130+ Interesting Psychological Facts That Will Make You Think

Diving deep into the roots of our human mind, behavior, thoughts, and feelings is a wild and fascinating. There are some incredible facts that can lead you on the path of having a better understanding of yourself and others.

What Are The Most Interesting Psychological Facts About Life?

• Being alone can take a toll on your health and make you more susceptible to getting sick. (1)
• At night, our imagination is the highest, while our creativity levels drop significantly during the day. 
• Being isolated and alone in your home for a long time can be just as bad for your health and well-being as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. 
• People who are in positions of power and influence over others are usually very bad at determining other people’s feelings. 
• The most depressed people in the world are the ones between the ages of 18 and 33. 
• Travel lowers your chances of depression and heart disease and also improves your brain health.
• Broken heart syndrome, medically called stress cardiomyopathy, could cause short-term severe dysfunction of the heart muscle. 
• The force of authority on humans has the same effect as surviving a traumatic brain injury. 
• When you have two completely opposite views or values about something, and you change one view to match the other, that’s called cognitive dissonance. (2)
• Women’s threshold for pain is greater than men’s, even though women have half as many pain receptors as males. 
• Staying optimistic about the future can protect you from physical pain and mental illness.
• The scientist Thomas H. Morgan is the one who discovered that chromosomes had inherited knowledge. 
• Some people live their lives as if they were in a reality TV show. This is called the Truman Syndrome. 
• When you look at people kindly, you show them your positive characteristics. On the other hand, when you see others in a negative light, you reveal to them your negative attributes.
• Depression is often the product of our thoughts. Our imagination usually causes problems that don’t exist.  (3)
• The type of music you listen to shapes your view of the world. 
• Being happy around people makes you happier. 
• Narcissistic Personality Disorder exists in approximately 6% of the population. 
• Today’s average high school student has the same anxiety level as compared to the average psychiatric ward inmate in the early 1950s. 
• Prayer and other religious rituals are connected with significantly lower mental issues or psychological discomfort levels. 

What Are The Most Interesting Psychological Facts About The Brain? 

• We can udnretsnad any msseed up stnecene as lnog as the lsat and frsit lteerts of wdros are in crrcoet palecs. Suhc as tihs stnecene. 
• A person has 7 minutes of neural activity before passing away. 
• An average person’s mind wanders 30% of the time. 
• We often tend to divide what we know into classes of 3-4 objects in them. The Indian phone number is 984-973-2543. Three blocks with 3-4 bits in each chunk. 
• Our brains are now 10% smaller than the brains of hunter-gatherers. 
• Information lasts longer in the mind of a person who evaluates it than if the person only examines it without the need for instant recall. 
• Repetition affects the brain physically as new associations are made between the brain cells.
• If you can’t stop thinking at night, start writing down your thoughts. This will help you relax and will also put your mind at ease. 
• Our minds are constantly working behind the scenes to make boring speeches more exciting and interesting. 
• Anything that your mind says has an identical response from the body’s cells. 
• Cab drivers in London need to know the name of every street in London. Therefore, their hippocampus is bigger due to the increased activity in the area as they are trying to decipher more details. 
• Saying to yourself that you slept well tricks your brain into thinking you did.
• Our brain tends to experience rejection as physical pain and discomfort. 
• Our brain doesn’t think that long-term deadlines are so important. 
• Phantom Vibration Syndrome is the name of the neural activity that happens when you think your phone is vibrating when it isn’t. (4)
• When we sleep, our spinal fluid flows into the skull beyond the brain’s blood vessels. This reduces brain cell waste, a particular accumulation of amyloid-beta protein. 
• Increased physical activity and exercise will delay your brain from aging by ten years.

Interesting Psychology Facts About Love

• When looking at someone you love, your eye pupil rises to 45%. 
• Emotional pain is better remembered than physical pain, and it also has a more significant influence on your behavior.
• Romantic desire is biochemically the same as a serious obsessive-compulsive disorder. 
• Any relationship between 16 and 28 years is more likely to be healthy and long-lasting.
• The maximum amount of close relationships and friendships you can maintain in your life is between 50 and 150. 
• Love is actually three feelings in one: lust, attraction, and attachment.
• A hug longer than 20 seconds produces hormones in your body that increase your trust for the person you are hugging. 
• You tend to think more about a certain person than about a catastrophic event. 
• The smarter the person, the more selective they are, and thus they have fewer friends. 
• Being in love can decrease your appetite. 
• Attraction is based on obsession.
• Love can be a pain reliever. 
• Lust is different than love.
• Being in love changes you in the way of like or doing some things you have never liked or done before. 
• Love is blind, i.e., when you are in love, your ability to make logical assessments decreases. 
• The ‘love drug’ is found in chocolate. 
• Love is similar to being high. 
• It takes one-fifth of a second to fall in love. 
• Love shuts off the prefrontal cortex of the brain, and the result is bad decisions and regrettable events in a new relationship.
• The brain is the organ that falls in love, not the heart. 
• Love can make you sick because the cortisol that is produced suppresses your health and your immune system, thus making you more likely to get sick.
• Couples’ heart rates start to be recognized with time. 

Interesting Psychological Facts About Dreams

• Your dreams can sometimes be more meaningful than your conscious thoughts because 70% of them contain secret messages and represent your subconscious mind. 
• During the 7 minutes of neural activity a person has before dying, they see memories in a dreamlike pattern.
• When you are not stressed out, your dreams are happier. 
• Most of what we are dreaming are thoughts or events that happened to us in the past days. 
• Your creativity drastically increases when you are sleepy.
• Not all people dream in color. 
• Sometimes, your muscles get paralyzed when you are dreaming. 
• Blind people can see pictures in their dreams. 

Interesting Psychological Facts About Human Behavior

• It takes approximately 66 days for an average person to make something a daily habit. 
• People who have a deep sense of guilt are more able to identify the concerns and emotions of the people around them. 
• People who use sarcasm as a defense mechanism or as a way to tackle a difficult question have healthy minds. 
• People are more likely to return a lost wallet when they see a picture of a child in it. 
• People who are shy don’t reveal very much of themselves to other people; however, they act in a manner that makes other people think they know them more than they actually do.
• People are more honest when they are emotionally drained. This is the reason why people are more vulnerable when they are talking late at night. 
• People would rather change the truth than change their perception of people. 
• People who are fluent in two languages tend to change their personality when they are switching from one language to another. 
• The person who loses their mobile phone goes through a fear that can be compared to a near-death experience. 
• We are more likely to get into blame mode when something bad happens to us.
• We scream out when we are really happy and when we are really sad because the hypothalamus in our brain is not able to distinguish between happiness and sorrow.
• Thinking that something negative will happen can be less stressful to understand than not knowing how it will end up.
• We tend to persuade ourselves that a boring job is interesting if we don’t receive a reward for it.
• People respect items more when they get to assemble them themselves. This is called the ‘IKEA effect.’

Interesting Psychological Facts About Body Language

• Micro-expressions are the best predictor of true feelings and the truth. 
• When a person crosses both legs and arms, it means that they have emotionally withdrawn from the conversation. 
• There are six universal facial expressions: happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and surprise. Also, some scientists think that embarrassment and contempt should also be considered primary facial expressions. 
• A normal blinking rate is 6-8 blinks per minute, and the eyes remain closed for about 1/10th of the second. However, the blinking increases dramatically when people are lying or are under pressure.
• Women laugh at men they are attracted to, while men are attracted to women who laugh at them. A man wants a woman with a good sense of humor, but he doesn’t mean she needs to make jokes, it means she needs to laugh at his jokes. 
• When uneasy, men tend to touch their faces, while women touch their clothing, neck, arms, hair, and jewelry. 
• A partial shoulder shrug shows that the speaker doesn’t believe in what they are saying. On the other hand, if both shoulders rise equally and fully, then it means that the speaker is giving truthful statements. 
• When stressed, some people pacify themselves by crossing their arms and rubbing their hands against their shoulders, i.e. giving themselves a body hug. This way is reminiscent of the way a mother hugs her child.
• When a woman is not attracted to someone or doesn’t feel comfortable in the conversation, she will place her bag in front of her as a shield to create distance between her and the other person, or she will clutch it tightly. On the other hand, if she likes the person in front of her, she will remove her bag to the side, signaling that she doesn’t want anything to stand in her way. 
• The most common lying signs are the touching of the nose, the covering of the mouth, the rubbing of the eye, the incongruous nodding, the scratching of the neck, the grabbing of the ear, fingers in the mouth, and the collar pull. 
• Contrary to popular belief, maintaining eye contact usually means that the person is lying.
• If you sob out of happiness, the first tear comes from the right eye, and if you cry out of sadness, it comes from the left. 

Fun, Cool, And Weird Psychological Facts

• Men are not funnier and more entertaining than women; they just make more jokes because they don’t care whether others will like their humor. 
• People working in rooms with blue walls or decorations are more productive and creative. 
• Having siblings helps with getting along with peers. 
• If you have a plan B, then your plan A is less likely to succeed. 
• No person born blind has suffered from schizophrenia. 
• Hearing one single negative thing can destroy five positive memories. 
• The way someone treats their employees is an indicator of their character.
• People read quicker with longer lines; however, they prefer shorter ones. 
• If a law is too strict, then we would be more likely to break it. 
• Consuming food without preservatives increases our IQ by up to 14%.
• You are endlessly pursuing human faces in inanimate objects.
• Memories are like pieced images rather than precise snapshots.
• Food prepared by someone else tastes better than yours even when you are using the same recipe.
• When you are low on money, you obsess over it.
• You can recall more easily the beginning and the ending of something than the middle part.
• Your ‘obsession’ with social media is connected to your psychological system. 
• Large groups make more subjective and perhaps worse choices than smaller groups of people.
• You are conditioned to like and enjoy the songs you listened to in high school.
• Phobias can be memories that are passed down from our ancestors by means of our DNA.
• Almost every color has a physical wavelength attached to it, except magenta. The brain views magenta as “not green.”
• Rage, sorrow, happiness, surprise, anxiety, and disgust are the six feelings that are involuntarily shown to our faces.
• Money can buy happiness but only to a certain extent. 
• Social media is psychologically designed to be addictive. 
• People are happier when they are busy doing something. That’s why when they are upset; they need to do something to keep their mind from thinking about their problems.
• Chocolate produces the hormone oxytocin, which is the ‘happy’ hormone responsible for your happiness.
• Good liars are also good at detecting lies from other people.
• A gene is the reason why some people are negative all the time.
• Striping off the paper from drink bottles is a sign of sexual frustration.
• Some researchers think adding Internet addiction to the list of mental illnesses. 
• A man named Billy Milligan is reported to have had 24 different personalities. 
• The sight of water has a calming effect on people. 
• The fastest supercomputer in the world takes 24 million watts of power to run, but our brains only need 20 watts and operate over 100,000 times faster. 
• Asking yourself, ‘Will I?’ will motivate you more than saying ‘I will.’
• A Paris syndrome is getting so excited to see Paris and then realizing that Paris is not what you are hoping to be.

More Psychology Facts

1. Our brain does more creative work when we’re tired

It’s supposed to be the other way round, isn’t it? Not really. Research shows that overworking your brain can spark ideas. When we are tired, we tend to relax; we don’t control our thoughts. We let our minds wander. That’s why we come up with great ideas. Out of nowhere.

Get tired and release all your creativity!

 2. We ignore the ones who adore us & pay attention to those who ignore us

We seem to be magnetically pulled by people who don’t give us a bit of their attention. Moreover, we get obsessed with them. A common fact.

People want to have what they can’t have. A study showed that rejection is connected to motivation, reward, and addiction.

Isn’t it ironic?

3. Our decisions are more rational when thought in another language

When we need to decide on something, we involve our feelings there. It seems like we can’t escape it. Therefore, we are more likely to feel negative emotions which affect our rational thinking.

Thinking in another language brings more logic as we put our feelings aside.

Go ahead, learn a new language, and enjoy the process of thinking. Make a better decision.

 4. How we treat a waiter reveals a lot about our character

“The waiter rules.” We have all been in a situation to see waiters being attacked by some people’s inappropriate behavior.

Experts say that we should never trust people who are rude to waiters because the way they treat restaurant staff reveals their true character.

Do you follow this rule? Do you judge people’s character by the way they treat waiters?

5. Doing things that scare us will make us happier

This is one of the secrets to happiness. The more you dare to leave your comfort zone and try new, exciting, scary, uncomfortable things, the more you boost yourself with confidence. And you feel happy about it.

Psychology says that fear is fun.

Challenge yourself! Dare to do it.

6. If we talk about our goals, we are less likely to succeed

If you want to succeed, don’t tell anyone- that is the advice of experts. Setting your goals is a huge step. When you talk about them you think about the future-not present. Therefore, you might feel under pressure.

That’s right. Set your goals, don’t give them a voice, keep them as your secret.

Achieve them all.

7. The level of stress we experience when we lose our phone is the same as the one we get on our wedding day and dentist visit

Did you know that there is a phobia of being out of cell phone contact? It’s called Nomophobia: No-Mobile-Phobia.

According to a study, “more than one in two nomophobes never switch off their mobile phones.” They get stressed out and anxious; they panic when their phones are not in their hands.

Are you addicted to your mobile device?

8. We spend 80% of our time gossiping and that’s ok

What’s the first thing that crosses your mind when you think of that? Women. According to studies, men gossip as much as women.

We spend pretty much of our time discussing other people, don’t you think so? Some people enjoy it; others despise it. A study found that not only we spend most of our time gossiping, it may be vital to our survival.

Do you gossip?

9. Millennials are the most depressed workers

Millennials, are a generation exposed to anxiety and depression.

One in 5 of them claimed that have been depressed at work: physically there but drained and incapable of doing their tasks throughout the day.

Respect, listen, support, be there for them.

10. It takes only 4 minutes to fall in love with someone

It means, our mind knows whether we will fall in love or not in this amount of time. So, if you want to impress someone, prepare yourself to blow their mind in 90 seconds to 4 minutes.

Time starts now. Ticktack, ticktack.

Good luck with your first impression!

11. Emotions might help predict the future

Have you ever had a feeling that something will happen no matter what? You just know it. No doubt about it. Was most of what you predicted true? Well, it’s all connected to our intuition. What we feel deep inside is almost always right and it can help us predict what will happen to us and others.

Keep a journal. Write what you said to someone and you’ll see whether you will be right later.

12. We can control our dreams

Imagine you are being chased in a dream and find yourself unable to escape it. The only solution is flying. Fly then! No matter how strange, we can be aware and control our dreams. It’s called Lucid dreaming.

Everyone has the potential to do it. Just stay calm and focused.

Good night. Sweet dreams.

Sandy White

Sandy White is a creative writer with a vivid imagination. The power of curiosity leads her to explore people’s inner world which is portrayed in her articles.