It’s the time of the year when torrents of photos of happy families and smiling groups of friends are plastered all over social media. For many people, taking hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures is now a crucial part of any festive occasion. But before you reach for your phone and strike a pose, consider that constantly taking snaps can actually impair your memory of the event, and leave you with a distorted self-image.

That said, we tend to have an inaccurate and even inflated view of ourselves anyway. Most of us like to think that we are spontaneous, for example, even though brain scans reveal that many of us aren’t. Others are convinced they are introverts, when in reality they are just bad at recognising faces. And nearly all of us consider ourselves to be good people who stand up for what’s right. But research suggests that the vast majority of us would not only fail to stand up to an oppressive regime, but even end up supporting it.

The reason for this is that we are very quick to conform to what everyone else thinks, something that is actually also preventing us from being happy. In fact, depression is becoming an increasingly big problem, especially for young people. One particularly devastating form that we have learned about this year is “smiling depression” – being depressed while appearing happy.

But it is never too late to turn your life around. A good place to start is getting to know yourself. Another simple thing you can do is to stop worrying so much about making the wrong decision. A fear of regret can lock us into bad relationships, jobs and habits – but there are ways to break free.

Hopefully we will get many more insights into the human psyche next year – and we are far from reaching the limits of human knowledge. In fact, there is even hope that, by going beyond conventional science, we can solve the biggest question of them all soon: what consciousness really is.

All the best.

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