How We Break

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

…we are composed from what is not us. We are a bricolage of what is to hand in the place and time of our formation. Psychological origin stories tend to focus on the influence of one or two main characters, usually the parents, often ignoring other players and the setting entirely, but these are key variables that need to be accounted for in the st

Neuroticism is a personality trait, a particular way of approaching and responding to the world. Those of us who are more neurotic approach the world with caution; we look for and expect danger and difficulty. We are always on guard. When we do meet danger and difficulty, we tend to react more strongly to it; we experience more distress, more frust

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

…what the sociologist Michael Bury calls ‘biographical disruption.’ His work highlights how the experience of illness or breakdown ruptures the fabric of normal life and forces us to rethink our relationships to our bodies, our lifeworld, our mortality, our values and our identity.

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

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 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