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• Your job review is scheduled in two days and, in passing, your boss says, “Well, we’ll certainly have a lot to talk about.” You try to put what he said out of your mind—what did he mean by that?—but it keeps coming back, and now you’re a nervous wreck.
• You’re sitting in the airport, ready to board, and thoughts of every plane crash you’ve ever read about keep barging into your head. You try to shake them off, reminding yourself that plane travel is safer than driving a car, but it doesn’t work.
• You’re going to the doctor next week to have that mark on your thigh looked at and you think it’s probably nothing, but worst-case scenarios float into your head 24/7 and distracting yourself doesn’t work. Why is that

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Trust is the foundation of all human connections, from chance encounters to friendships and intimate relationships. It governs all the interactions we have with each other. No one would drive a car or walk down a sidewalk, or board a train or an airplane, if we didn’t “trust” that other people took their responsibilities seriously, and would obey whatever rules applied to the endeavor at hand. We trust that other drivers will stay in their lanes, that conductors and pilots will be sober and alert. And that people will generally do their best to discharge their obligations toward us. Culture, civilization, and community all depend on such trust.

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Source: Wikipedia

Most of us will, at one point or another, find ourselves reflecting on or recovering from a romantic run-in with a narcissist. Whether it was a short or long-term connection, it’s likely that during the post-mortem on the relationship, you’ll ask yourself how you managed to get sucked in by his or her charms, how you missed all the warning signs, what made you so vulnerable to the charms of a cold-hearted manipulator (and, often, a cheat). It’s usually not much comfort to realize that these are probably the same questions the hapless nymph Echo asked herself after her encounter with the original Narcissus of Greek myth.

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We all pride ourselves on making considered, well-thought-out decisions, and avoiding snap judgments based on little or no information. But despite our insistent belief in our “reasoning,” the fact is that a lot of the time, we’re doing nothing of the kind.

Human beings are actually hardwired to make snap judgments, or to engage in what Daniel Kahneman has called “fast” thinking—much of it taking place outside of our conscious awareness. At the risk of making you feel like a puppet on a string (albeit your own brain’s string) consider the following research and ask yourself, “Who’s driving the car that’s me?”

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The self-help genre often offers up solutions to our issues without forcing us to reflect on what we’re actually doing and saying in our lives to cause those problems in the first place. So, in a contrarian mode, I’ve decided to detail what research knows to be some of the most toxic habits we bring into our relationships—even though we may not even be aware that we carry them.

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