — tiny immune molecules most commonly used to treat cancer. Not only do these bypass the liver to block CGRP, but one injection appears to be effective for up to three months with almost no noticeable side effects. To read more from LAUREN GRAVITZ, click here.

Do you have a sense of purpose?

Are you struggling to discover your purpose? That may be because you feel isolated from other people. Here are six ways you can overcome that.

For decades, psychologists have studied how long-term, meaningful goals develop over the span of our lives. The goals that foster a sense of purpose are ones that can potentially change the lives of other people, like launching an organization, researching disease, or teaching kids to read.

Indeed, a sense of purpose appears to have evolved in humans so that we can accomplish big things together—which may be why it’s linked to better physical and mental health. Purpose is adaptive, in an evolutionary sense. It helps both individuals and the species to survive.

Many seem to believe that purpose arises from your special gifts and sets you apart from other people—but that’s only part of the truth. It also grows from our connection to others, which is why a crisis of purpose is often a symptom of isolation. Once you find your path, you’ll almost certainly find others traveling along with you, hoping to reach the same destination—a community.

Here are six ways to overcome isolation and discover your purpose in life. To read more from Jeremy Adam Smith, click here.

You’ve had all day to worry, but your brain decides that the moment you rest your weary head upon your pillow is the precise instant it wants to start fretting. The result of course is that you feel wide awake and cannot sleep. Two possible solutions: (1) spend five minutes before lights out writing about everything you have done. This might give you a soothing sense of achievement. Or (2) spend five minutes writing a comprehensive to-do list. This could serve to off-load your worries, or perhaps it will only make them more salient? To find out which is the better strategy, a team led by Michael Scullin at Baylor University, invited 57 volunteers to their sleep lab and had half of them try technique 1 and half try technique 2. Their findings are published in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

The participants, aged 18 to 30, attended the sleep lab at about 9pm on a weekday night. They filled out questionnaires about their usual sleep habits and underwent basic medical tests. Once in their sound-proofed room and wired up to equipment that uses brain waves to measure sleep objectively, they were told that lights out would be 10.30pm. Before they tried to sleep, half of the participants spent five minutes “writing about everything you have to remember to do tomorrow and over the next few days”. The others spent the same time writing about any activities they’d completed that day and over the previous few days.

The key finding is that the participants in the to-do list condition fell asleep more quickly. They took about 15 minutes to fall asleep, on average, compared with 25 minutes for those in the “jobs already done” condition. Moreover, among those in the to-do list group, the more thorough and specific their list, the more quickly they fell asleep, which would seem to support a kind of off-loading explanation. Another interpretation is that busier people, who had more to write about, tended to fall asleep more quickly. But this is undermined by the fact that among the jobs-done group, those who wrote in more detail tended to take longer to fall asleep. To read more from Christian Jarrett, click here.

Have you ever had a “gut-wrenching” experience? Do certain situations make you “feel nauseous”? Have you ever felt “butterflies” in your stomach? We use these expressions for a reason. The gastrointestinal tract is sensitive to emotion. Anger, anxiety, sadness, elation — all of these feelings (and others) can trigger symptoms in the gut.

The brain has a direct effect on the stomach. For example, the very thought of eating can release the stomach’s juices before food gets there. This connection goes both ways. A troubled intestine can send signals to the brain, just as a troubled brain can send signals to the gut. Therefore, a person’s stomach or intestinal distress can be the cause or the product of anxiety, stress, or depression. That’s because the brain and the gastrointestinal (GI) system are intimately connected.

This is especially true in cases where a person experiences gastrointestinal upset with no obvious physical cause. For such functional GI disorders, it is difficult to try to heal a distressed gut without considering the role of stress and emotion. To read more from Harvard Health, click here.