🌅 What if your brain stopped predicting the worst?

Your brain keeps forecasting storms. This exercise teaches it to expect a sunrise instead.

Humans tend to create their own self-fulfilling prophecies. We picture the worst and then, annoyingly, watch the worst unfold. It becomes a self-powered anxiety loop. But what if you could actually interrupt it?

In Erik Barnes’s piece, a study from York St John University dug into how anxious people imagine their futures. Those dealing with anxiety consistently imagine darker, more catastrophic futures. So researchers tried a simple daily writing exercise called the “Best Possible Self” technique and found it reduced anxiety while boosting self-worth.

Fifteen minutes of imagining things going right. A small daily habit that might keep your brain from manifesting storms all on its own.

Image of the day

🧠 If you're trying to win the argument, you're already losing

When emotions run high, the smartest move is also the most counterintuitive.

Marriage counselors and hostage negotiators have more in common than you'd think. Both work in high-stakes, high-emotion situations, sometimes with lives (or at least relationships) on the line. Occasionally, there's even a demand for cash and a getaway helicopter.

But there's one surprising strategy they both rely on to defuse tension and get results: staying curious.

As Erik Barnes reports, leading with genuine, question-asking, ego-checking curiosity during an argument can short-circuit defensiveness and open the door to actual connection. Whether you’re in a boardroom, a bedroom, or a blow-up with your in-laws, asking someone to explain how they see the world makes them feel heard.

Or as conflict resolution expert Richard Birke puts it, “You can contradict them and start an argument, or you can acknowledge that there’s something you don’t yet understand.”

And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared the most challenging color test the internet has to offer (you can take it yourself). On the test, women outperformed men, which is perhaps unsurprising because men tend to suffer from various color blindnesses more often than women.

There is a form of enhanced color vision that is incredibly rare and almost exclusively found in women. Do GOOD readers know what it is called?

• Chromatic hypersensitivity (58.8%)

• Tetrachromacy (13.7%) ✅

• Enhanced spectral perception (ESP) (25.5%)

• Tritanopia (2.0%)

Tetrachromacy is a rare superpower where people have a fourth type of color receptor in their eyes, letting them see millions more shades than the rest of us. It’s almost exclusively found in women, since the genes for this extra color vision live on the X chromosome, and you need two different versions to make it work. Scientists believe true tetrachromats are very rare, and only a few have ever been officially identified.

📣 “This has to stop”: Burned-out teacher’s viral rant hits a nerve

She dreamed of teaching. Two years later, she quit in a blaze of Facebook fury.

On the occasions I’ve talked to one of my son’s teachers, I find myself approaching them like a mistreated shelter dog. It’s OK, it’s OK, I’m on your side. It’s disheartening to see that weariness in their eyes, an instinct clearly trained by countless encounters with parents blaming them for everything.

That instinct? Fully validated by Julie Marburger, a Texas teacher whose viral Facebook post laid bare the burnout. Photos of a wrecked classroom. Stories of disrespectful kids and combative parents. A system stacked against teachers doing their best with nothing. “Any passion I once had has been wrung completely out of me,” she wrote.

As Adam Albright-Hanna reports, she quit. Left education behind and started selling real estate, but not before doing what countless teachers around the country wish they could do. Julie went off on a viral thread that is still echoing.

Eight score and two years ago, our sixteenth president brought forth on this nation a rousing speech of such power and beauty that to this day many of us can recite it from memory. On November 19th, 1863, the towering (both literally and figuratively) Abraham Lincoln delivered 272 words at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg. In just a few minutes, he framed a nation at war as undergoing the great test of its founding ideals. One hundred sixty-two years later, his closing promise, “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” still reads like a to-do list, and an invitation.

Do you have something GOOD to share?

We’re always on the lookout for uplifting, enlightening, and engaging content to share with readers like you. If you have something you think should be featured in the Daily GOOD, let me know!

💬 From the group text…

Turned on my heater for the first time today to get that fun burny-dusty smell you always get the first time. Soon… soon I’ll be like this duck!

@partyfowls805

The calmest I have ever seen Stew

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