Why is it that you just can’t walk past buskers with kids. They always want to stop and listen to the music or performance, even if you’re in a hurry to be somewhere at a certain time.  It’s because children live in the present, they can’t see past the next 15 minutes of their life.  Somewhere between being a child and becoming an adult, we lose that gift.  We become immersed in our future.  We worry about what is happening for the rest of our day, when we are going to fit in everything this week and what our plans and meetings are next month.  But there are costs to living in the future. We are not very good at interrupting our future self to live in the present and this means we miss out on things that could be a positive experience.... Read More

A lot of us have many goals that we want to achieve in life. We seem to be good at deciding what it is we want to achieve but a lot of us have trouble creating an action plan, or turning our goals into behaviour.  According to Gollwitzer, creating goals involves two stages. The first is the deliberation phase that involves deciding what our goals are and exactly what it is we want to achieve. Second is the implementation stage where we create a plan on how to execute our goal.  According to Gollwitzer, the way to translante our goals or thoughts into behaviour is by focusing on the implementation stage.  This is because during the deliberation phase, we are open to different alternatives or strategies that deter us from executing our goals.  What we need to do is to execute one goal and stick with one strategy, rather than going for many goals.  The best way to do this is by creating an implementation intention.  This is a step by step plan on how to execute the goal. It specifically sets out that when X happens you will do Y, so that it becomes an automatic process.  For example, when the sun comes up, you will go for a 20 min run, when you get home from school you will study for 2 hours, after dinner you will sit down and organise your next day. These implementation intentions allow us to pick our target goal and helps us to become oblivious to other goals or strategies… we become numb to our thoughts, desires or temptations that contradict our goal.... Read More

Telling another person how we feel, we all know, helps us to feel better when we are down. But what is it about verbalising our feelings that makes us realise it’s not so bad after all?  Why is it that talking to a therapist about our life problems, helps us to overcome our emotional instability? That question can be answered by what happens in our brain when we verbalise our feelings.  A study conducted by Lieberman and Eisenberger investigated what happens when people verbalise their feelings.  They found that the simple act of verbally labelling an expression, leads to less amygdala activation in the brain, when compared to those people who did not verbally label the expressions.  For those who don’t know, the amygdala is the part of your brain that controls your feelings and emotions and is the part that is activated when you are feeling sad or upset. Therefore, by simply describing your feelings, the emotional centre of your brain no longer becomes activated and you no longer feel the emotion that is troubling you.  ... Read More