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
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
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.
Understanding Your Mind
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
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?
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.
Understanding Your Mind
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
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
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.