"I am responsible for my own happiness" Happiness is a feeling, just like anxiety and fear, which comes in waves; it can’t sustain itself because it’s not humanly possible to be happy all the time. And do you know why? It’s because the ancient part of our brain that’s hardwired for survival (the Amygdala) is programmed from birth to look for any ‘threats’ in our environment just like any wild animal. If we’re ultra-sensitive or...

It is the dawn of my 65th birthday and I awoke at 5am dreaming about being on a trip with a lovely man.  But somehow I had ‘lost’ him and I spent most of the dream anxiously wandering around looking for him and woke up before I found him. For my birthday gift, my lovely son had bought me a framed Jack Vettriano print called ‘The Missing Man’ In the picture two women and one man, still dressed in evening clothes stand on a beach looking...

Did your parents warn you to never to take money  from strangers? Here's my story of this warning. When I was six we lived in a small village in England. One morning I was walking to school through a small wood alone because my brother was sick. On the way I was approached by a nice man who chatted to me and walked me to school. He was there again when I came out of school and offered me sixpence and sweeties to go for a walk with him. Yep...

So why does our brain imagine all sorts of horrible things? It’s a question of survival! Even when we’re doing something that makes us happy our Amygdala (fear/survival brain) is continuously scanning our environment to see what ‘threats’ lurk out there. This is done either consciously or unconsciously. Say you’re swimming in the sea; your eyes are constantly searching above and under the water to see if there are sharks, jellyfish,...

Says Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University in his book, ‘Stumbling on Happiness’; ‘The brain is a belief making machine, and making future is what it does”, “The greatest achievement of the human brain is to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of reality, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future".  Says Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University...