So, Will Smith and Chris Rock at the Oscars, eh?

Right now, you can’t hear yourself think over the sound of the internet breaking as people watch and then re-watch – probably several times and always open-mouthed – the moment when Hollywood A-lister Smith lopes over to the stage and hits Rock over an ill-considered gag about the actor’s wife.

Plenty – and I do mean plenty – has been said over the last week about the rights and wrongs of this unsavoury contretemps, and I’m not about to add my own fuel to that particular fire other than to say that to differing degrees both men were right and both men were wrong, and you need to judge for yourself the morality of eachâ€...

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Even those without a Tik Tok or Instagram account can’t have failed to notice the increasing appearance in daily life of the #ThatGirl hashtag that has overrun the lifestyle media online, in print and across television.

For those who have either managed to miss it, or who have seen the phrase but don’t know what means, the #ThatGirl is the hashtag that’s been given to a lifestyle revolution among young, digitally active younger women promoting what can only really be described as a seriously hardcore healthy lifestyle.

We’re talking a daily ritual of unrelenting avocado obsession, high intensity workouts, the consumption of litres of water, gratitude journals & seemingly endless time ...

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Is it possible to hypnotise an entire nation? The truth may surprise you.

My mission in life is to help people overcome the emotional and psychological challenges they face in their lives. 

Sometimes – often, in fact – the origins of the problems I treat lie buried deep in the past and it takes years of training and experience I have to help my clients meet and address them.

But my training wasn’t always just limited to therapeutic practice. Once upon a time, I also trained in stage hypnosis. I did it because i was curious about the different aspects of the master tool that is hypnosis. 

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How many emails have you opened in the first three weeks of 2022 that have had a version of ‘New Year, new you’ in the subject line? If you’re anything like me then I’m guessing it’s a lot.

Sometimes it’s felt like I can’t open my inbox without being drowned in a deluge of messages exhorting me to take up yoga, ‘do’ Dry January, rethink my entire wardrobe, find that dream job or book a summer holiday – all in the name of reinventing myself.

Three paragraphs in feels too early to go down the sweary path, but the whole ‘New Year, new you’ thing is all bollocks. Really, you’re fine just the way you are – and if anything, you probably need to be more of who y...

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History is littered with people whose behaviour has been so outrageously self-serving that they have become poster boys and girls for narcissism and you really don’t have to search too hard or too far back to find them.

Adolf Hitler is perhaps the most obvious and dangerous example from the last century, but the most recent ex-President of the United States of America is a more contemporary example who deserves to share the same sentence.

In between there are plenty more celebrities, both minor and major, whose public behaviour and verbal outpourings can easily be described as being narcissistic.

From Joan Crawford’s emotionall...

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Christmas, eh? Sleigh bells softly ringing, snow on the ground, a fire crackling in the grate. A bronzed turkey alongside a studded glazed ham. Little sausages wrapped in bacon. The perfect tree. The perfect presents. The perfectly perfect pine-scented Christmas you ever did see, or even imagine.

Look, we all need a bit of a pick-me-up after the year we’ve had (and if you’re wondering what sort of year we’ve had, check out my blog on how to stay sane in a world of pain for the litany of misery we’ve endured), but there’s no point in being totally delusional about it.

Christmas is never perfect.

There. I’ve said it.

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If you follow these articles regularly, you’ll know that recently I’ve covered some fairly dark subject matter – from why Facebook and the metaverse pose a threat to your mental health and how the relentless onslaught of bad news is driving anxiety and depression to record levels.

This piece also deals with some dark thoughts, but this time the darkness is literal, rather than metaphorical.

As I write this, we’re now just three weeks from the shortest day of the year. This is, of course, a ludicrous description since it has just as many hours as the other 365 days of this year – it’s just that marginally more of the 24 that make up December 21st are spent in the dark.

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Now, more than ever before, it seems as though we’re being buried under a relentless torrent of news that paints a pretty miserable picture of a world in which there appears to be precious little cheer.

The litany of bad news is extensive.

The surge in Covid cases that is overwhelming Western Europe and plunging society back into lockdown; the deaths of 27 migrants whose boat sank in the English Channel; an imploding energy market putting utility companies out of business; rocketing fuel prices; the ongoing climate crisis; allegations of Tory sleaze; children murdered on the streets of London and parents murdered in their homes …

The list goes on,...

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There were two Facebook-related stories that found their way into the news over the last couple of weeks. You likely saw one and missed the other – but together they represent a grim warning about the role social media will play in our future mental health.

The biggest story of all revolved around Facebook’s announcement that it was now funnelling the majority of its time, money and effort into what we currently know as the metaverse. I’ll get to that in a minute.

The second story – the one you may have missed – is immediately more sinister on its own, but when viewed through the prism of a voraciously expanding social media monster that’s high on ambition and low on morality takes on...

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As humans in a modern and consumer-led society, we spend a lot of our time chasing things we don’t have.

This might be the pursuit of material things that amplify our social status – money, property, a smart car or that holiday in the Seychelles, for example – but they’re often less tangible things such as health and happiness.

Happiness is the biggest dream that humans chase, although in most cases we don’t really understand what happiness looks like or feels like. Often – and wrongly – we seek to define it by our identifiable material achievements.

How often have you said or thought, if I could just earn another £x / buy a bigger hous...

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