Gary Drevitch
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Writer, Editor, Psychology Today staffer, father of 3, Boston native
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Articles by Gary Drevitch
The 1960s Art School Experiment That Redefined Creativity
By Keith Sawyer The year is 1964. An art school student is in a studio, sketching a still life. But it’s no ordinary studio. A researcher in the corner is watching closely and taking notes. The student has been given only one hour to complete the sketch. His still life must be composed from a set of 27 carefully chosen objects, including a bunch of grapes, a steel gearshift, an antique book, and a glass prism.
Leading Through Identity: Mobilizing a Shared Sense of “Us”
Bracht, E. M., Monzani, L., Boer, D., Haslam, S. A., Kerschreiter, R., Lemoine, J. E., Steffens, N. K., Akfirat, S. A., Avanzi, L., Barghi, B., Dumont, K., Edelmann, C. M., Epitropaki, O., Fransen, K., Giessner, S., Gleibs, I. H., González, R., Laguía González, A., Lipponen, J., . . . van Dick, R. (2023). Innovation across cultures: Connecting leadership, identification, and creative behavior in organizations. Applied Psychology, 72(1), 348-388. Fladerer, M. P., Haslam, S. A., Steffens, N. K., & Frey, D. (2021).
Tom Brady Says Obsession Is Key. Science Says Otherwise
Curran, T., Hill, A. P., Appleton, P. R., Vallerand, R. J., & Standage, M. (2015). The psychology of passion: A meta-analytical review of a decade of research on intrapersonal outcomes. Motivation and Emotion, 39(5), 631–655. Donahue, E. G., Forest, J., Vallerand, R. J., Lemyre, P-N., Crevier-Braud, L., & Bergeron, E. (2012). Passion for work and emotional exhaustion: The mediating role of rumination and recovery. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 4(3), 341–368. Elliot, A. J., & Church, M. A. (1997).
Why You Should Stop Rejecting Unpleasant Feelings
You wake up and something feels off. Your mind is slow and cloudy. Your energy is low, and you begin to worry the day may not be as productive as you hoped. The day has barely begun, yet there is already a sense that it should feel different. The response begins quickly: You try to correct the feeling. Coffee, movement, mental pressure: Get focused, get moving, start the day properly. A good start is expected to include energy and clarity.
How Music Therapy Can Help Parentless Children Navigate Loss
Music therapy can assist grieving adolescents and children. Music can help comfort grieving youth in a variety of ways. Turning to music can be a healthy outlet for grieving youth. Finding comfort in music can help grieving youth cope with the death of their parent. One of the many activities children and teenagers enjoy doing throughout their childhood is listening to music.
How to Talk About Childhood Issues Without Blaming the Parents
Parents might unconsciously communicate their own unresolved trauma to their children. Those children might communicate their parent's distress in psychiatric symptoms. Trauma and adversity may travel through generations unless deliberately interrupted.
The Emotional Cost of Becoming Someone New
Months ago, even the thought of this would make me emotional. Now, I think I’ve found ways to cope with it, and I want to share that. I am about to graduate from my doctorate program, and even thinking about it makes me feel sad. Because this journey changed my entire life. I came to Austin in August 2020, risking everything, starting my life from scratch with two children, moving from Astana. I left a well-paying job and chose to apply for a Ph.D. program.
Education to Improve the Planet’s Health, and Our Own
by Hunter Gehlbach, Ph.D. Below the surface of our Earth Day celebrations lies a strange paradox. On the one hand, the Earth makes us healthier. A growing body of research shows how spending time in nature improves human health, resilience, and well-being. On the other hand, we have degraded the natural world to the point that the planet’s health is suffering, so now the planet is making us less healthy. Planetary Health is a burgeoning multidisciplinary research field and a social movement.
When Your Career Is Stable, but Your Relationships Arent't
This one is not for the person who is falling apart publicly. (There are other articles for that.) This one is for the person who is still showing up to work, fulfilling leadership roles in meetings, making the tough decisions, and answering emails like nothing in their world has shifted—while privately trying to metabolize that their romantic life has once again fallen apart.
Why We Can Struggle to Leave the Past Behind
Some time ago, I read a piece on Medium recounting the story of a pike, described as an “aggressive predatory freshwater fish.” The pike was placed among smaller fish but separated from them by a bell jar. The pike repeatedly tried to attack and make a meal out of them, but failed each time because of the barrier, leaving it with nothing more than a bruised nose. But when the bell jar was removed, the pike still did not attack them.
What Happens When a Couple Opens Their Relationship?
1 in 5 people have been in a sexually open relationship. People who open up tend to be highly satisfied with their relationships at the outset. At least in the short term, opening up doesn't appear to change life or relationship satisfaction. Opening up is linked to increased sexual satisfaction for individuals. Source: Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash Consensual non-monogamy (CNM) is fairly common, with about 1 in 5 adults saying they’ve been in some type of sexually open relationship.
Do Women With ADHD Cheat More?
Women with ADHD are significantly more likely to engage in infidelity than women without ADHD. Impulsivity, dopamine-seeking and object impermanence can make resisting fidelity harder for women with ADHD ADHD doesn't excuse infidelity, but it does ask us to look a little deeper before we judge. Sometimes it's hard to be a woman, as the song goes, giving all your love to just one man. But how many women actually do?
Has Mindfulness Had Its Day?
Recently, a colleague said: “I think mindfulness has had its day.” I felt alarm, confusion, quiet hurt, and a flash of anger. I didn’t trust my reaction or my impulse to push back. So I sat with it. I’ve heard some version of this comment in different countries, from a range of colleagues—each time with a different mix of curiosity, concern, even relief. As if we’ve been surfing a wave, and now it’s time to move on to the next one.
A Compassionate History of American Attitudes Toward Animals
A new book offers a detailed history of human-animal relationships and how we got to where we are now. Our pets have increasingly become family members but we often ignore the suffering of other species. We’re responsible for the unseen consequences of our actions, not just the seen ones. In America's mid-nineteenth century cities, animals were pervasively seen, heard, and smelled. The is a scene from New York City. Source: Bill Wasik/Currier and Ives/Public Domain.
Have You Ever Met an Emotional Gangster?
In our culture, it is hard not to have stereotypes about mob activities. Perhaps what many of us know comes from The Godfather movies, The Sopranos series, or media coverage about various New York crime families. Don Corleone, Tony Soprano, and John Gotti are gangsters. These are tough guys—and while we may not have met any actual gangsters, most of us probably know some emotional gangsters. Some of us may even realize that we ourselves are emotional gangsters.
Where the Resistance Lives
Source: Photo by Keegan Houser/Unsplash There are moments, sitting in front of a blank page, when I can feel the words waiting—not absent, just withheld. It is rarely a lack of ideas. More often, it is the presence of something I would rather not say—a sentence that feels too honest, too exposed, or too close to something unresolved. In those moments, the mind becomes active. It suggests alternatives, distractions, safer directions.
What Is Your Quarter-Life Crisis Trying to Tell You?
The most powerful internal drivers of the quarter-life crisis are purpose, meaning, and anxiety. The crisis intensifies when young adults have insufficient permission to question who they are. The hunger for meaning is not a philosophical luxury; it is a psychological necessity. Source: Photo by Chris Turgeon on Unsplash Nobody who has ever sat across from me in the grip of a quarter-life crisis has opened with the words: I think I have a meaning problem.
Why So Many Adults With ADHD Still Feel Wounded by School
Source: Rodion Kutsaiev / Pexels “Tell me about a place you would never want to go back to—not a destination, a setting." It’s a question I sometimes use in therapy because it gives people something concrete to hold onto. Broad questions about childhood can be hard to answer. But this one tends to unlock something specific, and for many adults with ADHD, the answer comes quickly: School.
The ProSocial AI Index: A Better Way to Think About AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is often discussed as if its impact was mainly a technical issue: Is the model accurate? Is it fast? Is it cheaper than the old system? Can it scale? Those are useful questions. They are not the whole story. A tool can be efficient and still steer people in the wrong direction. It can save time while weakening judgment. It can increase output while shrinking empathy. It can help an institution make decisions faster while making those decisions narrower, colder, or less fair.
Higher Education Mergers Feel Personal, Because They Are
You attend a meeting to hear the announcement that your college and another will merge. The message is framed around efficiency, alignment, sustainability, and opportunity. Your reaction doesn’t focus on the strategic reasons, though. Rather, it feels emotional. Faculty, staff, and students worry about where they will “fit.” Units can become protective during a planned merger. Discussions about opportunities and innovation may happen in secret, with concern over ownership of those ideas.
How "You’ve Got Mail" Can Help Comfort Motherless Daughters
When teenage and young-adult girls lose their mother, their connection to their late mother suddenly gets disrupted. A mother’s love for her daughter always lives on, and the bond will always remain, but a disruption occurs when a mother dies. It is painful for anyone, but in this post we will focus on daughters losing their mother at a young age. Sometimes young daughters who lose their mothers might be able to relate to other girl peers who also lost mothers.
Resilience and Reconstruction in Practice
A comprehensive, long-term approach is needed when forced displacement occurs. Resilience thrives on maintaining identity continuity amid forced displacement challenges. Meaningful work boosts displaced individuals' resilience through contribution and recognition.
The Let-Down Effect: When De-Stressing Makes You Sick
The Let-Down Effect Source: Generated with Groq 2026 Twenty-five years have passed since I first described the syndrome I later called The Let-Down Effect in my book When Relaxation Is Hazardous to Your Health (2001). At the time, the relationship of stress and illness had been well established. What had not been discussed was the relationship between relaxation and illness, and the Let- Down Effect was not even a searchable term in Google.
What Old Psychology Can Teach Us About New Betting
In 2026, people are more empowered than ever when it comes to placing financial bets. Each year, millions of people bet on sports, make wagers in prediction markets about political events, or try their hand at day trading of stocks or cryptocurrency. Modern financial tools like Robinhood for trading digital investments allow people to buy and sell assets immediately and frictionlessly.
What if Your "Type" Is Just Unfinished Business?
Sexual imprinting shapes attraction by encoding early relational experiences for what feels desirable. The parent you felt closest to may influence your adult “type,” emotionally or physically. What feels like “chemistry” is often familiarity, not necessarily compatibility. Unfinished relationships can stay active in the mind, pulling you toward similar dynamics.
Painting With Blood: Who Does It and Who Collects It
Some key artists work using blood as a medium. There are three re-occurring themes behind artwork using blood. Collectors and museums are surprisely receptive to artwork created using blood. A representation of Marc Quinn's Blood Sculpture Source: Generated with Grok AI Art collecting has always required collectors to grapple with the boundaries of what counts as legitimate artistic practice. This post explores one of the more provocative corners of contemporary art: the use of blood as a medium.
Beyond Vanity: Feeling Attractive in Midlife
Midlife changes often begin with an unfamiliar face in the mirror. Caring about how you look may reflect a deeper desire to reconnect with the true self rather than vanity. Self-care and cosmetic choices can support alignment when guided by internal values. Feeling more like yourself can restore vitality and engagement, and provide a renewed sense of direction. Has it happened to you yet? The glance in the mirror that caused a quiet but unsettling thought: Who is that? What happened to me?
Are Muslim Arabs Especially Likely to Believe in Fate?
The idea that some cultural groups are more fatalistic than others is not new. More than 100 years ago, social theorist Max Weber claimed that capitalism first emerged in Protestant countries and not elsewhere because, as religions go, the Protestant faith was less fatalistic than the others. Unlike Catholics, for example, early Protestants extolled the virtues of planning and hard work.
EMDR in a World Hyper‑Focused on Healing
Experiences can make us feel highly reactive. EMDR helps us access and organize these experiences and can lead to life shifts. Bilateral stimulation supports adaptive information processing.
Rockhounding and Our Primordial Fascination With Crystals
My idea of a relaxing weekend away is a luxury spa with a great book in a quiet place. My husband’s preference is to go gem collecting with fellow rockhounds. For years I just thought this was quirky and did not pay much attention. Then he announced he was going to Mount Ida in Arkansas to mine crystals. He returned from this trip with bags of quartz crystals that he dug out of the mountain. I did not anticipate how much the crystals would captivate me.
Is It Really Possible to Love Two People at the Same Time?
About 10% of Americans have experienced polyamory. Polyamory often increases romantic intensity through novelty. Polyamorous women often have sex only with partners they love but may fall in love quickly. Romantic love is sometimes—but not always—diminished when shared. Source: Pexels/Darina Belonogova “My fantasy is to have five lovers. However, I do not think that my husband will agree—and, anyway, I will not have time for them all.
What Strong Couples Repair
Strong relationships protect core psychological needs over time. Many couples' conflicts begin as threats of safety, belonging, autonomy, competence, or dignity. Responsiveness, shared coping, and repair make love more durable. Most relationships do not break in one dramatic moment. They wear down when too many small injuries stop being repaired. People often explain successful partnerships in terms of chemistry, compatibility, or luck.
Too Much Advice Is Making Us Worse at Parenting
Too much expert advice can increase parental anxiety. Parenting has shifted from a relationship to a “child-focussed project.” Less information can help parents function more effectively. “Can you see the ways that external advice can exacerbate parental anxiety by creating unrealistic standards and fueling a sense of inadequacy?
You Are Not a Project to Be Improved
In an unpredictable world, self-improvement can become a way to manage anxiety. Self-awareness can become self-surveillance. A constant drive toward improvement can pull us away from connection. Source: Designed by Freepik I track my steps, my workouts, my calories. I read the research, listen to podcasts, and try to stay current on what it means to live well.
The 5 Types of Need-Fulfilling Romantic Relationships
What type of relationship do you have when it comes to need fulfillment? Is yours the kind that satisfies many dimensions of your needs? Or are some needs never met by your partner? To answer this question is to take a global, practical look at your relationship. With clear eyes, you try to determine: What does your relationship do for you? This might seem selfish or, at least, self-focused, but it gets at one of the key roles of relationships: need fulfillment.
What Is Soft Socializing?
Shared activities give interactions structure, reducing pressure to sustain conversation. Everyday talk plays a key role in maintaining relationships over time. Low-pressure communication environments can support well-being and reduce social fatigue. Connection does not require constant engagement; it can unfold through shared presence. You may have seen the term soft socializing circulating online.
Parenting a Child With Pathological Demand Avoidance
I work with many parents who suspect their child might have pathological demand avoidance (PDA). They are overwhelmed and report difficulty finding health care professionals who understand their experiences. What Is Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)? PDA is a pattern of behavior that occurs in some children and adults with neurodiverse presentations, such as autism, ADHD, or anxiety. PDA is not a clinical diagnosis. A more suitable phrase for the pehnomenon may be persistent drive for autonomy.
3 Keys to Understanding a Romantic Partner
Deciding who will work out as a romantic partner can become a tricky task, especially in the early stages. A new study reveals three sets of clues that could help you decide whether a new relationship will work out. By doing some astute observation of a partner's past, you may be able to more firmly predict the future. Everyone wishes to understand their romantic partner better, but it’s not always clear what to look for.
3 Daily Habits That May Help Lower Your Risk of Dementia
Aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) per week. Limit total sedentary time to less than eight hours per day to avoid "active couch potato" risks. Seek a "Goldilocks Zone" of 7 to 8 hours of shut-eye per night; too much or too little sleep can backfire. Implementing these habits during the "midlife window" (ages 35 to 64) appears to maximize long-term benefits.
Psychiatric Nursing Students Can't Find Clinical Training
An ever-increasing percentage of psychiatric care in the United States is being delivered by Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioners (PMHNPs). To earn this credential, one must first get a nursing degree. Then, the most common path is to obtain a Masters of Science in Nursing with a psychiatric specialization.
What Makes You Wealthy? It’s Not Money
Wealth starts with a plan. Research shows intentional people consistently outperform those who wing it. Failure is not the enemy of wealth. Growth-minded individuals treat setbacks as data, not defeat. Successful people seek criticism. Feedback-seeking predicts faster adaptation and higher performance. The author and Cheryl HInes after the interview Source: Bobby Hoffman Are you wealthy?
You Don’t Have a Libido Problem, You Have a Presence Problem
Source: Antoni Shkraba Studio / Pexels Libido disparities can be caused by many things: hormones, stress, relationship dynamics, life stage — all of that matters. But over and over again, I see something else underlying low desire, something quieter, more revealing, and often missed. The low-desire partner isn’t always lacking libido; they’re often lacking presence. This is the person with a very busy mind. A mind that doesn’t easily land. A mind that is scanning, organizing, anticipating, managing.
Sacred Spaces and Spiritual Connections
Significantly spiritual places are linked to good mental health. Nature, buildings, neighbourhoods. and homes can count. Building these connections protects your well-being. Source: bertvthul / Pixabay It’s a well-known and well-studied fact that Mother Nature isn’t just beneficial to your wellbeing, but it’s also nigh on essential. Just 20 minutes spent in a forest, for instance, can significantly reduce your stress levels.
When Therapy Treats You as the Problem to Fix
This post is the final in a three-part series. You can read Part 1 here: What If Your Therapist Is Wrong About You? and Part 2 here: When Therapy Explains Before It Understands When difference is treated as a problem to fix There also seemed to be an implicit assumption about what therapy was meant to do in that context.
Are We Programming Our Own Obsolescence?
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves do not develop in a vacuum. They are in constant dialogue with much bigger stories – the shared narratives of our culture and our time. These stories shape what we desire, what we fear, what we strive for, what we count as purpose, and what we deem morally good or bad. Most of these stories feel so natural to us that we no longer recognise them as stories, for they tend to masquerade as truths.
Is Love Addiction Real?
Is there such a thing as love addiction? It is a concept that has been gaining traction in popular culture but whether it might be viable as a clinical condition hinges on what is meant by love and by addiction. Different types of love There are many types of love, each of which has transformative power over and on us. Does each have a form that would lead to it becoming addictive? Eros describes a passionate longing for a person physically and what they may represent, such as an ideal of beauty.
When Therapy Explains Before It Understands
This post is the second in a three-part series. You can read Part 1 here: What If Your Therapist Is Wrong About You? In the first post in this series, I described an experience from early therapy that left me questioning not just what I felt, but whether what I felt was real at all. More than a decade later, having worked in this field—and more importantly, having met people with whom I genuinely resonate—I can now see that the experience I had at the time was not imagined.
Reducing Firearm Suicides Starts With Gun Reform, Not Gun Control
Most gun owners want guns to be used responsibly. Most Republicans support universal background checks. The key question should be, “How do we solve the problem of gun suicides?” Advocates of common-sense gun laws often cite the number of firearm deaths in the United States—nearly 50,000 per year—as a reason for tougher restrictions on the sale and distribution of guns.
The Fog of War Through AI-Generated Images
AI-generated images and videos proliferate in an age when they are easy to make. Psychology research shows that photographic evidence, whether faked or not, is particularly persuasive. Detectors can help identify true images, but they’re imperfect. We need to hone our critical thinking skills, in part by seeking out fact-checking resources. The barrier to creating compelling and believable AI-generated images and videos of war has been lowered considerably.
The Sober Curious Movement's Big Blind Spot
Giving up alcohol feels like progress. But if you're reaching for cannabis instead, you haven't changed the pattern—just the packaging. I started working with a client I'll call Marcus last year. A 31-year-old, sharp, hard-working, successful tech-ops executive, he was genuinely proud that he hadn't touched alcohol in 14 months. He'd started out with Dry January, loved it, and kept going. His sleep improved. His skin cleared up. His dinner tabs got smaller.
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