The other major strategy for changing the voices in our heads is to try to become an imaginary friend to ourselves. In friendship,

We need to grip our anxieties head on and force ourselves to imagine what might happen if their vague catastrophic forebodings truly came to pass: what would happen to us if everything we are dimly worried about really came to pass? What are the real dangers? How might we still be OK, even if it all fell apart? Entertaining the most extreme consequ

The origin of the voice of the inner judge is simple to trace: it is an internalisation of the voice of people who were once outside us.

recognising a feeling doesn’t mean you follow it to a conclusion.

During our meditative session, we need to give all our anxieties a chance to understand themselves, for three-quarters of our agitation is not that there are things to worry about, but that we haven’t given our worries the time they require to be understood and defused.

Afflicted by a lack of self-love, romantic relationships become almost impossible, for one of the central requirements of a capacity to accept the love of another turns out to be a confident degree of affection for ourselves, built up over the years, largely in childhood.

The outcome of any concerted attempt at self-knowledge could be presumed to be a deep understanding of ourselves. But strangely, the real outcome is rather different. It appears that the more closely we explore our minds, the more we start to see how many tricks these organs can play on us – and therefore the more we will appreciate how often we ar

Too much of social existence requires an excessive degree of stoicism from us. There are heavy incentives for us not to feel or notice our pains. Eventually, this unacknowledged distress may sink our entire characters into depression.

Honourable self-love is not selfishness: it’s the feeling of correctly respecting ourselves.