Metacognition — the ability to think about your thinking — can help you learn faster and make better decisions.

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

“The idea is that we move from a place of wanting the world to conform to what we like [towards] not needing other people to be different from who they are.”

It's not just about the home; it's about everything.

Philosophy asks if free will is real. Neuroscience reveals why the answer is more complicated than we expected.

The average American works 1,700 hours annually, but Buddhist meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg suggests that instead of reserving relaxation for weekends, we should incorporate mindfulness into our daily lives for greater happiness and connection both at work and home.

Mindfulness aims to cultivate frequent moments of vivid awareness throughout the day, reconnecting us with our values and priorities, which can enhance productivity, well-being, and career success, as highlighted by Rasmus Hougaard of the Potential Project.

This emotional intelligence (EQ) course, featuring experts like Daniel Goleman and Amy Cuddy, highlights EQ's vital role in career success, offering strategies to enhance self-awareness, management, and interpersonal skills, ultimately fostering better performance in personal and professional settings.

This class equips participants with strategies from experts like David Goggins, Amy Cuddy, and Dr. Rudolph Tanzi to enhance mental strength and emotional well-being through mindfulness, body-mind techniques, and compassionate emotional processing, ultimately fostering resilience and personal growth.

A physician, a psychologist, and a mindfulness teacher explain what stress does to your body and mind, and how to use it to get smarter and stronger.

Everything you experience is filtered through your brain, and everyone’s brain is different. Neuroscientist Christof Koch explains how understanding this can deepen your connection to the world around you.

It's OK to hate a frigid pond.

Happiness researchers Robert Waldinger MD, Tal Ben-Shahar PhD, and Peter Baumann explain why the happiest people aren’t happy all the time.

“Because of the efficiency worship that we have developed in our industrial age, we are now seeing procrastination as a character flaw rather than what it is, a signal that is worth listening to.”

Three doctors break down brain function, somatic awareness, and how to recover from bad experiences.

“We can make ourselves more likely to be happy by building a life that includes the conditions that make for happiness.”

The benefits of compassion in the workplace are manifold — but leaders should retain an intentional focus on mental, emotional, and physical balance.

"Virtually everything we're taught about sexuality for the first two decades of our lives is wrong."

"You can't possibly exaggerate how much better it is to live in a peaceful, orderly society, and to be wealthy, and healthy, and surrounded by people who you love."