Make this the year that you quiet all those negative thoughts swirling around your brain.

All humans have a tendency to be a bit more like Eeyore than Tigger, to ruminate more on bad experiences than positive ones. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that helps us avoid danger and react quickly in a crisis.

But constant negativity can also get in the way of happiness, add to our stress and worry level and ultimately damage our health. And some people are more prone to negative thinking than others. Thinking styles can be genetic or the result of childhood experiences, said Judith Beck, a psychologist and the president of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. Children may develop negative thinking habits if they have been teased or bullied, or experienced blatant trauma or abuse. Women, overall, are also more likely to ruminate than men, according to a 2013 study. To read more from LESLEY ALDERMAN, click here.

We all know how to hold a grudge, but few of us know why we hang on to past hurts—or how to let them go. Family conflicts are as old as Cronus consuming his offspring, Cain slaying Abel, and having to sit at the kiddie table during holiday meals. When we feel boundaries being crossed or the sting of familial insensitivity, it can give rise to hard-heartedness and an unwillingness to see each other anew. Those feelings can last decades, even lifetimes. I know this because when I was 18, my sister and I got involved with the same guy.

Rob was a sexy British vagabond, and my time with him was short and educational in the way my flaming teenage libido longed for. But it turned out the charms of an eager amateur had limited appeal next to the hot-blooded worldliness of an older, beautiful sister. They met when Rob dropped me off at home just before I got on a plane and left town for Christmas break. When I returned, Rob and my sister picked me up at the airport…together. As I sat in the back seat of the car, contemplating double murder, the seeds of family strife were sown.

Years later my sister was living abroad and, without investigating why, I found the infrequency of our visits a great relief. Then war broke out around her and she had to come home pronto, and she moved in with me—just before I was diagnosed with cancer. To read more from Elaine Smookler, click here.

The holidays mean large extended family gatherings, hours of cooking and a group of people who don’t typically interact in person, all confined to one location and trying to act festive. It’s the reality show version of your family.

When you return from your holiday visit, you may be exhausted for days afterward, finding it hard to focus and return to your regular routine. It feels as if you took the red-eye from Phoenix, but in reality it was a quick one-hour flight from Cleveland.

This is family jet lag.

As with traditional jet lag, the problem is the result of a disruption of your normal routine. Family jet lag works both ways, affecting both travelers and those who receive out-of-town relatives. It’s not that you don’t want to see your family, but the fact that you see them in person only once or twice a year means that you have a limited opportunity to discuss difficult issues best dealt with face-to-face. To read more from ELIZABETH YUKO, click here.

people relief from subjective symptoms, such as pain, nausea, anxiety and fatigue.

But there’s a reason your doctor isn’t giving you a sugar pill and telling you it’s a new wonder drug. The thinking has been that you need to actually believe that you’re taking a real drug in order to see any benefits. And a doctor intentionally deceiving a patient is an ethical no-no.

So placebos have pretty much been tossed in the “garbage pail” of clinical practice, says Ted Kaptchuk, director of the Program for Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In an attempt to make them more useful, he has been studying whether people might see a benefit from a placebo even if they knew it was a placebo, with no active ingredients. An earlier study found that so-called “open-label” or “honest” placebos improved symptoms among people with irritable bowel syndrome. To read more from KATHERINE HOBSON, click here.

When fear takes charge of our brains we tend to focus all our attention on risks and worst-case scenarios. Here’s how to turn down the noise.

Last year I wrote an article called ‘How To Teach Your Kids About The Brain’ that I hoped a few of my friends might see… to date, it’s actually been read over 100,000 times.

I continue to get emails about it from people all over the world, commenting on my ideas and sharing theirs. Many adults tell me that they didn’t realize their brains worked in the ways I described – and that having this new understanding has really helped them. One of the ideas that has resonated with people is that naming emotions and brain functions can help us understand the brain better. Let’s focus on what I called “Frightened Fred” (which you might call Frieda, Froggy, or any other creative name you can think of). To read more from Hazel Harrison, click here.

Somehow we’re squeezing 18 people into our apartment for Thanksgiving this year, a year when too many people are worrying about fraught post-election conversations. My relatives, who luckily are all cut from the same political cloth, range in age from my mother, aged 92, to my 32-year-old nephew (my 17-month-old granddaughter’s political leanings are still unfolding.)

I love them all, but in a way the one I know best is the middle-aged man across the table whose blue eyes look just like mine: my younger brother Paul.

Paul and I irritated each other when we were kids; I would take bites out of his precisely made sandwiches in just the spot I knew he didn’t want me to, and he would hang around the living room telling jokes when he knew I wanted to be alone with the boy on the couch.

But as adults we’ve always had each other’s backs, especially when it comes to dealing with our mother’s health crises, which have become more frequent in the past few years. Paul is the first person I want to talk to when there’s something that worries me about Mom; I know he’ll be worried, too. To read more from ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG, click here.

Do you frequently answer that question by saying something like, “Real good, real busy”? There’s a subtle implication that we are good because we are busy. Is that true? Some very compelling research suggests the opposite.

We all have peaks and valleys of energy and productivity, what the renowned psychologist and sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman called circadian (daily) and ultradian (shorter, sometimes hourly) rhythms. Paying attention to when we’re most energized and alert, as well as when we need to take a mental break, allows us to do our best work. To read more from Rich Fernandez, click here.

Giving is hard. According to many evolutionary psychologists, including Dacher Keltner, of the Greater Good Science Center, we are born to be good. Altruism and sharing are part of our makeup. Nonetheless, giving to others is not a cinch. We struggle with it. Just look at all the angst that surrounds our annual “season of giving.”

To be truly generous requires us to step beyond the self-protected bubble we create for ourselves. Just think about it. So many decisions we make during the day—what to eat, what to wear, when to do this, that, and the other thing, with whom, for how long, etc., etc.—serve our own version of things and reinforce the notion that we are in charge. Going beyond that bubble takes us into a zone where others’ needs may supersede our own. And that puts some pressure on the whole I’m-in-charge system we’re hardwiring into place most of the time during our day. And even when we do give, if we’re not careful, we give in a way that serves our own needs. Ever receive a gift that said much more about what someone else thought you should have than what you needed or wanted? To read more from Barry Boyce, click here.

Maybe the smart phone’s hegemony makes perfect evolutionary sense: Humans are tapping a deep urge to seek out information. Our ancient food-foraging survival instinct has evolved into an info-foraging obsession; one that prompts many of us today to constantly check our phones and multitask.

Monkey see. Click. Swipe. Reward.

A new book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High Tech World explores the implications of, and brain science behind, this evolution (some might say devolution). It was written Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and research psychologist Larry D. Rosen. To read more from ERIC WESTERVELT, click here.

How to get your needs met in a way that considers all parties with kindness. Do you have a pattern of saying yes to others, but then feeling resentful later on? Do you believe that you must come to the aid of others and often give to get?

You are not alone.

Many of us have developed a belief that we must be nice, pleasing, or helpful to the exclusion of our own feelings and needs in order to be worthy of love or appreciation. This belief is, of course, not true and furthermore an impossible goal to meet. When we give to get, we can often end up feeling angry and as a result we don’t create healthy boundaries at home and work. To read more from Carley Hauck, click here.