Life Stages And Transitions
It typically starts with a phone call: "Dad's had another fall." And somewhere in the weeks that follow, the relationship quietly changes shape. The son becomes the parent. It's the job you never applied for, but it's yours.
Body and Mind
When I was a boy, my hair was thick and luxuriant. I thought nothing of it. Then one day a hairdresser said that he could see signs that I was on the road to hair loss. Whether that was insight or a good guess, I'll never know. But he was right.
Practical Tools
Most men in genuine difficulty are not short of concern. They have concern in abundance. What they're short of is a structure for turning that concern into something that works. Problem-Solving Therapy exists to supply exactly that.
Practical Tools
It doesn't matter that the stick has been fetched forty times already. Your dog will find it, present it, and want to do it all again. Your brain, at three in the morning, is doing the same thing with the conversation you had with your boss. The difference? The dog has more fun.
Work And Retirement
You're sitting in the car with the engine switched off. You're not on the phone or listening to music, or even wondering whether you remembered to buy milk. You're just sitting there. You probably don't know why. But that tiny stretch of time in the car is where this article begins.
Understanding Your Mind
Jealousy is often assumed to be a teenage affliction that everyone grows out of. That, or evidence of a rather pathetic character flaw in the adult who still has it. Neither of these is quite right. Jealousy in midlife men is common, and interesting psychologically - as we're about to explore.
Life Stages And Transitions
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.
Understanding Your Mind
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.
Understanding Your Mind
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.
Relationships
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.
Body and Mind
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?
Practical Tools
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.