The Mental Compass

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...

Given the emergence of modern dating terms like ghosting, benching, and situationship, it is crucial to teach today's youth how to navigate consent, recognize red flags, and set boundaries to foster meaningful connections while prioritizing their mental well-being. In this age of instant gratification and connectivity, whether offline or online, assertive communication and the art of setting boundaries, are essential skills to avoid feeling overwhelmed, used, or manipulated and to maintain healthy relationships, romantic or platonic. In any modern relationships, one of the most critical concerns is the fading of clear boundaries. The digital era has redefined friendships, which often overlap with romantic entanglements, further blurring the boundaries. This concept of consent is often misunderstood or misinterpreted or mishandled in relationships, whether in digital interactions or in person, especially in Indian context. Not everyone is aware of the legal aspects and cultural chal...

Being called “low-maintenance” is often framed as a compliment. It paints you as the easy one, the person who doesn’t demand attention, doesn’t stir conflict, doesn’t need constant reassurance. You become the friend who understands when others cancel plans, the partner who “gets it,” the colleague who quietly adjusts to everyone’s moods. And for a while, it feels good to be seen as adaptable, independent, unbothered. But beneath that polished calm, there’s a quieter truth that rarely gets said out loud: being low-maintenance often comes with a mental health cost that slowly, silently accumulates. Most people who grow into this identity rarely choose it willingly. It usually forms in childhood, in those small moments where expressing needs led to disappointment, rejection, or conflict. You learn quickly that being “too much” risks losing people. So you shrink a little, then a little more, until your emotional footprint becomes so small it barely registers. Over the years you refine this...

Public accusations can have detrimental psychological effects, particularly in the era of viral videos and hasty judgments. A 42-year-old man in Kerala recently committed suicide after a video of him acting inappropriately on a bus went viral. Millions of people saw the video. While investigations continue and perspectives differ, the emotional consequences of public accusation demand deeper psychological understanding. Examining the distinction between shame and guilt is essential to comprehending why such circumstances might turn tragic. According to psychologist June Tangney’s shame and guilt framework, these two emotions may appear similar but function very differently. And when shame becomes global and public, it can be far more psychologically corrosive than guilt. The Psychology of Guilt: I Did Something Bad Guilt is typically behavior focused. It arises when a person believes they have done something wrong. The internal narrative of guilt sounds like, “I made a mistake” or “I h...