Building resilience
Busting the Myth of Busy Rushing from place to place and feeling a constant crush of pressure is familiar to many. MiNDFOOD’s resident psychologist asks, what are the true costs of living this way and how can we change our lives to put happiness first? Hurry hurry. Hurry hurry. The heartbeat accompanying our daily lives.…
Traditionally the best way to deal with workplace bullying was to find a job elsewhere, unfair as that may seem. We find out if this is still the best advice. Most of us like to believe we live in a just world. A world where good triumphs over evil and the bad guys are punished.…
Hearing Voices In Your Head Hearing voices is conventially bound up with the notion of “craziness” or losing your mind. Our resident psychologist speaks to Debra Lampshire, who is a long-time hearer of voices, in an effort to understand and correct some of the prevalent myths. When we hear that someone has “gone mad”, we…
Negative connections with people can be a drain on us emotionally, mentally and physically. But there are ways to cope with, and limit, the effects of toxic relationships in your life. Last year, Katie, a client, received an email from an acquaintance with a mocking tone, wishing her “so much bad luck in the future”.…
Deepening Dependence Dependence is often seen as a dirty word, associated with the “needy” and the emotionally unstable. But looking into research on what really helps people become happy, successful and, importantly, independent, we may need to turn this idea on its head. Tom’s partner Amy, who like Tom is in her early 30s, has…
Inequality plagues many societies. Our resident psychologist looks at how putting others down, or being put down ourselves, contributes to society’s malaise. When we think of inequality, we might tend to think of “big” examples such as the fight for civil rights in the United States, apartheid in South Africa, or the subjugation of…
Feeling overly busy, tired and irritable? Eating too much or too little? These are all signs we may be suffering from the bugbear of modern life: stress. But what if there was a positive way to look at stress? Rethinking stress. How many times this week have you caught yourself saying, “I’m stressed”? Chances are…
While it’s easy to have the best of intentions when it comes to changing behaviour, sticking at it can be tough. Sue hates flying. She commonly feels fearful from the moment she is seated on the plane and doesn’t fully relax until the moment the plane touches down at the other end. Because of her…
A useful way of describing our emotional life can be found in Paul Gilbert’s “The compassionate mind” which I have summarised below and in the next section: We have three main emotional systems: 1) Threat and self-protection system (many people know this as the fight/flight/freeze system). The idea behind this system is to pick up…