A list of the most valuable content we created in 2022

This year, we created a lot of new content aimed at helping you improve your life and understand aspects of the world. In this post,we highlight what we think is our most valuable work from the last year, including four interactive tools, ten of our favorite podcast episodes, and four of our most popular articles. Finally, we tell you what you can look forward to in 2023.

Our Best Interactive Tools 🛠️

All of our interactive tools are free to use and cover topics like helping you examine your beliefs, learn what makes you happy, and develop new positive habits. Here are four of the best tools we’ve launched this year.

1. Surpass Self-Limiting Beliefs

What if many of the times when you thought you weren't good enough, strong enough, brave enough, attractive enough, outgoing enough, or ready enough… you actually were? And the only thing holding you back from succeeding was your beliefs about not being enough? Psychologists call these kinds of recurring thoughts which unnecessarily limit our behavior self-limiting beliefs.

By using this tool, you will:

• Learn how to define and identify some of your own self-limiting beliefs

• Evaluate how your self-limiting beliefs may be negatively impacting your life

• Try three useful strategies for reducing self-limiting beliefs

2. Uncover Your Guiding Principles

This is a tool to help you figure out your life principles - rules of thumb that you can use when deciding how to act in order to better achieve your goals. These rules might be informed by what kind of person you want to be or by your understanding of morality.

By using this tool, you will:

• Learn what principles are and why it's helpful to have them.

• Build a list of your own Personal Principles.

• Remember your principles and apply them to your life.

• Optionally, print a beautiful customized poster for your wall if you want to keep your life principles in mind throughout the day!

3. Replace Unhelpful Coping Strategies

Throughout our lives, we're bound to face challenges that require us to adapt. Leading the life you want is less about avoiding every obstacle, and more about developing healthy coping strategies for navigating the stressful challenges you encounter.

This tool is designed to help you:

• Identify and understand unhelpful coping strategies you might be using

• Develop a positive coping strategy that can serve you more effectively in facing difficult situations

• Create an implementation intention plan for shifting toward this positive coping strategy

4. The World’s Biggest Problems Quiz

In this quiz, you'll explore some of the most pressing problems facing humanity: ones that are not only major, but also often overlooked in comparison to other issues. You can choose which topics interest you from among global health, animal welfare, and existential risk.

By taking this quiz, you will:

• Learn more about these issues and explore potential solutions.

• Receive a personalized report with your score for every cause area and showing how you measure up against others.

How will you apply this knowledge to help humanity?

Our Favorite Clearer Thinking Podcast Episodes 🔊

Our podcast, Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, now has 137 episodes - featuring deep, nuanced, and educational conversations with fascinating people! Here are ten of our favorites from 2022:

1. Bringing rationality into politics (with Elizabeth Edwards-Appell)

2. Humble-bragging, counter-signalling, and impression management (with Övül Sezer)

3. Estimating the long-term impact of our actions today (with Will MacAskill)

4. Are we all the heroes of our own stories? (with Cate Hall)

5. A former Al-Qaeda recruiter speaks (with Jesse Morton)

6. Why is self-compassion so hard? (with Kristin Neff)

7. How can we un-break politics? (with Magnus Vinding)

8. Critiquing Effective Altruism (with Michael Nielsen and Ajeya Cotra)

9. Is the universe a computer? (with Joscha Bach)

10. Our 100th episode! (with Uri Bram and Spencer Greenberg)

Our Top Articles 📚

We also wrote in-depth articles for our newsletter and blog. We’ve included our top four here.

1. Understanding the two most common mental health problems in the world

Anxiety and depression are the two most common mental health conditions in the world, but they are frequently misunderstood. In this data-based essay, we aim to help you better understand anxiety and depression, as well as the hidden links between them.

2. Understanding how other people think: a theory of worldviews

We put forward a theory of worldviews that will help you understand how different worldviews work. We call this "Snow Globe Theory." Every worldview includes many beliefs, but we believe that almost every one has four central components that can be expressed by answering these questions: What is good? Where do good and bad come from? Who deserves the good? How can you do good or be good? This article explains this way of thinking about worldviews and applies it to a long list of worldviews that are most likely to be prominent in your life today.

3. A quantitative exploration of psychological interventions for well-being

Which psychological interventions hold promise for improving well-being? We explored this question using survey data to look for promising psychological interventions that might improve people's lives.

4. Ten theories for how to achieve true happiness

The question of how to achieve true happiness has been debated for thousands of years. In this article, we’ve summarized ten approaches to happiness, new and old, that are popular today. We’ve also included links to helpful tools and resources you can use for each of these approaches.

What’s to Come in 2023? 🚀

We’ve got lots more interactive tools in the works, right now! Our team is diligently researching things like imposter syndrome, cultivating self-compassion, flexible and nuanced thinking, the ‘Big 5/6' personality types, gratitude, jealousy in relationships, and more. So please look out for these new tools in 2023!

We also just launched one of our biggest projects ever: Transparent Replications! In 2023, we’re going to be running replications of new psychology studies published in top journals, in an attempt to combat the replication crisis. You can read about this project in one of our recent articles. If you’d like to get involved with Transparent Replications in 2023, you can find out how, here.

Thanks for sticking with us through 2022! We hope that our content helped you think better, understand yourself more deeply, and made it easier to take action towards your goals. If you liked what we did and would like to see more of it in 2023, or have suggestions on how we can improve in the coming year, please get in touch to let us know!