If you have a really good dig down the back of your sofa and scrape together the £180,000 you’d need, you could buy yourself a Ferrari 458 (in the obligatory Ferrari red, obviously).

With nearly 500 horses under the bonnet, it’ll take you from 0-60mph in just three seconds and, if the law permitted and the roads were clear, could take you from London to Liverpool in just under an hour.

Chances are, having found yourself in the lucky position to be able to afford to buy one, you wouldn’t then drive your shiny new supercar through a ploughed field or pull donuts on a gravel drive.

And why? Well, because a hundred and eighty grand is a fair bit of mon...

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On Monday I had the privilege of being asked to lead a session on mental health in the workplace for the TruMunity Unconference in London, a recruitment event for HR leaders and recruitment professionals with informality and learning at its heart.

When thinking about what to talk about, I kept coming back to the role business has to play in tackling the mental health crisis the UK faces.

A study into wellbeing in the workplace recently estimated that around 97 million work days are lost each year in the UK to mental health issues.

Imagine the impact of that figure for a moment. It equates to more than a quarter of a million years. And if you’re ...

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Over the years I have treated a great many people struggling with a variety of psychological issues. Some of the issues I treat are straightforward, some less so. But more often than not the root cause of the problems my clients face is one of the unholy trinity: love, money and work.

Years ago, as society began to understand the DNA of mental health, it was a commonly-held belief that debt caused depression. To an extent, that’s still the case. But there’s increasing evidence to show that the opposite is also true and that a significant life event like the loss of a job, chronic and debilitating poor health or the d...

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Triskaidekaphobia is the formal word for the fear of the number 13 and it’s a phobia that I’ve treated occasionally in my time as a hypnotherapist. But if you happen to be famous, a far scarier number – and one deserving of its own phobic classification – is surely the number 27.

Depending on how old you are, you might now be thinking of Amy Winehouse or Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison. Possibly Kurt Cobain. Maybe Brian Jones.

No-one is old enough to be thinking about Alexandre Levy, even though the Brazilian composer became the founding member of the now notorious 27 Club in 1892.

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I’m rarely driven to the point of invective, but recently I’ve read about two pieces of bewildering Government policy the logic of which, no matter how hard I try, I’m unable to rationalise.

Worse, I’m genuinely worried that together they could, If I’ve interpreted them correctly, produce the most emotionally damaged generation of people we’ve ever seen.

First came the news that  100,000 teenagers will be provided with mental health training to help them cope with the pressure of exams.

Before we ...

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“But the root of all these evils is the love of money, and there are some who have desired it and have erred from the faith and have brought themselves many miseries.” – First epistle of the Apostle Paul to Timothy

I find that quote from the New Testament intriguing; not because it is a religious text – each to their own on that score – but because it seems to me to be a metaphor for the power that material wealth can have on our emotional wellbeing.

The words the faith, for example, could easily be interpreted as a sense of morality or of right and wrong. And the notion that the desire for, and acquisition of, wealth can bring misery seems to me to have more tha...

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Recently, I’ve been rather taken with the word thingy (stop sniggering at the back).  Everyone must agree that it’s a wonderful word; a catch-all for all those things in life whose proper names are either unknown to us or whose pronunciation is clumsy.

Some of my friends use a thingy to change the channel on their TV, though personally I use a doofah and others I know use an oojamaflip. 

In fact, our lives are joyously full of thingys (or should that be thingies?) It’s the corrugated cardboard sleeve on your takeaway coffee cup (it’s actually called a zarf), the plastic tip on the end of a shoelace (or, to give it its proper n...

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It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? Perhaps one you’ve never asked yourself before. Maybe you’ve never felt you’ve needed to. After all, you might not be displaying any obvious sign that your emotional wellbeing is at risk and perhaps your lifestyle is a predictable drumbeat punctuated with an occasional burst of high octane.

In other words, you’re just … normal. Right? Okay. Maybe you are. Maybe you’re not. Only you know for sure. Or maybe, just maybe … you don’t.

Now I’ve put the question out there, indulge me and take a few minutes to really think about your answer.

And while you’re doing that, let me explain why for a great many people – maybe even for you – their lifestyle is anything but normal and why it...

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In the grand scheme of things, you know something might have gone wrong when you’re heating something up in a microwave and there’s a sudden loud bang, a shower of sparks and the house is plunged into sudden darkness.

Like most ordinary people, I know what electricity does, but not how it does it. I can change a lightbulb and, if the circumstances are right and there’s a diagram to work from, a plug. When there’s a normal power cut – in other words, the sort that isn’t accompanied by loud noises and sudden fireworks in the kitchen – I also know where to look to see if a fuse has blown (though what to do next would elude me).

But that’s pretty much as far as my expe...

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