I had my foot down on the accelerator. Engine revving. Going nowhere. Not a metaphor. Actually happened one morning. Driving to work, engine screaming, but the car wasn’t moving. Or rather, it was moving, but painfully slowly. Like pushing through mud. Then I realised. Schoolboy error. The handbrake was still on. That’s the feeling I…
This isn’t therapy. If you’re dealing with clinical depression, severe anxiety, or trauma, please see a professional. I say this as a doctor, not as a disclaimer. You might walk out of that exam with 80%. And you spent the next three days picking apart the 20% you got wrong. You gave a presentation at…
You’re driving forward whilst staring backwards. That’s the problem. People often tell me they want to change their life, lose weight, quit smoking, sort out their anxiety. Great. Brilliant. Let’s do it. We make a plan, and weeks later I ask them what they’ve been doing since we last spoke. They look sheepish, because they…
You can rewire your brain. Most people just don’t bother. Your brain, its structure and how it works, isn’t fixed. It isn’t hardwired, and it isn’t the finished article you’ve been handed and have to make do with for the rest of your life. I know that’s not what it feels like when you’ve thought…
Your life × doing zero = zero progress. That’s the Zero Law. Simple mathematics with profound implications for your life. I’m not a mathematician. I’m a GP. But I remember enough from school to know that any number multiplied by zero equals zero. n × 0 = 0. Always. No exceptions. And this basic mathematical…
You’ve finished this course, which was designed to help you cope when you find yourself in a new situation. Well done, genuinely, for getting this far. I hope you’ve reflected after each article and made some small changes in your mindset, your approach, and your life. Most people don’t get this far. I told you…
You overvalue things simply because they’re yours. I’ve got a wardrobe full of clothes I haven’t worn in years. Won’t wear this year. Probably won’t wear next year either. But I can’t throw them away. Why? Because they’re mine, and I like to hang onto stuff. That’s the endowment effect in action. You hang onto…
You only see the winners. That’s the problem. You see Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs. All dropped out of university, all became billionaires. So you conclude that dropping out leads to success. You don’t see the thousands who dropped out and failed. That’s survivor bias. You’re only seeing the survivors, only seeing the winners,…
You’re doing what everyone else is doing. Even when it’s wrong. Perhaps you look around before you act. Maybe you check what others think before you speak. You follow the crowd because the crowd must know something you don’t. That’s social proof tendency, and it’s running your life more than you realise. It’s not always…
Have you ever known something before you could explain why? A decision that felt obviously right, or obviously wrong, before you’d worked out the reasons? That’s intuition. And you’ve got it too, even if you don’t trust it. In a new situation, intuition can feel absent, or you can mistake a rushed decision for a…