While therapists famously close their offices for vacation in August, your own personal troubles don’t leave home without you. To help readers cope during this dry spell, Media City looks at the best of the psych magazines — with tips on marriage, on staying mentally fit and on finding that elusive formula for happiness.
Psychology Today
Psychology Today takes on the question of how to maintain intimacy in a marriage when tech devices are screaming for your attention. Hint: Turn them off! But if you can’t, face the consequences of “diminished relationship satisifaction” “the iPhone Effect” and “absence presence,” just some of the labels given to how technology is affecting couples today. While all this seems like common sense, the magazine’s cover story raises one issue that perhaps is not as well-known. Complaints about porn use — because of its easy access via devices — is the number one issue therapists say they are dealing with today. The magazine also tackles promiscuity, suggesting that marriages in which one or both partners have had multiple partners before tying the knot will result in a “less satisfying relationship,” while couples who didn’t play the field before marriage have better relationships. Overall, Psychology Today gets it right on its mix of topics, including a feature on violence among young men, the positive impact of putting down roots and even canine intelligence. Even if its relationship advice confirms what we thought we already knew, it’s still an interesting read.
Mental Floss
Mental Floss, in what it calls “The Impossible Issue,” delights in highlighting the simply weird, but mostly seems like a hodgepodge of strange, unrelated articles, including one on “People who Really Love Blue” to “The Magic of Steph Curry” and “The Librarian Who took on Al Qaeda.” Enough said. But we couldn’t resist mentioning the profile of a British guy who dressed up as a goat and lived amongst goats, actually “joining a herd” and writing a book about it. You might remember reading about him in The Post first. One of his acquaintances — in The Post’s version of the story — called him an “idiot” because he initially wanted to become an elephant. Mental Floss would be good to take along for a long car or plane trip this summer — after you’ve exhausted all your other reading material.
Live Happy
Live Happy reads like a caricature of itself or a teen magazine targeting adults. We learn that listening to the right music can make you happy, eating the right foods can make you happy and being fit can make you happy. What, you already knew that? Well, Live Happy dresses up this advice by giving familiar jargon unusual labels like “body intelligence” (We don’t really know what it is after reading the article) which has something to do with your ability to “harness your body’s full energy spectrum.” Live Happy devotes 10 pages to “finding happiness in your headphones,” which we’ve already established makes us happy, but just in case you needed convincing.
New York
If you’ve ever wondered what happened to Winona Ryder, what she did when she dropped off the face of Hollywood for a period, New York tells the story in a cover profile. Ryder, who was famously caught shoplifting, took a timeout afterwards and got “really into constitutional law for a while and really into linguistics” and, drumroll, “really into etymology.” Who knew? Maybe Johnny Depp? She also shares that she doesn’t use social media and doesn’t actually know how to use it. New York also delivers its annual Fall Fashion spread, taking us back through time to revisit the trends of the 1980s and the history of stacked heels. Also sprinkled in is an interview with 16-year-old sneaker phenom, Benjamin Kickz, who (has been all over the news recently) resells sneakers and says he’s on track to rake in $1 million in sales this year. Not bad for a home-schooled kid, but we wonder when his family decided to trade in his childhood for a $1.2 billion industry.
Time Life
We miss the days when Life magazine was delivered in regular doses. The Time Life special on seminal Olympic moments reminds us of the colorful characters and dramas of years past, like the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding saga; or that of gymnast Kerri Strug, who sprained her ankle on the vault but got back up to help her team win the gold in 1996; and the tragic Munich massacre of 1972. We are reminded that there was, indeed such a group as the Jamaican bobsledding team — and, no, they didn’t win — but they inspired a 1993 movie, Cool Runnings. There was a “Miracle on Ice” however, in 1980, when the US hockey team, a group of college players, beat the mighty professional players on the Soviet Union team, one of the biggest upsets in Olympic history and indeed one of the top sports stories of the 20th century.