I was shopping at my local Farmers Market last week when I saw a woman near me juggling her bags of shopping.  Given she only had two hands and a lot of bags this was quite a task!  She picked up the eggs she’d just bought, fumbled and then dropped the carton onto the ground, spilling eggs over the grass and cracking a few.  I went to help her and what do you think was the first thing she said?

“Oh, I’m such an idiot!”

Have you noticed the natural tendency most of us have to exaggerate one negative experience amongst a whole bunch of positives? How we minimise a range of pleasant experiences at the expense of a more unpleasant one which occupies our full attention?

It turns out this tendency is actually hard wired into our brain as a legacy of our evolutionary development. Our brain is trained to look out for potential dangers or threats, with what Neuroscientists call the ‘Negativity Bias’.

How many times have you said to yourself “I’ll be happy when I… (insert here – lose weight, find a partner, get a new job, get what I want from my Mum etc)”?

Some people spend a lot of time considering therapy, whereas others take a much more flexible approach, entering and leaving therapy many times throughout their lives. If you’ve been considering Therapy and are unsure whether to give it a go, here are some signs that it may be helpful:

I was speaking with a client recently about some concerns she has with mindfulness. She told me she had attended a course on mindfulness, and during the program she had been repeatedly instructed by the teacher to ‘feel into her body’…