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The Vessel Editorial Team

The Vessel Editorial Team produces content on psychology, philosophy, spirituality, and the questions people return to about how to live well. We publish essays, reflections, and explorations drawn from psychological research, philosophical traditions, and contemplative practices. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, research, drafting, fact-checking, editing, and review, rather than a single individual's writing. The Vessel takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.
  • Relationships

The idea that a couple’s love burns hotter when their families disapprove has been repeated for fifty years, but when researchers actually followed couples, the disapproval didn’t fuel the romance, it more often predicted the slow thinning of it
Airplane wing over a soft sea of clouds with a warm dawn horizon
  • Inner Life

The move to a sunnier city, the bigger salary, the thing we’re sure will finally make us happy usually does far less than we imagine — researchers found that whatever we focus on looms huge while we’re picturing it, then shrinks back to almost nothing inside an ordinary Tuesday
  • Inner Life

People who narrate their own bad luck — my back always goes, I never sleep before something important, this always happens to me — may be less describing a pattern and more rehearsing one
  • Inner Life

The person who keeps a smooth, untroubled face through every hard moment often isn’t the steady one in the room — researchers keep finding that the people who routinely push their feelings down tend to feel a little less joy, hold on to a little more of the bad, and sit a quiet step apart from the people they love
  • Inner Life

We treat being alone with our own thoughts as the easiest thing in the world, but when researchers left people in a bare room with nothing to do but think, many found it so unpleasant that some chose to give themselves a small electric shock rather than sit quietly with their minds
  • Relationships

Saying sorry in person can be uncomfortable, but at least both people are in the discomfort together — online, one person is typing alone, and the other is reading alone, and for some that asymmetry may be the hardest part of all
  • Inner Life, Relationships

We brace before admitting a mistake or asking for help, sure it will look like weakness, but the very thing we are dreading tends to read to other people as courage — and it is mostly ourselves we are judging so harshly
Two people sit talking on a bench by the sea at sunset, in silhouette
  • Inner Life

The person who walks away from a good conversation quietly certain they talked too much or said the wrong thing usually isn’t reading the room badly — researchers keep finding the other person left it hoping they’d talk again
  • Inner Life

Nobody talks about why so many people find it easier to be vulnerable with a chatbot than with their closest friends — but the reason makes complete sense once you hear it
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