The self-help industry is worth billions and has a mixed record. This section takes a different approach — covering practical psychological techniques that are grounded in evidence, explained without jargon and presented with honest expectations. No breakthroughs guaranteed. Just tools that work often enough to be worth knowing about.
Practical Tools
Somewhere in the garage sits the physical evidence of an ambition that exceeded a skill set. A shelf with a visible lean. A birdhouse that no self-respecting bird has ever gone near. Far from being embarrassments, they are quietly doing you quite a lot of good.
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.
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.
Practical Tools
Resilience is one of the most overused words in the self-improvement industry. It appears on posters, in corporate training programmes, and in the titles of books written by people who have confused having a difficult morning with surviving genuine adversity.
Practical Tools
Overwhelm isn’t a character flaw. It’s not some moral failing, like leaving the toilet seat up or thinking cargo shorts are a good idea. It’s simply what happens when you keep stacking demands higher and higher until the whole thing starts to wobble like a badly built shed in a gale.
Practical Tools
There's a point during adult life when most men quietly abandon things they enjoyed because the enjoyment no longer seemed sufficiently justifiable. This is a mistake with consequences that go considerably beyond the unused guitar in the spare room.
Practical Tools
Men are not, contrary to the stereotype, immune to worry. They are, however, remarkably creative in their methods of not dealing with it — methods that tend to work briefly, poorly, and at increasing cost.
Practical Tools
Behavioural activation is one of the best-evidenced techniques in clinical psychology. It is also, in its basic form, the instruction to do things when you don't feel like doing things. Which sounds, on the face of it, like advice your grandmother could have given you for free.
Practical Tools
There will come a time when someone you care about is going to be struggling. You'll know something is wrong. You'll want to help. And then you'll have absolutely no idea what to do. This article is for that moment.
Practical Tools
The self-help industry is worth approximately $40 billion globally and contains roughly $30.5 billion worth of noise. This article is an attempt to identify what's left.