Trauma, Darkness, and the Powerful Therapy That’s Helping Me Heal
Want more posts like this in your life? Join the Tiny Buddha list for daily or weekly insights. Trigger Warning: This piece contains references to childhood trauma, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Please take care of yourself as you read, and step away if you need to. If you are struggling, you are not alone — […]
Can Teaching Self-Compassion Improve Teen Mental Health?
Suicide. It’s not something we like to talk about—especially when we’re talking about our kids. Yet it’s a painful reality in our world today. Unfortunately, most of us know someone in our community whose child has died by suicide. There’s good news and bad news on teen suicide rates. Let’s have the good news first. […]
Has Technology Made Us Less Courageous?
A popular social media trend in 2025 was the celebration of social isolation. Reels, posts, and memes abound that celebrate rebuffing social invitations, giving up on dating, doing the bare minimum at work, and even lamenting the loss of social distancing as though it was the silver lining and not an unfortunate consequence of the […]
Is It Good or Bad to Use Rewards for Motivation?
Author’s Note: Right now a great many people are trying to comply with their New Year’s resolutions. Many of them will rely on rewards of some sort to motivate themselves, never realizing that this is an extremely controversial practice and the subject of heated debate among psychologists. Should it be? Here’s my personal take: After […]
We’re Missing the Good News About Youth Mental Health
Let’s play a word-association game. If I say “youth Mental health,” what’s the next word that comes to mind? It’s probably “crisis.” For over a decade, researchers, policymakers, teachers, parents, and the media have been raising the alarm about the rising prevalence of anxiety, depression, and emotional distress among young people. Most alarmingly, the suicide […]
Your Happiness Calendar for Educators for January 2026
Our monthly Happiness Calendar for Educators is a day-by-day guide to building kinder, happier schools where everyone belongs. This month, lead with Self-compassion to meet your goals with more gentleness with daily tips from Greater Good Science Center. Explore more keys to well-being with educators working for the greater good in our winter/spring communities of […]
Why Self-Respect is So Powerful
Self-respect is often described as a somewhat abstract, intuitive, internal feeling or judgement that one has about oneself. But if we observe it up-close and long-term, we can see that it’s actually built, brick by brick, from the tiny promises one keeps to themselves repeatedly over the course of their life. Psychological research suggests that […]
Seven Ways to Spread Love in the World in the New Year
Each morning after meditation and prayer, I envision the encounters that I anticipate at home or at work, and I ask myself: “How do I need to manifest love for this particular person today?” As a medical school leader, I rarely hear the people around me talking about “love,” per se, but they often have […]
Why Well-Being Is Falling in Rural America
Growing up in Urbana, Ohio, in the ’70s, Beth Macy didn’t have things handed to her. Back then, her dad, seen as the town drunk, was a source of shame—as was being one of the poorest kids in her class. Despite all this, Macy (a journalist and author of Dopesick, adapted as a Peabody-winning Hulu […]
How to Slow Brain Aging
When most people think about aging, they imagine a linear progression towards an inevitable end. They think in terms of birthdays, knowing that the more candles on the cake, the more we should anticipate things like joint pain, lines on the face and even foggy thinking. Yet the most recent research shows us that we […]