I’ve written quite a bit on mental health in the past. Articles like: How can we improve mental health? Try this breathing exercise for stress release and getting rid of cortisol Crush your OCD with this one question Defeating anxiety and stress But recently, I’ve been wondering about another question. What is psychological health? We hear a lot about what mental illness is but what about its opposite? What does a psychologically healthy person’s mind look like? Much in the same way as an out-of-shape person has to aim to be an in-shape person, a person struggling with mental health has to know what they’re aiming at for in order to be mentally healthy. It’s oddly tricky to find a good article about this on the internet. Try searching for ‘what is psychological health?’ and you don’t get much back. But then I remembered I’d read an introduction to psychology book when I was younger, …[Read More]
Mind
39 things I know at 39
1. Manage your testosterone Testosterone for men is essential and the defining hormone that makes a man a man. High levels make you feel confident and rambunctious and aggressive. It makes you lean and muscular and gives you a strong sex drive. What’s not to like? In terms of testosterone, we’re supposed to be half the men our fathers and grandfathers were. Testosterone is produced at night and your body needs sleep and dietary fat to produce it. So eat red meat, nuts, butter and oil and get your sleep. And stay away from stress as well as stress produces cortisol, the stress hormone, and the testosterone killer. 2. The mind and body are inextricably linked When you have problems with your body, you will have problems with your mind. When you’re ill with the flu, you have nothing to give with your mind. When you’re sad and depressed, your energy …[Read More]
In pursuit of better sleep
I’ve been an insomniac for most of my life. The first memory I have of it being a thing for me was in my first or second year at boarding school when my housemaster remarked on it. He said it was a condition that affected bright people. Of course, I took that. 🙂 Left to my own devices on school holidays, I would stay awake long past midnight. I would read the latest Harry Potter until I finished it, say at 6am in the morning. I would then wake at 11am or 12 noon and not be tired until the early hours again. Over and over. This is fine when you’re on holiday but less so when you have stuff to do the next morning. I remember at university, I had a 9am exam on Personal Identity. I went to bed at 11pm and watched the hours tick by. By …[Read More]
Should we self-censor what we consume?
When I was at uni, I took an Aesthetics class. The Philosophy of Art. I don’t remember much from that course except for a couple of essays on Plato and Tolstoy. Plato was keen that when educating the young men of his Republic that their art be censored and that the youth should only consume art that promoted nobility. So poetry shouldn’t be about loucheness and hedonism, rather they should be about promoting bravery in battle and moral uprightness. I was reminded of this recently after binge watching a series of Mindhunter on Netflix, a show about the FBI’s profiling of serial killers in the 1970s. This is show that goes deep into the minds and motivations of deeply disturbed people, and it’s very entertaining and very compelling. We watched this off the back of Unabomber, another Netflix show, this time about the hunt for another serial killer, Ted Kaczynski. …[Read More]
How can we improve mental health?
I go through low periods. For those who know me, this might sound surprising. I’m normally bouncing off the walls with positivity. And this is true for the most part. There are times however where I make myself positive, because I want to and I know that to some extent, you can control your mental state. Mental health is one of those things that we don’t really discuss. Which is strange given how much time we devote to physical health. We sign up to gym memberships, we go running, we watch what we eat and look for the latest superfoods. Instagram is full of accounts dedicated to inspiring us to exercise better and eat better. But what about mental health? Shouldn’t we also work on that? How do we improve mental health? It’s becoming better known that the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK is suicide. This …[Read More]