I am trying to stop eating as much rubbish as I can just now. My downfall is biscuits and cakes. If I see a pack of cookies you can be pretty
sure that with a cup of tea or coffee they will be all gone in a matter of
minutes. I want to stop eating them [...]
Do you ever feel you do the same things over and over again and it feels like
Groundhog Day? Why not take a leaf out of the Dice Man’s book and roll
the dice and make a choice for you.
Luke Rhinehart wrote the Dice Man back in 1978 and it is still as fresh today
as it was [...]
One of his techniques which I have used in the past and recently discovered again is called ‘Noise removal breathing’
Win hypothesised that for every situation in our lives there is a different breathing pattern. This is logical as when we are angry our breathing pattern is different from when we are calm and relaxed. This [...]
Accessing our own higher mental processes is often difficult. Psychologists have found it easy to manipulate the reasons we give for decisions, judgements or actions. Worse than this, even when we’re not actively being manipulated, we regularly fool ourselves without the need of any encouragement.
But are these mistakes systematic in any [...]
“The worst is yet to come.” — Schopenhauer
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was such an extreme pessimist that he thought we live in the worst of all possible worlds and happiness is an illusion. This is what makes it surprising that he wrote a best-selling book containing a self-help section. And yet [...]
Because happiness is something most of us aim for, how we define it has important implications for how we conduct our lives. To see why, compare these two competing definitions of happiness:
1. Happiness is all about minimising pain and maximising pleasure.
The underlying idea here is that there is a [...]
Stress is a fact of life, but being stressed out is not. We don’t always have control over what happens to us, says Allen Elkin, Ph.D., director of the Stress Management Counseling Center in New York City, and yet, that doesn’t mean we have to react to a difficult, challenging situation by [...]
I have designed some activities to build self-esteem that I would like to share from a series of lessons I am designing on “mental self-defense strategies”. Dream Busters ~ Recognizing Resistance~
How many times during an ordinary day, do so many of us repeat actions even though they are illogical and irrational? Sometimes we might laugh when a friend commits such an error of judgment or just an action that cannot be explained. This article will focus on a combination of some of these actions. I [...]
It seems incredible that a successful form of psychological therapy could be based on telling people their thoughts are mistaken. And yet that is partly how cognitive therapy works.
“The founding father of cognitive therapy is Aaron T. Beck a psychologist not well known to the lay public, but widely revered amongst psychologists.”
This type of therapy [...]