How We Break

Anxiety and depression are not abnormal. They are not pathologies or aberrations. They are just one end of a spectrum of normal experience playing out on the same mechanisms that allow us to survive.

The more we identify with a limited and fixed version of our self, the more vulnerable this self is to hurt and harm, to the effects of change, accident and turbulence. If it has no flexibility, it is fragile.

The inability to switch off, to switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation, is a hot topic in medicine and psychology right now. It is measured by heart rate variability (HRV). Which should, if you are well balanced, be high: your heart rate should vary a lot. If you can gear up when you have to, and then switch quickly and comfortably i

Before you are body, or nervous system or brain or mind, your most immediate experience of yourself is as a medium through which, in which, a world is manifested with you at its centre.

The ability, or lack of it, to live with uncertainty shows up in psychology as the individual characteristic intolerance of uncertainty (IU). The person with more IU responds to situations of uncertainty with more negative emotions and rumination. It is a trans-diagnostic trait, i.e., it seems to be an important factor across various emotional diso

There are some worlds where it is really hard to feel good about yourself, or to think well of yourself. There are some where it's hard to think at all. Our worlds are full of impediments. It is not just that our desires are thwarted by circumstance, although that's part of it, but equally our desires are by circumstance, our wants are shaped by wh

a key aspect of what is entailed by being different from the majority: you become accountable, you have to explain yourself.

We have an inbuilt cognitive and behavioural resistance to the new; we work to try to make our ‘now’ just another version of our ‘then,’ so that nothing new needs to be decided, no extra effort needs to be made, no discomfort felt. But a tendency to get stuck in old ways, even in the face of new demands, can become a source of our trembling and bre

Our best defence against the turbulence of life is not self-transformation but self-knowledge and self-acceptance.