Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  One of the most exciting discoveries in the past 20 years is the fact that our brains are constantly changing.    Psychologists call this neuroplasticity and essentially what this means is that our remarkable brains can continue to grow and evolve in response to the experiences that it is exposed to. And this can happen all the way through our lives. Understanding and believing that our brains can get better with time and effort is possibly one of the most important pieces of information both for ourselves and for our children.   Carol Dweck has carried out extensive research in this area and identified two types of mindsets:   Growth mindset - a belief that our intelligence and our general ability can be improved with support and hard work Fixed mindset – a belief that our intelligence and ability can’t change regardless of what we do As you can probably imagine the first one creates high levels of motivation while the second one can generate feelin...

  When I talk to people in my clinic, they will often say something like “I just want to be happy”. And why not, we all want to feel more happiness in our lives.   But maybe chasing happiness is not the best way to actually achieve more happiness….   we now have so much research which tells us that putting our efforts into pursuing meaning and purpose rather than happiness contributes much more to our wellbeing.   Martin Seligman defines meaning as being part of or belonging to something bigger than ourselves. His research suggests that being able to contribute and belong to something meaningful creates a sense of purpose in our lives.   And it is this sense of purpose that nudges us closer to a flourishing wellbeing.   Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning proposes that there are two different kinds of meaning.   The big M meaning which is about the meaning of life .   This meaning is about finding a grand purpose in life – this m...

  “Of all the experiences we need to survive and thrive, it is the experience of relating to others that is most meaningful and important” Louis Conzolino professor of Psychology at Pepperdine University.  This is a truth that is now universally acknowledged - our relationships are the single most important predictor for wellbeing across the life span.  For the past 80 years researchers at Harvard have been trying to answer the question “what makes a good life?”.  They have followed hundreds of people through their lives asking questions, collecting data, and taking extensive physiological measurements.  The results are fascinating but the single most important thing that has emerged from this study is summed up by George Valliant “the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people”.  The study found that strong positive relationships were the strongest predictor of life satisfaction, out weighing social class, wealth, IQ or ...