Journal

I want to talk about a history of anxiety- mine! My first memory of anxiety was being asked to take a leading roll in the infant school nativity play, playing Joseph, which obviously meant delivering lines. I managed to persuade everyone that I wasn't suitable and managed to escape the play altogether. I still get [...]

“You work so hard to fix yourself, but maybe what you need isn’t another tactic, another book, another five step plan. Maybe you don’t need to be fixed, maybe what’s really holding you back is the idea that you need to be fixed” - V Tugaleva. Mindfulness does not seek to fix you. Mindfulness is [...]

It takes a long time before there is a shift our own and society's  thinking about strong new evidence about something that matters to us or challenges our previous held beliefs and assumptions. Take a look at climate science as an example. This is often because challenging ideas are unpleasant to have to think about [...]

Whilst watching a brilliant talk by neuroscientist Beau Lotto , which I highly recommend,  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQUgGg9XzbQ) I experienced one of those moments of insight. It was the realisation that there is one word that sums up the human condition- uncertainty. I have already blogged about predictive coding before, but feel as I need to give uncertainty [...]

I attended a conference on pain at Reading University a few months ago. The 2 days were fascinating, having speakers from a wide range of backgrounds. Dr Amanda Williams, UCL, gave a very interesting talk on pain in animals. She said that although chronic pain has been observed in farmed and domesticated animals, there has [...]

Mindfulness was first used therapeutically in the West in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn for the treatment of chronic pain. Perhaps what is mindfulness' biggest tool is to stop the tendency to try and escape your pain, either through distraction or by using substances such as prescribed or unprescribed medications to help blunt the experience. Mindfulness [...]

“You work so hard to fix yourself, but maybe what you need isn’t another tactic, another book, another five step plan. Maybe you don’t need to be fixed, maybe what’s really holding you back is the idea that you need to be fixed” - V Tugaleva. Mindfulness does not seek to fix you. Mindfulness is [...]