I’m trying a different approach to listening

Two colourful birds on a branch one with wings spread against a blurred background.

Lately, I’ve been trying to be a better listener by using Carl Rogers’s technique of ‘unconditional positive regard’ (UPR), an idea I learned about on a recent psychology course. UPR refers to nonjudgmental acceptance of, and care for, a person – regardless of whether you agree with the things they say, think and do. It doesn’t suggest that you ignore or permit harmful behaviour, only that an individual should not have conditions they need to meet for them to be worthy of warmth and support.

When I first heard about UPR, it struck me that one reason it might be so powerful is that we very rarely come across this nonjudgmental approach in our daily lives. From socialising to contributing in meetings, it can often feel as though we’re being assessed in various ways. I thought about how comforting it is when you know you’re being held in a positive regard that isn’t going to waver, even if you have an off day or make an error – and whether this was something I could more intentionally foster for the people around me.

In practice, this has meant resisting the urge to jump in with advice, which I’ve noticed is often infused with judgment, and attempting to listen without necessarily looking for a solution. It’s revealed more of my own biases and thought patterns – such as the way I sometimes default to ‘I would/wouldn’t have done X’, rather than understanding where the other person is coming from. It’s meant asking more questions and being increasingly mindful of my nonverbal communication, such as avoiding facial expressions that communicate surprise or disagreement. Granted, I fail every day to uphold the aims of UPR, but the process of attempting it has increased my capacity for compassion – and a happy side-effect is that I seem to judge myself a little less now, too.

by Molly Williamson

FIND OUT MORE

The Psyche Idea ‘Why Listening Well Can Make Disagreements Less Damaging’ (2024) by Guy Itzchakov provides a summary of research showing how high-quality listening, incorporating a nonjudgmental approach, can reduce extremist and prejudiced views, encouraging more nuanced and complex beliefs.

For a reflective personal account on using Rogers’s theories to become a better listener, try the Aeon Essay ‘The Art of Listening’ (2022) by M M Owen.


NOTE TO SELFCAREGIVING

Caregivers have more youthful brains

A man with a beard sitting on a sofa with two young children, one resting on his head, in a room with bookshelves.

My twins turned 11 the other day. I’m thankful the endless nappy changing and interrupted nights of their infancy are in the distant past. But there are new stresses, such as becoming an on-call chauffeur – to parties, sleepovers and sports clubs. Then, as now, the end result is similar: I’m frazzled most of the time. Ask me to guess and I’d say that being a parent has probably accelerated my brain age. So you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a new paper in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience by James K Rilling and colleagues that claims caregiving – including being a dad – is associated with having a brain that’s young for your age.

The study builds on past research that found mothers and fathers in their 50s had a younger ‘brain age’ compared with their childless peers – by about half a year. This was based on measures of their brain structure, such as white- and grey-matter volume, as judged against databases of hundreds of brains of various ages. The new study extended this pattern to grandmothers and people caring for someone with dementia, and the findings suggested the brain age benefit might be even greater later in life. Compared with controls, grandmothers and caregivers had brain ages that were between four and six years younger, on average (after adjusting for other factors such as income and BMI). Both the old research and the new suggest there’s a sweet spot – too many (grand)kids or too much stress and the brain benefits are reduced.

As to why caregiving is associated with lower brain age, the researchers propose various reasons, such as being more mentally and physically active, the emotional connection, and the sense of meaning and purpose that comes from being a caregiver. My brain feels tired, but it’s nice to know the responsibilities of parenthood might be keeping it youthful!

by Christian Jarrett

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I first wrote about the neural consequences of fatherhood 11 years ago for Wired in the article ‘How Becoming a Father Changes Your Brain’ (2014).

In the Psyche Guide ‘How to Get the Most Out of Caregiving’ (2024), Elissa Strauss shows how to see the challenges of caregiving in a positive light.


The benefits of thinking about deep time

A mountain peak with a walking path and hikers, under a clear blue sky with scattered clouds.

Last September, I took part in a ‘Deep Time Walk’: a 4.6 km hike through the Welsh countryside, mirroring 4.6 billion years of Earth history. As the kilometres passed, our guide took us from the Precambrian to the Holocene, stopping periodically to share pivotal moments: life’s origin, cataclysmic bombardments, mass extinctions. Every metre we stepped was a million years.

In the last moments of the walk – our legs well exercised by this point – our guide pulled out a tape measure. The last 30 cm of the 4.6 km, he explained, represent Homo Sapiens. The final half-centimetre? Recorded human history. And right at the end, some of humanity’s most consequential events – the invention of the printing press, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution – could all squeeze into the final millimetre. After walking for kilometres through Earth’s past, I felt a sublime smallness, but also awe.

A growing body of research suggests there are myriad psychological benefits to feeling small in the face of nature’s vastness: it dampens the ego, and can foster feelings of humility, reciprocity and generosity. Most of these studies have focused on the physical world – boundless landscapes or the enormity of the cosmos, for instance – but one recent paper, by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues, showed there are also upsides to experiencing smallness in time.

Rather than go on a walk, the researchers simply showed people a video that compressed the Universe’s 14-billion-year history into one year, then asked them to reflect on how human history and their lives fit within that story. The psychologists wondered if it might prompt thoughts of mortality, but the effects were actually positive: in particular, people reported greater self-forgiveness and lower anxiety.

Our time on Earth is short – and, from the planet’s perspective, we are just flashes of sunlight on a pond – but it turns out that embracing that fact could be good for you.

by Richard Fisher

FIND OUT MORE

Watch the clip, used in the study by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues, that compressed the 14-billion-year history of the Universe into a year, edited from the US TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

You can discover more about Deep Time Walks, or download the app to walk one wherever you are.

My Psyche Guide ‘How to Do Mental Time Travel’ (2024) and my book The Long View (2023) both explore how to take a longer perspective of time.


True contact is found in silence

Black and white photo of a man and woman sitting under an umbrella; the woman leans on the man’s shoulder.

When I was an adolescent, time spent with my first girlfriend – a title very quickly rescinded – was as exhilarating as it was onerous. The cause of the former was straightforward, but that of the latter was specific to that juncture in my life: I felt that a beat of dead air was a solemn mark against me, and every moment must be filled with witty and memorable words. Before our meetings, I would tabulate, sometimes physically putting to paper, all the interesting, intriguing, titillating things I could mention. I treated hanging out like a state examination. You can imagine why she lunged at the first opportunity to become an ex.

But we remained – and remain – close friends, and some time after our ill-starred relationship ended, something indelible happened: we had our first real silence. Late in a balmy summer night, conversation extinguished itself and, for some reason, nothing else was said. I’ve had a lot of beautiful silences since then, but it remains the most poignant.

I was reminded of this experience by Emil Cioran, the brooding and sardonic Romanian French philosopher, who was actually capable of stringing together witty and memorable words. ‘True contact between beings,’ he wrote, ‘is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.’

Silences between people, of course, have all sorts of meanings, and Cioran is far from the only philosopher to write about silence. But here he incomparably evokes the strange intimacy that inheres in the best kinds of silence. Perhaps the next time you are fortunate enough to inhabit this kind of silence with someone important to you, you’ll think of ‘true contact’.

by Sam Dresser

FIND OUT MORE

The delightful Psyche Video ‘Le Mots de la Carpe’ by the French animator Lucrèce Andreae shows how silence can be path to love in the cacophony of speed-dating.

For more on Cioran’s minimalist approach to life, see the Psyche Idea ‘Learning to Be a Loser: A Philosopher’s Case for Doing Nothing’ (2023) by Costica Bradatan.


To see your home city anew, try this

A traffic light showing a green transgender symbol in front of a historic city square with statues and buildings.

One of my favourite walking routes though London goes from Waterloo Bridge to the London Eye, across the Thames to Big Ben, up Whitehall, and on to Soho for much-needed refreshment. But this spring, when a friend was visiting me from the United States, something happened on that familiar walk that made me see my home city with fresh eyes.

At a crossing by Trafalgar Square, she stopped in her tracks, though the lights were green. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the light flashing, not with the usual walking man, but with two female symbols, intertwined. ‘Oh that,’ I said shrugging. ‘The gay traffic lights of London.’ They’d gone up years ago, for the annual Pride Festival, and were so popular, they’d stayed – a little like my friend and I, who had a blast running back and forth between crossings so she could photograph all the LGBTQ+ symbols. Though she lives in San Francisco with her wife, these lights tickled her pink – and now they had the same effect on me.

This is an example of what the social psychologist Clayton Critcher at the University of California, Berkley calls the ‘vicarious construal effect’. By seeing an experience through someone else’s eyes, you can capture a feeling you’ve lost – or one you never even had. In an interview, Critcher said: ‘Simply trying to think about what someone else might see actually changes the way we see and interpret what we’re doing, changes the emotions we feel.’

This effect works whether rediscovering your hometown or more fully understanding another’s lived experience. So next time you notice yourself becoming oblivious to the place where you live, try to see it through the eyes of a visitor. Or better still, invite one over and share their perspective.

by Elena Seymenliyska

FIND OUT MORE

For looking at the world with the wide eyes of a child, check out the Psyche Guide ‘How to Revive Your Sense of Wonder’ (2022) by Frank Keil.

And for more on the joys of exploring with an open mind, follow the Guide ‘How to Wander’ (2023) by Jordan Fisher Smith.

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