As I explained earlier ‘happiness’ is a general term we apply to distinct positive emotions. We get satisfied, we look forward to things, we experience pleasure…but if all those things are different what exactly does it mean to be ‘happy’? Are they all happiness? Is that all happiness is – a blanket term for positive [...]
Want to be happier? Here’s a quick, easy and simple way to do it.
Fighting off gratitude with a pitch fork
Quite a common self-help tip for becoming happier is to be more grateful. I’m sure I’m not alone in having a knee jerk bad reaction to that word. I have great parents but they made the [...]
Five reasons it was good they broke up with you
You know what I don’t like? Articles which use the phrase above as a title.
I mean, for the love of God. For the love of peppermint ice cream. For the love of Spongebob Squarepants why in the hell do people write that stuff? Who actually wipes [...]
As with happiness, that feeling of ‘let’s do this!’ has different names to describe different nuances of the psychological state. Yet people (including me) use the words interchangeably.
In personal development everything comes down to motivation, or what’s better described more generally as that ‘let’s get on with it’ feeling. There is so much literature on [...]
In a recent article I mentioned an exercise I did of typing up all the big questions I could think of, in the space of about twenty minutes, that I didn’t know the answers to. There’s not much to say about it, but it’s such a good exercise that it deserves an article in its [...]
I’ve discussed how happiness (what I now would specifically call joy), misery and a good number of other emotions in between well up within us because we’ve subscribed to a particular context. It could be a football match, a play, a video game – anything artificial.
But does such a scenario have to be man-made to [...]
‘Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it’
- George Bernard Shaw
Patriotism sucks. Realising that can aid personal development too, hence why I’m writing about it. It’s one of the oldest and, for centuries, most harmful models of thought ever created.
When patriotism was good
Many [...]
For a long time I was frustrated. Not depressed, not particularly anxious – just frustrated. Why? Well, that’s what this article is about. Or rather, isn’t about.
I used to unhappily wrestle with big doubts about anything and everything, but largely about people and life. A few weeks before this blog began I cathartically purged myself [...]
If you can put certain activities into routines you’re pretty much guaranteed to succeed in the endeavour to which those activities contribute. Just like if you have a routine of showering every morning you’re pretty much guaranteed to be clean whenever you leave the house. Straight-forward enough, but the difficulty can be in making a [...]
In the last article I explained that the positivity of an answer isn’t what makes you content, but that having an answer that you believe in does. A person is more likely to get unhealthily attached to really positive answers and can even be taken prisoner by them as their minds refuse to let in [...]
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