You know what you need to do. You’ve probably known for a while now. Maybe it’s the career change you keep talking about, the relationship you need to end, the health problem you’re ignoring, or the business you’ve been “planning” for three years. You’ve read the books, watched the videos, made the plans. You’ve got…
A few years ago, out of the blue, I received two written complaints about my practice. Generally, I have a complaint rate of about one in every four thousand consultations. It doesn’t seem like a large amount, and what’s important is that neither of these complaints were about misdiagnosis, medical error, or clinical mistakes. The…
It’s winter in the UK, and flu season is upon us. I saw a really sick kid a few days ago and admitted him to hospital. He’d been seen just a few days before with what looked like a simple cold. Now he’s on a paediatric ward with pneumonia, struggling to breathe, parents terrified out…
There’s a condition I see on a regular basis when I talk to patients. It was first described by Aaron Beck, one of the fathers of modern cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), back in 1976, when he was researching the distorted ways people think and where therapy could help. This particular cognitive bias seems to affect…
By now, I hope you’re beginning to accept that how you see the world, and a lot of how you think, is influenced by your cognitive biases. These aren’t occasional quirks. They’re running constantly in the background, affecting every decision you make, every interpretation you create, every judgement you form. Most of what you do…
One of the general underlying trends for the last few chapters has been about taking action (or the lack of it). This problem is confounded because often we don’t realise this is what we need to do, or what it is we have to do. There’s another bias that needs to be discussed with this…
Why You Keep Taking the Same Road and Expecting a Different Destination I’d like to talk about stubbornness for a moment. Stubbornness can work for us or against us. I often see people disadvantaged by a stubborn tendency, people who carry on doing what they’ve always done yet possibly expecting a different result. I also…
How Substances (Legal and Otherwise) Keep You Stuck There’s a concept I call the Drug Mis-Influence Tendency that distorts our perception of the world. When this happens, we become vulnerable to harm, often without realising we’re at risk. Things like drugs and alcohol are the main culprits. You just need to witness the carnage in…
He still wanted the purple pills. He was adamant they worked far better than the cheaper, non-purple generic alternative. The pills were chemically identical in terms of the active drug, but the non-branded ones, he told me, just didn’t work at all. Most people are already aware of the phenomenon called the placebo effect. The…
By now I hope you accept that the majority of our automatic day to day decisions are affected by cognitive biases. In this lesson we’re going to discuss the effect that our perception of comfort and safety has on our lives, because here’s something most people don’t realise. Comfort and safety are not the same…