I recently experienced a rather distressing event. It certainly wasn’t life threatening by any means, neither was it an event with any long lasting consequences but, nevertheless, it did cause some short-term concern. What was this thing? I hear you ask.

A few days ago I woke with the song Saviour’s Day by Cliff Richard spinning through my mind on what appeared to be a never-ending loop. For those familiar with this perennial ‘classic’, it was the chorus that repeated through my inner ear, you know, when Cliff sings, Open your eyes on Saviour’s day, don’t look back or turn…

I’m lying on a beach, the gentle sound of the waves crawling to the shore. I can feel the towel beneath me and the sand between my toes; it’s grainy and I don’t like the way it scratches at my skin. I sit up and brush the sand from the towel and spy the children selling their trinkets to the tourists further along the beach. We bought some silver from them yesterday and promised to bring them some shampoo and other spare toiletries. Hannah from Kerala, with her brightly coloured sari and rings on her toes, silver and gold bangles…

Postcodes aren’t exactly interesting, at least that’s what I thought. I’d been reading about how cognitive psychologists from Cambridge University had been involved in the design of the UK postcode system in the late 1950s and happened to mention it briefly on Twitter, a kind of admission of my own nerdiness.

A couple of my followers replied suggesting I create a thread about what I’d learned. I suspected they were either joking or were just as nerdy as me. I duly obliged, hoping that someone might find it interesting.

Less than 24 hours later my thread was trending. People had…

Families can be stressful; just think about the times we gather to celebrate a wedding, a birthday or a religious festival. We may also have experienced the storm and stress of the adolescent years and other events in the wider world that increase anxiety and worry, eventually spilling over into our daily lives.

The Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing often wrote of families as being at the root of many psychological problems, while others have linked family disharmony to conditions such as schizophrenia. Generally, however, families aren’t necessarily dysfunctional, but they can be stressful.

As a father I’ve always tried…

I’ve taught teenagers for more than a decade and managed to raise one myself; the jury’s still out on how successful the latter has been, but it seems to have gone okay. We tend to see the teenager years as defined by, what American psychologist G. Stanley Hall called, storm and stress. But don’t worry; it’s not that bad, as Aristotle pointed out:

‘Youth are heated by nature as drunken men by wine’

Okay, so that might not fill you with confidence. How about Socrates:

‘Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when…

It’s an unusually warm day in early spring and I’m in Skipton, a beautiful market town at the southern tip of the Yorkshire Dales. I’m revisiting and reconstructing my past.

For a couple of years in the early 1980s I lived here, in a tall terrace house on a road that seemed so much steeper to the younger me. At the top of the road there used to be a number of council office buildings; we would climb onto the roof of the smaller building during the weekends when the site was empty, sit and chat or dare each other…

We all wish we could remember more stuff. Perhaps you want to be able to recite your favourite poem from memory, memorise a shopping list or recall all those internet passwords. The problem is that short-term memory is limited and there is only so much we can cram into that finite space before we lose it.

Chunking describes the process by which individual pieces of information are broken down and grouped together. The process is said to make the recall of information easier because it helps to bypass the inherent limitations of working memory (the dynamic short-term memory essential to…

I read an article a little while ago about overcoming your fears — it suggested skydiving.

Now, I’m sure I’d find leaping from an aeroplane at 13,000 feet pretty scary, but I’m also likely to have a minor panic attack if my phone rings, or if someone invites me to a party where I’ll have to make polite conversation with people I don’t know.

I’ve lived with anxiety for most of my life and, although I try not to let it stop me from doing the things I want to, it often does. But I’m working on that.

Understanding anxiety…