Understanding Your Mind
Where Did I Put The Keys? And Other Senior Moments
A man searches for his car keys even though he has them in his hand. Similarly his spectacles are on his head all the time. Senior moments at the age of 40 - surely not?
Understanding Your Mind
Understanding your mind is not about therapy-speak — it's practical. This section covers the core psychological concepts that shape how men think, feel and behave: emotions, thinking patterns, self-awareness and why your brain does the things it does. No jargon. Just clear, informed writing that might explain a few of the things you've wondered about for years.
Understanding Your Mind
The Long and Winding Road
There is a roundabout on the way home where, on certain evenings, a man turns left instead of right. Nobody knows he has done it, and he is neither lost nor avoiding anyone. He is doing something sensible, and this article is an attempt to explain what.
Understanding Your Mind
Jealousy, Insecurity and the Male Ego at 40+
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.
Understanding Your Mind
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.
Understanding Your Mind
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.
Understanding Your Mind
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?
Understanding Your Mind
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?
Understanding Your Mind
Shame in Men
Men hide shame with impressive efficiency. They have been doing it for a long time, and they have developed an extensive repertoire of concealment strategies.
Practical Tools
When You've Lost The Plot
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.
Understanding Your Mind
Loud Music, Bad Taste — And Loving It at 57
Middle-aged men are expected to make peace with Radio 2 and accept that the music of their youth has been appropriately filed under nostalgia. Some of us have declined this invitation.
Understanding Your Mind
What Depression Looks Like in Men
Depression in men is under-diagnosed, under-treated and over-fatal. A significant part of the reason is that most men — and many of the people around them — don't recognise it when it's happening.
Understanding Your Mind
What Are Cognitive Distortions and Why Do They Matter?
Your brain is lying to you. Not occasionally, not in unusual circumstances — regularly, systematically, and with considerable conviction. Here's what it's doing and why it matters.