What if, alongside scheduling appointments, meetings, and social events in your calendar, you started to allocate specific times just to be by yourself – to enjoy solitude? I propose this thought ...

Like the fertile soil of a well-kept garden, a life of splendid, utter uselessness yields abundance beyond our immediate aims John Alec Baker was not an ornithologist by profession. He had a regular ...

Patients with eating disorders who feel overweight are often told that the underlying cause is emotional. What if it’s not? People with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa often say ...

Discovering I have aphantasia helped me understand my response to being assaulted and why I wasn’t debilitated by PTSD When I think back to the night the assault happened, all I find is emptiness. I ...

It was a scorching Sunday afternoon. So I decided to sip iced tea and watch a cute blond boy – about my age, in brown shorts and a white polo shirt – play around in the open field with his baseball ...

You’re preparing for a big event: a presentation, say, or a tennis match or a piano recital. Your mind wanders, envisioning every possible outcome. But what do you imagine? Do you picture yourself in ...

To become more forgiving, we are often told to be more empathic. Empathy is a powerful social adhesive, one that most people believe helps us mediate forgiveness as it increases the likelihood of ...

People living in Western nations today can expect to live a considerably longer life, on average, than 100 years or so ago. The dramatically shorter average life expectancies of the past were skewed ...

‘I’m exhausted.’ As a clinical psychologist who specialises in burnout and chronic stress, I hear these two words frequently. Many people around the world are under chronic stress these days, and ...

It’s first thing in the morning, I’ve plenty to do but I can’t stop thinking about Nicole Kidman’s character from the American TV series I watched last night, The Undoing. It’s a psychological ...

If only I’d had the courage to say I loved him before he married someone else. I should have gone to law school like I had planned to. What possibilities might have opened up for me? I could’ve ...

If you’ve been feeling stuck, empty or unfulfilled, you’re not alone. In my work as a psychologist, clients express these struggles frequently. You may feel like you’re just going through the motions, ...