Downsizing: the joy of having nowhere to put anything
As I write this, I am in the middle of moving from a large detached house into a bungalow roughly a third of its size. This is about gains and losses.
Why Your Patience Has Left The Building
Do you recognise that low-grade fury that arrives sometime around the mid-forties? It focuses on a word, a font, or the way the self-checkout machine now offers unsolicited opinions about your shopping. Let's work out what's going on.
The Case for Reading Fiction
Men read less fiction than women, by a wide and consistent margin, and most men who don't read novels have a perfectly reasonable-sounding excuse for it.But there is a body of research on what fiction does to the brain.
I Blame The Parents
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece recently asking whether therapists are partly responsible for the rise in adult children cutting off their parents. It's a good question, badly put — and the badly-put version is worth untangling.
What Chronic Stress Does to the Male Body Over Time
Stress is one of those words that has been used so casually, for so long, that it has almost stopped meaning anything. A traffic jam is stressful. A difficult meeting is stressful. So, apparently, is losing your job, your health, or your marriage. So, what does it mean?
Mindfulness for Men Over 40
Mindfulness has an image problem. Scented candles, a woman's voice telling you to notice your breath, and an app subscription that costs more than a round at the pub. Strip all of that away, however, and there is a piece of genuinely well-evidenced psychological technology underneath it.
Redundancy: It's Not the Money That Breaks Most Men
Redundancy is discussed almost entirely in financial terms. This is understandable, but the money is rarely what actually does the damage. The real damage is considerably less visible, less discussed, and worth more understanding.
Alcohol: Your Best Mate — or Your Biggest Problem?
Alcohol often has a complicated relationship in men's lives. It gives, and it takes, and it's one they are least likely to examine honestly.
Anger as a Secondary Emotion
Anger is the emotion men are most comfortable expressing and least likely to examine. This is unfortunate because in a significant proportion of cases, the anger is not the point. It is the thing sitting on top of the point — so what's going on?
My Tech, My Rules
Older men and technology: they resist it, misunderstand it, and eventually capitulate to it with the enthusiasm of someone accepting a parking ticket. Or do They? This narrative is wrong. The more interesting story is considerably more nuanced — and considerably more deliberate.
From Payday To Pensions
During the middle years, the relationship between money and identity undergoes a shift that the financial planning industry covers in considerable detail, yet the psychological dimension is hardly touched on.
Do Men Bother With Self-Awareness?
Self-awareness is the psychological equivalent of flossing — universally recommended, rarely practised with any consistency, and the subject of guilt whenever the question is raised directly. Do men engage with it, and does patchiness matter as much as the self-help industry insists it does?