Nir and Far

How Your Brain Sabotages Your Social Life—and Simple Ways to Fix It

Nir Eyal — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 13:00:26 +0000

When a friend invited me over last week, I found myself entering a predictable state of hesitation. I stared at my phone for a while, thinking, Should I bail?

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The Truth About Emotions: What Parents Need To Know

Nir Eyal — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 07:00:34 +0000

It’s one of those days. You wake up tired, having had a bad night’s sleep. An unresolved fight with your friend or partner is still gnawing at you, but you push it down, knowing you have to get the kids ready for school and finish a major project at work. You feel on edge, and you just want to make it through the day. Knock it off and hold yourself together, you think.

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Finding Your Footing When The Ground Shifts Beneath You

Nir Eyal — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 13:00:37 +0000

Imagine this: You walk into work on a normal Tuesday, coffee in hand, only to be called into an emergency all-hands meeting. Your division is being dissolved. In an instant, everything changes.

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Unlock Your Potential With The Power Of Belief

Nir Eyal — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 13:00:26 +0000

In 2006, U.S. Team freestyle skier Michelle Roark zoomed down the slope at her first Olympics, conquering hilly terrain that not even a 4x4 could handle. At 31 years old, she was much older than the average Olympic freestyle skier. She had fought through massive obstacles for half her life to get there.

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The Pain Paradox: How Fear of Pain Creates More Pain

Nir Eyal — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 07:30:13 +0000

In the opening shot of the music video for “Throw Some Ass,” the camera scans a clinical white sign: “Sofi Tukker Center for Asses That Don’t Move Good.” Inside the mock hospital, a heart monitor flatlines—until the beat drops. Suddenly, the music video erupts into a NSFW riot of sensual movement.

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Let’s Not Decide Who Kids Are Before They Do

Nir Eyal — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 13:00:20 +0000

The true joy of parenthood lies in watching our children unfold into their authentic selves. Yet in our eagerness to know them—and as a natural result of our constant proximity—we often fall into the trap of assigning fixed identities to them prematurely.

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How to Find Fulfillment When Your Job Doesn’t Provide It

Nir Eyal — Mon, 26 May 2025 13:00:33 +0000

Our job enables us to provide for ourselves and our families, but that can make us feel all the more shackled to a work situation that makes us miserable or unfulfilled. Are we meant to suck it up? Do we just have to accept the fact that not everyone gets to have a fulfilling job?

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Why Seeking Approval is Killing your Potential

Nir Eyal — Tue, 13 May 2025 07:00:16 +0000

That flutter of excitement when someone likes your post. The warm glow after your boss praises your presentation. The slight panic when your work receives criticism instead of praise. Sound familiar?

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How Successful People Timebox

Nir Eyal — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 16:00:16 +0000

Timeboxing is the most powerful time-management technique. However, there is no one way to timebox. Some people keep the same schedule every week and review it on Sundays. Others change their timeboxed calendar daily and review it the night before. This step-by-step guide, plus timeboxing examples from real people, will help you figure out what timeboxing looks like for you.

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Stop Gaslighting Yourself: Why Your Memory Isn’t as Reliable as You Think

Nir Eyal — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 08:12:30 +0000

Have you ever cringed while showering, suddenly remembering something embarrassing you said years ago? That memory still feels so fresh, so real—but what if I told you it might be entirely distorted?

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How to Protect Your Focus Without Burning Bridges

Nir Eyal — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 13:00:41 +0000

Most professionals don't struggle with time management. They struggle with people-pleasing.From an early age, we're conditioned to say "yes." But this automatic response creates a significant dilemma: every time we say yes to something inessential, we're implicitly saying no to work that actually matters.

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The Real Culprit Behind Plummeting Children’s Mental Health

Nir Eyal — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:25:37 +0000

Kids are suffering. In the United States, 13 percent of three- to 17-year-olds had a mental or behavioral health diagnosis. Parents and teachers often blame social media for rising teen depression rates. But many studies show only a correlation between the two (and a low one at that), not causation.

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The 4 Secrets to Storytelling for Business

Nir Eyal — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 13:00:06 +0000

Every successful leader, marketer, or entrepreneur is, at heart, a great storyteller. Storytelling is not just an art—it’s a science, grounded in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral design.

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The Hidden Power of Social Comparison

Nir Eyal — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 14:00:40 +0000

I’ll never forget the day I learned about Facebook’s $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition. Instead of celebrating my own recent success as an author, I found myself spiraling into a pit of self-doubt.

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Is Psychiatry Keeping Us Sick?

Nir Eyal — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 17:36:32 +0000

Something is deeply wrong with the mental health system. Instead of leading to recovery, it often perpetuates cycles of dependency on therapy, medication, and diagnoses. Psychiatric diagnoses, which are unreliable to begin with, have become our identities rather than tools for recovery.

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Why You’re Always Busy but Never Productive (and How to Fix It)

Nir Eyal — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 17:01:34 +0000

Most of us don’t think about how we spend our professional time—we just try and keep up. But the secret to working smarter (not harder) lies in managing our most precious resource. Luckily, we have the best time-management technique—timeboxing—to help us. Sahil Bloom breaks down timeboxing categories even further in the work domain to ensure each type of work gets its due.

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The Surprisingly Strong Case for Luck in Sales

Nir Eyal — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 11:37:16 +0000

My wife and I started our first business together in 2003. We sold solar panels in Long Island, New York, which meant making thousands of in-home sales calls. Before we entered a potential customer’s home, we had a little ritual. We always looked at each other before we opened our car doors and said, “Let’s go sell a solar system.”

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Fail! Fail a Lot! It’s Good for You

Nir Eyal — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 13:41:36 +0000

Failure is baked into the human experience. So why are we so terrible at dealing with it? Fear of judgment and the stigma that our failures reflect poorly on us discourage us from trying new things. Negative self-talk and rumination convince us that our failures mean we’re incapable and undeserving. But failure is typical in all professions.

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You Are Not Your Mental Health

Nir Eyal — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:14:54 +0000

For many people, receiving a diagnosis of a mental health issue is a revelation, a kind of validation that explains the confusing symptoms they’ve endured, sometimes for years. Suddenly, the world feels a bit more manageable because now, there’s a label for their experience. For the first time in a long time, they feel understood. Take my friend, Thomas (not his real name).

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Control Your Calendar (Not Your To-Do List) and Success Will Follow

Nir Eyal — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 14:00:36 +0000

Our society celebrates getting things done. Long hours, overflowing inboxes, and maxed-out calendars become badges of honor. But this relentless pursuit of output can leave us feeling drained, disconnected, and unfulfilled. We neglect the things that truly matter to us—family, personal growth, health—because tasks, not our values, dictate our schedules.

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Getting Great Sleep is Much Easier Than You Think

Nir Eyal — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 15:47:59 +0000

A few years ago, I started waking up at three o’clock every morning. Over the years, I’d read many articles about the importance of rest, so I knew the research was unequivocal: Quality sleep supports cognitive performance and lowers the risk of diseases and health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, and dementia. Knowing that, I’d toss and turn in bed, disappointed that I wasn’t following through on my plan to get seven to eight hours of shut-eye.

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How to Be Lucky in Business and Life: 4 Science-Backed Principles

Nir Eyal — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 13:00:56 +0000

Something as vague and indiscernible as “luck” has no place in the business world, right? Except studies show luck can make all the difference between business success and failure. Turns out, it’s not a matter of being born lucky. You can, quite literally, make your own luck in business and in life.

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How to Stop Overthinking

Nir Eyal — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 13:00:14 +0000

We all dwell on unresolved personal conflicts from time to time. Who hasn’t ruminated on a hurtful comment or unintentional harm we might have caused someone? Feeling bad about something you did, or something done to you, is human. But while it’s expected that the arguments we’ve had, the negative events we’ve experienced, and the major decisions we face haunt us, rumination can also pile on new problems.

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How to Handle a Distracting Boss

Nir Eyal — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 13:00:14 +0000

See if you can relate to Sarah. She’s a software engineer who loves her job—except for her manager, Tom. To Tom, everything is a crisis worthy of interrupting Sara, even when she’s trying to focus on her work. One morning, while Sarah was coding a critical feature, Tom called and asked her to drop everything to help with an urgent report for the CMO.

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Only People Who Believe in Luck Have It

Nir Eyal — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 13:00:20 +0000

Richard Branson will be the first to tell you that he’s generally a lucky person in business and life. An adrenaline junkie, he’s lived through several near-death experiences, including in the early ’70s, when he and his then-wife survived a shipwreck that no other passengers did by jumping off the boat in a storm and swimming to shore. Branson isn’t the only uber-successful person to say that luck was on their side.

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