Is a Fear of Rejection Hurting Your Relationships?

Image by Marta Nogueira

How are you with rejection? Some people seem fairly immune to it and manage to brush it off. Others are very much affected by it, whether real or imagined, imminent or on the distant horizon. Many of my clients are in the latter camp, fearing rejection or abandonment, especially in romantic relationships.

As we try to address this problem, it’s helpful to begin thinking about it from an evolutionary perspective. Remember how humans have lived for almost our entire evolutionary history. We evolved from apes, who live in groups. And then lived as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, again in groups. We lived in villages with an extended network of family and others in our tribe.

These villages were well-protected, with strong fences surrounding them, because outside those fences were large, hungry animals who wanted to eat us. And neighbouring tribes, who could attack at any time. So it was very important – quite literally a matter of life and death – that you were inside that fence, especially as night fell.

And this meant that being rejected by the group in any way – shunned, banished, ejected from the village – would have been terrifying, because in that world (think the savannah, full of ravenous hyenas, lions and leopards; or forests, bristling with sharp-toothed bears, mountain lions and wolves) you would not make it for even a single day on your own.

Evolutionary psychologists think this is why the fear of rejection can be so intense, because somewhere deep in the more primitive recesses of your brain is the knowledge that rejection = death. It’s that stark.

Fear of abandonment

This is one reason why humans can be highly sensitive to the possibility of being abandoned in relationships. But there are many others, including having an Abandonment schema. This is a neural network in your brain holding ways of thinking, negative beliefs about yourself and others, powerful emotions and their resultant bodily sensations. When this schema gets triggered, you feel just awful – highly anxious and panicky, upset, angry or some other powerful emotion.

This would show up in your body as changes to your heart rate and breathing, becoming hot and sweaty, or tight, tense muscles. You might also believe things like, ‘No-one could ever love the real me,’ or ‘Everybody I love will eventually leave me.’

I have been thinking about this schema a lot recently, as I am reading Love Me Don’t Leave Me: Overcoming fear of Abandonment & Building Lasting, Loving Relationships, by Michelle Skeen. It’s a classic self-help book, drawn from the schema therapy model, so much of it chimes with my way of thinking/working. Skeen reminds us that this schema can develop for many reasons, including being abandoned as a child – for example, if your father left the family to go and start a new relationship and you barely saw him after that.

The abandonment could also have been more subtle. In this case, perhaps nobody actually left the family, but they weren’t very attuned to you or your needs as a child. They might have been good at what I call ‘practical love’. Feeding you, keeping you clean, getting you to school on time, all the important logistical stuff of parenting.

But not so good at the warm, emotional side of being a mum or dad – soothing hugs, telling you that they loved you and making you feel cherished, valued as a unique little person. In this case, you might feel abandoned, because your needs were profoundly unmet. It’s like an emotional, rather than physical abandonment.

Whatever the cause of this schema in childhood, as an adult you may struggle with relationships in various ways. You might become anxious and clingy, texting or calling your partner multiple times a day if you feel them pulling away. Or you could do the opposite, pushing them away, picking fights or even leaving them before they get the chance to leave you. If you have this schema, you might even avoid relationships altogether, because they have been so heartbreakingly painful when they fell apart.

Healing your schema

If any of this resonates with you, I am sorry – it’s such a deep and painful schema and really can make life a struggle. But remember that none of this needs to be a lifelong problem. Schemas, like so many systems and structures in your brain, are not fixed or set in any way. I often write about the concept of neuroplasticity, because I find it such a hopeful and positive idea. It means that whatever kinds of painful experiences you have had, and however they have imprinted on to your brain, they can be changed. Schemas can weaken and fade in intensity. Your attachment style (which could be either anxious or avoidant, if you have the Abandonment schema) can become more secure.

It really is all up for grabs, because your brain is shaped and moulded by experience. Think differently, over and over, and you form brand-new neural pathways. So instead of ‘No-one could ever love the real me,’ you learn to think, ‘I may not be perfect, but I am loveable and likeable just as I am.’ Over and over, until that pathway becomes wired in and the old one withers away.

Try reading Michelle Skeen’s book, for starters, because it really is very helpful and good. If this is a highly sensitive issue for you, I would recommend seeking therapy, preferably with someone who understands problems related to rejection and abandonment and can offer you a thought-through, convincing roadmap to healing.

And eventually, after doing some work on this stuff, finding a loving, supportive partner will be the most healing thing you could do. That may seem daunting right now, or even impossible, but it’s always one of my treatment goals when I’m working with abandonment-phobic people. It is doable, if you get enough help and support to make the necessary changes, trust me on that.

You could also try one of my most popular Insight Timer practices, Calming Your Parts: IFS Meditation. This will help you calm and soothe the young, abandoned part of you that gets triggered in relationships.

I very much hope that helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Let Your Heart Relish the Return of Spring

Image by Aaron Burden

Looking out of my study window, it’s a beautiful sunny morning. Birds sing. A few fluffy white clouds drift across the piercing blue sky. It’s still mid-February and I know we’re not quite there yet, but you can feel spring in your bones on a day like this. After a long, chilly winter, I think we’re all ready for the warm, light, hopeful days that are just around the corner.

It feels especially poignant for me, emerging from the fog of Covid after a grim couple of weeks. I feel, mostly, human again and am relishing the small, taken-for-granted pleasures of life. A whole night without coughing. Enjoying my morning coffee without it irritating my throat, leading to, you guessed it, more coughing. A short, gentle workout. So simple, yet blissful. Like my inner spring after two long weeks of winter.

Something I often work on with my clients is how to notice and appreciate the many joys of life, as well as the tough times. My recent post on gratitude offered some evidence-based ways to do that, but this one is about balance, allowing yourself to feel and experience whatever may be true for you, moment to moment. Good and bad, light and shade, winter and spring. It’s all part of the natural flow of your life.

The rainbow of emotions

One of my favourite metaphors for this experience of mindfulness, of aliveness, is the rainbow of emotions. So think of your emotions like a rainbow, ranging from dark colours on one side (sadness, hurt, fear, anger, grief, loneliness, shame) to light on the other (joy, love, excitement, pleasure, pride, satisfaction). In order to live a rich, meaningful human life we need to feel the full rainbow, from the dark stuff that no-one likes to the lighter shades we all prefer.

And what I notice in almost everyone I work with (as well as myself) is that the experience of trauma in childhood makes us overly focused on those dark shades. We may not like these painful emotions, but we spend a disproportionate amount of time feeling them, worrying and ruminating about painful experiences, laser-focused on everything that’s bad, problematic, hurtful or threatening in some way.

And this is normal, because trauma skews our thoughts, perceptions and emotional states. It dysregulates our nervous system, making us highly prone/sensitive to threat-focused emotions like anger and anxiety. It affects our memory systems, making it much easier to remember painful, destructive experiences and harder to recall – or feel – the many good things in our lives. And a central task of healing from trauma is to be more balanced – feeling, processing and healing from the bad stuff, of course, but also enjoying, thinking about and becoming more receptive to the good.

Enjoy your inner spring

To make this concrete, I have two tasks for you. First, please start a journal, if you don’t write one already. And in your journal I want you to note every sign of spring, wherever you are in the world (if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, this won’t work so well for you, so skip this one and go for the meditation practice, below). This could be species of birds returning to your garden or local green space. It might be dear little snowdrops peeking out of the frosty soil, crocuses, daffodils and other hardy souls braving the chilly mornings.

Notice the sun rising a little earlier each day, and setting a few minutes later. Feel the increasing warmth of sunlight on your skin, as the sun regains its life-giving power. One of the most joyful sights for those in the country is the arrival of lambs, bouncing and frolicking across the fields. If that’s you, drink in every delicious, life-affirming moment.

And as you notice and focus on every sign of spring, see if you can also notice a gradual uplift in your mood. Remember that, despite our increasingly high-tech, urban lives we are still animals, creatures of this Earth, responding to subtle changes in the seasons as much as the migrating birds or dormice emerging sleepily from their winter nests. Just as our mood naturally dips in winter, so it lifts in spring. Notice, maximise and enjoy that, as much as possible.

Task two is to try my Insight Timer practice – Taking in the Good: IFS Meditation. It’s all about gradually changing a negative mindset, choosing a positive self-belief, feeling and quality to embody and bring into your life.

I hope you enjoy it – sending you hopeful love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Find Your Own Path: Choosing the Right Approach to Healing

Image by Lili Popper

Have you ever been in therapy? I’m guessing, as you are currently reading this post on a blog all about mental health, that the answer is yes. If so, did it help? I certainly hope so, but sadly many people try different therapists, as well as different flavours of therapy, and find them either minimally helpful or not much help at all.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all therapies are unhelpful. It’s just that, in my experience, people often choose therapists without really understanding the exact type of therapy they offer, why it’s better/worse than other approaches, or whether it’s the best approach for them.

Let me give you a concrete example. If you have experienced trauma in your life, you will probably need professional help to recover from that. And so you may find yourself a nice, friendly, caring counsellor, who says what you need is to talk through those traumatic events in great detail. But for many people just talking about what they have been through, in an unstructured way, will not only be unhelpful, but actually re-traumatising.

You would need a trauma-informed therapy like EMDR, sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic experiencing, trauma-informed stabilisation treatment, schema therapy or trauma-focused CBT. All of these approaches will help you process your traumatic memories in a safe, structured and focused way. Just talking about your experiences, in this case, is not the way to heal them.

Let me be clear – I’m not knocking counselling here. There are some wonderful counsellors out there and the work they do is invaluable. It’s especially helpful to get you through a tough time, like bereavement or divorce, when a kind, empathic, non-judgemental person is exactly what you need. But mainstream counselling is not designed to help with trauma, which is why it’s not the right choice if that’s the kind of help you need.

Finding your own path

The longer I do this work and the more therapy models I study, the more I believe that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to healing, whatever kind of psychological problem you are struggling with. I often think to myself, ‘What does this person need, at this moment, in this session?’ And I then draw from a wide range of theories, techniques and strategies in my mind to find just the right one for that person, in that moment.

You might also find that you need different therapies at different times in your life – where a highly focused, time-limited approach like CBT may be perfect for one phase of your life, a longer-term, less-structured modality like IFS may be right for another phase, or set of problems.

With that in mind, if you are considering therapy, here are some suggestions for finding your own path to healing, happiness and a flourishing life:

1. The relationship is everything. Whichever of the many wonderful therapies you choose, remember that the primary healing agent in any therapy is the relationship between you and your therapist. This is especially true in longer-term approaches, like schema therapy or psychodynamic therapy. But even in short-term models like CBT, feeling safe in the room (or online) with someone, that they get you, care about you, are warm and nurturing, is crucial. I often tell people to shop around – if you have an assessment with someone and it doesn’t feel right, trust your gut and find another person.

2. Trauma-informed therapies for trauma-processing work. As I mentioned earlier, it’s so important to find a trauma-informed therapy/therapist if you have experienced trauma in your life. The bigger and more impactful the trauma, the more important this is. So ask your prospective therapist about their model, experience and plans to help you heal. If their answers seem a little off, or unconvincing, keep shopping.

3. Therapy is just one piece of the pie. As well as integrating various therapy models in my work, I am also a holistic practitioner. I talk to my clients about many things, but top of the list is how much sleep they are getting and whether they exercise regularly. We are only beginning to understand the importance of sleep for mental and physical health (spoiler alert: it’s profoundly important).

   And getting regular exercise is right up there with good-quality therapy, in my opinion. We need to move our bodies, in ways we enjoy, as often as possible. I’m talking weight-training, HIIT, spin classes, walking, swimming, yoga, dancing, running, vigorous gardening, rock climbing… Every system in your brain and body is built to work optimally when you’re moving, your heart rate is up, blood is pumping, your breaths are deep and skin is warm.

   Extensive research shows that exercise is a powerful healing agent for stress, anxiety and depression – the three main types of psychological problem people struggle with. Meditation is also key, as are warm, loving relationships, a healthy (ideally Mediterranean) diet, moderate drinking, a healthy microbiome, mind-opening books and podcasts… Therapy is an important piece of the pie, but it’s certainly not the only one.

I hope you found that thought-provoking and helpful. I also hope you find the right person/approach for you, as that can be life-changing.

And if you are struggling right now, sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Being Grateful for the Little Things Will Transform Your Mood

Image by Rosie Kerr

I thought I was one of the lucky ones. Since the start of the pandemic, I had never had Covid – not once. My wife and I had a certain smug glow, telling people, ‘Well we have never had it. Aren’t we lucky!’ And then, finally, those ingenious little microbes found a way in. We both got it, my wife a couple of days before me. And it hit us hard – last week was a write-off.

But this is not a post about Covid, or sickness. It’s about what comes next. Because as we emerge from a week of feverish coughing and spluttering, it’s like waking up after a long, dark night. And realising there was all this beauty, this wonder, right outside the whole time, we just couldn’t see it.

This skewed view of things is fundamental to being human. The Buddha taught that we walk around in a dream, seeing things not as they are, but as we imagine them to be. We think we are defective, not good enough, less than others, but none of this is true. We may think that other people are mean, or selfish, or untrustworthy, but most people are kind, decent and good.

And we may believe that the most important things in life are material – money, fancy car, big house – but none of those matter overly much, once we have enough to be comfortable. What matters is love, warm relationships, a life filled with meaning and purpose. None of those things can be bought.

How gratitude lifts your mood

Yesterday, I finally left the house and went for a walk through our neighbourhood. It was a cold, grey, windy February day. In another mood, I might have looked around and thought, ‘God, this is a grim day. Winter is just miserable – I cannot wait for spring.’ And (no-brainer question of the day) what would have happened to my mood? Of course, it would have worsened. The wonderful Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive therapy, taught us this back in the 60s – that thoughts trigger emotions, positive or negative.

But because I was emerging, blinking, from my forced confinement, instead I looked around and thought, ‘My God, how wonderful to see the world again!’ What a joy it was just to walk, putting one foot in front of the other, taking in all the sights and sounds of my beloved neighbourhood. And then to walk to my favourite coffee shop, where my brain fog had lifted sufficiently to let me read a book. And to drink coffee! My heart sang.

Again, it’s kind of obvious that where we place our attention, as well as the meaning we make of our experience, has a profound effect on our mood. The Buddha knew that. Beck knew it. Plato knew it. He said, ‘Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind’.

Positive psychologists like Martin Seligman know it – which is why he taught the mood-enhancing power of using techniques like the Gratitude Letter. This doesn’t mean that you should adopt some kind of Pollyanna-ish, good-vibes-only positivity, pretending everything is fine all the time. Because it isn’t – the Buddha also taught that to live a human life is to experience inevitable pain like sickness, ageing and the loss of loved ones. But he explained that we turn pain into suffering through our thoughts, our interpretation of the world.

Instead, we need to turn towards and accept painful things (like a week-long struggle with Covid, for example!). But we can still be grateful for so much. Life is full of light, beauty, wonder, awe and delight, as much as it is sadness, pain, hurt and disappointment. Light and shade. Day and night. Joy and pain.

So do check out Seligman’s gratitude exercises. You can also try my Hardwiring Happiness Talk & Meditation on Insight Timer, which is designed to help you notice, feel and maximise positive experiences throughout your day.

I hope you enjoy it – and sending grateful love from London ❤️

Dan

If You Struggle With Climate Anxiety, this Book Will Give You Hope

Image by Margot Richard

How do you feel about climate change? I’m guessing that, like most of us who take this problem seriously, you might find it worrying but try not to think about it too much. You do what you can – eat less meat, try not to fly, sign endless petitions – but try not to let it dominate your day-to-day life.

On a good day, this is how I deal with it too – doing what I can but trying not to get too freaked out. But I have to be honest, on bad days it really scares me. We are already seeing major impacts like melting glaciers, climate change-intensified hurricanes, forest fires, droughts and flooding. And unless humanity wakes up soon, we are in big trouble.

I think one of the less-reported aspects of climate change is its impact on our mental health, especially among the young. In a YouGov survey last year, one in three young people in Britain reported feeling scared (33%), sad (34%) or pessimistic (34%) about climate change, with 28% feeling ‘overwhelmed’. This breaks my heart for those young people, but it’s not surprising, because they will be most affected by climate change throughout the course of their lifetime. If you are a parent or grandparent, you may also be deeply worried about the kind of planet we will bequeath the next generation and the one after that – this is one reason why so many eco-activists are grandparents. They get it and feel compelled to act.

Reasons to be hopeful

So far, so gloomy. Which is why I am happy to tell you about the book I am currently reading, Not the End of the World: Why We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, by Hannah Ritchie. She is a data scientist at Oxford University and tells the story of feeling so freaked out as a student studying Earth Sciences, that she almost changed career. The onslaught of anxiety-provoking lectures on her course – and especially the stories about climate disasters she obsessively read in the media – were just overwhelming.

But this is a profoundly hopeful and optimistic book, because Ritchie argues that when you look at the actual data and key trends in energy use, pollution reduction, and so on, the real story is very different from the one we see in the media.

Let me be clear: Ritchie is no climate denier. She is a scientist who understands and accepts the prevailing scientific view – that climate change is real, it’s happening now, is man-made and unless we act fast to limit rising temperatures, humanity and all life on Earth is in big trouble. It’s just that she makes a compelling case that we have already made huge strides, at unprecedented speed, for example in decarbonising our energy production. In many industrialised countries we have virtually phased out the most polluting/carbon-emitting coal-fired power stations and rapidly developed green energies like solar, wind, hydroelectric and (somewhat controversially) nuclear.

Clean energy is now cheaper than its fossil-fuel alternatives and this will accelerate the more we adopt it at scale. This change is inevitable – as is the switch to electric cars/buses/trucks. As the cost of these green energies and modes of transport plummets, there is literally no reason not to make the switch, despite the increasingly devious and desperate tactics of the fossil-fuel industry. Sorry folks, this change is inevitable, whether you want it to be or not.

We have solved global problems before

Another argument I found really powerful and persuasive is that the global community has overcome two major environmental challenges before: acid rain in the 1980s and the ozone hole in the 1990s. In both cases, these were serious problems that required the global community to work together, despite resistance from the polluting industries that were causing the problems. And what led to the changes? Intense pressure from the public.

This led politicians to act, global treaties to be signed, industry to grudgingly change its polluting behaviour and, in both cases, drastic reductions in the harm to our environment. Now, climate change is a much bigger and more complex problem, but Ritchie argues – and I strongly believe – that if we all put enough pressure on our politicians, as well as using our consumer power to boycott the most climate-wrecking corporations/energy sources, we can solve this problem.

So if you or someone you love is struggling with climate anxiety, I strongly recommend you buy this book. It’s also packed with suggestions about how we, as individuals and communities, can make changes in the way we eat, shop and travel that can make a big difference. I am feeling hopeful about this problem for the first time in years, so I hope it will help you feel the same way too.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Finding Strength, Courage and Wisdom in Your Compassionate Self

Image by Vicky Sim

I have often envied people of faith – it’s clearly very comforting to have that belief and certainty about your life and what comes after it. But as well as being raised in a non-religious family, I was also taught from an early age to think critically. My family was highly political, liberal and motivated to make the world a better place. And part of that mindset was thinking critically about everything – what we read in the media, what politicians and others in power said and did.

I then studied Sociology at university and later, before retraining as a therapist, was a health journalist for over a decade. As a journalist I was taught to look for evidence-based treatments, for both mind and body, which was an excellent theoretical foundation for my move into psychotherapy. So, plenty more training in and encouragement of critical thinking there.

Since switching to psychotherapy later in life, I have retained this ability to think critically, question and try to understand the evidence, or at least the theory, behind every form of therapy I have studied. And this is why – somewhat frustratingly, I must admit! – I could never wholeheartedly sign up to any one therapy model. All of the many approaches I have trained in have their wisdom, their strengths and rich array of resources. But they also have weaknesses and things I can’t just blindly sign up to, because I don’t agree with them – that would require a kind of religious faith, which is not the way my mind works.

What is the compassionate self?

One of the things I have grappled with on my journey as a therapist is how to understand, name and work with the inner resource that is so crucial to therapeutic work, but has many names in different traditions. In Buddhism, this would be called your Buddha Nature; in Taoism, it would be your chi. In indigenous cultures, most of which practice some form of animism, this resource would be thought of as your spirit – within you, but also outside and all around you, in objects, places, and animals.

With the greatest respect to those who do, I don’t believe in souls, or spirits, so for me this inner resource must come from your brain – which is of course the most miraculous, exquisitely complex object in the known universe. And in the various forms of psychotherapy I integrate in my work with clients this brain-based resource would be called your Healthy Adult, in schema therapy. Internal family systems speaks of the Self. Family therapist Terry Real’s relational life therapy frames this as the Wise Adult. I like all of these ideas and think they each have their usefulness and innate wisdom. But I especially like the idea from compassion-focused therapy (CFT) of the Compassionate Self.

Let me explain why, before exploring how you can access this powerful, healing inner resource in your day-to-day life. First, I am really fond of the CFT model. Its founder, Professor Paul Gilbert, is a brilliant evolutionary/clinical psychologist – on his trainings in Derby I learned a great deal about the way our brains were shaped by millennia of adaptations, in some ways helpfully but in many ways not so much. He argues that most of our psychological problems come from an ‘old brain’ (subcortical) vs ‘new brain’ (cortical) conflict and also integrates traditional CBT with Eastern philosophy, especially ideas from Buddhism, which really resonate with my view of the world.

Like Professor Gilbert, I see compassion – for self and others – as the key healing ingredient for my clients. Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion has also been a big influence on me, so let’s add a dash of her wisdom and insight here. Which brings us to the Compassionate Self – how can you access it in your daily life?

You, at your best

The good news is that you don’t have to become someone different, or better, or more spiritually advanced, to embody your Compassionate Self. All the qualities this innate, inner core offers – strength, courage, wisdom, kindness, love, maturity, resilience, healing and, of course, compassion – are already inside you. You just need to do what the Buddha called ‘waking up’. Because he taught us that we all wander around in a dream, thinking we’re not good enough, or flawed, or broken in some way. And we think that if we only we had this thing, or that person, or this piece of wisdom, then we would be OK.

But… are you ready, because this is perhaps the most important thing you will hear today. None of those things is true. You are a walking miracle. And utterly unique – not one of the eight billion other humans on this planet is quite like you. You are perfect, with all your imperfections. You are lovable, with all your little quirks and eccentricities. You are beautiful, with all your flaws.

And you already embody this Compassionate Self in more ways than you know. It’s you when you spend 20 minutes chatting to an elderly neighbour, who recently lost his beloved wife, despite being frazzled after a long day. It’s you when you somehow manage to remain patient, at 3am, when your daughter had that bad dream again and needs a hug and reassurance that it was just a dream before going back to sleep. It’s you when your heart breaks as you read about refugees in some terrible situation, and donate to a charity that helps them, even though you can’t really afford it.

You embody your Compassionate Self when you make the effort to message that friend who recently got divorced and you know is especially lonely on Sundays. It’s you when you give your wife an especially long and tender hug, because you can see in her face she had a really tough day. It’s you when you organise a surprise party for your friend’s 40th birthday, even though it’s a huge job and you are already overwhelmed by your seemingly infinite to-do list.

So to embody your Compassionate Self, all you need to do is wake up from your dream of defectiveness and realise that this is you, already – it’s you, at your best.

If this has piqued your interest and you would like to meet this wise, compassionate version of you, try my Compassionate Friend Meditation on Insight Timer. People seem to really like this one – I hope you do too.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Do You Ever Feel Stuck or Blocked in Your Life? If so, Try This

Image by Travis Saylor

Do you ever feel stuck? Are you plagued by procrastination? Do you find yourself full of good intentions, plans and goals but struggle to achieve any of them? These questions feel especially relevant in this first week of the new year, when we are all encouraged to come up with noble-sounding, life-changing resolutions, which often end up dusty and discarded a few weeks later.

And they feel especially relevant to me, because I have felt a bit blocked this week. I came back from my holiday feeling pretty well rested and batteries recharged. This is a quiet week, therapy-wise, as many of my clients have kids who are not yet back at school. So I thought to myself, ‘Great! The perfect week to write lots of blog posts, social-media content and get started on that Insight Timer course I have planned…’

And I have done some of those things but, honestly, it’s been a struggle. I have procrastinated, a lot. I’m currently reading a brilliant book – Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman – so that has filled many of my quieter hours. It’s fascinating, and of course hugely beneficial for my work and understanding of neurodiversity, but it’s also a handy excuse to not be writing myself.

When some parts say yes, others no

This stuckness and procrastination is very familiar to me. Because, as I have learned over the years, I have one part – who I call the Hard Worker – that is relentlessly focused on getting stuff done. And he is amazing, because he has helped me achieve so much in my career. Everything I have done, any success I have had, is all down to him and his drive, energy and determination.

But there is a downside to this highly-energised part – he doesn’t get that I am human. So he keeps driving me, taking on more and more projects, working harder and with greater intensity, until I am teetering on the edge of burnout and have to take a big step back.

There is another part – who I call the Shutdown Part – who has the exact opposite job inside. When the Hard Worker has me hurtling towards exhaustion, this one just shuts me down. Sometimes I get sick, either with a bug or just feeling nauseous and wiped out. Sometimes he makes me feel down, with low energy and motivation. Other times I just can’t come up with yet another idea for my blog, Instagram post or guided meditation. I’m done.

Why integration is key

So if you are feeling any of those things right now, don’t despair. It’s probably someone inside telling you that it’s too much. You need a break. Just because it’s a new year doesn’t mean we are all magically fizzing with energy and zest for life. The days are cold and dark and, really, we should all be hibernating, not rushing off to the gym/getting sober/losing 10lb/starting a new side-hustle.

Instead, the key is to integrate the wisdom of both sides of you – the pedal-to-the-metal side and the hide-under-the-duvet side. They both mean well and are trying to help, even if their method of helping isn’t always, well, very helpful. So integration is key, rather than lurching from one extreme to the other (as in yo-yo dieting, for example, or getting sober and then relapsing over and over again).

As I am often saying in these posts, parts-based therapy models like schema therapy or internal family systems teach us that rather than letting one part drive us, the key is to integrate them all, with you (calm, rational, loving, adult you – the Compassionate Self) in charge at all times.

So to put this more concretely, if your Compassionate Self is in charge, you might resolve to go to the gym twice a week, instead of every day. That is entirely doable and a resolution you can stick to. Or, instead of suddenly going from wolf-like carnivore to strict vegan, how about eating plant-based meals every other day? If you want to drink less, that’s a good idea – but moderation every week for the rest of the year is better than Dry January and then back to excessive boozing. These are all achievable and realistic goals, which means they are likely to last longer than February.

Integral to this kinder, gentler approach is learning to make more thoughtful, considered decisions. I notice that the decisions I make in haste are often not very helpful, in the long run, so it’s always best to slow down and choose more slowly and skilfully, when we can. In the mindfulness world this is called taking a ‘mindful pause’, which is why I developed this practice for Insight Timer – Learn How to Take a Mindful Pause.

I hope you enjoy it – and that you have a wonderful, mindful, fruitful year ahead.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

What Are Your 10,000 Joys and 10,000 Sorrows?

Image by Madison Oren

There is an oft-quoted Taoist saying that every human life contains 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Meaning, it’s human to suffer, to struggle with painful emotions like sadness, loneliness or anxiety. But it’s also inherently human to experience positive feelings like joy, pleasure, happiness, love and pride. A rich, well-lived human life involves experiencing – and allowing ourselves to truly feel – all of our feelings, both pleasant and unpleasant.

As this is my last post of 2023, I am in a reflective mood, looking back over the past year and digesting everything that has happened, both good and bad. I also spend a lot (too much, according to my loved ones!) of time thinking about my 56 years of life on this planet, all the things I have experienced, that shaped me, that made me, me. And this reflective process can be a double-edged sword, as when I’m feeling a bit down, it can easily turn into a self-critical rumination, my Inner Critic reminding me about all the things I have said or done that I feel bad about in some way. Not helpful.

But on more balanced days, I can also remember moments of great joy. I had lunch with a dear friend recently and she asked me what skydiving was like (I tried skydiving back in my journalist days, when I would go on crazy adventures and then write about them). I did a tandem skydive and remember it with crystal clarity – the sheer terror of jumping out of a plane at 12,000 feet, plummeting towards Earth at lunatic speed and every cell in my body screaming, ‘We’re going to die!’

And then, my instructor pulled the rip cord and all that plummeting terror instantly stopped as we floated slowly towards the ground, silently circling above the stunning Oxfordshire landscape of verdant hills, fields and woodland. It was the closest I have ever come to flying and it was… blissful. I can still taste the sheer joy (and relief at the knowledge I was not actually going to die!), the visceral sense of freedom and in-your-bones wonder and beauty of that experience. Magical.

The practice: Focus on your joys

So here’s a little assignment for you over the Christmas break – try journalling about the 10,000 joys and sorrows of your life. If you’re like me, and most people who struggle with their mental health at times, it’s a good idea to just bullet-point the sorrows, without going into too much depth. And definitely don’t try and think of 10,000! Just do a timeline of the big, tricky stuff in your life, with a sentence or two for each.

That’s because every human brain has a built-in negativity bias, so we focus on anything that could be threatening – painful memories, worries about the future, problems in our life – in great detail, while only giving fleeting attention to the good stuff that happens all the time. It comes and goes, without sticking in your mind and brain.

Then spend a lot more time on your 10,000 joys, even if it’s hard to think of many. As with all of the practices I recommend, there is no right or wrong way of doing this, just have a go and see what happens. And remember that the more we focus on good stuff – happy memories, moments of triumph or achievement, kind words or gestures from friends and loved ones, the birth of a child or first kiss with a beloved – the more we correct that negativity bias. We start to focus more on good, pleasant or enjoyable experiences, moment to moment and day to day, which over time rewires our brain to think about and feel those things more deeply.

And if you would like help with this rewiring process and focusing more on the joys, try my Hardwiring Happiness: Talk & Meditation practice on Insight Timer. It’s based on a brilliantly simple practice by Rick Hanson, from his book Hardwiring Happiness: How to Reshape Your Brain and Your Life. I love this practice and use it all the time with my clients, who seem to love it too. Just click on the button below to try it now.

I hope that helps. And I hope you have a wonderful, restful, restorative break over the festive season. Thank you so much for your support, connection, comments and kindness throughout 2023, in response to my teaching, to my Insight Timer practices, through my various social-media channels and via email – I am so grateful and deeply appreciate every one of you.

I have some exciting plans for 2024, including my first-ever 7-day course for Insight Timer, so stay tuned to these posts for more details about that and other upcoming events in the year ahead.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

We Are All Part of One Big Human Family

Image by Annie Spratt

Where are you from? You might think that’s an easy question and that the answer would be New York, London, Sydney, Berlin, Budapest… or wherever else you were born and raised. But there is a deeper answer to this question, because for all of us, whichever country we now call home, our ancestors all came from the same place. And that place is Africa.

I learned a great deal about this in a fascinating BBC series presented by Dr Alice Roberts, a medical doctor and anthropologist: The Incredible Human Journey. It really is a wonderful series, bristling with revelations about who we are and where, ultimately, we are all from. And although the idea that all humans originated in Ethiopia is not new to me, what did blow my mind is that every single human on the planet today who does not live in Africa – that’s around 6.5 billion people – are all descended from the same tiny band of Africans who left the continent between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago.

It doesn’t matter what you look like, what language you speak, your facial features, the colour of your hair, skin or eyes – if you trace your ancestors back far enough they would be African. And it’s jaw-dropping to me that you (if you are not today an African) and me can trace our genetic lineage back to this band of intrepid early humans who left Africa in search of new lands and possibilities for life. Just a few families who emerged from that continent and slowly spread into Asia, Australasia, Europe and the Americas.

You are part of my family

And so you are my brother, sister, cousin, aunt, uncle, grandparent… You are part of my family. And isn’t that a wonderful idea which, if we all truly understood it, would make all the anger and fear and ‘othering’ of refugees a complete nonsense. Because these people coming, for example, in small boats to the UK, are my family. They are your family. And they are the family of all those politicians who speak of them with anger and disdain, knowingly stirring up primal fears and hostilities so we treat these poor, desperate people as somehow less than us, subhuman.

I dream of a future in which we understand that all humans are equal. That we all wish to be happy and safe. All of us want our children to eat healthy food and drink clean water, to live in a warm home, to get a good education and live a comfortable, meaningful life. In which we understand that, on an ancestral and genetic level, we are all the same, that skin colour is literally skin deep – because my skin and perhaps yours is only light because we live in cold countries, where our recent ancestors’ skin pigments changed as they adapted to colder climates.

And if, one day, we evolve to the point where we all understand this, it is taught in every school, every person on this planet understands and embraces their lineage, maybe these artificial borders we have drawn as mere lines upon a map, will no longer have meaning. The idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’ will melt away, because we are all, in fact, ‘us’. And keeping ‘them’ out, pushing those small boats back, becomes ludicrous, because those boats are full of family members, needing our help.

And I know, with all the war and aggression raging around the world, that these ideas seem fanciful, even naive. But I don’t care. I am an optimist. And I think if we all work towards it, this is a future we can co-create. Because, honestly, what’s the alternative? More war, division and darkness – and that’s not a world I want to live in, or leave to my son and his children.

If this resonates with you, please do watch that series – I think you will find it both fascinating and inspiring. You may also feel moved to help those refugees/family members. If so, Choose Love is an excellent charity, which is helping displaced people stay warm, safe and dry over the cold winter months. You can support them using the button below.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why Every Part of You Deserves Love and Understanding

Image by Tashi Nyima

Let me ask you a question: How do you feel about yourself, in general? I hope you mostly like and approve of yourself. But the opposite may be true – you may really dislike yourself and find it hard to treat yourself with anything approaching kindness. Sadly, this is especially likely to be true if you have a trauma history, because that often scrambles our sense of ourselves.

But even if you’re lucky enough to like yourself, most of the time, I bet there are parts of you that you’re not so keen on. Your inner Critic, for example. As I often say to my clients, nobody loves their Critic! That’s because this part of us often treats us harshly, or is highly demanding, pushing us way too hard with a long lists of shoulds (‘You should be doing better than this, what’s wrong with you?’ or ‘You should be thinner/smarter/richer/more popular/harder-working…’).

We may also feel negatively towards parts that make us do stuff we find shameful, embarrassing or destructive in our lives. The part that makes us drink too much. The parts that tell us to gamble, smoke weed, work obsessively, pick the same kind of unsuitable person over and over. Nobody loves these guys.

No bad parts

But as I have written before in these posts, we need to understand that there are no bad parts (such an important idea that Dr Richard Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems therapy, used it as the title of one of his books). Even what are called ‘extreme’ parts in IFS, like the ones listed above, genuinely mean well. It can be hard to see that sometimes, but every part of you is either holding some kind of pain or trying to protect you from it. And the weed-smoking one, or the gambling one, are just trying to help you numb, soothe or avoid painful emotions.

It’s why people get home from an uber-stressful day and say, ‘God I need a glass of wine!’ Or why people rush out from high-pressure meetings to smoke a hasty cigarette. In both cases that’s a soother-type part, helping the person deal with painful/stressful feelings. Now this doesn’t mean that we should drink like fishes or smoke 40 a day! Of course not. We may need to help these parts change, or set limits on them, but it’s imperative that we do that collaboratively, with compassion, or it just doesn’t work.

That’s why people get sober and relapse, over and over. Or why many smokers quit again and again and again, but always end up back on the baccy. If you want to make deep, long-lasting changes in your life, you have to work with these parts, not against them. You need to understand why they are making you drink/smoke/work/gamble. There is always a reason – and that reason is usually helping you with some kind of pain.

Easier said than done

I’m well aware that it’s much easier for me to write some encouraging words in a blog post than for you to actually change. To change the way you behave, day in and day out. Or the way you interact with these parts of yourself you may dislike, or even despise. It is not easy – take it from someone who spends their whole working life trying to help people change.

But it is doable. And this is one reason I recorded a new guided meditation recently – Sending Loving-Kindness to Every Part of You: IFS Meditation. I blended the classic Buddhist metta (loving-kindness) practice with the IFS approach, to help you develop greater feelings of self-acceptance, self-kindness and self-compassion for every part of you, even the tricky parts.

I’m pleased with this one, so I very much hope it helps.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why Your Brain and Body are Designed to Rest and Relax

Image by Aleksandar Cvetanovic

What are you doing, right now? Well, before you started reading this – what were you doing a few minutes ago? I’m guessing you were rushing around, either physically or mentally. And I’m confident about that guess because we’re all so damn busy these days, aren’t we? This is partly down to the advances in technology that enable me to write this on my computer, then send it whizzing around the world to all of you – which is wonderful – but also mean we are available, 24/7, for calls, texts, WhatsApp messages, Zoom calls, emails and countless other forms of digital communication. Those of us living in industrialised countries are never really off, in our 21st-century, high-tech world.

This can become especially tricky for us when we are stressed and overloaded at work. Something I notice a lot with my clients is that when they get stressed, they stop taking breaks, work harder and longer hours, staying chained to their desks – and some kind of screen – for longer and longer each day.

In some ways, I totally get it – if you feel stressed and like your to-do list is a mile long, you go into overdrive, pushing yourself harder and harder to get all those items on your to-do list, done. But I also have to speak to these clients about the ways in which 24/7 working is not only bad for your health, it’s bad for your performance and productivity as well.

Stone-age brains in a high-tech world

To understand why, we need to think about evolution, which works in a slow, steady, incremental way. So many parts of your brain are really old, in evolutionary terms. The whole ‘subcortical’ layer of your brain is millions of years old (not your actual brain, obviously, but those parts haven’t changed much in all that time). And these older brain regions were developed for stone-age life – hunting mammoths and gathering roots, nuts and berries.

And in our pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer lives, we were either very much on (hunting, fighting, climbing tall trees for honey) or off (lazing around after a large mammoth burger, playing, dancing, sleeping). If you want to know what off looks like, check out that photo – unlike modern humans, cats have no problem switching off!

So your brain, nervous system, body, hormonal system, organs – all are adapted for these intense bursts of activity, followed by lots of rest. And what do most of us do, today? Sit hunched over a screen, with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol coursing through our bloodstream, very much on in terms of stress and focus, but immobile/off physically. So a weird sort of grey area for your brain, which finds it all very sub-optimal and confusing.

This is why longer and longer hours don’t really work, for work, because your brain needs periods of downtime to process all the information you are cramming into it, sort data into different forms of memory storage (boring – delete; important but not crucial – file in long-term storage; absolutely vital – save in short-term memory for easy access and retrieval). The more hours you do, the poorer become your memory, concentration, cognitive function, creativity, collaboration, decision-making and a whole host of other skills and abilities most of us need to perform and produce at work.

Helping your body relax

I often write in these posts about the importance of exercise for your physical and mental health. I am evangelical about moving your body, because it was designed to move, which is why it feels so good. But it’s also vital to get enough rest, downtime and relaxation. If you’re a high-stress, high-octane, highly-caffeinated sort of person, you may not find that easy.

If so, as well as the higher-intensity exercise, try yoga, tai chi, meditation, gentle swimming, walking, gardening – slower, more meditative forms of movement. Getting enough good-quality sleep is, of course, crucial, so the experts recommend creating an eight-hour ‘sleep window’, in which you are in bed, ready to sleep (following all the usual sleep-hygiene advice about no electronic devices in the bedroom, keeping that room cool and dark, and so on) for eight hours a night. You may get eight hours, you may not, but you are creating the optimal conditions for that to happen.

You may also find my Body Scan Meditation helpful – this is designed to help you completely relax, either to wind down from a stressful day or drift off to sleep. Just click the button below to listen on Insight Timer.

I very much hope that helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

The Buddha Taught Us How to Avoid Turning Pain into Suffering

Image by Abhijeet Gourav

I turn 56 in a couple of months and, although there are many things I like about growing older, there are some definite drawbacks. Wrinkles, back pain and various minor health ailments – none of these are much fun. But the biggest drawback for me is the change in my sleep pattern. And especially my brain’s newfound trick of waking me up at 5am every day, for no apparent reason.

I really need my sleep. Eight hours every night would be good, but nine is probably my sleep sweet spot. Six hours, which I got last night, really doesn’t do it for me. I’m currently on my fourth coffee of the day, which helps, but is no substitute for a good night’s sleep.

My eyes feel kind of scratchy, everything is a bit of a struggle and it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re dragging yourself through the day, waiting for that glorious moment when you can go back to bed and hope for a better slumber tonight. This is all a bit painful, especially because I understand the increasingly persuasive science around the importance of sleep for our mental and physical health.

Turning pain into suffering

Luckily, I know enough about Buddhist psychology to understand how not to turn this pain into suffering. This was one of the Buddha’s many great insights – he taught that human life is inherently painful. We all get older, every day. There is nothing we can do about that, however much we might dislike it or slather on anti-ageing potions to hold on to our youthful looks. And with age often comes illness. Again, there is a lot we can do to prevent that, but some illnesses will inevitably come with advancing years.

The biggest, scariest truth we all have to face is that one day this will all come to an end. This is the hardest thing that any human has to grapple with – we are not immortal and so our time on this planet is finite.

All of this brings pain in the form of stress, worry, anxiety, sadness and other difficult emotions. And this pain is inevitable, to a greater or lesser extent – we can’t get rid of or avoid it completely, however hard we try. But the Buddha also taught that we then turn this inevitable pain into avoidable suffering through the way we respond to the initial discomfort.

He famously used the metaphor of a first and second arrow to explain this to his followers. When we feel pain, it’s as if we are hit by an arrow – this hurts, of course. But when, for example, we feel loneliness as our ‘first-arrow’ pain, but then start thinking, ‘I can’t stand feeling lonely, it’s the worst feeling in the world,’ or, ‘God, I’m so lonely – and I always will be. I just know I will never find someone to love,’ we add the second arrow of suffering.

Just feeling the pain is enough

Knowing this, I have become much more skilled at not turning my first-arrow pain of tiredness into second-arrow suffering. I used to think, ‘Oh man, I am so tired. I just hate this. I know I will feel terrible all day, it will affect my work and I won’t be 100% in my sessions today, which means I am letting my clients down…’ and on it would go, until I felt thoroughly depressed, on top of the tiredness.

Now – today, for example – I just think, ‘Oh well, I’m just tired. It’s not the worst thing in the world. Many people are suffering greatly right now, so this isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.’ And… I just feel tired. No depression. No unpleasant rumination. I just get on with the day, which seems to go much better.

Now I’m not saying this is easy, especially if the pain you feel is far greater than my relatively mild tired-and-scratchy feeling. Struggling with the impact of trauma, being highly anxious and panicky, or deeply depressed, are clearly much worse and harder to manage. But the same principles do apply – if you can just feel the pain, whatever it is, without piling on a whole load more mental and emotional suffering, you will feel less anxious, less panicky, less depressed.

And if you are feeling some kind of emotional pain right now, this practice I recorded for Insight Timer might help: Soothing Painful Emotions with the Breath.

I hope you do find it helpful – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

A More Compassionate Way to Think About Addiction

Image by Benjamin DeYoung

Do you struggle with addiction or compulsive behaviour? Many of us do, whether that’s drinking a bit too much wine, too often, eating more chocolate than we would like, or impulsively buying stuff we don’t really need. Our use of substances and activities can range from mild and fairly benign, like a bit too much chocolate, to severe and potentially dangerous, like using heroin.

Whether you are at the mild or severe end of this spectrum, addiction is probably something you have heard a lot about, either through your own research, from a health professional or in the media. And much of the information we get about addiction can, in my opinion, be both unhelpful and stigmatising. It can also be a bit old-fashioned, based on 20th-century ideas about the mind and brain that don’t stand up well to the latest research/insights from neuroscience and psychology.

But there is another, newer way to think about addiction. This approach is kind, compassionate and understanding of the reasons why we might misuse substances or activities, whether it’s smoking, over-eating, gambling, taking recreational drugs, drinking heavily or compulsively shopping. I have found this approach a game-changer in terms of helping my clients and understanding my own behaviour, especially when I was younger and, let’s say, not as sober and sensible as I am now!

Addiction = pain-relief

In order to understand why we become addicted to things, you first need to understand that our mind is made up of many subpersonalities or parts, with different functions for us, internally. I won’t go into detail about that here, as I have written about it extensively elsewhere, but my favourite parts-based model is internal family systems (IFS). In IFS, there are two main types of parts. You have young ones who hold painful memories, thoughts and feelings from that time in your life (so a four-year-old part, an eight-year-old part, and so on). And protectors, whose job it is to make sure those young parts never get hurt again.

These protectors are then divided into managers, who are hard-working, proactive and strategic – your Worrier is a typical manager, trying to anticipate bad things and help you avoid them. And firefighters, who are the opposite – they are reactive and want to get rid of the pain as quickly as possible, with no thought given to the consequences.

In IFS, addiction – or more accurately, addictive processes – is primarily about the firefighters. So a young part of you is in some kind of pain, feeling overwhelming emotions like stress, anxiety, loneliness, shame or anger. And the firefighter wants to put out the fire of painful feelings, by any means necessary. So firefighters might make you smoke weed, drink whiskey, use pornography, zone out with games on your phone, help you detach/dissociate from your feelings, or use a virtually limitless range of strategies to numb, distract or soothe the anguished young part.

And it works, right? That is why we have a glass of wine or two when we are stressed after a long day. Or go for a cigarette/vape break at work when we’re buckling under the weight of our workload. And it’s why people get addicted to heroin and other opioids, because they are so damn (and dangerously) effective at numbing physical and emotional pain.

Compassion for the firefighters

If you want to change your own addictive processes, understanding that any kind of addictive process is essentially the same, inside, and that they just vary in terms of severity, is step one. Then understanding that it’s all about getting rid of/distracting yourself from pain, is step two. And the admittedly tricky final step is having compassion for the parts of you that make you do things that can be harmful or downright dangerous.

As I often say to my clients, it’s helpful to separate the intention (soothing your pain) from the method or behaviour (drinking alcohol, etc). Because however damaging the method, the intention is always good. And when we speak to these firefighter parts, we get how desperate they to help – and the fact that they use the only tools they have available to them.

Learning to speak to them with compassion – rather than judgement and frustration, as we typically do – helps them soften and eventually change. And this change is long-term, because we have buy-in from every part of you, rather than the yo-yo dieting or swinging between sobriety and relapse we see so often with more traditional treatment approaches.

If you would like to find out more about this approach to healing your parts, try my Fire Drill: IFS Meditation. This will help you enter into a more compassionate and helpful dialogue with any part of you, even the more extreme and ‘difficult’ ones.

I hope it helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Change is Hard, But You Can Learn to Embrace it

Image by Chris Lawton

How are you with change? Do you love it, hate it, or somewhere in between? I must be honest – I’m not the biggest fan. My friends and family often tease me about my strong liking for things that are comfortable and familiar. Change can be unsettling for me – or rather, parts of me.

And I’m going through a somewhat turbulent period of change at the moment. Having decided to move out of my office and take my therapy practice online, I am having to negotiate a lot of logistical and other changes around that. We are also using the opportunity to do some much-needed work on our flat, so the builders arrived today – cue huge amounts of dust, noise and general chaos for a while!

As if to rub salt into the wound, my beloved gym did a big refurb last week – not very well, in my opinion – and has become a much less inviting space for me. So I’m looking to change gym too – which may not sound like much, but that place has been my haven for years. It’s a key resource for self-care and stress relief, so it’s a bit of a wrench to find somewhere else.

Although parts of me are excited about all of this, other parts are freaking out! And that’s how it is for most of us, no? I am always intrigued by the fact that lists of top-10 stressors feature a number of apparently positive events, like moving house, retiring or getting married. Although in many ways we enjoy change, finding it exciting, stimulating or rejuvenating, it can also be disorientating, uncomfortable and downright stressful.

The Buddha’s great insight

One of the Buddha’s profound insights was that humans naturally resist change. We don’t like it, fight against it and want things to stay the same. And we cling on to the idea that things can be permanent, unchanging and settled, especially if that helps us feel comfortable – like my gym. But the Buddha taught us that this idea of permanence is an illusion. In fact, everything is impermanent – constantly changing, evolving, breaking down and being reconfigured.

Take my body, for example. It’s made up of atoms, up to half of which were formed when giant stars reached the end of their lifetime and exploded in unimaginably vast supernovae, millions of light years from Earth. When I die, those atoms will become parts of other life forms, like a tree or snail shell. This is the way of life, constantly shifting, changing, evolving – because everything is impermanent, as the Buddha so brilliantly understood, over 2,000 years before modern science proved his theory to be true.

So I may not love change, or find it entirely comfortable, but I cannot resist it. That is futile – and a bit silly, really, because the Buddha also taught that this is how we create much of our suffering. We want things to be different, all the time. We’re all getting older, but want to stay young. We don’t like our job, but think we will be happy with that job, or this much money, or that pretty/handsome new partner.

Instead of this constant yearning for something else, the key to happiness lies in accepting that all we really have is this moment of existence. Everything else is like trying to grab smoke with our fingers, because the future is unknowable.

Learning to embrace change

So your challenge is to help the (young, anxious) parts of you that struggle with change. They need understanding and validation, as well as teaching that change can be tough, but it’s a core part of life. Change will happen whether we want it to or not, so we need to accept and embrace it, as much as possible. If you would like some concrete help with this, try this practice I developed for Insight Timer, Calming Your Parts: IFS Meditation.

It gives you a step-by-step guide to understanding and gently speaking to any parts of you that might be anxious, stressed or worried about change (or anything else you might be struggling with). I hope you find it helpful – and that you, like me, can learn to embrace change, bit by bit.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Would You Like to Live to 100? The Secrets to a Long, Healthy Life

Image by Huynh Nguyen

I often wonder how long my life will be. I’m 55 now, so hope to have at least another 30 years, if not more. My beloved grandfather lived to 104, so that bodes well, genetically! But perhaps more important than how long I live is how well I live – staying healthy, active and mentally sharp for as long as possible.

This intriguing question was answered in a fascinating Netflix documentary series I watched recently – Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. It’s presented by author Dan Buettner, who travels around the world to different ‘blue zones’ – places where there is an unusually high concentration of centenarians – to find out why people live longer there. Buettner visits Okinawa, Sardinia, the Greek island of Ikaria, Nicoya in Costa Rica, Loma Linda in California and ends up in Singapore.

In each of these blue zones people do not just live longer, they live well too. And some live remarkably well – in Costa Rica, he meets a 100-year-old cowboy who looks about 60, but is still working from dawn to dusk. He is so remarkable that the Costa Rican researcher Buettner is working with doesn’t believe him and checks his age on the national register! He is, indeed, 100 – and miraculously young, fit and healthy.

The secrets to living long – and well

In each of these blue zones, there are slightly different factors that help people thrive into old age. In Sardinia, the steepness of your village is key, because it means you are walking up and down steep hills every day of your life. But this is also a theme, because although in Singapore people are strongly encouraged to take daily exercise like walking, cycling and working out by the government, it’s generally the constant, low-level exercise that marks these places out.

Gardening, walking instead of driving, dancing, chopping wood, doing things by hand around the house – this kind of activity is key for longevity. Diet is another theme, even though the particular things people eat vary from place to place. The religious community in California (who are also mad about exercise) are mostly vegetarian. In Costa Rica they eat lots of black beans, in Okinawa it’s a particularly nutritious purple sweet potato, murasaki.

But along with diet and exercise, the most powerful learning for me was that having a sense of meaning, or purpose in their lives was key. Alongside this was the quality of their relationships. In every village, town or city Buettner visits, people live in warm, interconnected webs of relationship. These elderly people are not put in care homes, but kept in their families’ homes, or visited often by people in their community.

Love is the magic ingredient

If I’m honest, this doesn’t surprise me. I have written often in these posts about the importance of (good) relationships for our health. Evolutionarily, this makes sense, because we evolved from a common ancestor with apes like chimpanzees and bonobos. Apes don’t live alone. They live in large, social groups, as did every species of human, including homo sapiens.

This began to change just 10,000 years ago, with the agricultural revolution – and accelerated a few hundred years ago with the industrial revolution. Workers moved away from their traditional rural communities (where they lived in villages full of extended families, much like the blue-zone inhabitants) to live in towns and cities, doing back-breaking shifts in factories before going home to their small, nuclear family, or living alone.

Research increasingly shows us that living alone is not good for us, especially if we are often lonely. So perhaps the most important thing you could do, today and for the rest of your life, is to invest in and improve the quality of your closest relationships. If your family of origin was not a happy one, think about creating a ‘chosen family’ – perhaps your partner and children, friends and neighbours.

The blue zones teach us that eating well, exercising often, maintaining our interests, hobbies and even work well into old age are all crucial ingredients of a long, happy life. But even more important is the quality of our relationships – loving and being loved is the magic ingredient to a rich and fulfilling life.

I hope you find that useful – and do watch the documentary series, it’s fascinating.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why You May Have Experienced Trauma, Even if You Had a ‘Normal’ Childhood

Image by Jessica Voong

‘He didn’t see his childhood as unusual – it was the only one he had ever had.’ I read this line in a coffee shop earlier and it has really stayed with me. It was in a brilliant book, Why Therapy Works: Using Our Minds to Change Our Brains, by Louis Cozolino. It’s a bit dense, so probably more for the mental-health professionals reading this (or anyone else who enjoys dense psychology books!). But that line is so good – and speaks to something I see with my clients over and over again.

Because it doesn’t matter how bad your childhood was, what kinds of terrible things were happening – to you it’s normal, because that is all you know. Especially when you are young, before you have attended school, your house and family is your whole world. You might go to the park, or to other kids’ houses to play, but basically everything important that ever happens to you happens inside your family.

So even if your dad is drinking heavily, then shouting aggressively at your mum every night, that’s normal. Or if you grow up in poverty, feeling scared and hungry every day, that’s normal. If your parents clearly favour your sister over you and you know, in your bones, that they love her more than you, well that’s normal too.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that any of those things are OK, or right, or even normal by the standards of many other families. But it is normal for you, because that was all you knew then – and may still be normal for you now, until we work to reframe that story and help you realise it was neither good nor normal to grow up in that environment.

What children need to flourish

One of the central ideas in schema therapy is that of core needs. These are the developmental needs that all children have, whatever the culture or country they grow up in. These five needs are:

1. Love and a secure atachment

2. Safety and protection

3. Being valued as a unique human being

4. The ability to be spontaneous, play and express your emotions

5. Having boundaries and being taught right from wrong

It’s easy to see that the kids who are unlucky enough to grow up in traumatic, neglectful or abusive families are not getting these fundamental needs met. They probably don’t feel loved, safe or valued. Their emotions might be seen as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. And – a problem I see in many families today – they might have what we see as too much of a good thing. Meaning they are spoilt, allowed to say and do whatever they like without consequences. This is also a kind of neglect, because it produces unhappy children who will struggle to fit into society when they are older.

So, however ‘normal’ your childhood was, if these basic needs were not being met, it will have caused you problems as you became an adult. And it may well have been traumatic, even if it seemed normal on the outside, because being shouted at, bullied, devalued or ignored can all be traumatic for kids.

If any of this resonates for you, I’m very sorry you had a tough time growing up. But you may find this talk helpful, which I recorded for Insight Timer to help people tell a different, more compassionate story about their lives: The Story of You: How to Build Self-Compassion.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why I am Moving My Therapy Practice Online

Image by Andrew Neel

After eight-and-a-half happy years, I have decided to move out of my office in north London and see all of my clients online. This decision has been a few years in the making, as after the pandemic I realised I could easily run my practice exclusively via Zoom. And the vast majority of my sessions are now online anyway, so it should be a smooth transition.

Of course, I didn’t start working online during the pandemic – I have offered online sessions for well over a decade. But during the lockdowns I realised that the kind of therapy I offer – integrating schema therapy, internal family systems and other trauma-informed models – worked really well online. I also have clients all over the UK and have worked with people across the globe, so switching fully to online work opens the world up even more, for me and my clients/supervisees.

I am also increasingly focusing on other areas of work, such as supervision (which has always been online), writing my blog and an upcoming self-help book, and being a meditation teacher for Insight Timer and elsewhere.

If you would like to see me for therapy, our sessions will be via Zoom, which works very well for most people. My only request is that you have a fast and stable wifi connection, as the only drawback to meeting online is when people don’t have good wifi and the Zoom video/audio keeps breaking up. This can usually be solved by sitting as close to your router as possible, but please do bear this in mind before getting in touch.

If you would like to see me for online therapy or supervision, email me at dan@danroberts.com or use my contact form to get in touch.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Warm, Loving, Calm… What Self-Energy Feels Like

Image by Zain Bhatti

Internal Family Systems therapy is definitely having a moment. If you have tried to find an IFS therapist or supervisor recently, you will know exactly what I mean. And if you want to train in IFS, you will actually need to enter a lottery, as the courses are so popular right now! So what is IFS – and why is it surging from a little-known, slightly out-there model to the mainstream of psychotherapy?

IFS was founded by Dr Richard Schwartz (who prefers to be called Dick) in the 80s. Dick says that he learned the model from his clients, because they kept saying ‘A part of me thinks this, but another part thinks that…’ or ‘One part wants me to binge on cake, but another part really doesn’t want me to and is berating me about it.’

As a systemic family therapist, Dick was trained to think systemically, because rather than working with an individual client his sessions featured their whole family. And he began to see these families existing not just in his clients’ external worlds but inside their heads, too. This, for me, is probably the biggest revolution to have occurred in the therapy world for decades – the idea that we are not just one, unified self (Dan) but we have a brain that creates what we think of as ‘us’ in a system of parts (the many parts of Dan).

What is the Self in IFS?

I won’t go into detail about these parts here, as I have explained them in many other posts, webinars and talks for Insight Timer. Instead, I would like to focus on what Dick calls, ‘Who you really are, deep down’. Because all of these parts, as lovable and well-intentioned as they are, often develop to help us deal with trauma or other painful incidents in our lives. So they are stuck in somewhat rigid roles, either holding painful memories or helping us cope with them. And the way they do that can, unintentionally, be deeply unhelpful – like the bingeing or berating in the example above.

One of the many lovely ideas in the IFS model is that there is another you, at your core, which isn’t a part. That you is warm, loving, kind, compassionate, strong, calm and deeply healing, if we can access its nourishing energy. And this is your Self.

Again, if this sounds a bit out there, just think about it from a biological perspective. Every second of every day of your life, your body is healing, repairing and replenishing itself. This happens on a cellular level constantly, without you having any awareness of it. We know this is true, because you’re alive to read this post!

If this constant cycle of repair was not happening, you wouldn’t be here. For example, if you broke your leg playing football, the doctors would set the bone and put a cast on your leg, but all the healing would come from within. Your body would heal itself.

The same is true of your mind, brain and nervous system – where all the wounds from childhood, or other painful parts of your life, need to be healed – and in IFS, it’s the Self that does that healing, especially for the wounded parts who live inside you. As a critical thinker, whose initial training was in evidence-based therapy models like CBT, this explanation helps me understand what Self is and why it is real. It’s just the psychological version of the same forces that heal your broken leg.

What does Self-energy feel like?

If you have never experienced IFS, this may still seem a bit weird or hard to grasp, which is fine. Dick says that until you experience this stuff, it’s all just words. But one metaphor that is often used for Self is that of the Sun. So if you imagine you are on that plane in the photo, when you took off and before you flew through the clouds, you would know the Sun was above them, intellectually, but you wouldn’t be able to feel it.

And then that magical moment would happen where you burst through the clouds and there, in all its glory, was the beautiful, life-giving Sun. You could see it, feel its warmth through the plane window – even if you shut your eyes its bright, powerful light would shine through your eyelids. There would be no doubting or questioning it, because you were experiencing this delicious energy, not just imagining it.

Here are some other times you may have felt Self-energy, without being aware of it:

• When you looked at your partner’s face, thought of all the years you had spent together, all the times they had helped you when you were sick, or down, or struggling and your heart just filled with love

• Sitting with a friend as they tearfully told you a sad story from their life and you just listened, calmly and patiently, before giving them a big hug and they collapsed in your arms, sobbing until the anguish left their body and they felt soothed and restored

• Holding your newborn baby in your arms for the first time and feeling the kind of overwhelming, all-consuming love you didn’t know until that moment was even possible

• Being in such a deep flow state while doing something utterly engrossing that time slipped away, your mind went quiet and all that existed was you, the moment and the task

• Holding your ground with a rude co-worker when they crossed a line and feeling completely calm, strong and sturdy – unshakeable in your conviction

• Seeing a photo of an impoverished child in your newspaper and feeling such sadness, such compassion for that little person that you immediately made a big donation to a charity working in their part of the world, which helped you feel hopeful and determined to relieve suffering in your human family

I hope that gives you a little taste of Self-energy, especially if you are struggling right now. Remember that, whatever you have been through in your life, it’s never too much and never too late to heal. And the magic ingredient in that healing is, of course, Self-energy.

And here is a practice I recorded for Insight Timer – Accessing Healing Self-Energy – which you might enjoy.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Could You Start a Ripple of Kindness Today?

Image by Vonecia Carswell

I think we can all agree that we need more kindness in the world. We live in an age when a small, noisy minority dominate both mainstream and social media, as well as our political systems. We see this with the ‘othering’ of refugees and asylum-seekers, portraying them as somehow less important and even less human than us. Instead of welcoming these poor, traumatised people with kindness and compassion, many news outlets and governments around the world treat them with suspicion and outright hostility.

But these actions are those of a tiny minority, who unfortunately are skilled at gaining positions of power and influence. It may surprise you, but study after study finds that most people don’t actually think like this. Most of us are socially liberal, kind, tolerant, altruistic and generous. One survey, published this week, found that Europeans have actually become more welcoming to people fleeing humanitarian crises, such as the heartbreaking one unfolding in Ukraine, in recent years. Happily, negative media stories don’t change the way that most people think, feel or act as much as you might expect.

Time and again research shows that most of us treat our fellow humans with love and respect. Please remember that, if the news is getting you down, humans can be selfish and cruel, but they can also be kind, warm, loving and open-hearted. It’s just that everyday stories of people being nice to each other don’t make the news, especially in today’s clickbait-driven media environment.

We are all inherently good

If you would like to know more about the goodness inherent in all of us, I strongly recommend reading Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. He makes a strong case that, despite all the tales of our ancestors’ warring and bad behaviour, throughout human history we have lived in ways that are far more prosocial, cooperative and altruistic than historians and anthropologists often depict.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that we are so much better, as a species, than the media makes out, it’s clear we are still facing some major challenges right now. As my last post argued, by far the biggest of these is climate change, which does require urgent and decisive action by every member of the human family, but especially those of us with the most power, both spending and political. We also face linked challenges of income inequality, with far too many people still living in poverty, lacking basic facilities like clean water and sanitation, the degradation of Nature and much more.

We also see increasingly polarised political and social debates in countries like the US, into us and them, right and wrong, liberals versus conservatives. And all these problems could be solved, or at least drastically improved, with a little more kindness. Drawing on newer, more highly evolved parts of the brain like the cortical layer – the uniquely human region of the brain involved in rational thought, science, mindfulness, compassion and other high-level cognitive abilities – we can learn to treat each other with kindness, civility and respect, even if we disagree.

Less us and them and more just us, because we are all human, many of us have trauma histories or other difficult experiences in our childhoods. We all want to be happy, for our loved ones to be safe, healthy and lead meaningful, flourishing lives.

Start a ripple of kindness

So, what can we all do to make the world a kinder place? I like to think about starting ripples of kindness as I move through the world. Of course, I try to do this in every therapy session I offer, every blog post I write, every webinar I teach or guided meditation I record. My guiding principles as a psychotherapist are to treat every person I meet or teach with love, kindness and compassion.

But I also try to do this in my daily life. Every time I hold the door open for someone, buy a homeless person a sandwich, or let another car out at a junction, I hope that this little moment of connection, of humanity, will make the other person feel as good as I do. And my hope is that they will pay this forward, holding doors or smiling at the next person they meet, and so on. And this creates ripples of kindness, of warmth, of mutually experienced pleasure at our shared humanity.

It may sound a bit far-fetched, but at worst it can’t do any harm, right? And the more we treat each other with kindness, the less division, antagonism and conflict we will have in our world. Plus research shows that being kind is good for your mental health, so it’s a win-win!

Here’s your homework for the week: think about how could you start a ripple of kindness today. Trust me, this is one piece of homework you will enjoy.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Are You Anxious About Climate Change? Taking Compassionate Action Will Help

Image by Ronan Furuta

My mission in life is to help people feel calmer, safer and more at peace. That’s what I do, all day, in my therapy practice. It’s what I try to do in my teaching and writing, including these posts for my blog. The last thing I would ever want is to make you, my lovely reader, feel more anxious.

But if there is one thing we should all feel anxious about right now, it’s climate change. That’s because the science overwhelmingly tells us that climate change is real, humans are causing it, it’s here right now and will only get worse, unless we take drastic action to minimise the damage. After a summer in which most of southern Europe seemed to be on fire, today’s news brings another terrible wildfire, fanned by hurricane-strength winds.

This time it’s in Hawaii and has caused devastation, as well as a tragic number of fatalities, on the island of Maui. Let’s all take a moment to pause, close our eyes, and send our love and strength to those affected by this awful fire, as well as the many other climate change-linked tragedies around the world.

At the same time as we watch these disasters unfold with increasing regularity, most of our leaders seem unable to grasp the scale of the problem. There are notable exceptions, like President Biden, who may not have a perfect record on climate change, but does recognise that we face a climate emergency and has invested vast sums into transitioning the US economy to clean energy (which has boosted the economy, reduced inflation and created jobs). He deserves far more praise and gratitude from the public than he gets.

Climate crisis = mental-health crisis

I’m sorry if this is reading more like an impassioned opinion piece than a mental-health blog post/newsletter – I am very passionate about this subject, as I think we all need to be right now. But I also think it is a mental-health issue, because so many people – especially the young, who understand climate change best and will be most affected by it – are incredibly anxious, stressed and depressed about our deteriorating climate, as well as the threat to wildlife and our natural world that climate change is causing.

And the real point of this post is to say: please don’t let climate-change anxiety overwhelm and paralyse you. That’s not good for you, but it’s also exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants. They want us to be so freaked out that we think, what can I do? This problem is far too big for me to change, so I will let the politicians work it out and keep flying multiple times a year, eating meat every day and driving my SUV.

In fact, things are far more optimistic than that, because small actions we all take can make a real difference to this big problem. We also know that taking compassionate action like this is hugely beneficial for our mental health, helping with problems like anxiety and depression, so it’s a win-win. I really don’t want to lecture or patronise you, because I’m sure you already do plenty and are trying your best, but a few suggestions would be:

• Eat less meat, especially beef and pork, which not only contribute to climate change but also Amazon deforestation (a key driver of deforestation is for industrial agriculture, using the land to grow soy beans to feed cattle)

• Swap your petrol or diesel car for a hybrid or, even better, electric car. Using more public transport, cycling and walking would also be great (and get you fitter too!)

• Fly less – perhaps once a year, for your family holiday. The vast majority of flights are taken by a small minority of people, so we can all make a difference by choosing a staycation or taking the train on holiday (which is also a far more enjoyable way to travel than flying)

• Use your vote to support the greenest party or politician wherever you live. And pester your politicians and government to do much more – like transitioning to net zero as quickly as possible

• Use your consumer power (something I think we massively underestimate) to pressure corporations into using less plastic, not buying meat or timber products sourced from the Amazon, and much more. Sadly, many CEOs only care about profit margins, so let’s hit them where it hurts, by boycotting the worst offenders and letting them know why we won’t shop with them until they improve

• And try supporting some of the many charities and pressure groups driving the green revolution, like Earthed, Possible, Avaaz, the WWF, 350.org, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Greenpeace, who you can donate to using the button below

As I said earlier, please don’t let climate-change anxiety overwhelm you. This is a solvable crisis and we have all the solutions we need, right now. We, as the global human family, just need to act on them. Let’s do so today to make this beautiful, miraculous planet a safe, green paradise for our children and every generation that follows them.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan