The Best Greater Good Articles of 2018

Here are the 10 most popular Greater Good articles from the past year, according to Google Analytics.

1. How to Find Your Purpose in Life, by Jeremy Adam Smith: Are you struggling to discover your purpose? That may be because you feel isolated from other people. Here’s how you can overcome that.

2. Ten Films that Highlight the Best in Humanity, by Jeremy Adam Smith, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Jill Suttie, Amy Eva, Maryam Abdullah, and Jesse Antin: Forget the Oscars. With the Greater Goodies, we’re honoring movies from the past year that exemplify forgiveness, resilience, empathy, and other keys to our well-being.

3. How to Know if You Married the Wrong Person, by Christine Carter: Christine Carter has clearly married the wrong man—again. Or did she?

4. Six Habits of Highly Compassionate People, by Hooria Jazaieri: Follow these steps to feel more compassionate toward others and toward yourself.

5. Seven Ways to Help Someone with Anxiety, by Alice Boyes: Knowing how anxiety works can help you to better support loved ones without inadvertently making their anxiety worse.

6. What Type of Meditation is Best for You?, by Tania Singer:One of the most in-depth meditation studies to date shows that different practices have different benefits.

7. How to Hardwire Resilience into Your Brain, by Rick Hanson and Forrest Hanson We’ll be better prepared for life’s challenges if we cultivate these 12 inner strengths.

8. How to Stop Sabotaging Yourself, by Alice Boyes: Understanding the roots of self-sabotaging behavior can help us to find fixes that will make our lives more successful and less conflicted.

9. Seven Lessons from Mister Rogers That Can Help Americans Be Neighbors Again, by Shea Tuttle The host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood taught kids critical emotional and social skills that are still relevant to adults today.

10. How to Gain Freedom from Your Thoughts by Daniel Siegel: Dan Siegel explains how meditation can help us transcend limiting beliefs and discover more presence and possibility in life.

Editors’ Picks

We polled our staff and editorial advisors on their personal favorites from the past year—and came up with more you might also consider reading, grouped by topic and listed by number of votes they received.

Mind, Body, Self

How I Learned to Need People (the Hard Way), by Kira Newman: When work is all that matters, discovered Kira Newman, things can get a little lonely.
How Loneliness Changes Across Your Lifetime, by Kira Newman: Loneliness can strike at any age, although the cause might be different.
The Four Keys to Happiness at Work, by Emiliana Simon-Thomas: Research reveals the steps you can take toward greater well-being, health, and productivity at work.
How to Find Your Purpose in Midlife, by Jill Suttie: New research shows that a sense of purpose in life is important for midlife and older adults, not just for kids.
Eight Reasons Why Awe Makes Your Life Better, by Summer Allen: Research suggests that awe can make you happier, healthier, more humble, and more connected to the people around you.

Children, Adolescents, and Parenting

Self-Compassion for Parents, by Maryam Abdullah: Do you beat up on yourself for being a bad parent? There’s an alternative.
How to be a Strengths-Based Parent, by Lea Waters: By focusing on our children’s strengths, we can help them flourish—and stop being so critical and worried.
Why Attachment Parenting is Not the Same as Secure Attachment, by Diana Divecha: Parents who embrace attachment parenting can be distressed when they can’t live up to its ideals. They shouldn’t be.
Five Ways to Help Teens Feel Good about Themselves, by Amy Eva: As teens struggle with anxiety and perfectionism, how can we help them like who they are?
Five Ways to Help Teens Think Beyond Themselves, by Amy Eva: Part of finding your purpose is connecting and contributing to something larger than yourself.

Society and Politics

Why Women Need Fierce Self-Compassion, by Kristin Neff: Compassion isn’t always soft and gentle; sometimes it means being forceful and fierce.
Seven Insights to Help You Make Sense of Gun Violence, by Jeremy Adam Smith: Research can help us understand why guns are killing more Americans—and what we can do to stop it.
What’s Driving Political Violence in America?, by Zaid Jilani and Jeremy Adam Smith: Hate crimes are rising, and so is support for political violence. New research explores why.
Overwhelmed by Suffering? Here’s How to Act Anyway, by Elizabeth Svoboda: Confronted with images of immigrant children in cages, how can we get past overwhelm and work toward a solution?
How Seeing the Good in People Can Help Bridge Our Differences, by Jill Suttie: When we witness acts of goodness, we’re more likely to see our common humanity.