Self-Knowledge
What Alien Delusions Tell Us About Our Minds
In psychiatric hospitals and consulting rooms worldwide, one of the more unlikely-sounding but very common presenting problems involves aliens. A…
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Self-Knowledge
What Alien Delusions Tell Us About Our Minds
Alien delusions have to be read as a persecuted mind’s ingenious, desperate but highly understandable attempt to cope with awfulness.
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Relationships
On Being Terrified of Love
The mystery is not that men and women occasionally go strange at the prospect of love, but that they ever dare do anything else…
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Relationships
After They Left
What unexpected rates of interest happiness charges. If only the sweet times had come with warning labels.
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Relationships
Six Reasons Why Being Single is So Awful
The less we are able to admit to our despair, the more intense it will be. Here are some of the low points that deserve lamentation…
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Relationships
Why Hurt People Hurt People
In certain cases, one partner will punish another not for doing anything wrong, but precisely the opposite. They are being punished for their sweetness, crushed for their gentleness and tormented for their faith.
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Relationships
‘I Love You, but I Don’t Think We Should Be Together’
It is hugely honourable to do one’s utmost to be with someone. It may be greater love still to adore a person – and leave them well alone.
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Relationships
How to Get Over an Ex by Correcting Our Misfiring Brains
In order to outsmart our obsessions, we need to understand how badly our brains often work – and then figure out canny ways to work around their many cognitive glitches.
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Leisure
The Wisdom of Stoicism
Stoicism was a philosophy invented by leading minds in Ancient Greece and Rome to help us cope with agonising periods of our lives – especially those created by the selfishness and insanity of dictators and demagogues…
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Calm
The Fear of Losing Control Over Our Bodies
There is definitely something up with us; it’s just that the issue lies in our minds rather than in our bowels or stomachs.
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Self-Knowledge
How to Check in on Ourselves
We might be the stated owners of our whole beings; yet we consciously inhabit only a very small part of ourselves.
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Work
Why Isn’t There Peace in the World?
When the people we call historians talk about conflicts, the blame is almost always laid at the door of material factors. But the truth may be rather different – and far stranger…
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Self-Knowledge
What Does a Silence Have to Mean?
It’s a feature of our minds that we cannot help but fill silences; we automatically develop notions of what an absence must signify.
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Relationships
Wild Advice for Those Who Have Lost Their Minds Over an Ex
The world is not short of advice for those who are struggling to get over their exes. The problem is how much of it is extremely sensible and therefore, in its way, utterly ineffective.
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Relationships
Red Flags for Everyone: How Therapy Has Made Love Harder
Once we are done with rightfully expelling every last demented and unworthy partner from our domain, we may be extremely proud of how well we have followed the principles of emotional maturity; we may also be entirely alone.
Relationships
To Get Back Together – or Not? An Exam for Couples
What follows is a sequence of questions that exes who are meeting up again after a long break should discuss with one another before coming anywhere near to holding hands (let alone going to bed).
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Calm
When We All Lived in Villages…
It was hard to get around, life was narrow and judgemental, there wasn’t much to do in the evenings…but there was one enormous advantage: there were so very few options to choose from.
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Self-Knowledge
How We Encourage the Behaviour We Feel We Deserve
People’s behaviour towards us is to a large extent determined by what we unconsciously communicate that we deserve from others.
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Relationships
Why We Should Treat Dates Like Job Interviews
Every date is at heart a recruitment interview, for which we need to show up with a privately held brief and the right set of questions. This is possibly the most serious work of our lives.
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Relationships
Can Our Partners Change?
We’re up against one of the central tripwires of existence. We’re trying to remake a human being; we’re attempting to retool DNA with our bare hands.
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Relationships
How to Work Out the Level of Emotional Maturity of Prospective Partners
It can help to begin with a sense of what it is we should be looking out for in terms of markers of emotional maturity – so that we may know as early as possible who we have on our hands.
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Relationships
The Mark of True Love: Simplicity
There is only so complicated a relationship ever needs to be. When it is viable, love is – all told – fairly obvious.
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Relationships
Eight Rules for Ending Relationships
There are a host of rules around ending relationships that all decent people understand – and here, framed for our consciences, are eight of the most important.
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Self-Knowledge
How We Respond When Life Gets Frustrating
Life is inherently filled with frustrations but how we interpret these frustrations – what we take them to mean, who we think is responsible for them and how we opt to complain about them (or don’t) – is fascinatingly diverse.
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Relationships
The Psychology of Anxious Attachment
If the anxious can accept that their condition isn’t a sign of random sickness but is the result of a very identifiable sort of upbringing, they may develop the courage one day to explain their fears to a partner.
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Relationships
The Psychology of Avoidance
One of the most perplexing of all our behaviours is our tendency – in relationships – to flee from the warmth and affection it is so natural for us to want.
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Relationships
Changing Yourself Rather Than Trying to Change Your Partner
Here are seven ways in which we can improve our relationships – not so much by asking them to evolve as by altering the mindset we approach them with.
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Relationships
A Chance to Be Bad in Relationships
To love is not to confront someone with the full might of moral judgement at all times. It is to be able to bear something less than ideal at points.
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Relationships
Four Kinds of Sexual Deviancy and What They Really Mean
We don’t typically imagine that sexual deviants have very much to teach us about anything. But this is to miss out on a disquieting reality: these deviants are manifesting in an extreme form proclivities in which we are all to some extent implicated.
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Calm
Keep Going
Here is humanity as we seldom allow ourselves to see it: neither triumphant nor defeated, but doggedly persisting – despite so many arguments against it.
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Relationships
When One Person Has to Be Needy so the Other Can Feel Invulnerable
Vulnerability is so much less of a burden when, finally, two people can be brave enough to own up to their share of it.
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Relationships
Offering Love to Someone Who Is Not Convinced of Their Loveability
There are distinct challenges around trying to offer love to someone who isn’t convinced that they are, deep down, worthy of such a thing.
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Relationships
Using AI to Have Better Relationships
For too long, we have thought of love as an emotion, it is in fact a skill – and there is no reason why, as with so many other tools, we wouldn’t allow one of our AI machines to lend us a hand with one of the great challenges of our lives.
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Calm
The Letter You May Need to Send to Save Your Life
If we are to survive (and there truly may be nothing less at stake), we are going to need to be very brave indeed. We’re going to need to break the isolated habits of a lifetime – and take someone into our confidence.
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Sociability
Ideal Questions to Ask at Parties
There are – let’s suggest – very few truly boring people on earth, but a great many who end up seeming as much for a simple, touching and highly avoidable reason: because they are asking one another the wrong questions.
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Leisure
An Interesting Life Rather Than a Happy One
We may be destined to have interesting lives rather than calm ones, lives marked by a high degree of exploration, psychological understanding, and striving rather than settled certainty and equilibrium. What we lack in terms of contentment, we may make up for in terms of insight and experience.
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Leisure
The Wisdom of Liming
To know how to lime isn’t just one more low-key leisure activity, it’s evidence that one has understood some extremely significant things about oneself and one’s place in society and the cosmos.
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Leisure
Reasons Not to Give Up
We can sometimes wonder what art is for. Kølle’s picture offers us one possible answer: art is there to refocus our attention on what matters most deeply.
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Sociability
The Need – Sometimes – Not to Complain
We may choose not to complain not because we are weak, but for a more fundamental and clear-eyed reason: because we are up against something we know we cannot change.
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Relationships
On Being Terrified of Love
Whenever talk turns to being terrified of love, the implication is that the only people ever to be scared of…
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Relationships
After They Left
For years, we forgot all about ownership. It would have made no sense to ask who owned the little vase…
View
Relationships
Six Reasons Why Being Single is So Awful
Modern culture can be particularly insistent on this point: mature people shouldn’t mind their own company. Mature people should understand…
View
Relationships
Why Hurt People Hurt People
It’s one of the puzzles of relationships that, after a hugely promising few months or years, one of the members…
View
Relationships
‘I Love You, but I Don’t Think We Should Be Together’
We tend to assume that anyone who tells us that they love us – but simultaneously insists that they don’t…
View
Relationships
How to Get Over an Ex by Correcting Our Misfiring Brains
It would be pleasant to believe that we could think our way rationally out of heartbreak. But our minds are…
View
Leisure
The Wisdom of Stoicism
Stoicism was a philosophy invented by leading minds in Ancient Greece and Rome to help us cope with agonising periods…
View
Calm
The Fear of Losing Control Over Our Bodies
We can be cursed by a particularly pernicious and shame-bounded fear which stops us from flourishing at work, going out…
View
Select themes
Relationships
On Being Terrified of Love
Whenever talk turns to being terrified of love, the implication is that the only people ever to be scared of…
View
Relationships
After They Left
For years, we forgot all about ownership. It would have made no sense to ask who owned the little vase…
View
Relationships
Six Reasons Why Being Single is So Awful
Modern culture can be particularly insistent on this point: mature people shouldn’t mind their own company. Mature people should understand…
View
Relationships
Why Hurt People Hurt People
It’s one of the puzzles of relationships that, after a hugely promising few months or years, one of the members…
View
Relationships
‘I Love You, but I Don’t Think We Should Be Together’
We tend to assume that anyone who tells us that they love us – but simultaneously insists that they don’t…
View
Relationships
How to Get Over an Ex by Correcting Our Misfiring Brains
It would be pleasant to believe that we could think our way rationally out of heartbreak. But our minds are…
View
Leisure
The Wisdom of Stoicism
Stoicism was a philosophy invented by leading minds in Ancient Greece and Rome to help us cope with agonising periods…
View
Calm
The Fear of Losing Control Over Our Bodies
We can be cursed by a particularly pernicious and shame-bounded fear which stops us from flourishing at work, going out…
View
