When you catch yourself catastrophising in this way, try to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. With the right toolkit, we can come to realise things aren’t as bad as they seem – and so the fear becomes less intense. The scientific name for this process is ‘cognitive reappraisal’:5 changing the interpretation of a situation so that we

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When we feel stressed, anxious, irritated, or angry, one of the things that happens to the mind is that it shrinks down and zooms in on the challenge at hand—the stressful moment, the emotion we don’t want to feel. There’s a researcher, Andrew Huberman at Stanford, who calls this “the soda straw view” of the mind. This is the view of stress. When w

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(1) thinking ahead, or viewing the situation as just one moment on a larger, longer timeline and being able to identify it as just one point to get past in order to reach a better future point; (2) being specific and setting specific goals, or defining your end point as discretely as possible and pooling your attentional resources as specifically a

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When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. The role happiness plays should be obvious—the more you pick up on the positive around you, the better you’ll feel—and we’ve already seen the advantages to performance that brings. The ... See more