In theory, we all love kindness of course, but in practice, a kind person sounds like something we would try to be only once every other more arduous and more rewarding alternative had failed. Learning to be kind means acknowledging how boring kindness can (unfairly) sound. So much of what…

The temptation, with dealing with anxiety, is always and invariably to focus on the ostensible cause of our worry: the journey to the airport, the forthcoming speech, the letter one is waiting for, the presentation one has to hand in… But if we proceed more psychologically, we might begin in…

One of the cruellest aspects of mental illness is that it strips us of any ability to believe that other people might be suffering in the way we are. We aren’t being wilfully egocentric or arrogant; we are condemned by our illness to a feeling that we are uniquely pitiful…

When we are feeling well in our minds, we hardly notice that we might be harboring in ourselves anything as formal or as dramatic-sounding as ‘reasons to live.’ We simply assume that we like life itself and that it must be natural and inevitable to do so. …

One of the strangest but also most intriguing and redemptive things that humans get up to, in almost any culture one cares to study, is occasionally to gather in large groups, bathe in the rhythmic sounds of drums and flutes, organs and guitars, chants and cries, and move their arms…

We’re surrounded by some powerful ideas about the sort of things that will make us happy. We think that really to deliver satisfaction, the pleasures we should aim for need to be: Rare — we’ve inherited a Romantic suspicion of the ordinary (which is taken to be mediocre, dull and…

Some of us belong to a social group politely known as ‘worriers.’ That is, we are close to panic on a range of issues pretty much all the time. We worry that the scratch on our knee will turn cancerous, that we’ll catch a deadly disease from touching the hotel…

It’s not an illustrious category to belong to of course, but there are plenty of us at least. We worry about work, money, being left, illness, disappointing, over-promising, madness and disgrace, just to start the list. We worry in the early hours, we worry on holiday, we worry at parties…

To survive in the pressured conditions of modernity, we have to get very good at self-criticism. We have to make sure that there is nothing our worst enemies could tell us that we have not already fully taken on board: we must become masters of self-hatred. We must behold our…