Imagine that you’re 4 years old and that it’s 1968.

You’re brought into a small room, a “game room,” with a table, chair and three sugary snacks. You’re asked to pick one treat. You choose the marshmallow. Then you’re told that you can either have the marshmallow right away by ringing a bell, or wait a few minutes and get two marshmallows. Then you’re left alone for 15 minutes.

This seemingly simple experiment conducted by Austrian-born clinical psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University became known as “The Marshmallow Study.” But don’t let the silly name fool you. This study tested over 600 kids at the Bing Nursery School and has become one of the longest-running studies in psychology.

What Mischel actually wanted to explore had zero to do with kids’ desire for sweets, of course. The lead investigator wanted to test the concept of delayed gratification.

Life is hard for everyone. That’s why it helps to have an assortment of tools to navigate life’s inevitable lows.

And that’s exactly what you’ll find in Russ Harris’s book The Reality Slap: Finding Peace and Fulfillment When Life Hurts. Harris is a psychotherapist and renowned expert in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The book is based on ACT’s principles.

The reality slap is a term that Harris uses to refer to life’s various lows, which include everything from losing a loved one to experiencing failure or envy.

According to Harris, after a reality slap strikes, we face another problem: “the reality gap.” The reality gap consists of two sides. One side is the reality we have; the other side is the reality we want.

The bigger the gap between these realities, the more painful our emotions.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Danielle Dowling. 

You went on a first date with an amazing man. You thought you looked great in that dress. You’re pretty sure that he found the stories about your dog hilarious. You’re certain that he didn’t notice you got a little tipsy on all those cocktails.

The problem is that he doesn’t call. Or text. Or email. So, you decide to call your girlfriends to dissect every single thing he said and every single thing you did. Why didn’t he ask you out again?

According to the men in my life, here are the top ten reasons why your first date with him ended up being your last…

While researching the history of psychology, I come across a lot of interesting information. Every month I share five pieces, podcasts or videos that you might find fascinating, too.

Last month we talked about Alan Turing, Carl Jung and the famous Robbers Cave Experiment.

This month we’ve got quite the array of topics and in various mediums, including a podcast and a few videos. You’ll learn about the first sport psychologist, the infamous Wolf Man, the history of treating depression, mental asylums and a recent film featuring psychology’s masterminds.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance of small treats, small pleasures. They’re fun to experience, of course, and I think they also have a very important role to play in happiness.

When we feel depleted and drained, and when we have no time or energy devoted to the things that give us pleasure, we start to feel exhausted, resentful, and angry. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

But it can be surprisingly hard to think of what little treats you want to give yourself. So many pleasures come at a cost: cookies cost calories, movies and books take time and focus, a museum costs the price of a ticket. It’s good to have a list of treats and pleasures that have a very low cost in time, energy, or money.

What is positivity, positive psychology and the Positivity Ratio?

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson discovered that experiencing positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative ones leads people to a tipping point beyond which they naturally become more resilient to adversity and effortlessly achieve what they once could only imagine.

In this video, Psych Central’s Ask the Therapists Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D. & Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. discuss the benefits of positivity and understanding how the positivity ratio might help you in your own life.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Virginia Clark. 

Choosing your life partner is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. When you find the man who’ll be beside you every day, it impacts every aspect of your life. So, when I see women who approach finding their “soulmate” with so little concern about it’s true importance, I feel overwhelming frustration.

They meet and date perfectly good men, men who want to be in a committed relationship; but then they treat these men as if they were nothing special, as if there were plenty more where they came from. They make the same mistakes with men over and over again, get the same results, and are in complete denial about their own behavior. This tells me they don’t take themselves or dating seriously enough.

I’ve also seen women transform into adolescent girls when they date; they have no regard for consequences. When they do this they diminish themselves and of course get less than spectacular results with men. How can you stop sabotaging your dates and give looking for love the importance it needs?

Here are the three most common mistakes you may be making…

Each summer I pick a project. A few years ago mine was to develop my self-esteem. According to David Burns, that should only take ten days. But nine months later, I’m still not there.

From June to August last year, this was the routine: load up the double stroller with any floatable object in our house (wings, inner-tubes, noodles, life vests), drag them (and two sinkable kids) to the pool, score some beach towels from the lost and found, and plant ourselves under one of the few coveted umbrellas.

As soon as we hit the snack bar and caught up on the daily gossip from Mr. Snow Cone, I pulled out Burns’ book, Ten Days to Self-Esteem, which is about the size of a floating raft, the word “self-esteem” taller than a fruit freeze pop. But the woman under the next umbrella was reading ADD and ADHD for Dummies, so I didn’t feel so bad.

My mind wandered back to my first session with my therapist, almost two years ago. “Why are you here?” my therapist asked me.

“Because I feel like a Krispy Kreme doughnut,” I replied. “I have no center.”

Courage is plentiful. In fact, it’s all around us, writes Robert Biswas-Diener, Ph.D, a positive psychology researcher and founder of Positive Acorn, in his latest book The Courage Quotient: How Science Can Make You Braver.

And it doesn’t just happen on the battlefield: It also happens in the boardroom, on a bike ride and at the grocery store, he says. Courage lives in the everyday and helps us lead more fulfilling lives.

According to Biswas-Diener, courage “allows you to pursue the life you want, to overcome obstacles that hold you back from living a full life, and to put your core values into action, and it also helps and elevates others along the way.” It also helps you have better relationships and do better at work, he says.

In his book Biswas-Diener defines courage as “the willingness to act toward a moral or worthwhile goal despite the presence of risk, uncertainty and fear.”

We all face problems and difficulties in our lives. What often differentiates a person from being able to cope with the challenge or not is understanding what’s really going on. Why did we overreact to that comment from our boss? Why can’t we let that painful end of a relationship go 5 years later?

Sometimes gaining perspective and psychological insight means looking beyond the surface, and digging a little deeper. And we hope that our new blog, Sorting Out Your Life, will help you do just that.

This blog will be focused on helping people sort out their lives. Blog topics may include tips on making the most of psychotherapy, understanding why we do what we do (for example, staying in abusive relationships or dead-end jobs), dealing with difficult people in our lives, healing from past hurts, etc.

When I completed Elaine Aron’s Highly Sensitive Person Self-Test, I checked 24 statements. Out of 27.

I checked everything from being bothered by bright lights and loud noises to getting startled easily to trying to avoid mistakes to not watching violent movies or TV shows.

Maybe you can relate.

While there are many differences among highly sensitive people (HSPs), we have one thing in common: HSPs have a sensitive nervous system that makes it harder to filter out stimuli and easier to get overwhelmed by our environment.

For instance, the sound of sirens and other loud noises might reverberate like nails on a chalkboard through your head. (They do in mine.)  Crowds might make you especially uncomfortable, while strong smells make you feel sick.

Even in today’s advanced world, there’s still much misunderstanding and stigma surrounding mental illness. Many of us are quick to dismiss people with mental illness as inferior or less than or wonder why they can’t just snap out of it.

Many of us also rarely believe that mental illness merits the same understanding and compassion as medical illnesses such as diabetes, cancer or heart disease.

Such stigma has devastating effects. It “prevents some people from accessing support and professional help and breeds shame and secrecy, which can significantly worsen a person’s condition as well as their prognosis — even to a point of being life-threatening, in the case of suicidal ideation,” according to Joyce Marter, LCPC, a psychotherapist and owner of Urban Balance, a multi-site counseling practice in the greater Chicago area.

That’s why it’s so important to talk about the facts. Below, experts share accurate information about mental illness.