Innehållsförteckning för March 2023 från Psychologies

Reality check I’ve dipped in and out of buying Psychologies over the years, often turning to it in times when I have been feeling a little lost or uncertain. These days, though, it’s a different story: every month, I look forward to picking up a copy and losing – and discovering – myself in the positive, carefully curated stories and beautiful pages. For me, buying Psychologies is an act of self-care. I really love the authenticity in the interviews, particularly the recent chat with Laura Whitmore (January), who I found likeable and relatable, calmly and unwaveringly focused on her values. It is so refreshing to read interviews like this, that can be as inspirational as they are honest. Unfortunately, too many glossy women’s magazines still use their main interview to…

Allow me a bit of nostalgia, if you will. When I think of developing a wonder mindset, I imagine one of those Magic Eye posters from the 1990s. For those among the uninitiated, these wildly popular posters were pieces of digitally generated ‘art’ (a term used very loosely here), something of an optical illusion, but one that relied on a perceptual shift. A very complex and colourful variety of what’s called a random-dot autostereogram, the images on these posters looked like a staticky pattern of fractals or coloured shapes. But you weren’t trying to see that patterned image – you were trying to see another image hidden within the piece, something cheesy, such as a breaching dolphin or roaring lion. To view this magic image, one would stare at the…

So, if we do manage to put our phone down and glue some time-confetti back together, how do we go about making the most of it? It’s easy to feel like we speed through occasions and miss out on their real potential. ‘It’s about finding joy in the simple moments that tend to get missed because of something called hedonic adaptation,’ says Cassie Holmes. ‘This is our psychological propensity to get used to things over time. When you do the same thing over and over again, or you’re with the same person again and again, it stops to have the same emotional impact on you. ‘Think about the very first time your partner said, “I love you.” It’s like fireworks going off. But a few years on, that amazing exclamation…

Despite the very best efforts of our education system, it is struggling to cope with fully supporting the emotional wellbeing of our children within the curriculum. Have you ever felt that you would love to help, but were powerless to act? Well, here’s your opportunity to do something positive. The Ollie School plans to build an army of coaches who can make the world a better place, one child at a time. Ollie Coaching is a holistic approach that leads all our youngsters to a place where they can thrive in the chaos of modern living. So many schools are battling to provide an appropriate mental health environment, and busy parents are up against it in our fast-paced lives ruled by social media. That’s why Alison Knowles, who was challenged…

Rest is lazy Rest might appear lazy, but that doesn’t mean it is not wise or without purpose. There are some seriously healthy benefits to being idle – resting your chemistry, so to speak, and space to let your mind wander freely. This kind of relaxed rest can boost creativity, memory formation, and problem-solving. Don’t fall into the trap of equating rest with sitting in stillness, doing nothing. Rest can be nourishing activity, too. Exertion can be a necessary gateway for some people to be able to rest. Rest can also take great discipline! Have you ever tried to establish a daily meditation or yoga practice? It takes diligence, grit and insight to pace yourself and make the commitment to rest. Let’s reframe this myth as ‘Rest is necessary’ or…

Book of the month You Are Not Alone by Cariad Lloyd (Bloomsbury, £18.99) All of us will experience the death of a loved one at some time or another. Yet, for years, Cariad Lloyd thought she was the only one grappling with what she calls the ‘grief-mess’. Losing her dad to cancer at age 15 profoundly shaped her adult life, and led Lloyd to start her hugely successful podcast, Griefcast. Now, she’s taken the lessons she’s learned along the way to create this compassionate yet darkly comic companion in loss, weaving together her own journey with that of others. Most importantly, she debunks the theory of the five stages of grief, and demonstrates why each person’s grief is personal and unique to them – and just as valid. The M…

Session two... After her first coaching session, Ruby then cancelled the next two sessions. For a couple of reasons, I wondered whether I would ever see her again. Firstly, Ruby had told me that she ‘likes to make people happy, but always gets it wrong’, and I was concerned that she thought she had ‘got it wrong’ with me. But what was really playing on my mind was the second reason: I wondered if I had ‘got it wrong’ with Ruby! In our session, I had asked whether she ever felt in danger with her husband. It was totally unlike me to be so direct, particularly in a first session. I was worried that I had been too challenging, too soon. So I was relieved when Ruby messaged to say…

My first instinct is to look at my work-life balance and try to rearrange my work hours, so I feel more in control. Last year, I looked at ways to increase focus, and learnt some really good strategies that definitely helped, but perhaps they fell by the wayside a little as the year drew to a close. Is it time to double down on those, put work in its place, and just spend more time having fun? It’s not quite that simple, Holmes explains. ‘People often come at this like it’s personal life versus work, and you’re just sort of figuring out the balance between those two. But, actually, I don’t think that’s always a useful framework. It’s really about your time overall, and investing in what makes you happy,…

Turn routine into ritual ‘It's helpful to have routines, because then you don’t have to pay attention, which saves you time and energy. But if you turn it into a ritual, then it makes it more meaningful,’ says Cassie Holmes. ‘One example is my weekly coffee date with my daughter, which we started to do on the day that I would drop her at preschool, before heading to my office. ‘I decided to turn that routine into a ritual. So now it has a name: it’s our coffee date. We listen to the same songs on the way to the coffee shop. When we get there, she gets her hot chocolate, I get my coffee, we get our croissants. ‘Each week, we spend 30 minutes of this special, ritualised time…

Since my 40th birthday, I have been looking forward to no longer worrying about what other people think about me. So many people have told me that, once you hit 40, you just stop caring, your mind is your own, you are free from the existential angst that haunts the younger years. But this has not been the case for me: I am deeply affected by the responses of others, fearful of getting life wrong in their eyes. I am good at pretending I don’t care, pushing back during difficult conversations concerning my children’s health or education, but there is a frightened child inside me worrying about the consequences. At home, life has continued to be shaped by the complex needs of my family. The new year crawled cautiously in…

Avocado and black bean baked eggs The baked eggs will dial up your gut to brain fullness signalling, while the avocado is bursting with healthy fats that nourish brain and body. Fibre-rich black beans are a feast for your gut bacteria and – best of all – this dish tastes great! Serves 2 ● 400g tin of black beans, drained and rinsed ● 1 tbsp olive oil ● 1 red onion, diced ● 8 cherry tomatoes, halved ● 180g tinned sweetcorn, drained and rinsed (check there is no added sugar) ● 1 tbsp chopped fresh coriander ● ½ tsp chilli powder ● 4 eggs To serve: ● 1 avocado ● coriander leaves ● Tabasco Red Pepper Hot Sauce (optional) 1 Tip the black beans into a sieve or colander set…

Home truths Women get the raw deal with housework when it comes to working from home, two related studies have found. Psychologists monitored dual-earner heterosexual couples in Korea and China, and found each partner completed more family-related tasks when they both worked from home. However, when women worked from home, but men were at the office, the men did fewer tasks. Meanwhile, when the men worked from home and the women were in the office, the women kept up their share of the work. The women also not only had a greater share of the chores but also a greater share of the guilt: in both studies, women felt worse about their relative contribution when they did more work in the office – whereas men only expressed that in one…

Most nights, I lie in bed, fretting over decisions I’ve made in the past, wishing I could go back and undo what happened. It’s a common problem, but one I’d love to get over. After all, whether it’s ruminating on big life decisions, such as if you should have moved house or been in a certain relationship, or just lots of little things that you wish you had done differently, feeling regretful can easily impact us negatively. ‘Being stuck in constant rumination can be linked to low mood, and can signal that we may actually be experiencing a depressive episode,’ explains clinical psychologist Michaela Thomas. When we then turn our attention to looking forwards, our thinking can become much more negative and anxiety-fuelled, and worrying about the future can lead…

“If you expand your view of life to non-biological beings, AI technology truly is alive in every possible way” Deborah Levy’s novel Hot Milk (Penguin, £9.99) opens with the protagonist shattering the screen of her laptop. ‘My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else,’ she writes, ‘so what I am saying is that, if it is broken, so am I.’ This inextricable link between us and our tech is something that I feel intuitively, yet a sense of suspicion underscores the reliance I have towards my devices. I can trace the origin of this disquiet back to childhood when my too-young eyes saw the movie The Terminator on a grainy VHS. I went to bed that night with an irrational fear that…

A recent study has revealed that we have more free time than previous generations – but it’s fractured throughout the day. Researcher Brigid Schulte calls it ‘time confetti’. You know the drill: you have five minutes before you need to pick up the kids from swimming, or 10 minutes before your next Zoom call. It’s not enough time to really get stuck in to something, just enough time to check your email… It’s a slippery slope, warns Dr Meg Arroll: ‘Time poverty is complicated. Whereas people used to work set hours and then have well-defined time off, more flexible working patterns have had the unwelcome side-effect of allowing our jobs to seep into leisure time. We may no longer have a block of relaxation time in the evening, yet, in…

Up at 4am for an hour’s meditation, followed by writing a few pages of the novel, then a 5K run and an ice bath before getting down to work. It’s so important to start the day right, isn’t it? If that’s the kind of thing that comes to mind when people talk about ‘developing a morning routine’, you may have been put off the whole concept! But building a routine to start your day with can help get it off to a good start – you just have to find the right component parts for you. Not only does it have benefits in terms of headspace, calmness and productivity, but it’s time that is just for you, before the demands of the day kick in. In my twenties and thirties,…

It was a violet wintry afternoon when, rushing to attend the finale of my art school degree show, l caught the heel of my boot on a high kerb. Suddenly, I was flying through the air. If the past two years studying photography had taught me anything, it was an appreciation of how things can change in a thousandth of a second. Light, shadow, colours, all are in a constant state of flux – as is life. And since crash-landing onto my left shoulder, I have been living through the embodied truth of this wisdom. That day, a kind stranger came to my aid and A&E diagnosed a fractured humerus, an injury that can take months to heal. Still, I reasoned, it could have been so much worse. It was…

Q I’ve just been promoted at work, and now the office administrator is being weird whenever I ask her to do something for me. We’re the same age, and I like her socially, but whatever I ask her for seems to be a problem. I recently amended a letter she’d written and she asked, ‘So now you want me to completely change my own style?’ It’s great that you can be so specific about an example of where things are sticky, because that will help you both. Research says that 60 per cent of management problems arise from communication – and good communication starts with using clear and concrete language. If you were to say to this colleague ‘You’re being weird’, that’s difficult for her to hear, because it’s both…