It is Sunday evening and the working week has not even started, yet your mind is already three meetings ahead. You are rehearsing the difficult conversation, drafting the reply you have not been asked for yet, quietly scanning the week for the thing most likely to go wrong. If someone asked what you were doing, […]
Your Threat System Has One Motive: Survival. Here’s How to Give It a Better One Read More »
You’ve learned, without ever quite deciding to, that some of your feelings are welcome and others are a nuisance. The trouble is that the ones you’ve filed under nuisance are often the ones with the most to tell you. Think about a relationship, romantic or otherwise, that mattered to you. Alongside the love and the
The Emotions You Keep Overriding Are Trying to Tell You Something Read More »
Perfectionism has the best public image of any psychological pattern I know. Say it in a job interview and it counts as a strength. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist” is the humble-brag we’re all allowed. And often there’s something real behind it: many perfectionists genuinely care about their work and hold themselves to a
Perfectionism Isn’t High Standards. It’s Fear With Good PR. Read More »
Have you ever walked through the “nothing to declare” channel at an airport, done absolutely nothing wrong, and still felt a wave of guilt as though you were smuggling something? Nothing in your bag, nothing on your conscience, and yet there’s the feeling, insisting you’ve been caught. That little moment is one of the most
Feelings Are Valid, but Not Always True or Helpful Read More »
When anxiety or self-doubt takes hold, it can feel like one big, formless wave that arrives and sweeps you along. But if you slow it down, it isn’t formless at all. Everything that happens is happening in one of six specific places, and every skill worth learning targets one of them. I use this map
The Six-Area Framework: Where Anxiety Actually Gets You Stuck Read More »
You replay the conversation on the drive home. You’re mid-email when the doubt arrives. You lie awake at 2am with a mind that won’t switch off, and somewhere along the way you’ve concluded that you think too much. Here’s something I find myself explaining in the therapy room more often than almost anything else, because
Thoughts vs Thinking: The Difference Nobody Explains Read More »