“Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together and transforming our relationship with this person who has died.” Why is it so difficult for us to comprehend that a person is gone forever? Why do some people adapt better than others? How can we rebuildContinue reading “The Grieving Brain”
Category Archives: psychology
The Keys to Kindness
There is more kindness than we think there is in the world and we can all find ways to be more kind. This is a gentle book that sets out to help us understand what kindness is, how we define it in different contexts, what it does for us and how to help make ourContinue reading “The Keys to Kindness”
My Age of Anxiety
“Fear sharpens the senses. Anxiety paralyses them” – Kurt Goldstein. Is anxiety a medical illness or a cognitive mis-wiring, a philosophical or a spiritual problem or a cultural condition explored by poets? Scott Stossel explores how anxiety is a function of all of these. It can be measured physiologically, it can be measured as aContinue reading “My Age of Anxiety”
Thanks for the Feedback
Criticism can make us defensive, upset, and angry. Yet, being able to understand and absorb what we hear enables us to have better relationships, do better at work and develop a more harmonious existence. This book is a practical guide that helps by covering a daunting array of scenarios, relationships and circumstances. Within a single conversationContinue reading “Thanks for the Feedback”
Four Thousand Weeks
“We treat everything we’re doing- life itself, in other words – as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.” What a revelatory, life-affirming book! It examines our relationship with time, how we perceive it, use it and try to outrun the knowledge that it is so limited for us – anContinue reading “Four Thousand Weeks”
Fear
My favourite line in this book is – ‘Decartes said “I think, therefore I am”; but most of the time, the truth is more like, “I think, therefore I am not really here.”’ It’s a lesson I’ve been learning over the past two years and this book served as a timely refresher. Sometimes reading similarContinue reading “Fear”
I’m OK You’re OK
You could use this book to either improve yourself or your writing! Transactional analysis is a model to understand human behaviour, identify patterns that are parent-like, child-like or adult-like and use this to solve emotional issues and stabilise the way in which the individual interacts with others. What little I knew of TA was throughContinue reading “I’m OK You’re OK”
Endure
Endure is full of stories of individual athletes, coaching teams, scientists and corporate studying the nexus of the mind, brain and body to help humans break barriers on limits that seem impassable. Each chapters covers an element like pain, muscle, oxygen, heat and thirst, and how a belief in our own abilities enables us toContinue reading “Endure”
Move
What a delightful and light book. Williams explores types of movement from walking to dancing to stretching, fighting, breathing and so on and how each of these influences the body and mind. We obviously know that movement is good for us but this book dives into genes, genetics, how the brain communicates with organs andContinue reading “Move”
The Worm at the Core
This book makes a compelling argument that we are driven on an individual and societal level by our need to stave off our awareness of the inevitability of death. It’s not a depressing book; rather, it made me much more aware of my thought patterns and gave me a sense of peace – knowing thatContinue reading “The Worm at the Core”
Ayesha Anna Ninan 