The way to feel better is to not — Eat a whole Sara Lee cheesecake in a single sitting. Get fired. Get hired. Put too much pressure on yourself. Or not enough. Be diagnosed with a terrible lung disease. Drink excessively to mask a mortal fear, then go out the next night and drink even more. Long for something…

Seven lessons that make sense of the scrabble — I think I’m a Words With Friends addict. I blame my mum. Over the past eight years, my mum and I have played 566 games of this Scrabble-inspired mobile app together. For us, it’s an easy way to connect when we’re not physically with each other. In that time, I’ve…

Why the way forward might actually be upside-down — Some things are said so often that they just ring true — “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all”, “Let’s agree to disagree”, “Good things come to those who wait”, and “M&Ms. Melts in your mouth. Not in your hands.” There’s a bigger truth…

How to cure Covid uncertainty — You lift a rock. Underneath it may be a snake, or no snake. If there is a snake, you receive an electric zap. This was a test run by scientists in 2016, to measure what led to the most stress in its human participants. What was interesting about the test…

Why you and everyone you know is a PASTICHE — When you think about self-knowledge and inner work, you might picture a bearded guru or calm monk. But as I’ve started my own self-knowledge journey, through two focused years of therapy after being diagnosed with a generalised anxiety disorder and falling into recurring spikes of panic, I’ve found it’s far…

I spent a year collecting people’s go-to thoughts that help them in hard times. Here’s what I’ve learned. — We’ve all been to the dark before. The dark is that place in our minds where our worries loom large, where our anxieties are all-consuming, and where our sadness is enormous. Combined, they block out all the light in life. It’s a place we can fall into during times of…

What a computer game about life has taught me about life — The turn of the 20th Century to the 21st Century was marked with many things — Y2K, the Sydney Olympics, Beanie Baby hysteria and ill-fitting jeans. But none have impressed themselves as deeply into my psyche than the computer game franchise, ‘The Sims’. First released in 2000, ‘The Sims’ was…