Free one page explainers
Core ideas from psychology and psychiatry, each distilled onto a single page you can read here, print, or download as a PDF. Made for patients, therapists, teachers, and anyone who wants the concept without the textbook.
Reviewed by Shariq Refai, MD, MBA
Every explainer is free, evidence based, and written in plain language. Use them yourself, hand them to a client or a student, or pin one to the fridge. No signup, no email required.
Featured
Trauma bonding
The attachment pattern that forms when abuse and warmth alternate. Includes an Expert Perspective from Lisa Abrotsky, LMFT.
Thinking
Cognitive distortions
Ten common thinking patterns that make situations feel worse than the evidence supports.
Executive function
The eight mental skills that turn intentions into finished things.
Decision fatigue
Why choice quality drops as choice quantity rises, and how to protect the decisions that matter.
Rumination
The mental loop that feels like problem solving and works like quicksand.
Cognitive load
Why your brain feels full, and how to spend its limited bandwidth on purpose.
Working memory
The tiny mental workspace everything you think passes through.
Metacognition
Thinking about thinking, and why it changes what your thinking can do.
Confirmation bias
The default habit of noticing evidence that fits your existing view and skimming past what does not.
Availability heuristic
Judging how likely something is by how easily an example comes to mind.
Sunk cost fallacy
The habit of throwing more resources at something because you have already thrown so many.
Fundamental attribution error
Judging others by their character and yourself by your circumstances.
Stress and emotion
Window of tolerance
The zone of arousal where you can think, feel, and respond at the same time.
The stress response
What actually happens in your body when the alarm system fires.
Burnout
The three dimensions of burnout and the six mismatches that drive it.
Fight, flight, freeze, fawn
The four automatic threat responses, and why they are not choices you make.
Interoception
The sense of what is happening inside your body, and why it shapes emotion.
The polyvagal ladder
A simple model of three nervous system states, and how you move between them.
Emotion granularity
The more precisely you can name a feeling, the more you can do with it.
Alexithymia
A muted ability to notice and name feelings, and why it is treatable rather than fixed.
Radical acceptance
Stopping the second arrow of fighting reality, so the first one hurts less.
Distress tolerance
Getting through a bad moment without making the situation worse.
Motivation and change
Stages of change
The six stage cycle people actually move through when changing a behavior.
Behavioral activation
Why action comes before motivation when mood is low, and how to use that.
Flow
The state of full absorption where effort feels effortless, and the conditions that invite it.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs
The five levels of human need, and what the famous pyramid gets right and wrong.
Reward prediction error
The brain signal behind motivation, habits, and why surprises feel so good.
The Yerkes-Dodson curve
Too little pressure and you cannot get moving. Too much and you fall apart. There is a middle.
Self-efficacy
The belief that you can do the thing, which turns out to change whether you can.
Locus of control
Where you place the source of what happens to you, and why it shapes what you do next.
Learned helplessness
When repeated uncontrollable events teach a nervous system to stop trying, even after control is possible.
Growth mindset
The belief that ability is buildable, and why it changes what you try.
Psychological flexibility
The ability to keep moving toward what matters even when your mind is generating reasons not to.
The habit loop
Cue, routine, reward. The three-part shape almost every habit lives in.
Relationships
Attachment styles
The four patterns people carry from early bonds into adult relationships.
Theory of mind
The everyday ability to model what other people are thinking and feeling.
Understanding care
How a psychiatric diagnosis is made
From what you're going through to the words on the chart, one step at a time.
How a mental illness changes over time
Where it comes from, how it starts, how it rises and falls, and what the outlook means.
Levels of psychiatric care, from outpatient to inpatient
Weekly visits, day programs, residential care, and the hospital: who each is for and how people move between them.
Mental health shortage areas: why care is hard to reach
What a federal mental health shortage designation means, how it's scored, and your options when psychiatrists are scarce.