The Mental Compass

Gen Z has officially entered its villain era, and by villain, I mean the generation that finally decided to stop suffering in silence just to look “hardworking.” They want soft lives. Soft routines. Soft friendships. Soft everything. But is it really softness, or a quiet rebellion disguised as candle-lit self-care? Let’s be honest: Gen Z didn’t choose the soft life. The soft life chose them the moment life started throwing plot twists that even Netflix wouldn’t approve of. They grew up with economic instability, global panic, rising expectations, and that constant pressure of “Do what you love, but also earn 6 figures by 23.” So yes, if Gen Z now wants an evening cup of chamomile tea instead of crying into their laptop at 2 a.m., maybe… just maybe… they deserve it. The term “soft life” often gets misunderstood. People think it means laziness, entitlement, or vibes-only attitudes. But if you actually talk to a Gen Z adult today, half the time they’re multitasking six emotional breakdow...

Love isn’t just an emotion. It is a nutrition that physically shapes a child’s brain, influencing their emotional, cognitive, and social development. From infancy to adolescence, children’s brains are constantly forming neural connections based on their past experiences. When a child receives quality love, care, and support, their brain develops in a way that fosters resilience, confidence, and emotional well-being. Neuroscience studies show that children with consistent parental love experience the release of oxytocin, known as the “bonding hormone,” which strengthens emotional regulation and trust. Love also reduces cortisol; if stress hormones take over, it can impair brain development and may lead to anxiety, depression, or difficulty in forming relationships. Emotional nutrition provides not only mental well-being but also physical well-being. For healthy emotional nutrition, children need emotional validation, a healthy environment, good peer groups, and appropriate parenting sty...

Health Optimization Within recent years, the search for optimal health has become an increasingly mainstream culture. Enabled and driven by scientific and technological advancements and readily available knowledge on health and wellness, an ever-growing number of people are fervently dedicated to bettering and optimizing their own personal health.  Although well-meaning and initially driven by good intentions, some individuals might soon discover that the obsession with optimal health becomes an addiction, an obsessive and addictive behavior with potentially detrimental effects.  In this article, I would like to share my curiosity about this recent obsession: health and fitness trends. Here, I will discuss health optimization addiction, its implications, motivations, and modern tendencies surrounding it. Comprehending Health Optimization Addiction Health optimization addiction can be described as an obsessive preoccupation with enhancing overall health and longevity through he...

A quiet but fascinating shift is happening in the way people relax at the end of the day. Instead of peaceful music or soothing bedtime stories, many fall asleep to crime documentaries, forensic breakdowns, and narrations of murder cases. What once belonged to thriller lovers is now a nightly ritual for students, working adults, and even people who claim they hate horror. This growing preference for dark content before sleep reveals something complex about the modern mind and its struggle to find comfort in an uneasy world. At first it sounds contradictory. Why would a mind that is tired and anxious choose to listen to danger instead of peace. To understand this, it helps to look at the emotional and psychological climate people live in today.  Life for most individuals has become full of uncertainty, academic pressure, relationship confusion, career instability, and constant exposure to negative news. Even when nothing dramatic happens during the day, the brain carries small fears...

Language as Our First Home Before we learn to read or write, we learn to listen. A mother’s voice, a father’s stories, a grandmother’s songs, these sounds become our first world. The mother language is not just a way to speak. It is the first space where we feel safe, loved, and understood. A child does not only learn words. The child learns tone, rhythm, and emotion. The way comfort is given. The way anger is shown. The way affection is expressed. All these are shaped by the language spoken at home. Language is deeply connected to culture. It carries values, customs, and shared memories. When a youngster hears stories in their mother tongue, they are not simply listening to a story. They are absorbing identities. Sociocultural Theory and Language The sociocultural hypothesis, introduced by Lev Vygotsky, describes how learning occurs through social interaction. According to this view, children develop thinking skills by engaging with others through language. Speech is not separate from...

Sherlock Holmes, the character has a famous line, “You see, but you do not observe.” This captures a certain truth about human attention in this day and age. We are constantly surrounded by an influx of various kinds of information, but we only grasp around 10% of it. Our five basic senses also take part in this, absorbing all the information that never fully reaches our minds. To manage this information overload, our brain engages in something called selective attention.  According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, selective attention is the process by which a person concentrates on one stimulus or task while ignoring other simultaneous stimuli. In simple terms, it is our ability to absorb important information while filtering out the unnecessary ones.  Without this shortcut, it would become impossible to comprehend any information. A key instance of selective attention is called the “cocktail party effect”. This is where, in a party, one can manage to focus on one convers...

Written By Gurneet Kaur Jaitly, Counselling Psychologist RPS International, Gurgaon “Sometimes the smallest arms hold the deepest need for comfort.” At a zoo in Japan, a young Japanese macaque nicknamed Punch-kun was given a small plush toy after being separated from his mother shortly after birth. Caretakers noticed he clung to the soft toy constantly — sleeping with it, holding it while resting, carrying it as he slowly learned to navigate his social world. Today, Punch-kun’s story is all over social media. Millions of people have watched this tiny primate hold on to comfort the only way he can. For many viewers, it has become a quiet but powerful reminder of something we often overlook — how deeply a mother’s touch, or even a simple hug, shapes emotional wellbeing. When a Baby is Separated from Its Mother For a baby primate, separation from the mother is not just physical distance — it is emotional shock. The mother represents warmth, nourishment, protection, and safety. When that p...

There’s a strange kind of silence that settles at night, the kind that doesn’t feel peaceful, but sharp, almost intrusive. The world finally winds down, notifications fade, the day loosens its grip… and suddenly your mind starts replaying conversations you thought you had moved past. A comment you made too quickly. A tone someone used that you can’t decipher. A moment where you laughed awkwardly or stayed quiet when you should’ve spoken. At 2 a.m., every tiny interaction becomes a scene under a microscope, and every sentence you said becomes evidence in a trial only you are attending. We replay conversations at night because that’s when our emotional guard drops. During the day, we’re in motion - working, studying, scrolling, talking, showing up for the roles we’re expected to play. There’s no space to linger on that one uncomfortable moment from hours ago. But when we finally lie down, the brain tries to finish the emotional processing it didn’t have time for. And often, the memories ...

Walk through any college campus, coaching centre, or online student community today and you will notice something surprising. Students who spend their mornings with textbooks often spend their evenings checking zodiac readings, watching tarot card pull videos, or waiting for the next angel number to appear on their phone screen. What once felt like a niche interest has now become a quiet movement. Tarot readers on social media have millions of followers, astrology pages predict exam outcomes, and many students now begin their day not with study plans but with weekly horoscope posts.  This rise is not a random trend. It reflects a deeper emotional crisis among young people who feel caught between pressure, uncertainty, and the unpredictable nature of the future. For many students, life today feels heavier than ever. Academic competition grows each year, job markets fluctuate, and the path to stability seems unclear. Even the idea of building a life feels shaky as the world changes s...