A mind is a terrible thing to waste … but an even more terrifying thing to explore.
2017 was a roller coaster for psychology and mental health. The FDA called ecstasy a “breakthrough therapy” for treating PTSD, while scientists found that climate change was destroying a lot more than just our environment. Annoying habits are good, these types of porn watchers are unhealthy and a prehistoric glitch in our brain could be the reason we never seem to save enough money.
From social media-fueled disorders to the terrifying trait your favorite song might reveal about you, here are five of the most mind-boggling things we learned about our minds this year.
1. Taking too many selfies is now a mental disorder
The word “selfitis” has been around for a while, but 2017 marked the first year the condition gained recognition as something other than a narcissistic affinity for taking pictures of yourself.
While it hasn’t been recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, two behavioral addiction researchers at Nottingham Trent University in the UK developed the world’s first “Selfitis Behavior Scale.” Their findings were published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction.
“Typically, those with the condition suffer from a lack of self-confidence and are seeking to ‘fit in’ with those around them,” Dr. Janarthanan Balakrishnan told the Telegraph, “and may display symptoms similar to other potentially addictive behaviors.”
The scale ranges from 0 to 100 and is assessed through a series of 20 questions such as, “I become a strong member of my peer group through selfie postings” and “I feel confident when I take a selfie.” Patients answer on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is strongly disagree and 5 is strongly agree. At the end of the questionnaire, you add up your answers and the higher your score, the more likely you suffer from “selfitis.”
2. It’s healthy to talk to yourself
Next time someone catches you talking to yourself, just say you’re trying to relax.
Though having a conversation with yourself carries an awkward social stigma, new research suggests it’s actually great for your mental and emotional health.
The study, published in July in Scientific Reports, found that by referring to yourself in the third person, you create a certain amount of distance that allows you to better analyze what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it.
“Essentially, we think referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similar to how they think about others, and you can see evidence for this in the brain,” Jason Moser, one of the study’s co-authors, told msutoday.msu.edu. “That helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences, which can often be useful for regulating emotions.”
3. Your musical taste could reveal if you’re a psychopath
Knowing every word to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” might make you more than a Slim Shady fan.
In September, researchers at NYU had 200 volunteers take the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale — a personality test used to identify psychopathy — then played them 260 top hits. They compared the volunteers’ scores with their taste in music and found that fans of “Lose Yourself” scored highest on the psychopathy scale.
“The media portrays psychopaths as ax murderers and serial killers, but the reality is they are not obvious; they are not like The Joker in ‘Batman,’” Pascal Wallisch, the study’s head author, told the Guardian. “They might be working right next to you and they blend in. They are like psychological dark matter.”
Wallisch and her team are working to devise a way to discreetly identify psychopaths. The study is still under peer review and hasn’t yet been published.
Fans of Backstreet’s “No Diggity” also scored high on the psychopathic scale, while fans of The Knock’s “My Sharona” and Sia’s “Titanium” had the lowest scores.
4. Your ‘drunk’ self is your ‘real’ self
Drunk you may be the worst you … but it’s also the real you.
It’s easy to blame yelling at your best friend or that weird text to your ex on having one too many, but new research shows that being over-served doesn’t actually turn us into a horrific monster version of our sober selves.
Researchers asked a group of volunteers how they perceive themselves “drunk” and “sober” and found that most of them consider themselves to be a completely different person when drunk.
The volunteers then drank themselves silly and a separate group of sober volunteers observed and assessed their behavior.
They found that drunk or sober, people mostly act the same — with the one exception being that alcohol does tend to make people act more extroverted. The findings were published in May in Clinical Psychological Science.
“We were surprised to find such a discrepancy between drinkers’ perceptions of their own alcohol-induced personalities and how observers perceived them,” Rachel Winograd, one of the study’s co-authors, told psychologicalscience.org. “Participants reported experiencing differences in all factors of the Five Factor Model of personality, but extroversion was the only factor robustly perceived to be different across participants in alcohol and sober conditions.”
5. Swearing is f—-king great!
Swearing makes you stronger and smarter.
Yelling out a curse word makes you stronger and people who swear tend to have higher IQs, according to two separate studies.
The former study was conducted by researchers at the University of Rochester who surveyed 1,000 people about their everyday habits. Volunteers were asked everything from how often they swear to whether they sing in the shower to what they eat for breakfast.
The results, published in August in the Personality and Individual Differences journal, found that volunteers who swore on a regular basis had higher IQs than those who didn’t.
And the latter study found that swearing gives the body a boost of power. Participants who dropped an F-bomb during an intense workout were shown to increase their strength and stamina. The results were published in May in the Psychology of Sport and Exercise.
“We know from our earlier research that swearing makes people more able to tolerate pain,” Dr. Richard Stephens, the study’s co-author, told keele.ac.uk. “A possible reason for this is that it stimulates the body’s sympathetic nervous system. If that is the reason, we would expect swearing to make people stronger too — and that is just what we found in these experiments.”