Sign up for your FREE e-newsletter

You’ll regularly recieve powerful strategies for personal development, tips to improve the growth of your counselling practice, the latest industry news and much more.

We’ll keep your information private and never sell, rent, trade or share it with any other organisation. And you can cancel anytime.

Wellness

Mindfulness Techniques: Defusion Exercises

Mindfulness (learn more about mindfulness here) interventions have been shown to be beneficial for a wide range of psychological and physical conditions such as anxiety, depression, chronic pain, personality disorders, and addictions. Controlled trials of normal populations have also demonstrated positive changes in brain function and immune response, self-awareness, perceived stress, and increase in self-compassion […]

Coping with Bad Memories

Dr Jeremy Dean, a psychologist and author of PsyBlog, recently wrote a blog post exploring a new technique that holds promise for those experiencing disturbing emotional flashbacks. The post offers insightful ideas — particularly for those working with trauma and grief. Here’s an abstract: A better way to deal with recurring negative memories is to […]

Book Review: Developing Resilience

Neenan, M. (2009). Developing resilience: A cognitive-behavioural approach. East Essex, UK: Routledge. Pain, tragedy and sadness happen, how people react and recover from adverse life events can be as varied as the event itself. Why is this? How can two people experience the same incident yet one individual can fall apart and the other can […]

Sleep and wellbeing

Sleep is essential for health and well-being. But millions of people don’t get enough, resulting in such problems as daytime sleepiness, poor decision-making, interference with learning and accidents. The American Psychological Association’s page on “Sleep” includes a range of articles with scientific information on sleep-related issues, and tips on how to sleep better? Other popular […]

Lifestyle Interventions for Depression

Treatments for depression or anxiety, also called “interventions”, fall into one of three categories, and often several are recommended to be taken up at once. These main groupings are: Medical interventions; Psychological interventions; and Lifestyle interventions. In this post we overview a range of lifestyle interventions therapists can suggest when treating depression. Bibliotherapy What is […]

Positive Psychology and Resilience

What makes one person ‘bounce back’ following adversity and another person seem to ‘crumble in a heap’? This question has always posed a fascination for me. I have often wondered whether individuals are simply born with the skills to cope with the difficulties that life often presents or whether there are a set of stress-coping […]

Book Review: Help for the Helper

Rothschild, B. (2006). Help for the helper. The psychophysiology of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. New York. W. W. Norton & Company. Burnout, compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma are risks that, as therapist we are aware of however whilst many of us have a toolbox full of techniques to assist our clients, we often fall […]

Happiness, Positive Psychology and Wellbeing

The concept of happiness is the corner stone of the assumptions of positive psychology. Happiness is characterised by the experience of more frequent positive affective states than negative ones as well as a perception that one is progressing toward important life goals (Tkach & Lyubomirsky, 2006). Identifying factors that contribute to happiness has proven to […]

7 Ways to Improve Intimacy in Your Relationship

Good relationships don’t just happen. Many people have the attitude that, “If I have to work at it, then it can’t be the right relationship.” This is not a true statement, any more than it’s true that you don’t have to work at good physical health through exercise, eating well, and stress reduction. There are […]

Basic Principles of Time Management

Struggling to find time in your daily life? Consider the following proven time management principles and techniques. The 80/20 rule The 80/20 principle is also known as the Pareto principle. It is based on the ideas of an Italian economist called Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto was a French–Italian economist and philosopher who lived between 1848 and […]