Happy Free Thoughts Thursday, people.

Hope this week has been a good one.

Time is flying. Let's get into it.

3 Things I’ve Learned:

1. Same hormone = different responses.

The hormone oxytocin causes positive social cues to become more noticeable to women and negative social cues to become more noticeable to men.

For women, this promotes the formation of beneficial friendships and encourages bonding with men who have positive social standing.

For men, this enhances their "fight or flight" response which causes them to ward off or avoid negative social influences.

Researchers believe the purpose of these opposite reactions to oxytocin—which is often referred to as the "love hormone" and is triggered by displays of physical affection—is to foster an ideal environment for raising children; the woman nurtures and the man protects.

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2. There is no concrete evidence that our attention spans are shrinking.

This myth began in 2015 after a report was published by the Consumer Insights team of Microsoft Canada, but the report cited a source called Statistic Brain.

Statistic Brain then cites the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine and the Associated Press for this information—neither of which have records to support the stats.

It's true that we're becoming increasingly distracted and over stimulated, but it's probably not true that we have shorter attention spans than a goldfish.

(The goldfish thing may be a myth as well—check out the article for more info.)

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3. Dating apps offer different experiences for women than men.

Overall, 45% of users (both women and men) say that online dating has left them frustrated.

24% of women feel as though they don't get enough messages while 57% of men say the same.

30% of women feel as though they get too many messages while 6% of men say the same.

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2 Questions for You:

1. How often do agree with things you don't truly believe just because it's easy?
2. What identity are you holding onto from your past that is no longer serving you?

1 Quote:

“Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one.”—Confucius

I've been thinking a lot about identity recently.

Who am I? It's a big question.

Since our social circles are so big we often identify those around us based on one thing about them. Maybe it's their job title, maybe it's who they're dating, maybe it's a funny thing they did in college.

This is useful for big groups.

But it becomes dangerous on an individual level because we often latch on to a certain identity too strongly. This is typically whichever one gives us the highest status—the star athlete, the investment banker, the smartest in our class, etc.

This is dangerous for a number of reasons, but I'll focus on one for now:

When that part of our life ends we no longer know who we are.

When we derive our identity from one or two things in our life, especially when those things are external (i.e. what we do or who we date), we feel lost once they're gone.

We suffer an injury, lose our job or graduate college and suddenly "who we were" no longer exists.

A much more useful approach is to base our identity on characteristics that we can control, like the way we think, how we treat other people, what we're interested in, etc.

That way, when different parts of our lives inevitably come to an end, sure it'll hurt...

But we'll still know who we are.

Live your life to the fullest,

Chris

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